In the Storytelling System, a player assembles a dice pool equal to the Attribute + Skill used, modified by equipment, talents/powers, and GM-imposed modifiers. The goal is for at least one of the dice to come up as a certain target number (min. 8 for WoD, min. 7 for Exalted) in order to count as a success. Should your dice pool be modified to zero or less, you still get to roll one die, but you achieve success only with a 10; rolling a 1 in this case counts as a dramatic failure.
The main thing I don't like about the Storytelling System (and games that use dice pools to generate successes) is that the more powerful a character gets, the larger the dice pools that they generate. Each person has their threshold on how many dice they want to chuck at one time, and mine is not that high. When I ran Shadowrun 4th Edition (which uses d6 dice pools counting 5s and 6s as successes) for my gaming group, the combat characters were chucking anywhere between 13-16 dice per attack and were able to attack three times in one round! That's way too many dice to be rolling for an action to generate what was usually a paltry number of successes (33% chance of rolling a success per die).
With World of Darkness, you have a 30% chance of rolling a success per die. With Exalted, you have a 40% chance of rolling one success per die and a 10% chance of rolling two successes per die. In either game, more often than not, you'll generate less than half the number of successes as your dice pool. Unless you're playing a mundane mortal character in either of these games (and you usually aren't), you'll be generating big dice pools for your areas of expertise.
Now let's take a look at Roll & Keep. With Roll & Keep, you generate dice pools much in the same way as you do with the Storytelling System, but that's where the similarities end. When you make a dice pool with Roll & Keep, you roll all of your dice but only keep a certain amount to add up to represent your result. Dice pools are denoted as XkY, where X is the number of dice rolled, and Y is the number of dice kept. For example, if you have a dice pool of 5k3, you roll 5d10 but only keep and add together three of the dice (usually your highest rolls). Most of the dice pools generated will be from a combination of an innate attribute's rank and a learned skill's rank; when the dice are rolled, you keep a number of dice equal to the attribute rolled.
Both Storytelling and Roll & Keep have permutations to their core mechanic. With Storytelling (WoD), the permutation IIRC is that if you roll a 10 on any die, you can re-roll that die to see if you generate another success (re-rolling any 10s). With Storytelling (Exalted), the permutation is that if you roll a 10 on any die, that die generates two successes instead of one. Roll & Keep's permutation is similar to WoD, where you can re-roll any 10s that you get to generate an even greater result (referred to as exploding dice); the only times where this is not the case is when you don't possess the skill in question and when you have an attribute rating of 0 (zeroes count as zero in this case, not 10).
Another system permutation that both systems share is of a precious and limited resource that characters possess which the player can use to improve the odds of success in times of need. For Storytelling, it's Willpower; for Roll & Keep, it's Void Points (L5R) or Drama Points (7th Sea). For both systems, these resources work as follows: by spending units of this resource, you can improve your odds of success by increasing your dice pool by a certain amount. Refreshing spent resource currency is a time-consuming task and having no units of this resource has negative consequences for characters in both games.
One system permutation that Roll & Keep possess which is absent in Storytelling is a limit on how big a dice pool can get. With Roll & Keep, you can never roll more than 10 dice, regardless of the actual size of the dice pool. If the dice rolled exceeds ten, then convert every two dice beyond 10 into one extra kept die. If both the dice rolled and dice kept exceed ten, then simply add a +2 per excess die to the total result. In the case of 11k9, convert it into 10k9 +2.
It is uncommon for a Roll & Keep game to have characters rolling over ten dice on their dice pools (unless they have very experienced characters) and even rarer to have characters rolling AND keeping over ten dice on their dice pools (such characters can, for all intents and purposes, perform superhuman feats with their abilities on a regular basis). The reason I site how uncommon it is to roll these big dice pools for Roll & Keep is because there are no published games that feature extremely powerful characters: AEG's games (L5R and 7th Sea) deal in the realms of pretty realistic to dramatic swashbuckling action, at most.
Storytelling System games, on the other hand, often deal with supernatural characters such as vampires, werewolves, reality-bending mages, and mythic heroes endowed by the gods, all character types that most definitely generate dice pools in excess of ten even at amateur levels of power. The most unfortunate part about this is that it's much harder to create a permutation that consolidates dice pools to a certain limit with a system that has you counting binary results as opposed to adding numbers, especially when getting a "no-success" result is greater than getting a "success" result, sometimes significantly greater. Exalted has a permutation where it's possible to convert dice into automatic successes, but it's at a ratio of 4:1, and when doing so, it's an all or nothing affair (excess dice do nothing). It's an attempt at reducing the amount of dice rolling, but it's a clunkier method of doing so than Roll & Keep's ten dice limit.
As you can see, the ease of converting from Storytelling to Roll & Keep is less painstaking when compared to converting it to a system that uses different dice-rolling methods, in which case you'll need guidelines to compare ratings between the two systems. Both systems:
- Use multiple d10s
- Form dice pools primarily through "attribute + skill" combinations
- Rate humans typically between 1-5
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