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Your handling of rolled and unrolled dice adds extra complexity - people don't like doing division by anything other than two. Regarding stunts - I had them add successes instead of dice in my project to 1: Simplify time taken ("Declare, roll, don't wait for how many stunt dice you get") and 2: Act as botch insurance, to encourage more stunting.
I like your skill setup, though you forgot to put Awareness somewhere? 5 seems to be a bit too few for my tastes, though 10 seems like a nice round number. It's still possible to make it work for heroic mortals by forcing -most- mortals to effectively have only specialties. -- Xeriar

I was (and still am) toying with how to deal with Awareness. Part of me thinks it simply doesn't belong as a distinct ability. Someone trained in combat is trained to notice things in combat. Someone skilled in social situations is, in large part, skilled in social situations just because that person picks up on nuances. How about vague "do you notice something" check? I'm not sure. That has never really struck me as a matter of skill - and it seems included as such only for symmetry with other checks. How to handle it, though? - szilard

That's perfectly fine - I was just wondering if it was intentional. Handle it just like you mentioned - use Craft for noticing flaws in a structure, Combat for seeing feints, Socialize as empathy, Prowess for general feats of the senses, and such. --Xeriar

My general axiom is that you must be able to take some action that can be described as performing that Ability. You can't really "aware", in the way that you can "investigate" or "dodge". Similarly, you can "endure" or "resist", but you're not really taking an action there, you are failing to have an expected reaction to some condition. Therefore I support revoking its ability status, along with E and R. - willows

Athletics, Awareness, Endurance, Presence, Resistance and probably some of the others have a kind of 'passive' satus. Passive uses of skills aren't bad - tightroping walking -> athletics, weight training does not always make you stronger, but allow you to better apply what strength you have. Endurance is much the same way - knowing how to properly run, and training your body for it, is an athletic exercise. But Exalted has Endurance as a skill and not Lifting.

• Goes to mark down more abilities to nuke for his project. --Xeriar

Er, in what way is tightrope walking a passive ability? You have to DO it, right? That tightrope doesn't just walk ITSELF. -- Charlequin

I probably should have said balancing, since tightrope walking usually involves manipulating something else too. The point being - you build up your endurance, train to work more efficiently even though you don't necessarily have any more stamina, you 'do' the action while running, jumping, moving heavy objects or whatever. Likewise, if you balance well enough that a tightrope is no big deal for you, you 'do' the action while running, jumping, fighting (this is Exalted) and so on. The same could be said for awareness, you do it while other things are going on. Resistance is a little different, at least in that it's your body holding up rather than semiconcious manipulation. --Xeriar

So... at first I wasn't worried so much about the die rolling method herein. I wanted to reduce die pools (which this does) but retain the meaningfulness of adding dice (so that I wouldn't have to rewrite 50 billion Charms). This does that too.

...but is the solution to my goals worse than the original? I don't know. Any thoughts? -szilard

I've been addressing this by killing a lot of die bonuses and penalties in my XerExaltedLite rules. Moving Stunts to automatic successes helps that some. I've been going by a somewhat flexible 2 dice = 1 difficulty. I'd be hesitant to do it for Charm dice, though... --Xeriar

Are the following goals mutually incompatible?

• Eliminate the need to roll huge piles of dice. Many people don't like this.
• Keep the current size of die pools and retain some meaningfulness in adding a die to a pool. Ideally, this should prevent the need to change most charms.

I think the above system does accomplish both these goals (though I may be missing something). Unfortunately, it might fail a more general goal of simplicity.

The way you currently do it now - dividing by 3 is annoying, and some people just can't do it. Add to performing some very specific alterations based on what you rolled - yeah :-p. Even as you have it now, players aren't going to be rolling less dice - it's rarely advantagious to do so. It might be simpler if you have Charm dice count successes on a given die double, and have players roll twice - once for their Charm-enhanced dice and once for their normal dice. --Xeriar

changed the method around more-or-less completely. -szilard