Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
Writing rules to make it harder for people to make informed decisions is not a good thing. It's bad when it's THAC0, it's bad when it's intentionally using a harder-to-understand RNG. Decisions people make should be meaningful, and the should be able to understand which of the choices they can make is "correct" for which measure of correctness. In fact, if you care about speed of play, you should make the underlying math as easy as possible so that people spend less time thinking about what the +2 will do and more time deciding if it's what they want.
At what point did I say the probability system was chosen for this purpose? Start with a simple to resolve structure like Xd6>4 for its smooth response to inputs and handling of dicepool sizes at the extremes. Default speed of play is driven by required extra steps and their complexity. Hunting down five or so shifting modifiers for a d20 roll will naturally decrease the default speed of play. Acting on a player opted choice of one modifier or the other for a roll, be it d20 or dicepool or whatever, is a simple task that has no failure states stemming from neglect compared to missing some modifier the game system holds up as mandatory.

So we are both discussing observed speed of play. I’m not going to sit there and give a player time to estimate how many swings he thinks he can kill an ogre in and how a +2 to hit or +2 to damage will perform there. Pick an action and play. If he’s instead confronted with +2 dice or +2 damage it’s less likely they’ll obsess over minor differences in performance. This is of course assuming we’re running a table at a moderate pace, not heavily structured for war gaming. If we were really all about 0.5 dpr difference mattering more than the flow of gameplay there would be calculators, charts, excel spreadsheets and the like readily accessible.