Quote from: S'mon on March 07, 2024, 03:11:26 AM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on March 07, 2024, 01:53:25 AM
Two of my favorite games are dice pool. 

Mini-six Bare Bones is a simplified variant of West End Games D6 rules.  Simplified means four stats, not six, and combat defensive rolls are replaced by pre-calculated averages, cutting down the dice rolling in half, speeding up gameplay. 

I love Mini Six but rolling lots of D6s & adding them up isn't a dice pool system per the OP, it has plenty of addition which OP says dice pools avoid.

I'd say the OP is wrong.

I'd say the defining feature of a dice pool system is that it is resolved using a variable number of dice proportional to a variable character trait.

If everyone rolls the same number of dice in the same situation (everyone rolls 2d20 and uses the better result for a Climb check with advantage) it's not a dice pool. HERO with its always roll 3d6 for resolution is not a dice pool. Fate with its always roll 4dF is not a dice pool.

WEG Star Wars where your stats are literally variable numbers of dice to roll is a basic additive dice pool. WoD is a count successes dice pool system. Jovian Chronicles is a "take best" dice pool.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on March 07, 2024, 05:52:57 AM

Quote from: S'mon on March 07, 2024, 03:11:26 AM
I love Mini Six but rolling lots of D6s & adding them up isn't a dice pool system per the OP, it has plenty of addition which OP says dice pools avoid.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on January 08, 2024, 05:04:48 PM
As for Dice pools

My only main experience with dice pools is Westend's Star Wars,

?

Looks like when I clicked on the thread I got https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/what-s-wrong-with-dice-pools/msg1273227/#msg1273227 and assumed it was the OP.

Like everything in this world, not everyone agrees on definitions. 

To me a dice pool is 3 or more dice, each added to the roll from a different character trait, or temporary situation to affect the outcome roll.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on March 07, 2024, 12:57:49 PM
Like everything in this world, not everyone agrees on definitions.

Which is fine, as the only thing is how they're meaningfully different at the table. And while they're both technically d6 pools there's a huge difference in feel between systems which count successes vs add results. And then you have #Cortex which does both.

I don't think these broad and ambiguous definitions help anyone.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 20, 2024, 03:10:01 AM

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.

Correction: In SW/Genesys, for any given action only one player rolls the dice. The player of the acting character (which is the GM when NPCs take actions) rolls both the positive dice (ability, skill, positive modifiers, etc.) and the negative dice (difficulty, negative modifiers, etc.) for the action and then resolves the roll.

I think a lot of dice pool systems can be pretentious.

In fact, I would say many of them exist just because of a few factors.

1.  The author thought up a way to roll and count dice results that nobody else has.  Good or bad, the author wrote a game around that idea, because why not?

2.  Those funky polyhedral dice are hard to come by.  Let's write a game using only D6's because that's all any normal people can find.  This is not true anymore, but old school games using D6's seemed a good idea back in the day, probably correctly.

3.  The most popular games used up all the obvious dice mechanics, so to avoid plagiarism they came up with funky dice rolling to avoid lawsuits. 

4.  They're a hipster.  Known dice mechanics are for all those boring square brains.  We need to set our game apart from the pack to be the next king of the alternative scene.  Let's make dice rolling stand out just like we do, unique, bold, and cutting edge cool!

5.   I needed the math to work a certain way and give me results I wanted.  It added up to having a weird dice system. 

Things like that. 

But again, I like dice pool games.  But.   And that's a big caveat.  But, it has to work well and be easy to learn.  If you have custom dice, then it's an automatic no. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on March 07, 2024, 05:42:11 PM
I think a lot of dice pool systems can be pretentious.

In fact, I would say many of them exist just because of a few factors.

1.  The author thought up a way to roll and count dice results that nobody else has.  Good or bad, the author wrote a game around that idea, because why not?

2.  Those funky polyhedral dice are hard to come by.  Let's write a game using only D6's because that's all any normal people can find.  This is not true anymore, but old school games using D6's seemed a good idea back in the day, probably correctly.

3.  The most popular games used up all the obvious dice mechanics, so to avoid plagiarism they came up with funky dice rolling to avoid lawsuits. 

4.  They're a hipster.  Known dice mechanics are for all those boring square brains.  We need to set our game apart from the pack to be the next king of the alternative scene.  Let's make dice rolling stand out just like we do, unique, bold, and cutting edge cool!

5.   I needed the math to work a certain way and give me results I wanted.  It added up to having a weird dice system. 

Things like that. 

But again, I like dice pool games.  But.   And that's a big caveat.  But, it has to work well and be easy to learn.  If you have custom dice, then it's an automatic no. 

That's a good list, but I'd add

6. Designers are bored with the same old dice mechanics they've been using for decades

7. Rolling some d6s and counting successes is just better

Quote from: Mishihari on March 07, 2024, 08:22:48 PM
6. Designers are bored with the same old dice mechanics they've been using for decades

This comes up for me professionally. I work as a trainer, and there are really just a few basic movements which, if you do them right and progress the effort over time, it improves people's lives. Squat, push, pull, etc. But how entertaining is it for me as a trainer to teach yet another person to squat, and to watch yet another set of squats? After a few years and a few hundred thousand repetitions it gets old. It's boring.

