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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8671247" data-attributes="member: 82106">As a game designer, my feeling is that if I'm giving you one chance in 216 of success, its almost like a fraud, because people are optimistic and they will expect that they will pay off on that sometimes, but they won't, not in any reasonable finite amount of playing. So no, I don't even want those to exist, and I ESPECIALLY don't want them to be non-obvious (and believe me, dice pool odds are mostly very obscure to people!). I mean, I'm a math guy and I am not going to tell you off the top of my head what the odds are of winning an opposed check in TB2 where I have 8 dice and the other guy has 12 dice (all 4-6 contribute one success to each side). Is it one chance in 3? I bet, without resorting to some online dice odds calculator, that nobody has that answer on a first reading (sure, we can all probably figure it out if we really want to, but at the table?). OTOH everyone knows the odds yielded by a d20, and at least 5% chance of success, while not great, WILL come up now and then. For all these reasons I stuck to a d20 based design for my own game. I'm not pooping on dice pools or anything, I just think their virtues are overrated. PbtA's 2d6 always rolled straight up by the player is not bad either. I think people are pretty likely to understand that a 7 is 6 times more likely than a 12, for example.Meh, again, 95% of the time you want odds in the 25-75% range anyway. Now and then you want something as low as 5% perhaps. I don't really see the growth curve of D&D and such as a bad thing, personally.I don't know about that. I mean, TSR's FASRIP basically did EXACTLY that (admittedly its a d100 system, but in a practical sense it is the same issues). People love that thing, it works great, they still play it and hack on it, and its been out of print for 30 years! I mean, sure, it isn't a super common technique (though other games certainly have used it) but my point was just that it is very doable, you don't need dice pools. They are OK, but the math is kind of a PITA, actually.</blockquote>

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