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tussock's picture

Ah, dice pools.

Never have seen a game that produced anything like a sensible range of target numbers, dice pool size, or required successes.

The math is genuinely unintuitive, and the probabilities are all extremely jumpy when the target numbers move off 50% per die, especially with large dice pools.

Then you get into designers losing themselves in the possible modifiers, without calculating how severely one can effect the others. Number of dice, target number, number of successes, ratio of success to failure, degrees of success, and so on. You end up with games were you're more likely to accidentally kill yourself by being more skilled.

For anyone playing one: get yourself 4-6 dice to lower the chance of total failure below where you'll notice it, then do everything you can to ease the target numbers. -1 TN is almost always worth more than another half dozen dice, and you'll never have more dice than -2 TN is worth on d10's.
If there's degrees of success, and you want rare special success results, take a couple more dice. If there's a ratio of success to failure, make sure you have an odd number of dice, and focus on minimising that target number at all costs. Never roll anything in play against high target numbers, take action to lower them first, range, lighting, magic, or whatever.

Really, it's all just a clunky way of making very small modifiers have huge effects on your success at tasks, in ways that most people won't understand.

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