TheRPGSite

Hey all, It's been a long time since I've posted here, but I've been lurking for what seems like years now.

Full disclosure: My name is Scott Harshbarger, possibly know to some as Harsh as I do a fair amount of artwork here and there, and I am working with a couple others to put out our first book called Sixcess through Harsh Realities. I am primarily the art guy, but I have been pretty involved in the game design and playtesting, which brings me to my question(s).

In your experience, what are the pros and cons of dice poll systems?

Also, what are the pros and cons of universal (or generic) dice mechanics?

Just a note about Sixcess in particular in that the dice pools are typically 4-10 dice. I mention this b/c the most complaints I've heard over the years about dice pools is having to throw too many dice.

Thanks all, I look forward to your input!

*Ack! Title should be Dice Pools, not Polls. Yeesh. Sorry!

Hmm. While I don't have anything in principle against dice pool systems, in reality I've almost never played them. I played 7th Sea for a while (which of course uses rather small pools) and I played a couple of Shadowrun games in the early 90s, and that's it. So it's possible I have some unconscious bias against them.

Ultimately any RPG is going to be sold to me (or not) on the basis of the setting first, and mechanics second.

Well the 'no' answer seemed a little harsh but that's what I voted because there was no 'no, it's not really my thing' choice.

The reason for me picking no is because I'm just not a fan of generic systems.  In feel generic systems generally lack something that a system specifically designed for a setting would have.  For example a generic system might have X amount 'ability scores' that are always the same and they may work well for some settings but may not give enough ( or not the right kind ) of detail or 'feel' for other settings.  

And I know this may sound a bit silly, but I don't like rules, lists of equipment, and art in my books that don't jive with the setting I'm playing.  Hard to get into the 'wild west' mood when the cover has a picture of a guy with a lazer gun wearing power armor and a bunch of rules for spell casting in the book.  Just kills the mood for me.

I have no problems with dice pool mechanics and in fact think they can be pretty fun if done right.  I have to admit though, and I mean this with all due respect to you, but the 'sixcess' system you're kickstarting doesn't do it for me at all.  I like very rules light and your game is just too fiddly and the jargon is very off-putting.  I don't like rolling against a variable number either.  IMO it's much better to roll and count successes which are always calculated the same way and then compare those successes to a difficulty number that the GM can keep secret.

Quote from: Harsh;590509In your experience, what are the pros and cons of dice poll systems?

The biggest con with most dice pool mechanics is the opacity of probability. I prefer open odds both as a player and as a referee because knowing is half the battle.

The pros? I don't really like dice pools, but fans will tell you they love throwing a fistful of dice. That tactile metaphor is the big draw, something like having eleven testicles instead of two.*

QuoteAlso, what are the pros and cons of universal (or generic) dice mechanics?

8-10 years ago, I loved universal mechanics. Nowadays, no. I won't refuse a game because of it, but it's far from a selling point, more like bland, boring, but acceptable.

I think the larger market prefers universal mechanics, however.

* then detaching them and throwing them across a table.

Nah dice pools are fun for a game or two but then it just becomes labour. Basically it tars up the works and slows gameplay. I like rolling lots of dice, and even have a custom set, but I like doing lots of stuff while rolling lots of dice, not just one or two things.

As for generic systems, I'm not even sure what that means. You can port any system to any setting, so technically every system is potentially generic. Has anyone got examples of specific rules that can't be ported from one system to another?

But yeah you do need a setting if you're going to publish these days.

Quote from: Harsh;590509Also, what are the pros and cons of universal (or generic) dice mechanics?

Missed that question.

If you mean a single dice mechanic used throughout your RPG for everything, then that's fine in principle, although I do think there's something to be said for unusual sub-systems having their own approach. It draws them in to the spotlight more. A matter of taste, anyway.