But here's the thing: yes, it's boring for me, but it's not boring for the person getting under the bar to unrack and then grind out a heavy squat. They might feel fear or apprehension, but not boredom. And it's not about me.

Same for a game designer or GM - it's not about me. It's about the players. The game designer or game master is there to help the players have fun. And once you help other people have fun, guess what, you have fun, too.

Excellent example of why you should not use d20, thanks

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.

I tried to play this one time. It was a demo at my FLGS. It took so long to decode the chicken bones every time someone made a roll that I never attempted to try and play again.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on March 09, 2024, 09:30:40 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.

I tried to play this one time. It was a demo at my FLGS. It took so long to decode the chicken bones every time someone made a roll that I never attempted to try and play again.

There's a bit of  learning curve, but once you get over it, the game actually plays pretty smooth. However, I have noticed that people new to RPGs tend to pick it up faster than those that have played more traditional systems for years. I guess it takes a bit to "unlearn" and adapt, ut if you're willing to try, it can be fun.

Addressing the original post, I think most of the dislike I've seen of dice pools is either aesthetic (personal taste or sometimes loyalty to tradition) or the argument that dice pools make probabilities too opaque. A lot of people like the statistical transparency that something like a d% or d20 provides. D20 is also hard to screw up by comparison, so maybe there's some of that influencing people's opinions. Dice pools can be onerous when they have overly cute or complex ways of handling dice, tweaking TN and pools independently, constant rerolls, rolling too many dice, that sort of thing.

Personally, I prefer good dice pool systems (roll and count, at least). My homebrew uses a d6 dice pool for resolution. The lack of statistical transparency is a net benefit to me - players should not be thinking about the statistics underlying their choices but rather what their character would do in a given situation. Players should be able to get a gut feel for their skill based on a predictable scale (novices roll X dice, a master rolls Y dice) and that should be enough to gauge their confidence in a course of action as far as the stats go. My system only allows players to directly influence the number of dice they roll depending on their approach (and the GM can likewise add or remove dice). The TN is otherwise static for any given task. The few cases where the TN can vary, players were only ever asked to make a one-time choice and that choice is more or less determined by the kind of character you're playing.

One thing I really like about dice pool systems is that they usually scale up better. They're common in wargaming for that reason. It's just easier to roll like a dozen or two dozen d6 in one go for an arrow volley than it is to roll that many d20, add mods, compare to AC, and then independently roll and sum damage. I also have my own aesthetic preferences. I love the visveral satisfaction of rolling damage on a fireball and want that for non-casters too. I like how dice pools tend to keep numbers small (especially d6 pools). The small numbers make fiddly +1 bonuses obsolete, keeps monsters and players from becoming totally untouchable, and encourages stuff like magic items and spells to focus more on how they interact with the world or represent a new tool instead of just pumping a stat or whatever.

The non-linearity of dice pools also satisfies my need for lightweight simulation and verisimilitude. The real-world is defined by non-linearity, by bell-curves, by pareto distributions. The diminishing returns of adding more dice to a pool, the bell curve distribution of outcomes and the consistency this provides, these things often align with reality more than a linear d20 roll. The swinginess of a d20 can be fun in games like D&D, but it can also introduce a comedic element when the group hits a run of bad luck or a player fumbles their roll in a really critical situation. After a critical fumble everyone is going around the table making jokes about what stupid thing the character did to get that outcome. It can be fun, but it comes down to taste and genre for how tolerable that sort of thing can be. I prefer humor to fit in other places, rather than undercutting an actual tense moment where a character's fate might hinge on a roll.

While you'll have to pry my d20 out of my cold dead hand, I will concede that dice pools are the superior mechanic.

Dice pools can accommodate a much wider range of power levels with some semblance of balance. They are extremely easy to use and newbies pick them up quickly.

I prefer the most simple and direct implementation of dice pools: Roll X vs. Target Number.  You calculate X by the characters abilities and the circumstances. Result is the number of successes counted, usually each 4+'s on the d6's.

I don't mind too much systems that use different polyhedrons to scale the effectiveness, such as Deadlands where your ability could range from d4 to d12, but I think that unnecessarily complicates the beautiful simplicity of dice pools.

And there is just something satisfying about picking up fistfuls of dice and throwing them on the table.

Quote from: HappyDaze on March 10, 2024, 01:32:41 AM
There's a bit of  learning curve, but once you get over it, the game actually plays pretty smooth. However, I have noticed that people new to RPGs tend to pick it up faster than those that have played more traditional systems for years. I guess it takes a bit to "unlearn" and adapt, ut if you're willing to try, it can be fun.

The same is likely true of Braille but I don't want to game using it as a sighted person.   The complicated dice combos with unique faces are primarily an excuse to sell you overpriced variants of dice you likely already have as a gamer but wouldn't use because it would be even more cumbersome to decode without the custom markings.  I say that as a person who actually prefers dice pools compared with a single die mechanic to rule them all but who recognizes that each method has its strengths and weaknesses.   The FFG system for Star Wars (later genericized into an equally pretentiously misspelled so its trademarkable Genesys system) highlights the flaws of dice pools in my opinion.   People are free to like it though but I reached my limit of custom dice with Xwing.