Quote from: Fheredin on January 17, 2024, 04:04:03 PMThe problem is basically that everyone understands numbers pretty easily, but Genesys uses a Byzantine set of hieroglyphic symbols. The process of learning the system is atrocious, because it requires rote memorization....

This may be a lingering misperception of the creators about the typical RPG audience.

Arcane rules that required a lot of mental work to commit to memory and master used to be a major selling point in gaming, so this may have been expected to have more appeal than it turned out to, especially given the novelty factor. However, the payoff for investment in mastering a complex rules system is being able to better manipulate the system to your PC's advantage. The payoff here isn't anything more than reading the dice faster. (And, of course, the gamer demographic who liked mastering rules for their own sake is usually precisely the demographic not interested in narrative-driven rules anyway.)

Bespoke dice are a dice problem, not a pool problem, but they are magnified by pooling the dice.

Mechanics or dice shenanigans posing a barrier to entry is not a problem in and of itself. Too much of a barrier to entry is a problem, but a non zero barrier, like actually reading the book, is good for keeping out tourist that cannot commit to a 5-6 session mini campaign. "Looks complicated, I am too lazy to try" is a feature for self selecting players just as a 400+ page book is a feature for self selecting systems.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2024, 06:53:09 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on January 17, 2024, 04:04:03 PMThe problem is basically that everyone understands numbers pretty easily, but Genesys uses a Byzantine set of hieroglyphic symbols. The process of learning the system is atrocious, because it requires rote memorization....

This may be a lingering misperception of the creators about the typical RPG audience.

Arcane rules that required a lot of mental work to commit to memory and master used to be a major selling point in gaming, so this may have been expected to have more appeal than it turned out to, especially given the novelty factor. However, the payoff for investment in mastering a complex rules system is being able to better manipulate the system to your PC's advantage. The payoff here isn't anything more than reading the dice faster. (And, of course, the gamer demographic who liked mastering rules for their own sake is usually precisely the demographic not interested in narrative-driven rules anyway.)

I am familiar with systems that do that (I remember a system which deliberately used custom dice with Nordic runes for aesthetics, but the name escapes me.) That may have actually been the intent back when this was a Star Wars only game in the form of Edge of the Empire. However, I think this was more misguided attempt at streamlining. Edge of the Empire and the generic follow-up Genesys are pretty recent games, 2012 and 2017 respectively, which means the big fad game when FFG was designing it was Apocalypse World. I don't think that any designer would intentionally make something more cumbersome when cheap PbtA games were everywhere.

I appreciate the attempt to reduce arithmetic. Math in the core mechanic can add a surprising amount of drag to a game, and being able to avoid that is a key reason I do generally like dice pools. But I also think that Genesys sticks so tightly to it's narrative game mandate that it becomes difficult to play on that account instead.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2024, 06:53:09 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on January 17, 2024, 04:04:03 PMThe problem is basically that everyone understands numbers pretty easily, but Genesys uses a Byzantine set of hieroglyphic symbols. The process of learning the system is atrocious, because it requires rote memorization....

This may be a lingering misperception of the creators about the typical RPG audience.

Arcane rules that required a lot of mental work to commit to memory and master used to be a major selling point in gaming, so this may have been expected to have more appeal than it turned out to, especially given the novelty factor. However, the payoff for investment in mastering a complex rules system is being able to better manipulate the system to your PC's advantage. The payoff here isn't anything more than reading the dice faster. (And, of course, the gamer demographic who liked mastering rules for their own sake is usually precisely the demographic not interested in narrative-driven rules anyway.)

Complex rules, or at least rules complex enough for players to demonstrate system mastery, are still popular amongst a lot of people.

For many of us, we get paid to work with complex rules. We want a break from that in our games.

Dice pools are overkill if the mechanic is designed to generate a single number.

Dice pools might be overkill if the mechanic is designed to generate multiple numbers. Because ultimately that takes a minimum of two dice anyway.

Only if the mechanic is designed to treat abilities as resources, reduce the need for math, provide an avenue of shared information at the table, or do anything which presents choices after the roll as opposed simply generate numbers do dice pools become advantageous.

However attempting to raise/resolve multiple situations in a single roll is a related but separate problem. And yes #Genesys goes overboard.

Quote from: Domina on January 16, 2024, 11:19:50 PM
Surely you guys understand that you don't need to own as many dice as you have in your pool right?

Then it becomes a reroll mechanic, not a die pool.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on January 18, 2024, 04:52:28 PM

Quote from: Domina on January 16, 2024, 11:19:50 PM
Surely you guys understand that you don't need to own as many dice as you have in your pool right?

