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You pick up your attribute die and your skill die, roll them, and add them together hoping to beat a target number. It was the die mechanic that first brought me to the Cortex System (yeah, I finally get to use all those dice in my die pack now that I’ve stopped playing D20!). Some people have complained about this being too random. Yes, it’s more random than a single die system.
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Actually, dice pools are less random than a single die roll. Rolling a d20, you've got a 5% chance of getting any result from 1 to 20 -- a totally flat probability curve. Roll multiple dice together, and you get something approximating a bell curve, with the mean value much likelier to occur than the extremely bad or extremely good result. The range of possible results goes up -- as you say, 5 to 30 for 5d6, vs 1 to 6 for 1d6 -- but the variability actually goes down.