Quote Originally Posted by Xervous View Post
I find the complex probability calculations are potentially a good thing. If people can’t grasp the numbers they can’t fret over minutiae. More dice in a pool is certainly better, but people generally won’t be drilling down and weighing the exact statistical benefit of +2 against some other effect in the middle of play.
Sort of yes and no for me. In my rewrite of DtD40k7e I've done and checked lots of probabilities. When DMing it I also check probabilities to make sure that things like epic drinking marathon challenges have the right balance*. That's cool for me, I'm a programmer who enjoys math and I can whip out basic simulations and dice rollers easily. For this system there's also a chart of the 50 possible dice combos for the game that's easy for anyone. So as a player & in game, yes more dice is better and don't worry too much. As a DM easy probabilities, or a simple lookup table, are nice for planning.

Funny thing is, I don't think the current D&D has a simple set of probabilities. For just the base no-frills d20 roll, sure, that's simple. But then there's disadvantage and advantage that change value between different +mod vs DC, triple advantage, minimum 10, rerolls, and +/-1d4 to xdy. Calculating that for any one specific character alone is OK, almost none get all those modifiers. But trying to account for more than that and maybe the persn playing the bard can't make it that game and... Thats just messy.

* that was an interesting challenge. It was basically having one drink at each of ~200 bars over the course of a week. It needed to be doable by slightly above average normal people but possible for functionally supers type characters to fail. I crossed rl alcohol poisoning stats with the number of bars and distances between them to make it 30% doable by normals who took the whole 7 days and walked it, but probably kill almost anyone who tried to do a 3 day speed run by teleporting or such.