Why didn't 5E D&D just switch to dicepools?

[Koumei]

I don't know the stats of bloodthirsters specifically, but in general no. You can never auto-succeed at a task (if you get a 1+ armour save you still fail on a 1, Strength 10 against Toughness 1 still fails to wound on a 1), but you can totally auto-fail. If your Strength is worse than their Toughness by 4 or more (so the S3 of a human against the T7+ of certain greater daemons and shit), you are unable to wound them.

Attacking in close combat is pretty closely bound though: if your WS is better than theirs, you hit on a 3+. If their WS is at least (double your WS)+1 then you hit on a 5+. Otherwise it's a 4+. It keeps everything within a pretty close band (and also means you want to go up from 3 to 4, or 4 to 5, but don't care much about a bonus from 5 to 6 because almost everyone is 3 or 4 and WS 6 is the same as WS 5 when fighting against WS 1-4).

[Ghremdal]

I think the Bloodthirster is T6, so its totally possible for a conscript to kill a Bloodthirster in melee, though its highly unlikely. There are some autosucceed things in 40K (like getting a glance on a AV 10 vehicle with S10 shots)

But then again Warhammer is at its core a dicepool system, so its already bound.

[animea90]

If you used a curved or logarithmic RNG, you'd get there automatically. There are lots of RNGs which simply have "tails" and you could just use one of them and get an Achilles chasing the Tortoise effect without any special discipline on the part of your bonus assignments at all.

How would you achieve that? It seems like you'd need some kind of reverse bell curve, but I have no idea how you'd get that with dice.

Dice pools. You can always miss, even its its rare.

And for a system like exalted(where rolling a 10 gives you two sucesses) random mooks have a very low but non zero chance of hitting people up to a very high AC.

[fectin]

Actually, no. Only heroes count 10s as two hits, IIRC (with some broad but strict definition for that - I think it was essence 2 or an essence pool). It doesn't come up often, because anyone you bother rolling for after the first few sessions has that anyway, but life as a mortal is terrible.

[nikita]

One possibility I have often seen is to use something like 1D20 or 3D6 as RNG and then add that a natural die roll of 1 and 20 or 3 and 18 are always failure and success.

[Neurosis]

If you used a curved or logarithmic RNG, you'd get there automatically. There are lots of RNGs which simply have "tails" and you could just use one of them and get an Achilles chasing the Tortoise effect without any special discipline on the part of your bonus assignments at all.

How would you achieve that? It seems like you'd need some kind of reverse bell curve, but I have no idea how you'd get that with dice.

As Lokathor points out, Dicepools simply do that. A dicepool is an exponential function, but the tail remains. No matter how many dice you roll, there is still a chance of not rolling any hits. The dicepool's tail is actually infinitely long if need be, there is literally no number of dice you could possibly add that would fail to live up to the stated demands of bounded accuracy.

A regular curved roll (rolling XdY and adding the results to together, where X > 1) also has a tail. It's not infinitely long, but it can be very long if need be. If your RNG was 4d10, there are five numbers on either end of the curve which collectively come up less than 1% of the time. Now obviously there is an end to that RNG, but you'll stop noticing or caring about marginal improvements long before they literally stop being able to be added. That same +1 bonus that shifts you more than 6% in the middle of the curve shifts you just one percent of one percent when you're near the edge. One could rather easily make the claim that you were going to stop handing out bonuses before you literally got to the end of such an RNG, and that would fulfill the bounded accuracy claims as well.

-Username17

Strictly speaking, doesn't a Natural 1 being an automatic failure and a Natural 20 being an automatic success technically accomplish the demands of "bounded accuracy"?

[Username17]

Strictly speaking, doesn't a Natural 1 being an automatic failure and a Natural 20 being an automatic success technically accomplish the demands of "bounded accuracy"?

Not really. Telling people that their bonuses no longer count at all is not the same as telling them that the amount of bonuses they have still isn't enough to obviate a chance of failure.

-Username17

[ACOS]

Strictly speaking, doesn't a Natural 1 being an automatic failure and a Natural 20 being an automatic success technically accomplish the demands of "bounded accuracy"?

Yes and No.
(Frank's post notwithstanding -- though he is right in his assertion)

nat 1s bound accuracy offensively, but does the exact opposite defensively.
while nat 20s bound accuracy defensively it does the exact opposite offensively.

[MisterDee]

That "Orcs are always potentially a threat" was one of the design goals. Another was "Play a short adventure over the lunch break" - and that one pretty much disqualifies dice pools right from the start.

