Dice Pool System
A dice pool system does not refer to any specific tabletop roleplaying game system, but rather a common mechanic used in many different games. In RPGs that use a dice pool as their core mechanic, players roll a number of dice simultaneously to resolve actions and challenges, rather than a single die. The number of dice and which dice might be the same every time, or it might depend on the character's skill level or ability in the particular action they're rolling for. Different RPGs make different choices about what the dice pool looks like; in some games, all the dice might be the same size, most commonly d6s, but d10s, d12s, d20s and d4s also appear, and doubtless there are games using every conceivable die size! In some games, a single dice pool might even contain different sizes of die, perhaps bigger dice for greater skill, or otherwise modified by circumstances around the roll. Dice pool games also vary on how players interpret results. In many games, certain faces of each die represent "hits" or "successes," like 6 or greater, or maybe only 6s. Sometimes, the pool must be summed and compared to a target number. Some games seek to create sets that add up 10 or some other number, and still others use dice with symbols that compound and/or cancel each other out. Still other games might only keep the one or two highest (or lowest) results! Dice pool systems frequently exist in concert with other mechanics, like exploding dice, where some results add additional dice to the pool, re-rolls, "botches" or critical failures attached to a specific result, or special additional dice that add complexity, benefits, or complications to the final result. Dice pools are among the most popular resolution mechanics in RPGs, as seen in Vampire: The Masquerade and other World of Darkness games, Fabula Ultima, Fate, Blades in the Dark, the many Year Zero Engine games, Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars RPGs, Shadowrun, and many more.
Popular RPGs using Dice Pool System
Alien: The Roleplaying Game
The official ALIEN tabletop roleplaying game pits a crew of space truckers, scientists marines, synthetic human androids, corporate stooges, and other explorers against the cold, harsh void and the lurking horrors that haunt it. Save your oxygen—in space, no one can hear you scream.
Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game
A neon-noir wonderland that’ll take your breath away. One way or another. An evocative world of conflicts and contrasts that dares to ask the hard questions and investigate the powers of empathy, the poisons of fear, and the burdens of being human during inhumane times. An iconic and unforgiving playground of endless possibilities that picks you up, slaps you in the face, and tells you to wake up. Time to live. Or time to die. Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game propels you into the streets of Los Angeles as Blade Runners with unique specialties, personalities – and memories. The game pushes the boundaries of investigative gameplay in tabletop RPGs, giving you a range of tools to solve an array of cases far beyond retiring Replicants. Beyond the core casework, the RPG showcases the key themes of Blade Runner – sci-fi action, corporate intrigue, existential character drama, and moral conflict. It challenges you to question your friends, empathize with your enemies, and explore the poisons and perseverance of hope and humanity during inhumane times.
Fablecraft
Fablecraft is a fully virtual tabletop RPG. It’s easy for GMs and players to learn, whether you've slain many dragons or are completely new to the genre. Fablecraft features its own system, gorgeous human-made art, pre-built campaigns that eliminate prep, and a growing list of homebrew tools.
Forbidden Lands
Forbidden Lands is a new take on classic fantasy roleplaying. In this sandbox survival roleplaying game, you’re not heroes sent on missions dictated by others – instead, you are raiders and rogues bent on making your own mark on a cursed world. You will discover lost tombs, fight terrible monsters, wander the wild lands, and if you live long enough, build your own stronghold to defend.
Scum and Villainy
Unwise deals. Blaster fights. High adventure among the stars. Welcome to the world of Scum and Villainy. Scum and Villainy is a Forged in the Dark game about a spaceship crew trying to make ends meet under the iron-fisted rule of the Galactic Hegemony. Work with the members of your crew to thrive despite powerful criminal syndicates, warring noble families, dangerous aliens, and strange mystics. Explore the ruins of lost civilizations for fun and profit. Can your motley crew hold it together long enough to strike it big and insure your fame across the sector?
The Walking Dead Universe Roleplaying Game
The Walking Dead has always been about characters facing impossible choices in an unforgiving world. In The Walking Dead Universe Roleplaying Game, you enter into the world of the dead and must face these choices head on. You can do this at any point in the timeline – encountering familiar faces and locations, or new ones – but the hardest choice will always be the same: Who are you going to be? You will play as people struggling to survive in a hostile world. Exceptional challenges can appear from anywhere – from the lack of essential supplies, from conflicts brewing within the group, from hidden construction flaws in your safe haven, or from approaching walkers hungering for your flesh.
