Dead Horse Interchange

Ya can't use d10s for spell damage. That shit scales way too fast. We don't wanna make spellcasters any more overpowered than they already are.
And stuff like this is why I'm hesitant towards games with a die pool system. Not only do you tend to roll too many dice, but thanks to the way these games count successes only a third of them tends to actually do anything.
And all for what, really? So my vampire that punches with 20d10 has a slight chance of scoring zero successes?

The point of a dice pool is that as the pool expands, the chance of zero hits (total failure) reduces drastically but never becomes zero. It's well suited for relatively grounded games like shadowrun and a bad fit for superpowered games like vampire.

Storyteller had to include the ridiculous bit about how every 1 cancelled a success - increasing the amount of dice you roll actually doesn't really increase your chance of success.

That's why you need those powers that let you reroll successes.

Guest wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 25, 2021 10:55 pm

The point of a dice pool is that as the pool expands, the chance of zero hits (total failure) reduces drastically but never becomes zero. It's well suited for relatively grounded games like shadowrun and a bad fit for superpowered games like vampire.

I wouldn't call a cartoonishly-unlikely failure "grounded". How often have you seen a mercenary/soldier throw a grenade, only for it to bounce back? That one's always a possibility thanks to RPGs and their love for scatter rolls, especially in Shadowrun where the grenade rules have so much verisimilitude that you have to figure out how the shockwave propagates.

Scatter rolls are a different mechanic to dice pools. Scatter rolls being stupid does not make dice pools universally bad.

But scatter rolls are traditionally more cartoony the more you fuck up the throw.

I don't disagree with you on scatter rolls. I don't think any RPG handles grenades well.

The less bad ones just handle it like a fireball. Anything more complex, and you get systems that treat grenades like Warhammer artillery. They never seem to realize that you can also roll a grenade.

They also wildly overestimate the force of a grenade. I think you already referenced SR and it's "chunky salsa" rules.

I think there was some debate in the SR community about whether or not grenades actually deal double damage, because the shockwaves bouncing around can "hit" targets multiple times, and since a grenade usually explodes on the ground the shockwave will immediately bounce upwards with the rest of the shockwave.

I think at this point you might as well switch over to Phoenix Command (an infamous RPG from the 80s that was all about hyper-realistic modern combat physics simulation).

EDIT: Speaking of the weird depiction of weapons in RPGs, D&D and its derivatives are always a bid weird when it comes to firearms, at least in cases where they aren't part of the core rules. It seems that they really don't want to disrupt the pristine Tolkienesque technology level common in these systems, so firearms tend to have obtuse extra rules (from jamming to at least partially ignoring armor depending on the distance) and are often the most expensive base weapon you can buy, putting them way out of league for low-level parties.
A particular weird example is Pathfinder, where the firearms are so expensive (you have to pay at least 1,000 gold for all but the shittiest ones) that their fancy new firearm-focused class that came with the supplement - the Gunslinger - needed a class ability that gave him access to an actually affordable, jurry-rigged firearms that - for some reason - only he knows how to actually use. Very immersive.