As much as I like Mearls-bashing, in this one case I think the decisions was right.

Oh - currently drunk posting. That pair of half-liter 9.25% alcohol scotch beers is killing my ability to type. Why am I crushing this MTGO draft then?

[PhoneLobster]

Another was "Play a short adventure over the lunch break" - and that one pretty much disqualifies dice pools right from the start.

Good luck with that line of argument.

Due largely to an inordinate amount of apologia and mental dissonance for certain infamously terrible game systems, certain posters here abouts actually pretend that dice pool systems don't actually have time and complexity costs that matter. At least not when you "do them right"... because they believe there is ever a point where corralling rolling and dealing with handfuls of dice is actually as easy as rolling one dice.

In actual fact they have honest to god claimed it is EASIER to roll a handful of d?s than roll one d20. No really.

[animea90]

Another was "Play a short adventure over the lunch break" - and that one pretty much disqualifies dice pools right from the start.

Good luck with that line of argument.

Due largely to an inordinate amount of apologia and mental dissonance for certain infamously terrible game systems, certain posters here abouts actually pretend that dice pool systems don't actually have time and complexity costs that matter. At least not when you "do them right"... because they believe there is ever a point where corralling rolling and dealing with handfuls of dice is actually as easy as rolling one dice.

In actual fact they have honest to god claimed it is EASIER to roll a handful of d?s than roll one d20. No really.

Well my group solved that by used computerized die rollers. Mine automatically calculates the total number of successes, which makes it just as fast as using a d20.

[Username17]

Rolling a pile of more than one die is obviously slower than rolling a single die. Rolling d6s is obviously faster than rolling icosohedrons and other bullshit dice. Checking for binary results against a fixed target number is obviously faster than adding and subtracting two digit numbers.

But you know what? None of those effects is really a slam dunk in either direction. You know what fucking is? It's obviously faster to count hits than it is to add up the literal pips on the dice. Here, I'll roll nine dice and report the results:

5, 4, 4, 2, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1

Wow, that was a shitty fucking roll. How long does it take you to count how many dice came up 5 or higher? How long does it take you to add all the values together to find a total? Obviously, checking for hits like you were playing Arkham Horror is massively quicker than adding up damage like you were rolling up a D&D fireball.

As long as D&D continues to use "roll a pool of dice and add all the values together" to determine damage, any and all claims that it is avoiding using a "roll a pool of dice and count hits" system because it takes too long simply fails the laugh test.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

If it's not a d20 then it's not D&D anymore, to most of the fans. It'd be like if a longsword didn't do 1d8 damage. Some things have been around long enough that it becomes a fixture of the brand, look at how upset folks got with 4e when attacking with a magic missile was done the same way as attacking with a crossbow.

Most people don't think that hard about the math, they're just familiar with the tools of play.

[Stubbazubba]

As codeGlaze's signature predicts, their goals would both be better served and maintain the nostalgia for using d20 by simply extending their advantage/disadvantage mechanic. Instead of adding more to your single d20 roll, roll a bunch of d20s and take the highest. Add your Ability score and you're golden. This would apply to whatever their current "Proficiency" applies to, so attack rolls in proficient weapons and proficient skills, though there would be degrees instead of just adv/dis.

[Laertes]

That's not D20, that's roll and keep where you only keep one die. John Wick has his vengeance.

[PhoneLobster]

As long as D&D continues to use "roll a pool of dice and add all the values together" to determine damage, any and all claims that it is avoiding using a "roll a pool of dice and count hits" system because it takes too long simply fails the laugh test.

What fails the laugh test is that an argument in favor of dice pools over a roll no one was talking about justifies the position of being in favor of dice pools over the actual rolls the conversation was about.

But hey, positive step there with you reversing your prior position that dice pools are never slower or crapper. A pity you only moved on to blatant intellectual dishonesty through diversionary unrelated arguments.

[tussock]

So... why no dicepools?

The entire playtest, the only thing they ever asked was "does it feel like D&D to you".

No math. No monster critiques. No adventure design. No character options. No outcomes of trying things. No nothing. Just your feels. How the hell is a dicepool going to "feel like D&D"? It's not. That's why there's no dicepool.

[Voss]

Going to have to agree with tussock. Dice pools were so far out of consideration, you might as well be asking why they didn't launch a moon mission. I doubt it even was even seriously considered, except perhaps on a very early initial design doc that was summarily rejected in favor of the one that said it would somehow feel like everyone's version of d&d simultaneously. Because that was, we are told, actually adopted as a design goal.