Why are so many people turned off by dice pools?

Why are so many people turned off by dice pools?

Obviously not everyone, but the majority of people I meet prefer to play one-roll, one-outcome games.

Civil discussion please.

I don't have that many d10s laying around.

I don't understand how dice pools work. I'm a brainlet.

Too hard for the average player to understand how likely they are to succeed/fail at a glance and the more points=hyper-reliability at low tier tasks is covered by bell curves.

What the hell are you talking about. Two of the most popular systems, Storyteller, and Shadowrun, both use dice pools.

I like nice close but at a guess I'd probably say bell curves.

In a D20 or percentile game a +1 is a +1. It's an obvious straightforward system linner systerm. Even games that use a curved dice roll plus modifier like Travller or GURPS it's still follows an easy track probability curve.

Dice Pools systems on the other hand lend to very skewed results. An single die at centain Target Number can swing the odds of success dramatically.

Of course you can design the game with it in mind just as you can with linner probability. But player tend to be trusting because less obvious at a glance and hence less transparent.

it doesn't help the two most famous dice pool fsystems are probably World Of Darkness and Shadowrun. Both games infamous for lack of game balance and high complexity respectively.

They are limited in granularity by how many dice are comfortable to roll. Most often you have stats and skills of about 0-5 which translates to a progression of none->crippled->bad->average->good->superhuman.
That is not very stimulating or overly useful to differentiating characters/npcs.
You get the most use out of such a system by to naturally superhuman characters and relegating normal humans to the lowest values. So there are some setting constraints.

Speaking of dice pools, I'm working on a multiplayer pvp game that uses dice pools for attack and defense, and opposed rolls like in Risk. It's like a medieval version of Punch! But with dice rolls.

Does it sound retarded?
What if I told you I've never played a system that used dice pools. What do I have to keep in mind when coming up with the math for this game?

because of their opinions of the 2 most commonly known dice pool systems, Storyteller/WoD and Shadowrun. The first for its 90's era horror stories and the 2nd for its dense mechanics.

People do not like extra work in general.

>SR
>"most popular"
Na man.

Because they are in no way superior to a well managed single roll system. Furthermore they yield too much variability to be consistent.

Because they're a pain in the ass and offer no real meaningful benefit over one-roll systems.

huh, nobody ever complained because they don't know of the other option. I use dicepools because I'm in a third-world shithole, and I only use d6es. I like their bell-curve result if they're just additive, and their "hits" mechanics if they're like shadowrun.

Though I respect the other dice and single-die systems, especially the d20 and d%, and have used them.

Now, what I especially like is the one roll for both attack connecting and damage done. You don't need to roll to hit first and damage done second.

Too much maths

They produce less variability though.

You can't roll consistently 'about fifty' on a d100, but you can expect 'about two successes' on 5d6 4+ to hit.

What do you mean?

If you have a 50 in a d100 systerm, then you have (before modifiers) a 50% chance of success. If you have 1 you have a 1% chance, 100 and 100% and on so.

You might have the same chance of rolling 01 or 00 or another other number on the actual dice. But your actual odds of success are right there.

you can control outliers more easily in a pool by leveraging gaussian distribution, particularly if you have degrees of success

In any singular given roll of a singular die, you have an equal chance to roll any number on its faces. You have the same chance to roll a 99 as you do a 1 in a d100 system; 1%.

That's what he means by less variability.

Is there a good dice pool game?

ORE is pretty good. GURPS is okay if you can get past the massive reading requirement. Legends of the Wulin is fucking awesome. Burning Wheel is fucking awesome. I've heard good things about WoD. Street Fighter: The Roleplaying Game was surprisingly fun.

Yes but the number on the dice do not have any effect the games outside their relation to the stat (assuming there is no rules that 99 is guaranteed miss rules and the like)

If we take in account margins of success and failure. It's normally either higher while under the stat is better or lower in *comparison to the stat* is better.

Either way having a higher or lower stat number means a higher or lower chance of success and a higher or lower and range of success.


Heavy emphasis on "in comparison to the stat" by the way. If you have been playing it where the lowest dice result is automatically you're probably playing the game wrong.

Honestly? I enjoy the stress of things hinging on a single roll rather than the possible fecundity/mundanity of an assured outcome, even if it makes no logical sense. Keeps things interesting.

