Asking this forum about dice pools is pretty useless as any attempt I have made typically resulted in insults being hurled my way, thus I've made very little head way in their use.

That said I moved off of using dice-pools for a sub-mechanic I planned on using in my game mainly because I found I could simulate the same mathematical odds with a set amount of dice, 3d6 to be precise.

The big disadvantage I see in dice pools is they are a bit clunky and don't scale well, once you are throwing more than 7 dice at a time, counting up successes or totaling slows down play from the games I've played. 

Also botch mechanics, don't use these with dice-pools, if your dice pool has any sort of success threshold  that is sub 50% and has a botch mechanic or success subtraction mechanic, after a certain number of dice dramatic failures are going to become more common than success, which is stupid.

Big advantages Dice pools are super tactile, it's fun to roll dice, period. anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, likewise if we are talking a simple dice pool system it makes certain interactions breezy, a player merely needs to remember how many dice they throw, not how many fiddly bonuses or penalties are at play at any given time. also it's less abstract to the players what a bonus or a penalty is depending on the system, a subtraction or increase to a dice pool is self evident in it's effect.

I rather like die pool systems, especially if you get more than one bit of info out of a roll.

The One Roll Engine is a good example, where you get hit speed, location, and the amount of damage from one roll, where everyone rolls at once.

SilCore's roll and keep is pretty nice too since it meshes so well with the damage system.

EABA is pretty slick with how it models human limits with the amount of dice that you can keep.

Those are just off the top of my head.

Quote from: SmallMountaineer on June 26, 2024, 01:26:21 PM

Quote from: Nakana on June 26, 2024, 01:18:03 PMMy disdain for dice pool systems goes far deeper than yours, but you've added reason #826 why I think they're stupid. +1

From whence does your deep disdain emerge?

Mainly the World of Darkness system. Pick some arbitrary stat + skill combo for x number of dice (which ultimately average out to rolling almost the same number of dice for everything; roughly 7 dice if memory serves) and then count y number of "successes" over a TN to determine pass/fail.

I'd rather just flip a coin than that half hazard, "whimsy" of a mechanic.

TinyD6/There and Back Again are tolerable because it's 1-4 dice (max) and 1 success = success.

I don't consider WEG's D6 system a pool system.

I don't understand the issue this thread appears to be about. Dice pool performances vary WILDLY depending on how they are tuned.

There are three distinct categories of dice pools.

• XdY + Z pools have you roll several dice and sum them as if they were a single die which happens to output a bell curve. This version is all about producing a bell curve.
• Rolling Successes pools count how many dice roll above or below a critical threshold.
• Rolling Raises is a kind of unusual variant where you assemble something out of the dice. I'm most familiar with this from 7th Sea.

I have seen a fair bit of criticism of dice pools, but the criticisms always apply to one or at most two variants and never are categorically true of dice pools. More often criticisms hinge on specific quirks of older systems making obtuse design decisions. This thread is really no different, with practically all success-count dice pool games which don't do weird things like 1 penalizing a success and 10 giving you 2 being so inconsequentially slower than D20 in this regard that that particular match-up is a quintessential nitpick.

If you don't like dice pools, you do your own thing. I think that the D20 space is pretty well exhausted, but you never know; someone could prove me wrong.

However, after messing around with mixed step dice pools for a while...yeah, I'm pretty convinced that some permutation of this will be the future of the industry. The major fault with them is you need to keep 20+ dice of different sizes available to roll on the table and you need to know what each of the die sizes look like. But that is something most experienced groups can manage well enough. The second fault is that it isn't a particularly fast mechanic and you don't want the game to require too many rolls.

What they bring to the table is making a number of interactions which would have been system-shatteringly crunchy even in systems designed to manage a lot of crunch work without too much fuss. Most gamers out there like crunchy-like game interactions, but don't actually like doing the number-crunching themselves, so this is potentially a huge deal. If someone can get it to work, anyways.

Dice pools in and of them selves, I'm not a hater. However, like others have said, once you start rolling a whole hand full of dice and then have to add them all up it does slow the game down. Especially when you are 4 or 5 hours into a game and starting to get mentally drained.

Now what I HATE, games where you roll a pool of dice and only a 6 counts as a success. I historically have HORID luck and it kicks in on those systems. I played Alien once and was rolling something like 6 or 7 d6 .... NONE of them were higher than 3. There is nothing like going 'looking at the odds, I have to get 1 success. Guys, I hope you are not depending on me here because I'll still will not get this roll .... yeah I suck I failed again'

Of course for me that luck is true in a normal d20 type games too. In one game all night I never rolled above a 5 and rolled something like 3 nat 1s in a roll. However, at least in a d20 system where you have bonuses, you can still roll a 5 and at least get closer to a success. And, there is still the mental, I'm rolling a d 20 and need as 12 or higher, and have +2 to it so That is still a coin toss on each roll. So mentally it is less defeating to me any ways.