Narrative dice, as seen in Fantasy Flight's sad excuse for WFRP3, Star Wars, and L5R, and later the Genesys system (proving that every single property that uses the "genesys" word is bad).
Dice are not meant to provide narrative. It's stupid to try. Dice have their place, specifically cold hard percentages. Dice aren't special or important. They're a tool. Specifically a tool to decide a given variance. Success <---> Failure. How much damage does this axe swing do? Dice are perfect for this.
Dice are not good for providing narrative. If you're rolling 8 dice each with 6-8 symbols on them, you will never get a clear cut success or failure. Every action is muddy and contrived. These sort of systems are pretentious at their very core. It makes no sense that, in Star Wars, a roll to see whether you hit and killed a Stormtrooper with a blaster shot is "it depends" or "yeah kinda" or "no, but sorta" or other mixed bag statuses. But that's all that you get from these systems because of the numbers and dice involved. You always get a muddy middle ground result which has the opposite intended effect.
The intended effect of these systems is to increase the outcomes of a given roll. I hear it touted from the rooftops - "Your silly d20 roll just determines yes or no! PAH! My die pool of narrative symbol dice determines yes, no, yes-and, yes-but, no-and, no-but, or even schrug-emoji!"
Ultimately, adding all those potential results in eliminates the possibility of yes/no, taking away DM parlance and really doing a shit job of doing the GM's job. So you've gone from two potential outcomes with the potential of DM flourish should you have just made or failed a roll by one or two pips on a die, to narrative gobbledy-gook is the result for all rolls. All rolls having uniform but "unique" results means every roll has the same result. You've gone from 2 outcomes on a roll to 1, and pissed on the GM's fun doing so.
And I didn't even get in to the fact that it takes at least an extra 30 seconds for even experienced players to determine just what the fuck happened when rolling on these narrative pool systems. So they effectively slow the game down for the added benefit of making die results even less impressive and impactful than usual. What pointless shit, I can't believe anyone buys into these sorts of games and know for a fact nobody plays them.