If you mean a "universal RPG" a la GURPS, then my view is that there's no such thing. Any system has biases within it that means it will suit some genres/settings/approaches/game structures better than others. That's not to mean that there's no value in a multi-system rule set - I'm a fan of Savage Worlds myself because I tend to a two-fisted pulp style in my gaming regardless of the setting, and SW does that well - but I think it's better to find a niche and make sure you serve it well than to try to be all things to all men.

That's all pretty encouraging to me so far. Thanks guys.
Sorry about the oversight in the 'No' portion of the poll, Spinal Tarp. And thank you for the honest feedback. I know Sixcess isn't for everyone, but I will say I think it's closer to what you say in your post than you seem to think. Still, thanks for the input!

We are putting out Sixcess as a catch all, but we are doing it mostly b/c we wanted to put out our own games. And when we get to settings they will be with as much immersion as we can muster. Setting the mood and feel of a world/setting is very important to be sure. How can you play Star Wars with a reference pic of Frodo? It just doesn't work overly well.

I totally agree that any system can be played with nearly any game. I used to play supers with Ad&d 2nd ed. back in the day, and more recently used M&M 2nd to play Star Wars once before getting the d20 book.

From what I'm gathering here so far, it seems setting is more important to most of you than just the dice system by itself.

With that in mind, have any of you (or anyone else) ever bought a game just for the setting regardless of the dice system?

Quote from: Harsh;590519With that in mind, have any of you (or anyone else) ever bought a game just for the setting regardless of the dice system?

Hmm.

Purchases made without knowledge of the rules system because I was interested in the setting: Marvel Super-Heroes (FASERIP), MSH (Saga), DC Heroes, MegaTraveller, Twilight 2000, 2300AD, Space 1889, 7th Sea, Skyrealms of Jorune, TORG, Talislanta 4e, Star Trek (FASA), Star Trek - Original Series (LUG), Chill, and probably a load more I've forgotten.

Purchases made knowing I didn't like the rules but was interested in the setting: Mage - The Sorceror's Crusade, Wraith - The Great War, about twenty GURPS 3e wordbooks

Purchases made where I already knew I liked the rules: Some AD&D settings and Savage Worlds books, Urban Arcana (for D20 Modern), Ptolus, also technically Mayfair's Underground (which used more-or-less the MEGS system from DC Heroes)

"Generic" rules systems purchased where I didn't already own one or more setting books: Savage Worlds

This thread troubles me, as it implies the designers don't know what's important about their game system. Dice pools only matter if they add to gameplay. For systems like Storyteller and Shadowrun they add nothing*, and I've easily converted these to single die rolls with no loss. For systems like Dogs in the Vineyard, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and Don't Rest Your Head however, the die pools are an intrinsic part of play, and you can't play the same way without them.

And while the last three are some of my favorites, having a dice pool is NOT the reason for it.

Evaluating the Sixcess mechanics so far, it seems the die pool brings the possibility of unbound results which get more likely the higher your skill (the more dice you roll). That would be hard to facilitate without dice pools or different denominations of dice like Savage Worlds uses (but we've seen the probability arguments for that one), so it makes sense to use them if that's a feature you want.

*and in the dim recesses of my mind a little voice tells me that both these games DID feature open ended rolls of a sort that would be somewhat difficult to achieve without dice pools, though maybe without as much an impact. So nevermind.

Quote from: Grymbok;590510Ultimately any RPG is going to be sold to me (or not) on the basis of the setting first, and mechanics second.

I'm the exact opposite. Good settings are everywhere. Good systems I can count on the fingers of both hands. And if I want setting for a license I just buy the official guides, which are usually better written and not cluttered up with rules I'm not going to use. This was especially true for Stargate and Farscape when they came out in their d20 versions.

Quote from: Harsh;590519With that in mind, have any of you (or anyone else) ever bought a game just for the setting regardless of the dice system?

There you go referring to 'dice' system again. The dice are not important beyond the kind of play they facilitate, and you need to nail down what you want that kind of play to be because running a game in Sixcess is already different other generic systems like GURPS because of the range and occurrence of results created by the dice system.