Then it becomes a reroll mechanic, not a die pool.

Pretty sure they mean that if your dice pool is 8 dice, but you only have 4 dice on hand, you can roll the four, count the total or successes, then roll them again, count and add those to the first four. It takes slightly longer, but it's still a valid dice pool, not a reroll mechanic.

Hell, it'd take even longer, but you could roll one die eight times and just add the results and it's mechanically the same. I remember way back in the day having to do that for fireballs because I only had 3d6 on hand (I was 12 and my mom didn't want me stealing dice from the board game boxes because then they'd get lost) but the damage was 6d6.

Which in a way really highlights that there's not THAT much difference between a dice pool and various fast resolution for multiple attacks methods (rolling multiple different colored dice, each representing a single attack... Lord knows having multiple different colored 2d6 sets helps speed up Battletech cluster hits immensely).

I mean, a fighter's 4 attacks for 1dX+Y damage each is basically a dice pool of how many successes (each dealing damage) you have on a target. It even has the typical dice pool trick of splitting your dice to make attacks on multiple targets in the same turn.

It's just not explained that way, but really the difference between 4 attacks per round using single die for each and 4 die dice pool where each success does a unit of damage is largely just in those descriptions and specific expressions (8 dice doing 1 hit each vs. 4 dice doing 2 hits each).

This isn't really to advance any specific argument, it's just an observation about how presentation and order of operations matters. A six-second round with one attack per round and each hit doing 1 damage and a 60-second round using a 10 dice pool with each success doing 1 damage are different in scope (the latter you'd more likely see in a dice pool game where an entire combat might resolve in 1-2 turns with a lot of narrative description of the outcome... the former is the sort of round by round detailing you expect from D&D type systems).

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on January 18, 2024, 04:52:28 PM
Dice pools are overkill if the mechanic is designed to generate a single number.

Dice pools might be overkill if the mechanic is designed to generate multiple numbers. Because ultimately that takes a minimum of two dice anyway.

Only if the mechanic is designed to treat abilities as resources, reduce the need for math, provide an avenue of shared information at the table, or do anything which presents choices after the roll as opposed simply generate numbers do dice pools become advantageous.

However attempting to raise/resolve multiple situations in a single roll is a related but separate problem. And yes #Genesys goes overboard.

Quote from: Domina on January 16, 2024, 11:19:50 PM
Surely you guys understand that you don't need to own as many dice as you have in your pool right?

Then it becomes a reroll mechanic, not a die pool.

I think these are half-truths because you assume that the output is the only part of the mechanic. In my experience, most players are actually interested in the inputs more than the outputs because you control the inputs. The outputs are filtered through RNG. Dice pools can produce a lot of outputs, but they can also take a lot of inputs. A dice pool with one input and one output is a complete waste, but a dice pool with 5 inputs and only one output is probably as valuable as one which takes only one input and produces several outputs.

In fact, I would actually argue the former is generally better for most playstyles. The input side can be thought out beforehand, but the output side is always about improvising, so focusing on inputs can lead to a game feeling faster and deeper while focusing on outputs will slow the game down.

Rerolls. Not all rerolls are equal. I would suggest that there's a semantic difference between rolling a die again (keeping it's previous value) and rerolling a die (erasing it's previous value.) As most players are not particularly precise in their terminology, this is probably something we will never be able to consistently articulate precisely. Suffice to say that not all rerolls are created equal.

As a general rule, rerolls are used to shrink the dice pool. I actually don't recall seeing that many reroll mechanics in proper dice pool games because most dice pool games use homogeneous dice, usually D6s or D10s. When you are using a super-plentiful die, there's almost no value to a reroll. I suppose you could argue that Savage Worlds die explosions are a dice pool with rerolls, but that stretches the spirit of the definitions in both cases.

Step dice get massively more mileage out of reroll mechanics than homogeneous dice pools because the one mechanical effect (a reroll) hits the different dice differently. I think it's almost not worth bothering with step dice pools if you don't have a reroll mechanic and it's probably not worth including a reroll mechanic if you don't have step dice.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 16, 2024, 11:07:21 AM


Anytime you have a dice result called "Despair", you should reconsider your system.

Is it really a dice pool system? Thought you rolled consistently the same dice for specific situations and there was no option to say spend 2 dice on attack and 1 on defense as a guessed example?

Quote from: Omega on January 20, 2024, 02:15:41 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 16, 2024, 11:07:21 AM


Anytime you have a dice result called "Despair", you should reconsider your system.

Is it really a dice pool system? Thought you rolled consistently the same dice for specific situations and there was no option to say spend 2 dice on attack and 1 on defense as a guessed example?

