Which game systems use the dice pool mechanic?

[Wombat]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned HERO/Champions yet.

Riddle of Steel also uses a dice pool.
7th Sea does, too, but since L5R has already been mentioned, this is probably redundant.

 

[Psion]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned HERO/Champions yet.

I did have it in my first pass since some powers arguably are dice-poolish, but I removed it because Steve asked for "game systems use the dice pool as their primary game mechanic?" Hero's primary game mechanic is 3d6 <= TN style.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Dogs in the Vineyard - which is more fun than you might think. Someone recently ran a Jedi game using these rules which was tremendous fun.

http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/dogsources.html

Cheers

 

[HellHound]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned HERO/Champions yet.

Odd. In my experience, HERO & Champions weren't dice pool games - but then again, I was playing them in the 80's. Suddenly I think I need to pick up the new versions just to see how they rebuilt the system. The last time I looked at them was the foiled run at the Fuzion system.

Oh, and Godlike uses an interesting dice pool mechanic, as I recall.

 

[hexgrid]

Savage Worlds (similar in composition to the already mentioned Deadlands)

Nope, no dice pools in Savage Worlds.

 

[Umbran]

Out of curiosity and to compile a list, which game systems use the dice pool as their primary game mechanic? I know Fireborn and Legends of the Five Rings (3rd ed.) use a dice pool. Which others?

I note you say the dice pool mechanic, as if it is singular. It isn't. There are many different dice-pool mechanics, and they aren't equivalent.

 

[Staffan]

I note you say the dice pool mechanic, as if it is singular. It isn't. There are many different dice-pool mechanics, and they aren't equivalent.

True. There are three main types of dicepool mechanics as far as I can tell.
1. D6-style: Roll a bunch of dice based on skill level¹, add them together, and try to get above a difficulty number.
2. World of Darkness-style: Roll a bunch of dice based on skill level, compare each separately against a difficulty number, and count how many succeeded.
3. Traveller 4-style: Roll a bunch of dice depending on difficulty, and compare to skill level.
¹ For convenience's sake, I use the term "skill level" to include ability scores and similar things as well.

There are some other variants as well (such as roll a bunch of dice and compare the highest to a difficulty, and roll a bunch of dice and see how many match), but these are the main ones I've seen.

 

[Ghostwind]

I meant the term "Dice pool" to be generalized. If a large part of the game relies upon a dice pool mechanic, then it is of interest to me.

 

[Umbran]

There are some other variants as well (such as roll a bunch of dice and compare the highest to a difficulty, and roll a bunch of dice and see how many match), but these are the main ones I've seen.

The "see how many match" can be slightly more generalized to:

"Roll a bunch of dice. Arrange them in sets with a pattern (matching being one example). Both the type of pattern and the size of the set may be relevant to the task resolution."

There's also games like Alternity, who's baseline is a single-die mechanic, but the ever-present modifiers tend to turn it into soemthing more dice-poolish.

Is popularity the important point? The interesting issue isn't (to me, at least) how many games use a given mechanic, but what the performance characteristics of the mechanics are. That's why I brought up the diversity - even what you call the main mechanics perform quite differently. Diffeently enough that without knowing more about the reason for the question, I hesitate to lump them together under one banner.

 

[HellHound]

True. There are three main types of dicepool mechanics as far as I can tell.
1. D6-style: Roll a bunch of dice based on skill level¹, add them together, and try to get above a difficulty number.

Hmm - I never considered this to be a Dice Pool mechanic - When discussing Dice Pool Mechanics with other designers, the implicationis that you don't total the numbers on the dice in a pool, but test each die for results.

For example, On The Edge by Atlas Games uses a system where each character has a skill level of xd6 in what they do, and you total your dice when you roll them and compare results. Highest wins. This is not a dice pool, but a simple escalating DC system.

The game that made the Dice Pool cool is Vampire, where you roll the number of 10-sided dice and determine how many of the dice individually rolled higher thanthe DC number. This is the same basic mechanic used in Shadowrun, which uses exploding d6 instead of d10, to the same effect. These are traditionally considered to be dice pool mechanics.