Last time I asked a question of this nature it was regarding Point buy and if that system is inherently bad game design, I never really found any argument one way or the other compelled me.

I've had more fun with systems that were random gen or some simple array method. however I've enjoyed some point buy systems as well.

The reason I asked is simply because being that the OSR can be argued to be one of the most successful schools of design in the hobby space, I wanted to challenge some of the presumed stances it has on certain mechanics, as for the most part the OSR community tends to put it's nose at Point Buy.

As for Dice pools

My only main experience with dice pools is Westend's Star Wars, and D6 legends, both systems I think are really good and even beloved, I have also read Chronicles of Darkness and the old Hunter the Reckoning games, both which had slightly different versions of the storyteller system.

Chronicles was not bad, and while I love the premise of Hunter the Reckoning, it suffered the same issues every other storyteller system game had, which is having exploding or imploding botch based dice pools is like sucking ass threw a stray.

Besides having exploding and imploding / Botches in a dice pool, I don't quite understand why much of the OSR crowd seems to not fancy them? at least even as a sub-mechanic or a skill system?

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.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on January 08, 2024, 05:04:48 PMHunter the Reckoning... suffered the same issues every other storyteller system game had, which is having exploding or imploding botch based dice pools is like sucking ass threw a stray.

Besides having exploding and imploding / Botches in a dice pool, I don't quite understand why much of the OSR crowd seems to not fancy them? at least even as a sub-mechanic or a skill system?

I can't speak for the OSR as a whole, obviously, and I myself am not averse to dice pools as a mechanic, but the things about pools that I have either heard complained about or can see as difficulties include the following:

- Lack of easy odds transparency.  This is especially griped about in games like the original Storyteller system where the TN each die had to match or beat for a success was adjustable, so figuring your chances of success at any one roll on the fly was harder than simply comparing a d20 to a DC or a percentile roll-under. One thing I've noticed about a lot of OSR gamers is that they like to be able to figure out what the tactically best option is, and difficulty figuring the odds is an obstacle to that.  Fixed-TN systems like Burning Wheel or the Aeon White Wolf games have less of a problem on this, but it's still an approximation.

- Lack of room for progression.  To keep dice pools to manageable sizes, ability scores usually tend to be fairly strictly limited so that players seldom have to roll more than 10 dice at once, and usually less -- both the 7th Sea/L5R and World of Darkness games had both Attributes and Skills ranging only from 1 to 5 as a result. OSR players tend to prefer games where you have more room to grow and progress from starting power to high-power -- the classic 1st- to 20th-level development arc.

- Excessive granularity of result.  This is more for dice pools which count successes (e.g. Storyteller) rather than total up all dice values (e.g. Star Wars), but as the former is measurably quicker for most, it tends to be more popular in practice. When a roll can be successful with anywhere from 1 to 5 successes, there is a natural impulse on players to want to know exactly what each quantity represents in practical result, and most games in practice leave this to the GM to wing, which can get frustrating or boring.

It's less about what's "wrong" with dice pools, and more about whether they work to deliver typical OSR gameplay goals, part of which is usually evoking the feeling of the old school gaming experience.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 08, 2024, 05:26:57 PM
- Lack of room for progression.  To keep dice pools to manageable sizes, ability scores usually tend to be fairly strictly limited so that players seldom have to roll more than 10 dice at once, and usually less -- both the 7th Sea/L5R and World of Darkness games had both Attributes and Skills ranging only from 1 to 5 as a result. OSR players tend to prefer games where you have more room to grow and progress from starting power to high-power -- the classic 1st- to 20th-level development arc.

- Excessive granularity of result.  This is more for dice pools which count successes (e.g. Storyteller) rather than total up all dice values (e.g. Star Wars), but as the former is measurably quicker for most, it tends to be more popular in practice. When a roll can be successful with anywhere from 1 to 5 successes, there is a natural impulse on players to want to know exactly what each quantity represents in practical result, and most games in practice leave this to the GM to wing, which can get frustrating or boring.

Agree with all of it, but will add that it's the interaction of these two points that really can set a dice pool as the wrong thing for me for some games.  Games with dice pools that ignore either or both points do so at their peril. Even with a well-designed, appropriately used dice pool, you can't merely tack it onto a D&D-style game and expect it to work.  Of course, the opposite is true too.  Whatever one thinks about Burning Wheel, even the people who appreciate it would find that it stinks using a d20.  We all know how Star Wars d20 measured up against WEG--and that's an area where I could see either working with the right design.  That is, Star Wars might work as a d20 game, but WEG would not.