I’ve got no problem with dice-pool games. I like Ubiquity a lot. I especially like that when I want to award a bonus or penalty to a roll, I can just say "add two dice" or something - we don’t get stuck with the calculus of stacking bonuses.

Increasingly though, I find I prefer not to have a universal mechanic for a couple of reasons:

1) I can remember rules better if they have different mechanics. E.g. initiative is d6, to hit is d20, wandering monster d%, whatever. Maybe this is trickier with dice pools to do, I dunno.

2) Where only one die-type is required at the table (d6 let’s say), I’m at a loss when I just want to generate a random number, like a 1-in-10 chance. I think the "elegance" of a single die-type is less important than the "flexibility" of lots of different kinds of dice. Random tables in some d6 games seem odd to me when you roll 2d6 and use the first die as a tens column and the second die as a units column giving a roll of 1-36 - seems like form is more important here than function.

3) And this is more important. IME often where there is a (relatively) unified mechanic the apparent simplicity is deceptive. Yes I need only roll a Xd6 or something, but there the math used to figure out the target number can get weird in different situations. Another example is weapon damage: the intuitiveness of a great sword at d12 and a dagger at d4 is hard to duplicate simply with a unified mechanic.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;590535I'm the exact opposite. Good settings are everywhere. Good systems I can count on the fingers of both hands. And if I want setting for a license I just buy the official guides, which are usually better written and not cluttered up with rules I'm not going to use. This was especially true for Stargate and Farscape when they came out in their d20 versions.

I think you're in the majority there, don't worry (or at least the majority of people who post on RPG forums). I'd agree with you that I can count the good systems I've come in to contact with as a fairly low number - but really, I only need about three systems, and I've got more than that, so I've long since stopped prioritising looking at system.

Thanks for the input, guys.
First, please let me reiterate I am NOT the dice mechanic guy. My realm is primarily art and world design, which ultimately breaks down to trying to make each world/setting look as visually appealing and cinematic as possible. So, yeah, I readily admit I don't get the math et al involved in the mechanic, but then again, that's not my department in the least.

My primary reason for asking these questions is sort of a social study for lack of a better term. I've noted a wide variety of play styles and preferences in other gamers, especially on boards, in that some are very nit-picky about the dice and how they work, others could care less as long as the game has that 'cool factor', and still others are fairly well entrenched in what their experience or preference allows them to know/like. It's interesting to me to see all the various types of gamers out there and their takes on things.

For me personally, I think I pretty solidly fall into the 'cool factor' camp, but if the dice are too crunchy it really bogs down play and I lose interest. However, having played Savage Worlds, Vampire, Shadowrun, D&D, M&M, d6 Star Wars, and several independents over the years, I've seen a lot of different play styles. Some of the responses we are getting to Sixcess falls easily into the 'ok, we do that' or 'yeah, that's coming' camps, but we're not able to show all of that just yet, so it seems there is a lot of guess work that you all have to do on that end, and that makes people nervous. We're working on that. I'm also hearing that setting seems to be more important to many people because, well, they already have a lot of ways to play the games, they just want fresh ideas to play with. We have that too.

But in the meantime it's interesting to see where you all come from and how you approach your choices in games since obviously we are not all exactly the same. (How boring would that be?)

So, please continue! I'm very much enjoying your thoughts here!

Dice pools don't bother me, as long as they are reasonable and avoid becoming buckets o' dice like White Wolf games, and WEG Star Wars if you let it get away from you.

What I don't care for is universal task resolution mechanics.  Picking a lock, flying an airplane, and cracking Wintermute are all very different tasks, and they are as different from each other as they are from combat.  In general, skills should probably have a common framework, but locking them into the exact same type of resolution mechanic usually leads to problems.  Now, it could very well end up that all the skills in a given game are of a type that benefit from the same kind of rolls.  Nonetheless, they shouldn't be similar to combat as well.  They may not be radically different, but the variance in mechanics carries over to the atmosphere of the game, in my experience.  Rolling percentiles for the Thief's skills is a very different feel than breaking out the d20 for a face stabbing beat down.

