History
The first widely successful game to feature dice pools was Greg Costikyan's Star Wars role-playing game (1987), developing a system pioneered the year before in the Ghostbusters role-playing game by Greg Stafford, Lynn Willis, and Sandy Petersen. (Both games were published by West End Games; Costikyan consulted on Ghostbusters.)
Shadowrun (1989), designed by Bob Charrette, Paul Hulme, and Tom Dowd, was probably the first game to use the "success" mechanic rather than adding the dice together. Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) and Over the Edge (1992) followed, which were written by Ars Magica designers Mark Rein-Hagen and Jonathan Tweet respectively, the pair having been impressed by the potential of the dice pool mechanic and each having decided to make their own game based on dice pools. The majority of White Wolf Publishing's subsequent games use variations on Vampire's Storyteller System, and so also make use of the dice pool mechanic.
Read more about this topic: Dice Pool
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