Alternate Dice Rolling

This page is mainly geared towards those who enjoy houserules, homebrews, or conversions.

Some people enjoy different dice rolling methods. This short section describes how to use alternative methods with WOIN. Different methods offer different degrees of granularity, speed of use, and pool-building fun! Different dice mechanics feel different in play.  In general, an optimized (5d6) grade 5 character gets a Difficult result on an average roll.

With a litle math, you can also use this page to reverse engineer other systems and convert to WOIN.

Total. The default method is to roll a dice pool and add the total. An optimized (5d6) grade 5 character rolls 5d6, with an average roll of 17.

Roll 4+. Roll the dice pool as normal, but just count the number of dice which roll 4 or more. Target numbers are divided by 7 (round up). Difficulty numbers range from 1-7. An optimized (5d6) grade 5 character rolls 5d6, with an average roll of 3.

Alternatives: roll 3+ on a d4, 4+ on a d6, 5+ on a d8, 6+ on a d10, 7+ on a d12, 11+ on a d20.

Roll 5+.  As above, but divide target numbers by 10 (round up). This sacrifices a lot of granularity.  Difficulty numbers range from 1-5. An optimized (5d6) grade 5 character rolls 5d6, with an average roll of 2.

Alternatives: roll 6+ on a d8, 7+ on a d10, 9+ on a d12, 14+ on a d20.

Roll 6. This lacks any granularity but is incredibly quick to use. Divide target numbers by 20 (round up). Difficulty numbers range from 1-3. Not recommended. An optimized (5d6) grade 5 character rolls 5d6, with an average roll of 1.

Alternatives: roll 7+ on a d8, 9+ on a d10, 10+ on a d12, or 17+ on a d20.

d20. Roll 1d20 and add 1 for each die you would normally have in your dice pool. Target numbers are shown below. For DEFENSE scores, use the below table to derive static scores - there is no direct correlation, as a d20 is not a bell curve in the way a dice pool is. An optimized (5d6) grade 5 character rolls 1d20+5, with an average roll of 16.  This conversion emulates a bounded accuracy style d20 scale. Note that with a flat scale rather than a bell curve, it is much easier to achieve extremes at each end of the scale.

d100. Roll 1d100 and add 10 for each die you would normally have in your dice pool. Target numbers are shown in the table below.  For DEFENSE scores, multiply by 5. An optimized (5d6) grade 5 character rolls 1d100+50, with an average roll of 100. Note that with a flat scale rather than a bell curve, it is much easier to achieve extremes at each end of the scale.

With the three "count the number of dice which roll x or more" options listed above, specially colored or marked dice can make all three equally fast to use.  Small colored adhesive stickers affixed to d6s can work well, and it is very easy to simply count the number of blue or red sides facing.

Revised Difficulty Benchmarks

The table below shows revised difficulty benchmarks for each of the above systems.