Since I rarely want either a course grain or a narrow progression, naturally dice pools rarely work for me, even if I can appreciate the mechanic for games that have both.

In the "poorly executed" category, you can do d20, d100, dice pools of various types, and other mechanics equally poorly.  However, a poorly executed dice mechanic will tend to have different set of problems.  This is true even when you limit it to scaling.  A d20 game with bad scaling is because someone thought that because you could have +2 or +3 modifiers, that you could stack them indefinitely, and it would just work as long as you kept bumping target numbers.  Whereas a similar dice pool error is to think because your design will support 5 dice easily and 10 dice rarely, that you can bump to 15+ and nothing will change.  They are both bad, but bad in different ways.  Some people who won't mind the rough edges on one may hate the other, and vice versa.  It takes a little better appreciation of the math to see why why dice pools fall apart past some point. So I think the artsy types are a little more likely to screw one up.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 08, 2024, 05:26:57 PM
It's less about what's "wrong" with dice pools, and more about whether they work to deliver typical OSR gameplay goals, part of which is usually evoking the feeling of the old school gaming experience.

I find it weird that stuff from the 1980s like dice pools should be considered new-fangled and not part of old school. Is there is better terminology to distinguish game design that evokes the feel of 1980s games like Star Wars and Shadowrun?

Quote from: jhkim on January 08, 2024, 06:06:03 PMI find it weird that stuff from the 1980s like dice pools should be considered new-fangled and not part of old school. Is there is better terminology to distinguish game design that evokes the feel of 1980s games like Star Wars and Shadowrun?

This is a good point -- people tend to associate dice pools with the '90s because of the World of Darkness (Vampire 1E came out in 1991), but they were introduced earlier than that.

I might suggest that if we were picking a time period for the original games the atmosphere of which the OSR is most interested in evoking, it would run from 1974 to 1985; 1986 was the year that Ghostbusters, GURPS and HarnMaster all first came out (Star Wars D6 first came out in '87 and Shadowrun in 1989).  Maybe games from 1986 to 1991 could be called "OSR Next-Gen"?

I strongly prefer dice pools over xDy + z vs TN systems.

The thing with your more conventional D20-esque system is that they don't actually perform that well for adults who tend to play tired. I remember vividly from high school a friend of mine trying to do a Call of C'thulu all-nighter for Halloween. It didn't go well because once players get tired, even basic arithmetic can become really hard. These days most of the play time I have comes when one player or another is coming off a stressful 10+ hour shift or a deadline or this is the first time they've had away from the baby in a week. If I rescheduled every time a player felt tired, we would almost never play.

Dice pools function about as well during unimpaired play, but they continue to function well even when players are not quite at 100%. There's also the fact that because the core mechanic tends to not require as much attention to use, it allows for more eyeballs up gameplay. You can also do some really nifty things with cleverly dice pools which aren't possible in other systems. Not to toot my own horn, but the custom dice pool I posted a few years back on the Design board has stamina mechanics baked in as part of the core mechanic. What's more, this is a step die pool and the stamina mechanic gives you rerolls on your best dice first. Not only does the value of the stamina reroll scale in proportion to the dice used in the initial roll, but the value of adding more stamina to an action decreases the more stamina you add.

Let me repeat this. The stamina mechanic simultaneously scales up to the stats involved, down based on how much stamina has already been added, and all the complex math behind how that works gets buried on the designer end of the game. From the player or GM perspective, this is just fishing for dice--which admittedly takes notably longer for a mixed die pool than D20--and rerolling a few of them to see how many times you roll a 3 or lower.

Good luck doing that with D20.

This is consistently the tale, too. Yes, there are a lot of ho hum dice pools out there, but the vast majority of games which have interesting features in their die mechanics tend to be dice pools. That's not to say that there are no problems with dice pools, but I generally think that the better examples of dice pools have bonkers features which are worth quite a bit.

The worst problem most dice pools have is that because they scale up by adding dice, the bell curve flattens out and successes tend to become too numerous to really mean anything. Dice pools with more than about 8 dice are too large to comfortably use.

The only real problem, as opposed to bad implementation or preference zealotry, is speed of multi-roll resolution. If the GM needs to make hidden check for the party, rolling a handful of color coded d20s for the party is much faster then multiple dice per player.

Scalability is only a problem when everything is on one scale. A fast jet, a car, and a human can all have a speed of 2 dice and roll resolvable dice pools against their own kind with automatic success added when competing out of scale without needing to give the car 20 dice and the jet 200.

