I ran The Pool for my kids yesterday (there's a post about that in Actual Play) and I've been thinking about making a small change to the success and failure rules for our next game.

What I observed happening was that the players were reluctant to use dice from their pool early on because they felt they needed to save those dice in case they really needed them later. This behavior became more pronounced after one player gambled one die from his pool (he had three total) and lost. From that point on, he wouldn't gamble any dice from his pool until he had a success and was able to put that die back into the pool instead of taking a MOV.

What I'm thinking about doing is changing the rules so that if you roll multiple 1s you can both make a MOV and add a die to your pool instead of one or the other. I'm thinking that will increase the temptation to gamble on using the pool dice and make things a little more exciting early on.

Any thoughts on how well this would work from those with more experience with The Pool?

I'm not a necessary a Pool player but I think about it a lot for some unknown reason (kudos to James) But when I couldn't remember all the rules while driving home I fooled myself into thinking that 6's and 1 cancelled each other out, and any additional 1's gained from a roll went back into the dice pool.

So if the group is very reluctant maybe say that for each success over 1 a die returns to their dice pool.

JOE--

Have you tried the anti-Pool variant? It's an interesting approach that might resolve your problem.

Andreas

To illicit more MOVs from players simply rule that any time a player rolls one or more 1's they always get a bonus die and they can always make a MOV if they wish. Penalizing players by witholding the bonus die if they make a MOV seems unnecessary particularly when the game thrives on the collaborative input that players provide via their MOVs.

I wouldn't be too concerned if players seem a bit stingy with their gambles. If a player doesn't feel compelled to gamble on a conflict then they either feel ambivalent to it's outcome or they don't really mind who narrates. That's ok. Not every conflict will be seen by your players as a key conflict especially if you are just starting off your game and are still sort of "setting the stage" as it were. Assuming your game is set to run for several sessions you should find that as the players become drawn into the story the number of conflicts that they feel compelled to gamble on will increase since they will want to make MOVs more often.

Even so you may find that one or two players are overly cautious when it comes to gambling pool dice. Just make their failures especially significant to the story and introduce some inventive unforseen plot twisting complications for them. After a while they will begin to think twice about the wisdom of not gambling any pool dice at all.

Thanks for the suggestions. The next time we play, I think I'm going to go with Joe's suggestion that each success over 1 a die returns to the dice pool. I like the idea that greater risk can bring greater reward.

I haven't tried the Anti-Pool variant -- last weekend was the first time I tried any flavor of The Pool. I might try it out at some point, but my first impression is that I don't like the idea that player's might want to fail roles early and succeed later.

Maurice Forrester wrote: but my first impression is that I don't like the idea that player's might want to fail roles early and succeed later.

Mike: I see what you're saying about the dynamic of a story, but I think I can accomplish the same thing by allowing the dice pool to grow via multiple successes. Also, I like hearing what my kids come up with in their MOVs and so I want them to want to get lots of successes.

Seems sensible enough.

{looks at schedule to see if he has time to schedule playtest of own version}

:-)

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: {looks at schedule to see if he has time to schedule playtest of own version}

We've been talking about the Antipool a bit this weekend while playing the Wierd West Supers game. Seems like there's enough interest to get a game together. Why don't we move over to the Indie-netgaming list and see if we can set something up?