Blades In The Dark
A crew of scoundrels gathers round a stolen blueprint as they plan their big score. Their target has them outnumbered and outgunned; they’re just a no-name street gang up against the rich and powerful. But they have something their mark never expects: the stone cold audacity. The guts to risk everything. And a desperate hunger to get rich or die trying. Blades in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game, or TTRPG, about building a criminal empire in the industrial fantasy city of Duskwall. Inspired by video games like Thief, Dishonored, and Bloodborne, as well as crime drama films and television like Heat and Peaky Blinders, players create scrappy scoundrels who commit crimes in a haunted city. They might play a smooth-talking Slide, a bloody Cutter, an ingenious Leech, or a weird Whisper (among others) to lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top. They’ll also create a Crew, the gang they operate, and which, through a series of criminal jobs, will attempt to conquer the city’s underworld. One player, the Game Master (GM), takes on the role of the world those players inhabit; they’ll play as the rival gangs, wealthy nobles, and corrupt Bluecoats that pressure the player characters from all sides; the haunted, sunless, industrial city of Duskwall; and the ghosts, demons, and occult forces that lurk behind it all.
Candela Obscura
Candela Obscura is a tabletop roleplaying game, or TTRPG, about a circle of paranormal investigators who analyze occult phenomena in the turn-of-the-nineteenth century industrial fantasy city of Newfaire. In this game of monstrous gaslamp horror, players create intrepid characters who solve mysteries and defeat monsters with their various skills and specialties. They might play a smooth-talking Face with a knack for mesmerism, a soldiering Muscle bearing scars from the Great War, an ingenious Scholar of magick from the university, the sly Slink of a private detective or a Weird spirit medium. This crew, called the Circle, will take on jobs to set right the problems caused by supernatural phenomena. One player, the Lightkeeper or Game Master (GM), takes on the role of the world those players inhabit. They’ll play as the eponymous Lightkeeper, a character who dispenses assignments and information from the occult organization Candela Obscura. They’ll also play the environment, the city, and of course, the mysterious and even malevolent forces the Circle is called to confront.
Coriolis – The Third Horizon
Coriolis – The Third Horizon is a science fiction role playing game set in a remote cluster of star systems called The Third Horizon. It is a place ravaged by conflicts and war, but also home to proud civilizations, both new and old. Here, the so called First Come colonists of old worship the Icons, while the newly arrived Zenithians pursue an aggressive imperialistic agenda through trade and military power.
DIE: The Roleplaying Game
DIE RPG is a roleplaying game based on the comic of the same name by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans – and it too has been made by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans! In DIE, you play a group of authentically flawed and desperate real-world people (Personas) who are sucked into a cursed roleplaying game and take on the form of heroes, villains and power players (Paragons). Some of you might want to get back to the real world for whatever’s waiting for you there. Some of you might want to stay in a reality where you can finally get what you want out of life. You all have to agree whether you stay or go, and dead people can’t vote. It can get pretty bloody.
Fabula Ultima
Fabula Ultima is a Tabletop Roleplaying Game inspired by Japanese-style console RPGs, or JRPGs. In Fabula Ultima, you and your friends will tell epic stories of would-be heroes and fearsome villains, set in fantasy worlds brimming with magic, wondrous locations, and uniquely bizarre monsters! This is a game about larger-than-life heroes and tragic antagonists. There is no predetermined plot, scenario, or "adventure", and the heroes' actions, motivations, and objectives will drive the story forward while the Game Master reacts to their choices and places obstacles on their path, often in the form of powerful villains with their own devious agendas, which will change time and time again as the protagonists manage (or fail) to thwart their plans.
Hunter: The Reckoning
A Storytelling Game of Desperate Measures. You saw what you shouldn’t have, the veil pulled back from the secret world and the monsters who prowl it. You chronicled the tragedies they wrought, these monsters, and the victims upon whom they preyed. You grasped the extent of their influence and witnessed the corruption of the organizations formed to keep them in check. And you vowed to do something about it. Tonight, you act. It’s time for a Reckoning.
Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game
Take on the roles of Marvel's most famous Super Heroes—or create your own—to fight some of the most dangerous Super Villains in the Marvel Universe! Featuring the All-New, All-Different d616 System, the MARVEL MULTIVERSE ROLE-PLAYING GAME gives players the chance to explore their own corner of the multiverse. All you need is the book, three six-sided dice, and a group of friends. What're you waiting for? Start your adventure today!
Mutant: Year Zero
Mutant: Year Zero takes you to the world after the great Apocalypse. Humanity’s proud civilization has fallen. The cities are dead wastelands, winds sweeping along empty streets turned into graveyards. But life remains. Among the ruins, the People live. You are the heirs of humanity – but not quite human anymore. Your bodies and minds are capable of superhuman feats. You are mutants.
