Again, neat in concept, but incredibly painful in execution.Īnother commonly discussed issue with dice pool games is that unlike a rolling method with a flat distribution, the probabilities of success and failure are not especially transparent to the GM or players. Each comparison that the attacker won resulted in a wound to the victim. However, the original damage mechanic was really painful - you'd roll all of the dice (anywhere from 3-5, sometimes more), and then you'd compare each one on a die-for-die basis against the victim's damage resist. For most activities (a skill check, for instance), you're generally just rolling your dice pool and looking for the highest result. As nifty as Iron/Jadeclaw's systems were, there were a couple resolution mechanics that were really painful. The time to interpret is another big bugaboo. Once they've all come to a stop, you're now picking through the debris to find out which are good, bad, or needing a reroll or double-count it - at its worst, that part was painfully time consuming.Įxalted is one of those "never again" games for me - as much as I liked the concept, needing to buy d10's in bulk just to run the game wasn't cool. Shadowrun and Exalted were probably at the ridiculous end - throwing 20d6 or 25d10 was just bonkers. After the rolling is done, interpreting the results is relatively quick. 4 or 5d6 is pretty manageable, and you can usually get away with rolling them on the table, rather than into some kind of container (shoebox, box set top, etc). Some of the dice pool games I thought were interesting are the ones where the die pool isn't necessarily the same type - Cortex and the Iron/Jadeclaw games, for instance.ĭice pool games start getting unwieldy once you start needing to throw more than a small handful of dice at a time. To an extent, I sort of consider Savage Worlds to be a dice pool system - it's just a dice pool of two (with different die types). Silhouette is probably my favorite example. The "dice pool" systems I like most tend to be ones where the dice pool is small - 1 to 5 dice. I personally do prefer dice pools and the binomial distribution of results over single flat-distribution rolls. Some people don't particularly like the binomial distribution of a success-counting die pool, but then again, there's plenty of people who prefer it to a flat distribution like 1d20 or d%.ĭepending on the specifics of how they're handled, dice pools can be great, or not so great. Exalted can be like this, as can Shadowrun - players can easily end up with die pools of 20+ at chargen, which can be difficult to roll and sort in reasonable time. This means removing 3 dice from the pool is equivalent to requiring 1 more success.ģ) Some dice pools just use too many dice. Consider in the nWoD, where each die has a 1/3 chance of being a success. Does a harder task require more successes or reduce the number of dice in the pool? Some games use both, which adds a (in my opinion unnecessary) layer of complication. It's worth nothing that both Shadowrun 4e and nWoD use static TNs, which resolve this.Ģ) Inconsistency with difficulty. cWoD had a similar issue due to its botch mechanic, which meant at TN 10 you'd be more likely to botch with larger pools than smaller ones. Changing the TN was far more significant than adding or removing dice, and it was extremely coarse-grained as well. This was especially bad in Shadowrun before 4th ed, which used D6s. In any case, known problems:ġ) Floating target numbers. Click to expand.Dunno where you got that from.
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