Not carved in stone, of course; but as a rigid design goal, I would avoid it.  Trying to wrangle a particular mechanic so it fits the universal mechanic can make it feel forced, instead of something that flows better even though it's not the exact same as everything else in the game.  For example, if you want a wide range of outcomes from a social interaction, using a d% for different shades or nuances might work better than a d20 roll for 'success' or 'failure', then rolling on a separate table for degree.

I like Dice pools, but not the typical dice pool that most people think of.  I use this type:

(http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g141/rajzwaibel/NewPicture2.jpg)

The biggest reason why I like it is because there's no math during the actual combat phase, which speeds things up a lot.  When you don't have to add or subtract things on every dice roll, it keeps things going.

As it stands it would have to be simpler than Sixcess has been described to me.

Something closer to the original Star Wars d6 (1E, with a few minor fixes) or the like for me to pursue it with a lot of interest. Simplifying Shadowrun 20A, cutting all the weird exceptions and using the Stat+Skill+Misc Mod look for 5/6's would be awesome as well.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;590535This thread troubles me, as it implies the designers don't know what's important about their game system. Dice pools only matter if they add to gameplay. For systems like Storyteller and Shadowrun they add nothing*, and I've easily converted these to single die rolls with no loss. For systems like Dogs in the Vineyard, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and Don't Rest Your Head however, the die pools are an intrinsic part of play, and you can't play the same way without them.

And while the last three are some of my favorites, having a dice pool is NOT the reason for it.

Evaluating the Sixcess mechanics so far, it seems the die pool brings the possibility of unbound results which get more likely the higher your skill (the more dice you roll). That would be hard to facilitate without dice pools or different denominations of dice like Savage Worlds uses (but we've seen the probability arguments for that one), so it makes sense to use them if that's a feature you want.

I think you've got it backwards, sorry.

Dice pools are usually quite deterministic compared to the single linear distributions you see in games such as the d20 system - # successes follows a bell curve. Unlikely results may be thousand-to-one or even millions-to-one occurrences.

Dice pools in Storyteller do perfectly what it says on the tin; PCs don't roll natural 20s and autosucceed, the archmage doesn't roll a 1 on their save vs. the magic item you forget the PCs had and explode - the PCs  get around the expected number of successes and follow the plot, dangnamit. Results that derail your plot can be minimized to occur on thousand-to-one rolls.

Conversely, while unbounded results that get higher the higher your skill are tricky, unbounded results in general aren't hard to achieve with various rolling-up methods (e.g. if you get a maximum result, add and roll again).

In theory anyway :) I did start a thread on rpg.net awhile back on that topic, where I fished and found a few people exploding games by making billion-to-1 rolls.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?640605-Dice-Pool-Games-Freak-rolls-that-shook-up-the-game

Hi Harsh.


My opinion on dice pools is that if you have to roll too many dice it gets annoying.

Especially if you have to add, subtract, multiply, note margins, etc...

Too much of all that and it gets distracting from the actual game.

I also find 'dice pool poker minigames' to be distracting.



Essentially I play rpg's to enjoy the characters and events in the game, not to fiddle with dice.

My answer basically amounts to - Dice Pools are just another type of resolution mechanic.  If there's no gaping hole in the probability, then it's the game itself that will sell it.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;590657I like Dice pools, but not the typical dice pool that most people think of.  I use this type:

Spoiler

(http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g141/rajzwaibel/NewPicture2.jpg)

The biggest reason why I like it is because there's no math during the actual combat phase, which speeds things up a lot.  When you don't have to add or subtract things on every dice roll, it keeps things going.