Star Wars RPG by Fantasy Flight Games
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a heroic group of spacefarers faced the forces of evil in an epic struggle that still inspires us today! The Star Wars Roleplaying Game offers the opportunity to play out a fantastical space opera in one of the most beloved universes of all time. The Star Wars Roleplaying Game is a tabletop game played with pen, paper, and a set of special dice where players can create their own Jedi, scoundrel, alien, bounty hunter, and lots more to play out adventures in the world of the Star Wars films. One player, the Game Master (GM), acts as the rest of the galaxy, playing as the characters’ allies and enemies, and creating scenarios and obstacles for them to overcome. Published by Fantasy Flight Games, the Star Wars Roleplaying Game is composed of three intercompatible games designed for different settings: Edge of the Empire, for playing smugglers and bounty hunters like Han Solo or Boba Fett; Age of Rebellion for playing rebel freedom fighters against the Galactic Empire like Luke Skywalker and Poe Dameron; and Force and Destiny for playing Jedi fleeing from the Empire’s reach, like Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Tales From the Loop
Roleplaying in the ’80s That Never Was: In 1954, the Swedish government ordered the construction of the world’s largest particle accelerator. The facility was complete in 1969, located deep below the pastoral countryside of Mälaröarna. The local population called this marvel of technology The Loop. In this roleplaying game, you play teenagers in the late 1980s, solving Mysteries connected to the Loop. Choose between character Types such as the Bookworm, the Troublemaker, the Popular Kid and the Weirdo. Everyday Life is full of nagging parents, never-ending homework and classmates bullying and being bullied. Explore the secrets of the Loop in two main game settings – one based on the Swedish Mälaren Islands, the other on Boulder City, Nevada. The Mysteries let the characters encounter the strange machines and weird creatures that have come to haunt the countryside after the Loop was built. The kids get to escape their everyday problems and be part of something meaningful and magical – but also dangerous.
The One Ring 2e
Twenty-four years ago, an alliance of Elves, Men, and Dwarves defeated a horde of Orcs and Wild Wolves, under a sky darkened by Giant Bats, inaugurating a new era of prosperity for the Free Peoples. But twenty years is a long time for peace to last, and in many dark corners of the earth a shadow is lengthening once again. Enter the world of Middle-earth with The One Ring™, the official tabletop roleplaying game based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Designed specifically to evoke the atmosphere of The Hobbit™ and The Lord of the Rings™, the game contains rules for creating heroes and sending them off on adventures in a land threatened by the growing Shadow.
Vaesen
In dark forests, beyond the mountains, by black lakes in hidden groves. At your doorstep. In the shadows, something stirs. Strange beings. Twisted creatures, lurking at the edge of vision. Watching. Waiting. Unseen by most, but not by you. You see them for what they really are. Vaesen. Welcome to the Mythic North – northern Europe of the nineteenth century, but not as we know it today. A land where the myths are real. A cold reach covered by vast forests, its few cities lonely beacons of industry and enlightenment – a new civilization dawning. But in the countryside, the old ways still hold sway. There, people know what lurks in the dark. They know to fear it.
Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition
Vampire: The Masquerade presents a more dramatic, contemplative world than most tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). While the average TTRPG experience is a Dungeons & Dragons inspired one (fighting monsters and getting treasure), Vampire is about simply surviving and keeping a piece of yourself intact. Players in Vampire become the titular mythological figure in a version of our modern world. And while near-immortality and superpowers seems cool, they come at the cost of existing in a secret society where hunters and other clans are out to get you. And there’s also the whole hungering for blood thing. In a typical Vampire game, holding onto humanity is just as tough as fending off foes.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse 5th Edition
Gaia is dying. The ices melt, while the seas swell. The heat rises, while the forests wither. Extinction threatens millions, in favor of the few. The Garou — warlike shapeshifters torn between Rage and spirit, between Wolf and Man, and champions of the earth-mother — have failed. The Apocalypse is here. Yet, a new generation of Garou now call upon their Rage to confront the forces of destruction, avarice, and greed ravaging the earth-mother. With tooth and claw the Garou will wrest her from the brink of death — or follow her enemies to the grave. Will you answer their howl? What legends will the Garou sing of you? When will you Rage? In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, you play as the Garou, a creature of flesh and spirit, blessed and cursed with primal rage. Born to fight and die in a desperate war to protect Gaia — the very living earth — you engage in an unequal battle against the greed and power-hunger of human civilization that has trapped the world in a choking web of technology and corruption.