*le sigh*
In SR3, you rolled either attribute for some tests, or your skill level in dice plus available dice from an appropriate pool.
There was combat pool, hacking pool, task pool, magic pool and driving pool basically.
Furthermore, you could increase the ammount of dice you rolled for some skills or attribute rolls using certain cyberware and bioware implants.
All in all, it was very very rare to see anybody rock up with the ability to actually roll 20+ dice.
The biggest exception to this was the damage reduction roll, because, as a troll, you could, pretty reliably, get that to go way past 20 dice. But that was a very specialized and only one certain roll tank built that could be circumvented by all sorts of things.
And somebody thought no, that will not do. That is clearly OP, we have to ner . . no not nerf, FIX IT!
And they tried.
And they failed.
They made Trolls basically unplayable in SR4 and 5 for the things you would want a Troll (melee/bruiser/tank/heavy weapons guy) And instead made elves better in all of those.
More through accident than design, they made Trolls the superhuman athletes that magical adeps should be looking at the fluff.
And they ended up not with less rolled dice, but with more rolled dice.
20+ dice pool to roll came to be the de facto standard for the main profession one should expect of a character. Because you needed to make up for the fact that you could not lower the TN for your rolls and thus needed to make sure that you had more dice to roll to make sure you got the hits back that you lost with the 4/5/6 fixed TN change.
Then came SR5 and with it Limits. And again, it was an attempt to make people roll a smaller number of dice. And again, it was a baindaid fix on a leaking submarine in the mariana trench and it did diddly squat nothing of course. The Dice pools grew again so you could reliably hit your limits with your rolled hits, even if it meant rolling 30 dice and wasting 20 of those.
The Point where i will admit the variable TN system broke was with people learning to basically not care about their ammount of rolled dice, but rather than how to reliably push down the TN needed for hits. 8 to 10 dice is plenty, almost too much already, when you can have a TN of 2 for most things.
And of course, this was mostly the case for combat. Something TROLLS were mostly king at in SR3. And again we come back to certain people not liking Trolls being the combat monsters they were meant to be and bitched, moaned, whined and complained about it untill the people responsible for this stuff were fed up with it and wanted to silence those voiced.
Of course, there were also ways around this problem in SR3 . . it is just that nobody chose to use those ways.
Why? Same problem why a tanky built is technically more of a liability for the rest of the characters and even complete world around it than it is usefull.
Because it means the other characters get bigger problems because the problems have to be made to take into account the monster tank. And even if you hit the monster tank troll character with an anti tank missle in some cases the troll would remain standing, if badly wounded . . while everybody around him in the explosion radius basically just keeled over dead . .
Same problem with the lowered TN.
You had to make stuff so difficult that the one with the most systems mastery and generally lowest TNs still got challenged.
But that meant that people/characters who did not have the required systems mastery and lowered TNs basically could do fuck all because THEIR TNs increased from the normal into the double digits while the optimized character more or less went from his lowered TNs to slightly above what would have been the norm . .
Granted, if you did play a character for years and on a regular basis and got to upgrade him semi regularly/often, you could increase skills and numbers of dice rolled theoretically to infinity . . same as with magic and initiation.
And of course, that could not stand!
Mundanes having close to the same possibilities to the magic users? THE NERVE!
But as i said, most characters started with about 10 dice max to roll in their main skill and then could, if needed, add up to another 10 dice from an applicable pool . .
So ironically, the game that made the FISTFULLS OF D6 MEME a thing that exists was the one with the comparatively least ammount of dice rolled.
Also, of course, there were many many many more rolls to be made in SR3, so people rolled dice more often.
Which certain idiots at CGL got confused with the number of dice rolled as well.
