[Tom H.]

To me, the dice pools are pretty fun to play with.

It probably is no more distracting than having to crunch a bunch of modifiers in your head to come up with a final effective target number.

The biggest problem is that the probabilities are highly obfuscated. This impairs a GMs ability to accurately improvise and adjust the situation if he doesn't just trust the suggested abstraction of the mechanic.

It seems a bit complicated for me to work out the probabilities without some time, but maybe there's a resource that indicates the approximate impact on probability of adding or subtracting incremental dice. (I never got around to studying dice pools.)

The Star Wars dice pools seem kind of like a FUDGE dice mechanic on heavy steroids.