It's a dice pool. For example, and yes this gets crazy convoluted, when making, say, an attack roll, you roll a number of ability dice equal to your stat. If you are skilled in the weapon, you change one or more of the ability dice to a proficiency dice. You may gain one or more boost dice for favorable circumstances. The GM then builds a dice pool to match the difficulty of the task. Difficulty dice, challenge dice and setback dice to match ability, proficiency and boost. Then the player rolls their pool of dice, and the GM rolls their pool of dice.
Obviously the Star Wars game adds a Force dice.
I'll stop there. The next step is to interpret all those symbols, and that's anudda thing...

You don't split the dice, but then you don't technically split dice in Star Wars D6, and that's considered a dice pool system.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 20, 2024, 03:10:01 AM
I'll stop there. The next step is to interpret all those symbols, and that's anudda thing...

Then there's the player figuring out how they are going to spend their advantage and what their options even are for this check for this skill.  Here's a cheat sheet somone made to give people who don't know the system an idea of how convoluted this can be.  This is where players who are prone to analysis paralysis just lock up.
https://forum.swrpgcommunity.com/t/threat-advantage-tables/511/2 
player.exe has crashed.

Quote from: BadApple on January 08, 2024, 05:21:47 PM
The problem I have with dice pools is kind of dumb, tbh.  There's too many things for a player to sort out for a check.

If I've done my job as a GM right, every check has meaning and thereby putting stress on the player.  The more dice a player has to check under stress the longer it takes to sort out and in turn hurts the game's flow and pacing.  I find that three dice is as big as a dice pool gets before it starts to have a negative affect at the table.

By the same token, my favorite dice mechanic is 2d6.  This is the most familiar dice mechanic to most non RPG games and so it's easy to get players on board with it no matter what their experience.  It's comfortable for my players therefore it's easy to use therefor, my game runs better.

These are my observations of the various games I've run and played over the years so it isn't scientific.  If I had my way, every roll would be a % roll but that's not what seems to work for most players.

I see what you're saying and I guess the problem you have will be valid for certain kinds of dice pool games but not others.

I'll compare SWD6 and VTM. In SWD6 you roll a lot of D6s but all you're really doing is adding them up and that total passes or fails a check. It's pretty accepted that anything more than 5D is starting to get into super human territory. So 5 dice per roll is usually the maximum you'll see. Just add up the five numbers and you've either passed or failed. Fairly binary and fast paced. I can absolutely see your problem occurring with VTM though. Where each individual dice is a success or failure and you have botches that you need to subtract from the pool and potentially various other mechanics you need to keep in mind like Soak for combat and stuns, and so much other shite. And don't even get me started on Shadowrun or Battletech AToW.

Whether a game is dice pool or not. A simple action should at the very maximum take the seconds it would take to resolve in real life. Five seconds to shoot a gun IRL and 2 - 5 minutes to resolve that with RPG mechanics is not acceptable and drags down a game. I wish more games understood this.

Quote from: Wisithir on January 17, 2024, 07:37:55 PM
Bespoke dice are a dice problem, not a pool problem, but they are magnified by pooling the dice

Are there are games that use bespoke dice that are not dice pool systems?  I can't think of one. 

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 22, 2024, 03:19:27 AM

Quote from: Wisithir on January 17, 2024, 07:37:55 PM
Bespoke dice are a dice problem, not a pool problem, but they are magnified by pooling the dice

Are there are games that use bespoke dice that are not dice pool systems?  I can't think of one.

DCC makes use of d5, d7, d14, d16, d24, and d30. 

Quote from: Wisithir on January 22, 2024, 03:48:33 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 22, 2024, 03:19:27 AM

Quote from: Wisithir on January 17, 2024, 07:37:55 PM
Bespoke dice are a dice problem, not a pool problem, but they are magnified by pooling the dice

Are there are games that use bespoke dice that are not dice pool systems?  I can't think of one.

DCC makes use of d5, d7, d14, d16, d24, and d30.

Those are odd sizes but I wouldn't call those bespoke dice.  They aren't made just for that system like the FFG dice.

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 22, 2024, 03:19:27 AM

Quote from: Wisithir on January 17, 2024, 07:37:55 PM
Bespoke dice are a dice problem, not a pool problem, but they are magnified by pooling the dice

Are there are games that use bespoke dice that are not dice pool systems?  I can't think of one.

One could make a case for FUDGE/FATE. You roll 4dF (Fudge die is six-sides; with two +, two -, and two blank faces) as a randomizer and add that to your stat value to see if you beat the target number. You get a nice bell curve with a median result of your skill value as a result.

The reason I'd say not a dice pool is that you always roll 4dF for checks.