That, and I've not been exposed to enough dice pool systems to really grasp the general pull.

Dice pools force average if you sum the results.
If you count successes, they are too swingy.
I don't know any rpg that can implement well either one of these designs.

You also get weird ass systems that use both as well as matching and sequential sets like Godlike or Cuthulutech with it's "pokerdice".

No matter how your dice resolution works, someone will hate it with a passion

JC how horrifying.
Do they work?

It's up there, user. I'd say they're right after dnd/pf in terms of popularity in the grand scheme of things. After that there's "the rest".

They are usually pointless. You get enough curves with 2-3 dice already, so if you need that mathematically for some reason for your system (makes small modifiers more meaningful, big ones less), you got that covered.

The only games where pools are justified is where you need to split them for actions, or there's some other sort of manipulation going on, but I don't even know of any that handles it well (Wild Talents is usually touted as one, but I see absolutely no point in the secondary stat you derive being a thing 90% of the time).

Basically this. Modifiers in a 1d20 / 1d10 / 3d6 + Stat system are easy to calculate and balance your game around. Dice pool games are inherently much harder to balance and often times they aren't very well balanced at all. Just look at old WoD Vampire and all of Scion and you'll see they weren't well balanced games.

Not all linear bonus games are well balanced but it's certainly easier.

Bring a shaker and something to roll fat handfulls of dice in. Also remember that rolling 10 dice and picking out all the 5+ ones is kinda time consuming, especially if someone has fancy-schmancy dice with stupid designs that are kinda hard to read.

Dunno. I think they're comfy as fuck. It's very satisfying to roll a handful of d6s/d10s and count the successes/failures, as well as having modifiers be just dice you add or take away rather than having to do a small math challenge for every roll because of additive modifiers.

I understand not everyone is a fan of having to find a gorillion of the same die type though, because that was very unfun for me at first, but getting one d6 pack fixed that issue right away.

Actually had a really good two-month or so beer 'n pretzels campaign with Lasers and Feelings with some more normie friends. Dice pools are easier to grasp than excessive modifiers for the less elucidated. Explaining stacking shit like in Dark Heresy to most folks and getting them to keep track of it is difficult; telling them they need to roll a four or higher and get X number of dice is easy.

I meant what I wrote. That user stated incorrectly that dice pools have higher variance than single die roll, when in actuality the opposite is true so I corrected them.

I wish I saved the pie chart some user posted a few weeks back that showed the market segregation. SR was only around 5-7% of the total population. Does anyone else have that data?

Is there any point to using non-linear dice if you don't have degrees of sucsess?

>Civil discussion please.
Why are you here?

I don't get it...

GURPS is dice pool now?

Normal, or gaussian distribution makes for more predictability, while still allowing surprise results.

Quite a few reasons actually:

>more dice = more expensive
>it's implied you will be calculating how many dice to have in your pool, which can be tedious
>too many dice is a pain to judge the results for, especially if you're supposed to add them all
>can be difficult to get a good roll with so many dice in your hand
>obfuscates probability of success beyond what most people can intuit

>embarrasses self with lack of game design knowledge.


oh sweetie.

Speaking of dice pools, how does Veeky Forums feel about Wild Talents? I'm thinking of trying the system out for my campaign.

Get the fuck out

The reasoning I heard for dice pools is that people hated d20 because a single nat 1 rolled at the wrong time could put an adventure into an unrecoverable state. (Your bonuses are supposed to protect you when you roll dice low, but the ubiquitous "critical fumble" house rule prevents that from happening.) The solution was to roll numerous dice in a bell curve, to make it less likely to roll all the dice low. But this made all the rolls unremarkable and dicerolling became a math chore. What they really needed to do was to break potentially deadly problems into multiple rolls. But you can't sell that as a game while you can sell dice pools as the latest craze sweeping the gaming world, and here we are.

What it mostly come down to is

>Not d20...
>Ahhhhhhhhh ahhhhhh ahhhhhh
>Rainman head hitting occurs

There is nothing inherently wrong with the mechanic, you just need a lot of fucking dice and it can be hard to use as a result.

Dice pools are hardly the only way to reduce the fumble rate. You can use 2d20, 3d6, or many other combinations to get a better rate. I would say that ORE at least does it right, with every single dice having a specific meaning to the point where it sort of is just multiple rolls but marketed as a dice pool system.