For games that roll pools of dice, which do you prefer? d6? d10?d12
Do you have a preference? Why?
d4 or go home
d10 dicepools tend to work best, IMO. The 1-10 range is a nice, mathematically simple degree of variation, with enough swing for results to matter but without the absurd highs and lows of D20/D% stuff. Of course dicepools can spread that chance all the more, but d10s also lend themselves to various interesting dicepool mechanics which would be less viable without the simple decimal number set.
I'm going to vote d6.
For practical reasons, they are cheaper and easier to come by.
For aesthetic reasons, I think they make a better clatter on the table and feel better in the hand. Since they fit well against each other, they also take up less space. Perhaps because I'm a wargamer as well, I find something inherently satisfying about dropping a boatload of d6s on the table.
For mechanical reasons, if all you need is a binary pass/fail, then you don't need anything more complicated or granular. If you are fooling with anything that adjusts the number being rolled against, then each shift is more important (16% vs 10%). If you're doing any kind of exploding dice or 1s=Bad, d6s will make that happen more often and make that mechanic more likely to come up in play. Of course, if you want the 1s/explosions to come up less often, or you want TN shifts to have a smaller impact, then these are obviously negatives.
>>43794461
The rest of your arguments are also good, but the cost and availability argument is espescially salient. Almost everyone with an interest in board games have some d6s lying around, and they're cheaply available in bricks. For avid gamers, they great utility of the d6 means you can invest in some good ones. Also, it's easier to create close to fair d6s than most other dice, if you care about die fairness.
d10s are ok, since WoD, L5R etc already use dice pools of those so experienced role players tend to have some lying around, but the other dice are a real investment if you suddenly need a lot of them. (The only game where I can remember rolling fistfuls of d12s is Deadlands, so not every gamer will have them available.)
d10s, because I have a hardon for d10s.
Also, what this anon said >>43794079
>>43794583
Yeah. D6s have a unique advantage in that they are the only dice you can routinely purchase at places that aren't tabletop game stores. I picked up a bunch of relatively decent, fairly heavy d6s at the local dollar tree. 10 pack for $1. This isn't as huge now that amazon is a thing and everyone orders shit online, but growing up in an area that didn't have a FLGS games that I could play with dice I could easily acquire? The best.
Fudge dice, if possible.
Dat zero-centered, bell-curvy goodness.
>>43794079
This. The decimal range is much more intuitive.
>>43793940
Why that really depends of the systerm, successes, roll and keep, straight addition, the 'dice poker' Cthulhu tech and one roll engine.
>>43794461
This guy gets it. Thanks to the central limit theorem, it doesn't really matter which die type you use in a game with large dice pools. So you might as well use the easy and widely available die type.
d10 is pretty easy to find as well, and not actually worse, so sure. Why not? If that floats your boat. Like a d6, it also doesn't have the tendancy of a d8, d12, or d20 to roll off the table.
Like I said, mathematically the diffference is negligible. My personal preference is the cheapest, most widely available die.
Oh, and they are a little easier to store and transport if you like non-rattling dice blocks.
Does it make sense for a video game RPG to use dice pools, or is the appeal of dice pools purely based on simplifying math, which is not an issue in video games?
>>43801359
Generally, the selling point for a dice pool system is that the results are on a bell curve, which makes them a lot less swingy. This is just as applicable for a video game, I imagine.
>>43801359
It depends on how they want the probabilities to work - particularly modifiers. Give someone a +2 bonus on a d20 and you have changed the range from 1-20 to 3-23. +2 dice on a 10 die pool will raise the average number of successes and highest possible, but not the minimum.
d6s. you shouldn't be changing the target number a lot in a dice pool game, you want to keep the odds relatively easy to calculate, so you don't need any more granularity than a d6 provides.
ideal dice pool system: roll d6s, count 4+ as hits, get a bonus die for every 6, every 1 is an extra resource that does something cool but not directly related to pass/fail (think of boons from WFRP3 or whatever the equivalent is from the new Star Wars game). Add negative dice as the situation demands for potential critical failure/weird misfortunes.
>>43796481
that's a plausible argument for percentile roll-under, but when you're talking about dice pools where you count every die separately then it isn't any more or less intuitive to use 10-, 6- or 4-sided dice
Why don't we have d12 as our base dice? It's a lot easier to divide up the dice rolls for smaller challenges.
Are exploding dice good for smoothing off checks that would otherwise be impossible in a non-explosive dice pool of the same size(checks that require more successes than the size of the pool)? Am I overestimating the relevance of impossible situations?
>>43801839
Agreed. 4+ on a d6 and 6+ on a d10 are identical, in terms of sizing up probabilities. When you start dealing with varying target numbers across multiple dice it gets wonky either way you have it.
>>43802007
The smaller the die, the more likely it will explode. Burning Wheel has the 6+ explodey thing built into the mechanics precisely for that reason - to make impossible rolls at least potentially possible.
>>43802415
>The smaller the die, the more likely it will explode.
This is one of the things that turned me off of Savage Worlds. Low skill motherfuckers regularly besting experts because of exploding d4s.
To get back on topic--d6 all the way, for all the reasons mentioned. I think d6 only is a great thing for indie RPG's in particular. If the whole group has to go out and purchase a handful of d10 (or mooch off that one guy who has too many dice) then a lot of groups just won't bother.
>>43804322
Im not really sure how SW works, but with 2d6 vs 2d4 where a die explode on maximum, the 2d6 still wins.
http://anydice.com/program/71a4
Just click [Graph] and [At Least], then you will see that 2d6 is always higher, which translates to more likely to get a higher number.
Even when there's only a single die, the exploding d6 wins.
