I saw a play through of WHQ silver tower (or something like that), and was interested how the heroes had a pool of dice to activate special abilities. Does anyone have experience with such a system?
An idea that I had just today was to link such a pool system with skills and abilities, but also equipment. So that a character can buy/find a certain weapon and get access to its abilities.
The Resident Evil board games have different/custom D6s; blue/standard dice for standard pistols and shotguns (as well as for evasion rolls), and red dice with fewer misses for upgraded weapons or special weapons, but aren't used for evasion rolls. Different weapons have different quantities of these dice listed on their stat card (knives roll one blue die, pistols can roll 1-3 blue dice depending on ammo spent on the roll, upgraded pistols roll one red die for the first ammo spent instead of blue etc). The vast majority of what made a weapon unique was on it's card, though.
World of Darkness (Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Awakening etc) also did things with equipment, i.e you typically crit on a "0" (D10 system), but shotguns crit on 9 or 0 (? Been a while since I played the system tbh). Your attack roll was your relevant stat (strength for melee, perception for ranged) and skill related to the weapon type, any particular specialisation you had in that weapon changed some mechanics (e.g. melee weapons skill, specialisation in swords), and any extra dice the weapon allowed, and 7+ (?) was a hit.
Didn't Warcry also have a weird doubles/triples mechanic allowing for different skills and abilities based on the numbers rolled?
I've also seen games where you would roll dice and keep the values constant throughout a specific scenario, and weapons/equipment needed specific values to function, or allowed for modification of dice values (e.g. some equipment would increase or decrease a die value, or flip the die to it's opposite side - 1<>6, 2<>5, 3<>4, a weapon would need 1s or 2s to hit with low damage but penetrate armour, or 5s and 6s to deal high damage but be affected by armour, reducing damage, or you'd use a run of numbers to use it, i.e 1-2-3, 2-3-4 etc).
Having equipment linked to dice, other than the above, in my experience has been different "sizes" of dice rather than dice pools.
The only game I’ve played with dice pools was Shadowrun. It was not a fun experience. Especially when you had a dice pool of 30 dice and needed just one “success” to survive and failed…
Shadowrun was an intriguing game, but I think mileage varied by the version being played.
you did some good work there. (With regards to that, @Malo Thank you for adding the 'similar threads' function. I get to enjoy threads from areas of the forum that I seldom check out. Sometimes I have a real dive through it.)
