Over the Edge 3E is one of my top five all-time favorite RPGs.
My sole complaint with 3e is with the solitary supplement, which was bafflingly printed in pale gray on white. It's very close to unreadable for me under normal lighting because of that choice. Which is a real shame, because the content itself is great.
I'm not surprised at all by the switch to a count-successes model; given that combat rolls can easily hit 6d, at which point expected successes are just over 3.
Die pools rapidly grow far larger than that in melee, and low double-digit pools are not uncommon. And that's not even considering possibly changes through the mystery advancement system, which will likely buff pools through Attribute increases and other means. ATM you only see those kind of numbers in melee, and it's entirely due to threat.
The issue I see before play is that the odds of setback (fumble) increase with ability; if that's not fixed after playtest, I'll house rule it. But that's the only houserule I can forsee for me.
In practical terms, this never matters unless you invite it to. Your odds of rolling a crit hit or crit fail in your initial pool (which is always be the largest one in Alpha) are identical, which is fair enough - and if/when they clarify which takes precedence if you roll both in a die with 6+ dice in it, I suspect trip-6 will win out and make crit fails even more rare. Also, if you're willing to use luck to reroll in a given pool, that further skews the odds toward crit hits, because you're going to be re-rolling any 1s looking for hits, and some of those hits will be sixes, possibly completing a triple if you had other sixes showing.
Note that Rebellion also needs to clarify what happens when two crit hits are rolled, since the (hits = TN+1) result will become an infinite loop unless there's a defined processing order between attacker and defender.
The "look at all your ones in any pool" thing you're talking about will literally never trigger a crit fail if you play safely and don't gamble. It's purely a temptation for risk-takers, a trap for people who are bad at math, or a desperation move for times when the current situation will kill you right there and then. Consider - let's say you have a big fat 10-die pool thanks to accumulated threat on multiple enemies, and your intial roll looks like this:
1 1 2 3 4 4 4 5 6 6
A little lucky but not amazingly so. You start with two potential explosion pools, one with a single die (from the
6 6) and one with two dice (from the
4 4 4). Assuming you have just one luck you're willing to spend, what do you do? You want to be able to roll some explosion dice, but anything risks a crit fail if you roll a third
1, and that would be disastrous.
So you reroll one of those
1 results now, while you still can. If it lands on a
1 again, just give up and be happy with your six hits. Rolling any explosion dice at all is not worth the 1-in-6 chance per die of losing everything by rolling a third
1.
If you re-rolled into a
2 or
3 you at least got rid of one of those
1 results, and can now safely roll your single-die explosion pool. If that comes up
1, stop. If you rolled anything else and you want to take a fairly safe gamble (which I wouldn't, because I'm really conservative) you could then risk rolling your two-die pool and hope you don't get a double
1 to crit fail - and if you roll a double hit of any kind you'll be safe to roll the single-die explosion that new double generated. It's really pretty safe to take that two-die explosion roll - but you're risking taking a crit fail when you didn't need to and you knew it.
If your initial reroll of a
1 comes up a
4 or
5 you now have an extra explosion die, either by itself from the (new) double
5, or a three-die explosion from what are now quad
4 results. The quad result is by far the most dangerous (and tempting) outcome since you could roll two or more
1 results for a crit fail, but you could also fluke into a crit success. Before you dwell on it, roll that safe single-die explosion from the
6 6 pairing. If that comes up a
1, just stop. If not, ponder the risk of getting two
1 results in 3d6 versus more hits or even a crit. I wouldn't take it myself outside of a desperate situation. Alternately, If you re-rolled into a
5, you now have
1 2 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 6 to work with. Either double is a safe extra die. If that doesn't come up
1, the other double is equally safe. And after that, if you're still at a single
1 showing back in your initial pool, then you can risk 3d6 hoping not to roll double
1 in the result and assess the safety of any explosion that might result from that 3d6.
The only point in the whole process where the risk of a crit fail exceeds that of a crit success is if you take a voluntary risk knowing the chances.
And of course if that one re-rolled
1 bounced into a third
6, you have a crit hit and just stop, scoring either 10 hits or (TN+1), whichever is higher. No mucking about with explosions then.
Also worth noting that while that takes a ton of page real estate to type out, I can explain with a set of dice for the example in about a minute, and once you grok how to safely use explosion pools it becomes automatic very quickly. Things only slow down when you have luck to burn, because once you've past a given pool (whether initial or each explosion one-by-one) you cannot go back to an older one, so it's a "speak now or forever accept that roll" situation.
