Dice Pools: how many is too many

[tedcahill2]

If you were playing a system that uses dice pools, how many dice is too many. By too many I more refer to the slog of determining successes as compare to the space required to roll them.

I ask because I'm brainstorming some custom dice mechanics and I want to use dice pools but don't want people rolling 15, 20, 30 dice per skill check or combat check.

The thought I had was to set a maximum number of dice rolls, let's say 10. This provides a sufficient amount of randomness. For every 4 points in your dice pool above 10 you get an additional success. In essence, once's you've reach 10 dice in your pool you reach a point of diminishing returns. I created a table of the binomial distribution for between 0 and 10 successes with dice pools from 1 to 50, and like the looks of the distribution.

One thing to keep in mind is that even when the table says 100%, that doesn't mean you'll always succeed, you still need to roll the dice to confirm that a critical failure hasn't occurred.

Dice	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	33.3333%	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
2	55.5556%	11.1111%	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
3	70.3704%	25.9259%	3.7037%	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
4	80.2469%	40.7407%	11.1111%	1.2346%	-	-	-	-	-	-
5	86.8313%	53.9095%	20.9877%	4.5267%	0.4115%	-	-	-	-	-
6	91.2209%	64.8834%	31.9616%	10.0137%	1.7833%	0.1372%	-	-	-	-
7	94.1472%	73.6626%	42.9355%	17.3297%	4.5267%	0.6859%	0.0457%	-	-	-
8	96.0982%	80.4908%	53.1779%	25.8650%	8.7944%	1.9662%	0.2591%	0.0152%	-	-
9	97.3988%	85.6932%	62.2822%	34.9693%	14.4846%	4.2422%	0.8281%	0.0965%	0.0051%	-
10	98.2658%	89.5951%	70.0859%	44.0736%	21.3128%	7.6564%	1.9662%	0.3404%	0.0356%	0.0017%
14	100.0000%	98.2658%	89.5951%	70.0859%	44.0736%	21.3128%	7.6564%	1.9662%	0.3404%	0.0356%
18	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%	89.5951%	70.0859%	44.0736%	21.3128%	7.6564%	1.9662%	0.3404%
22	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%	89.5951%	70.0859%	44.0736%	21.3128%	7.6564%	1.9662%
26	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%	89.5951%	70.0859%	21.3128%	21.3128%	7.6564%
30	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%	89.5951%	44.0736%	44.0736%	21.3128%
34	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%	70.0859%	70.0859%	44.0736%
38	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	0.3404%	89.5951%	70.0859%
42	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%	89.5951%
46	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	98.2658%
50	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%	100.0000%

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I made a similar thread ones, the posts there might be of some help.

[Cespenar]

Comfort-wise, you would like the dice to be as many as to be easily grabbed by one cupped hand, in my opinion. I'd say you could even go as low as 6 dice, and instead do the additional successes at a rate of 3 extra dice, rather than 4.

If you don't want to go that minimalist, 10-12 is also okay for two cupped hands, I guess.

[Florian]

IMHO, it mostly depends on the dice and what you do with them. For your system with a fixed target number of 5+, the ideal solution would be to get some custom six-sided dice with 2 big red dots four blank sides. That makes it easy as pie to see how many "hits" you've scored, regardless of pool size.

[Bansheexero]

I think 10 is a decent set number. I was creating a system and noticed the number 12 kept popping up, but rather than extending the dice pool, I had the extra numbers alter the success rate of the dice instead. For instance, initially, only natural 10's grant 2 successes, so I extended it to 9's and then 8's (similar to how nWoD does things). You may wind up with way higher numbers, so maybe do 20 as a max, but you can make increased skill/talent assure basic success in more consistent ways.

[GrayDeath]

Obviously the Pool needs to go up to 11. ^^







I remember Shadowrun 3rd Edition Games where we used pools of 30+ dice with regularity, so I understand where youa re coming from.
Rememberm however that all "hard limits" on pool numbers, no matter if you allow additional successes to be created by the imaginary dice, makes balancing really high difficulty stuff more challenging.

Additionally, critical failures are almost always a bad idea (the only way they are not is if its incredibly unlikely and requires to fail say twice while under stress etc), as they bring nothing to the game but an additional, unfun complication. Believe a man who in thier time played far too many WW Games ^^

[Knaight]

Throwing around and counting 15 dice or so is still generally pretty fast, and if you use most die sizes (not d20) you probably won't run into many ergonomic issues. I'd be inclined to put "too many" at closer to 20 than 10, and even then if rolls are infrequent you can go higher.

[gkathellar]

It depends on the significance of the actions involved. "Gather these leaves with a rusty rake," probably shouldn't involve more than two or three dice, because the level of anticipation on the action is low. Conversely, when the players uses Luminous Leaf-Gathering Cyclone Atemi with their +3 cold iron nine-pronged rake of the secret masters while fighting Autumn Moon Of The Violet Grove, rolling fifteen or even twenty dice is totally reasonable, because the player is using an awesome super move against their nemesis and counting those successes is part of the fun.

This is something to crib from Wushu: allow dice limits to vary based on the scene.

[Composer99]

You're probably fine with anywhere from 8 to 12 dice, especially if you are using d6s. If you're using larger dice, you might want to cap at 8 dice (and also provide a complete set of dice in your core rules "product package").