Your Favorite Resolution Systems

[Satinavian]

Players can understand larger and smaller pools without being able to quote the curve distributions, but can you pick the better roll out of 5d10TN7 and 7d10TN8 without a calculator?

Of course. That is still pretty trivial and stuff people should have had in school.

I mean, when we still played shadowrun 3, it was pretty abvious most people at the table were aware of the expected value of sucesses even in fast paced combat.

It with some more complications, like "want at least 1 success but more successes are preferrable" or "as many successes as possible but no more than one 1" or similar, I could still do it without calculator, but it would be kinda tedious and not practical to do on the fly in game. And i know other players who are not good at math would not be able to do that even with calculators.

This pretty much, why should we always know the best method to get a desired result?

Because presumably the PCs know their own abilities and can, if they are not amateurs, chose the best way to solve a problem if there are meaningfull differences.

Interesting choices are not between using a good approach and a bad approach. Interesting choices might be risk vs reward, like in the Splittermond example above, where you could go for "higher average but higher fumble chance/normal test/ lower average without fumble chance". Or using consumables to get a bonus or try it without. Or having a pool you can distribute to several tasks.

These are actually interesting, engaging choices. Those, where the players just don't understand their chances and pick at random are not.