Hmm, why are there the jumps from 3d to 4d in places?  To fix a gap in the probability curve?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;590657I like Dice pools, but not the typical dice pool that most people think of.  I use this type:

The biggest reason why I like it is because there's no math during the actual combat phase, which speeds things up a lot.  When you don't have to add or subtract things on every dice roll, it keeps things going.

That is more of a step dice mechanic than dice pools to me.  I think of dice pools as rolling fistfulls of the same die and matching against the task resolution number.

Quote from: CRKrueger;590817Hmm, why are there the jumps from 3d to 4d in places?  To fix a gap in the probability curve?

Yep.

Quote from: Harsh;590651I've noted a wide variety of play styles and preferences in other gamers, especially on boards, in that some are very nit-picky about the dice and how they work, others could care less as long as the game has that 'cool factor', and still others are fairly well entrenched in what their experience or preference allows them to know/like. It's interesting to me to see all the various types of gamers out there and their takes on things.

Seriously, while fascinating, people like this have most likely found the game they're looking for already. Trying to base your game on their requirements will just lead to another of the same game.

The tricky thing is that the opinions you really want need to be from the disenfranchised who DON'T know what they want (tricky), and RPGs are such an insular hobby that there's not a lot of crossover (gamers tend to play lots of different settings, but people into specific settings do not tend to play lots of RPGs, if any at all) to do that in.

Thankfully though, that's changing.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;590680Conversely, while unbounded results that get higher the higher your skill are tricky, unbounded results in general aren't hard to achieve with various rolling-up methods (e.g. if you get a maximum result, add and roll again).

Indeed, but the key IS that they scale with your skill.

I can't stand dice pools.

RPGPundit

I tend to dislike anything cumbersome, and dice pools lean in that direction.

Some dice pool systems are as cumbersome as Rolemaster even.

Not to mention that they're often thought up with notions of "coolness" in mind and no actual consideration to probabilities or math.

RPGPundit

Probabilities are a potential issue with dice pools, but it can also be a source of strength for them. The gm ought to understand the basic probabilities because he is in charge of reality (and dice pools can be misleading in this respect). But as a player i prefer to have probabillities to be a bit clouded on my end during play. I real life i eye ball my chances of success at anything, i dont neccesarily know that I have a 70% chance of jumping a gap in the road, though i may look at it and think the odds are good. So for me eyeballing the odds with a dicepool works well when i am a player. But as a GM i like to get the various probabilities on them because it can lead to weird results in play if you set challenges too high or lowfor what they ought to be.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;591427Probabilities are a potential issue with dice pools, but it can also be a source of strength for them. The gm ought to understand the basic probabilities because he is in charge of reality (and dice pools can be misleading in this respect). But as a player i prefer to have probabillities to be a bit clouded on my end during play. I real life i eye ball my chances of success at anything, i dont neccesarily know that I have a 70% chance of jumping a gap in the road, though i may look at it and think the odds are good. So for me eyeballing the odds with a dicepool works well when i am a player. But as a GM i like to get the various probabilities on them because it can lead to weird results in play if you set challenges too high or lowfor what they ought to be.

Sorry, I didn't mean to try to oblige you to jump in defense of dice pools, I know you use them in  your system.  I'm sure YOU gave some consideration to the probabilities and math; I'm just saying that I think a lot of other people who make dice pool systems don't very much.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;591785Sorry, I didn't mean to try to oblige you to jump in defense of dice pools, I know you use them in  your system.  I'm sure YOU gave some consideration to the probabilities and math; I'm just saying that I think a lot of other people who make dice pool systems don't very much.

RPGPundit

No worries. I didn't feel like I had to defend dice pools at all, just found the subject interesting.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;591878No worries. I didn't feel like I had to defend dice pools at all, just found the subject interesting.

Well, cool then!

RPGPundit

I think I am blind to 'dice pool' or 'not dice pool'

But, I am very consious of clunkyness and metagaming mechanics.


So I find Rolemaster and Marvel Heroic Roleplay about equal in 'Irritates Bill' severity.