Is this Dice Pool System a Terrible Idea?

[TheWorid]

So, I have been tinkering with a certain die mechanic for a game for a while, a dicepool system where added dice add risk. To make sure that I do not put it into a game for disastrous results, I am putting it here first for a sanity check.

The salient parts are this: when you want to do something, you roll a handful of d6s, an amount equal to the level of the effect you wish to use (which can be modified up and down with metamagic-type abilities). Modifiers are dealt with in terms of -1D/+1D, but are kept relatively rare. Each d6 that comes up 1 or 2 is a fault, and having one or more faults on a roll results in failure.

The part I am less sure of myself on is that your traits (and only your traits) can let you nullify faults - basically, granting free "hits" (the terminology for all of this is vague until I nail it down more). You have access to one such trait per type of action per tier (a grouping of three level); as far as I can tell, this keeps probabilities for using effects on your tier pretty reasonable. Not sure currently if the net number of hits or faults should do anything other than cause success or failure; I was working on what I termed Harry Potter spell logic, where a given spell does a certain thing (so, there is a spell for killing someone, and killing someone tends to mean that spell in particular) in the sense of providing a discrete narrative option.

So my question is simply, is this a terrible mistake that will destroy everything I ever really loved? In terms of both being mathematically insane, or simply being too strange for players to easily grasp. As a corollary, what would be a fair way to add actions together (as in, treating characters as a group for the purposes of the roll)? I was going with adding +1D per doubling of people in the group (+1D for two people, +2D for four people, etc.), but I want it to be statistically the same (or slightly superior) at least roughly, so that people will want to do it as opposed to tediously rolling multiple times.

Thanks!

[Username17]

So for terminology clarity, you basically have difficulty dice that set the number of hits you need, and your hits are automatic based on character badassery, right? That's a little counterintuitive perhaps, but it certainly seems like it would work. It might make more sense to people if the opponent (or the MC) rolled the dice, since they are going against the acting character. And that in turn might lead to the kind of dissociation that SoD Wizards feel in 3e games.

Anyway, as players become more powerful, level appropriate tasks will become more of a crapshoot. That is, the variance of difficulty rolls will rise as the difficulty rises. You could spin that as a good thing, if you state it as a way to combat people falling off the RNG as players specialize. That is to say that a character with a skill of 1 has a 35% chance of success against a Difficulty of 6; while a skill 2 character has a 38% chance of success against a Difficulty of 9. The guy who is wrongly specced for a task has a better chance of success at higher level. The flip side is also true, the skill 3 character has a 90% chance of success at difficulty 6, while the skill 4 character has only an 86% chance of success at difficulty 9. Being overleveled for a task is less of a big deal the higher level the task is.

The part which is pretty weird for me is that there is a lot more granularity in task difficulty than there is in character ability. A task for a level 4 character is 3 difficulties higher than a task for a level 3 character, and that means that there are two additional intermediate difficulties. Most games want to ballpark difficulties and assign granular character ability - so they use fixed difficulty thresholds and positive dice.

-Username17

[TheWorid]

The underlying logic of the system is, when you want to do something, you have a put a certain amount of your power into performing that task (represented physically by dice); like choosing the Force of a spell in SR. You then attempt to do it by rolling the dice, seeing if anything went wrong along the way, but more skilled characters can better utilize the (often magical) power at their fingertips. Things get more chaotic when you are playing with vast amounts of energy, so higher level moves can get out of hand even for experts. The game is supposed to run into high power levels, and I wanted high level moves to feel bigger than lesser ones in a tactile way.

Conflicts between characters would be handled in a manner similar to challenge tests: you make your own test of equal or greater dice in order to muster a defense strong enough to combat the attack. Successful attacks inflict negative status conditions, which serve to penalize defense on future attacks and allow greater levels of success to be achieved against that target (up to death/capture/insanity).

The level of characters is supposed to run from 1 to 9 (although the scale extends from -6 to 12), gaining a new trait each level. It would only be possible to buy one trait per tier to raise your skill in an action, because only one such trait would exist to be purchased. Skill levels are intentionally granular, so you can buy a trait like "Strong" and be done with describing that aspect of your character.