Dice Pools Or Variable Dice?

[Wik]

Here's what I mean. A dice pool uses a pool of several dice of the same shape and is usually rolled against a difficulty number. For example, the World Of Darkness is this style. For every dot in a Stat and skill, the dot represents one d10 and the standard difficulty is 7. If you have a DEX of 3 and a Firearms of 2 that's five d10s to roll.

The original Star wars used d6s.

Does WEG Star Wars really count as a "Dice Pool" system by your reckoning? I would consider it to be more of a "variable die" system that only happens to use one type of die - you're adding together all the dice for your result, after all. Also, later versions of the d6 system added in hit points and a bunch of other "Variable die" traits.

For what it's worth, I prefer any system where there are few modifiers to rolls and where actions can be resolved quickly. Doesn't really matter what dice I roll to get there.

Also, hit points do not equal variable die mechanics. There are some variable die games that use "health levels" (savage worlds), and there are dice pool" games that use flat hit points (Shadowrun 4e pretty much does this). Some games that use hit points do set up a penalty/"Death Spiral" as you get hurt (the new d6 games, for example, or Serenity). And so on, and so forth.

The definitions here are good, but I think they only apply to base mechanics - you can't really infer that a game is going to have/is more likely to have any specific feature based entirely on the die mechanics of the game.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I dislike dice pools, specifically the number-of-successes variant, for purely practical reasons: it takes way to long to determine the result of the roll.

For this player at least, adding the results of three or four dice to get the total is much faster than wading through a sea of dice counting the number of greater-than results. Recollections of a Shadowrun game with buckets-o-dice still causes a nervous tick.

Must be some weird neurological programming: I can't look at some dice without adding the results.

 

[Jhaelen]

I dislike dice pools, specifically the number-of-successes variant, for purely practical reasons: it takes way to long to determine the result of the roll.

Well, if you're using dice with symbols rather than numbers (like WHFRPG3) it would probably be faster.

Colouring the numbers that count as a success works, too.

I have several players that are noticably slow when they have to add numbers. One is so mathematically challenged that she sometimes manages to get a wrong result when adding her attack bonus to a single d20.

I don't mind dice pool systems; they can be great and they can be bad - just like variable dice systems.