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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wil" data-source="post: 2804788" data-attributes="member: 3502">Here are the probabilities for BW:<a href="http://www.burningwheel.org/pdf/bw_probabilities.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.burningwheel.org/pdf/bw_probabilities.pdf</a>Here are the probabilities for SilCore (for comparison purposes):<a href="http://www.dp9.com/PDF/SilCOREdiceprob.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.dp9.com/PDF/SilCOREdiceprob.pdf</a>To me, the spread of the numbers *is* the reason to use a die pool (or roll and keep) vs. single die.  There may be no functional difference in the end, but using that logic I can ask, "Why use D&D instead of Palladium?".You'll notice that in BW, requiring one additional success for someone with skill level 2 reduces his chances of succeeding from 75% to 25%.  You'll notice that beating a difficulty of 4 vs. a difficulty of 6 with skill level 2 in SilCore results in about the same decrease in performance - meaning adding a success in BW might be said to be the same as adding 2 to the threshold in SilCore.  To get the same decrease in performance in d20 (75% to 25%) on the raw die roll, you would need to increase the DC from 5 to 15.  Of course, all that means is that d20 has less granularity then BW.So to me the answer to  "Why use one over the other?" will simply be player preference, as the mechanically it can be shown that BW and d20 do work on different assumptions, regardless of similarity in the final outcome.</blockquote>