Complicated probability is only a problem when all parameters are adjustable, dice count, target number, and success target. Who can tell if its more appropriate to subtract a die, add on to the dc, or ask for an extra success in a given situation? Solved by limiting it to only one axis of adjustment. The odds of success being unapparent to the player makes the decisions more interesting, instead of only taking the optimal course on autopilot.

Excessive granularity, an extra success in dice pool can mean as much or as little as beating the dc with a d20 by several points. No one complains about the granularity of a d20 in a binary test and it can give up to 20 point success versus a 10 dice pools ten maximum successes.

I like dice pools. D6 and Shadowrun 2e are two of my all time favorites.

I do agree about the odds not being obvious, though in D6 you can figure you basically have a 50% shot of rolling 3.5 per d6 or higher. Shadowrun it's trickier because for higher target numbers you need a 6, and then another number added to it.

The downside of D6 is that many people cannot add. They had to invent that D6 legend with the special dice so people could just count instead.

Quote from: jhkim on January 08, 2024, 06:06:03 PM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 08, 2024, 05:26:57 PM
It's less about what's "wrong" with dice pools, and more about whether they work to deliver typical OSR gameplay goals, part of which is usually evoking the feeling of the old school gaming experience.

I find it weird that stuff from the 1980s like dice pools should be considered new-fangled and not part of old school. Is there is better terminology to distinguish game design that evokes the feel of 1980s games like Star Wars and Shadowrun?

I think Retro works better. But bear in mind, some OSR people don't even like using d100% and insist on using d6s for things like skills. Hell, a lot of them even find skills new fangled.

There is nothing wrong with dice pools if what you enjoy doing at the table is playing with dice. I have played games with a variety of dice pool systems and they all include unique and clever ways to use dice. Some are quite impressive in their subtle complexity. But that isn't why I sit at the gaming table. I play to conquer the enemy, rescue the princess, or make off with the loot. Every second I have to think or talk about dice is time I don't get to enjoy what is happening with my character in the game world.

In most circumstances I just want the dice to answer a simple question, usually as simple yes/no and I want them to do it as quickly as possible so I can get back to what is happening with the characters. I can get that from d20 and d100 very efficiently.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 08, 2024, 06:33:53 PM

Quote from: jhkim on January 08, 2024, 06:06:03 PMI find it weird that stuff from the 1980s like dice pools should be considered new-fangled and not part of old school. Is there is better terminology to distinguish game design that evokes the feel of 1980s games like Star Wars and Shadowrun?

This is a good point -- people tend to associate dice pools with the '90s because of the World of Darkness (Vampire 1E came out in 1991), but they were introduced earlier than that.

Probably because WoD popularized dice pools.

GM Emulators were around as early as the 90s but did not take off till 2010 or so.

Possibly because it takes time for an idea to percolate and people to feel it out enough to try their own.

Quote from: JeremyR on January 08, 2024, 09:52:23 PM
I like dice pools. D6 and Shadowrun 2e are two of my all time favorites.

I do agree about the odds not being obvious, though in D6 you can figure you basically have a 50% shot of rolling 3.5 per d6 or higher. Shadowrun it's trickier because for higher target numbers you need a 6, and then another number added to it.

The downside of D6 is that many people cannot add. They had to invent that D6 legend with the special dice so people could just count instead.

I never got fully into 2e SR but have played it and the SR MUD used the 2e system fully.
 
Player illiteracy is appalingly rampant in RPGs for some reason. You do not see it half as bad with board games. How do people even function if they can not do even basic math? I am really bad with math and can still do 3+4=7.

Think one of the earlest dice pool systems I ever encountered was Tunnels & Trolls. Though it is I think more like a neo-dice pool system.

I thought WoD's dice pool system was ok. For me it was just another system in a growing list of systems. Aberrant though warmed me up to it as it just seemed to present it a little better somehow to me.

Troubles with Sanguinne soured me in dice pools for a long time.
 
The Torchlight edition of Metamorphosis Alpha used a dice pool system.

And as mentioned. I played some 2e Shadowrun and the SR MUD that recreated the system. Probably the implimentation I've had the least hassles with after Aberrant.

I think the big problem comes when you have would-be designers trying to come up with a dice pool system and not understanding how it works.

For you game designer types, it is worth learning how to use Anydice so you can get a better grasp on the percentages of the various die mechanics out there.
https://anydice.com/