A Thought Experiment: Mathless Dice Pools

I like dice pool mechanics. They're fun, and they're a nice change of pace from the die roll+stat+skill we see in most games. The system I'm most familiar with is White Wolf's Storyteller engine, particular the way it's implemented in New World of Darkness. For the unlikely gamer that isn't familiar with this kind of system, it works like this:

• A character's "dice pool" is a number of dice equal to their rating in the skill. So if you're playing NWoD, and you have 3 dots in Firearms and 2 dots in Dexterity, your rating is five
• When you attempt an action, you roll a number of dice equal to your rating. In NWoD, you roll d10's, so in the previous example, you would roll 5 d10's
• After you roll the dice, you count how many of the dice are "Successes." Coming back to our example, any dice that show an 8 or higher is a Success. The more Successes, the more Successful the roll. Get it? ;)

There's a lot to like about dice pool mechanics. For one thing, they're fun from a tactile perspective. In other words, rolling fistfuls of dice is fun; I'm not going to deny it. Dice pools are also cool for determining success and failure. After all, if you achieve a Success, you've succeeded (usually).

However, there are problems. One thing that I don't like much is the trouble a GM can have with determining the difficulty of a check. Basically, some tasks might require more than one Success. Seems like it might be easier to say a Success means you succeed, but then you have trouble when players attempt something that should be harder. Climbing the wall in the rain should be more diifcult than climbing it on a nice day, right?

And, because I'm really lazy, I admit that I wish it were easier to do the counting. 8's, 9's, and 10's are all successes, which means a little more time separating the dice. I think I've been spoiled by the fudge dice used by our current system of choice, Evil Hat's FATE engine.

So, here are some ideas I've have for a new spin on dice pools.

To fix my tiny nitpick with the word Success, there is a simple solution. We'll appropriate the word "Shift" from FATE. In FATE 3.0, a Shift is what get when your roll is higher than difficulty. If it's two higher, you get two shifts. So in this theoretical engine, when you roll your dice, you get a certain number of "shifts."

My next idea to make a really tight system is eliminating the disconnect between the number on the die, and its result in the game. The coolest thing would dice that directly indicated a shift without considering numbers. For instance, dice could have some sides dyed green. Each green die is a Shift. Easy, right? Customized dice are, unfortunately, not exactly cheap, so we'll have to settle for something else. The other thing to fiddle with, is how often a success occurs. In NWoD, someone with a rating of one succeeds 3/10 of the time. I could almost replicate this be rolling fudge dice and considering +'s shifts and discounting -'s and blanks.

The other thing that appeals to me is using coins or tokens. They're easier to come by or make, and there's something endearing about the idea of having only two sides. The tokens would show the Shift side or the Not Shift side. Normal coins could easily stand in if we assume that Heads are Shifts (or vice versa; as long as everyone's counting the same thing, we should be okay.)

The last thing that would create the ideal Dice Pool system is an easy way to handle easy and difficult situations. The most intuitive thing to do would be to consider an anti-shift. For argumnet's sake, call it a Neg. A neg is equal to negative one shift. The harder a task is, the more negs it has. For a really easy way to run the game, the GM could have Neg and Shift tokens. When a player attempted an action, a GM could pick up a number of tokens appropriate to the situation and throw them in the pile with the results of the check. "The dice show 5 shifts, but there are 3 Neg tokens, so I achieved 2 shifts." If a roll were especially easy, the GM would show some Shift tokens that could be counted as usual.

So to summarize:

• A player throws a number of coins equal to their rating.
• They separate out the Shifts.
• This total of Shifts may be increased or decreased by Shift or Neg tokens.
• In the end, one Shift is a success; more than that indicate that the check went especially well, and would likely have other mechanical advantages.

What do people think about Dice Pool Mechanics? Any dislikes? Would those dislikes be adressed by a system like this?