r/BurningWheel • u/Ray2024 Shopkeeper • Jun 08 '26
What's the largest dice pool you've rolled?
Had a seven lifepath tailor making a dress and rolled a lot of dice as a result.
Curious to see how big the pools rolled are after achieving a personal best of 8 dice against an Ob3 Embroidery roll, this included two FoRKs and a bonus from a linked sewing test. The actual result was 3 successes as well.
The intent was to impress the client whilst meeting the deadline, so working quickly rules would have kicked in if the roll had not matches the Ob exactly.
5
u/Bradbury_Lives Jun 08 '26
Long term campaign with an Orc character. Hatred-boosted ritual, Deeds point, lots of help and FORKs, and ended up with 26 or 27 dice.
3
u/inostranetsember Jun 08 '26
Ran Burning Empires. Players were optimized for certain parts of the Infection mechanics, six lifepaths. One roll (with Help, Linked Tests, Artha) was something 13-15D against Ob 9. Nail biting to be sure!
3
u/Agitated_Ranger_3585 Jun 08 '26
At a convention one-shot (e.g. not worried about advancing the skill) a dwarf rolled Runecasting, FoRKs, and spent a persona to add their Greed attribute. 16 dice vs Ob 5, exploding dice as a Art.
One success.
1
5
u/BurningLuke Circle of 10,000 Jun 09 '26
50 dice vs Ob 25. The player's character was a disgraced general. His (NPC) brother was the head of a temple in a heretical but beloved temple in an important imperial trading city. However, the brother was in a coma (due to being poisoned by an assassin who thought he was the general) and the disgraced general was in charge of the city.
The emperor arrived in the port with some naval warships to collect some "unpaid taxes." So the disgraced general concocted a scheme to tithe the city's inhabitants (collecting cash dice) and raid the temple's coffers (using their fund) in order to create a new fund: The Temple Bank. Succeed and he'd found a new financial institution in the city, adjunct to the temple. Fail and his in responsible financing would bankrupt the temple and enrage the people.
He succeeded. IIRC, he then used his new bank to take out a loan to pay the city's debt to the emperor. In the end, he was only in debt to himself. It was madness. We loved it. He went on to use the Temple Bank to fund the creation of an army of religious zealots (as one does). The resources flowed until his supply lines got cut in enemy territory (as they inevitably do).
8
u/Whybover Great Wolf Jun 08 '26
I fairly frequently set campaign arcs effectively around one big roll, occasionally it would be a few big rolls; I really remember one particular example as it was the way I introduced one gaming group to what I like most about BWG. The party were a merchant caravan, and it would usually be selling coffee, but sometimes it was passing an exam to be a religious teacher, or impressing the local rulers enough to influence laws/trade.
The caravan would often pull together, clubbing together Linked Tests, setting up optimal opportunities for Help, etc. I think one of the biggest rolls we managed was Accounting to rewrite a taxation system such that the local farmers profited from selling coffee without losing the ability to sustain themselves: they Linked a Resources test to have some funds in the interim, Etiquette and Persuasion to put the case to the leader, and an Almanac test to get the calendar right (I can no longer remember what the individual failure consequences for those would have been, but they each bit, I know I'm in a good spot when the players such their teeth in before a roll). Those +4D, 5D of Help from a relationship and the other two players, a base B4 Skill, and 3 Persona put them at just better than a 50/50 shot (16D averages 8 successes, 15D gets 8S half the time) and they cheered when the dice came up in their favour.