What About Roll-and-Keep?

Another look at an RPG that could solve a problem I'm facing; this time it's 7th Sea (specifically the 2nd edition), published by Chaosium.

There seem to be two popular approaches to dice pools. There's your "count successes" systems (i.e. Vampire Skills) and then there's roll-and-keep.

7th Sea's approach to roll-and-keep uses what are called "Raises", which are sets of dice (from a pool of "Traits" aka Attributes, and Skills) which when combined, must equal or exceed a value of 10. Dice that don't contribute to a Raise are discarded.

To use an example from the free quickstart:

Let's say you roll a 10, 7, 5, 5, 2 and a 2. The Raises (sets of 10) you can make are:

• 10 (one Raise, which you keep)
• 5+5 (one Raise, which you keep)
• 7+2+2 (one Raise, which you keep)

Simple!

But let's say instead, you roll 10, 9, 9, and 7:

• 10 (one Raise, which you keep)
• 9+7 (one Raise, which you keep)
• You have a 9 left over. You can’t make a Raise out of that, so it's not used and instead discarded.

You can then spend those Raises for a variety of actions, but at least 1 Raise ensures you succeed at your stated task--additional Raises can be spent to alleviate the consequences, however, as you don't just get off scot-free, shit goes badly unless you've got the Raises to ensure a smoother sequence of events.

7th Sea's style of roll-and-keep is probably more maths than I think really makes sense for my game, to be honest (especially since I'm already counting matches in order to turn them into Talents), so what about this?

• Your Attribute determines the number of d8s you can keep; like how 7th Sea has dice you must discard, likewise, you can only keep a number of dice equal to your stated Attribute. This encourages players to seek out high Attributes in order to improve their chances of success, but that simultaneously ensures low Attributes elsewhere (given the Pendragon-style pairs every Attribute comes in).
• You add a Skill, if available. This is a d8.
• You add Talents, if available. These are also d8s.
• Roll the dice pool!
• You can choose whichever dice you wish to keep, be they high or low, provided you keep the required amount.
• If all d8s match, you gain a new Talent. Low Attributes make it easier to gain Talents (as superfluous d8s are discarded), but high Attributes make it easy to succeed at your skill check.
• This also means that, should you not match every dice, you can simply discard the non-matching dice. This gives Low Attribute characters a valid playstyle to follow, as you could be quite literally a jack of all trades and a master of none. Maybe you WANT lots of Talents? Maybe there's some kind of "Help" action that can allow your own Talents to be used by another player?
• Success if determined by simple addition; you must meet or exceed a target number decided by the GM.

I admit, I like this a lot already. Attributes now have a reason to exist (they'll need to be smaller numbers, however), but if the goal is to minimise maths and speed up play (as seen last time, my first proposal would have been bogged down by a lot of counting), then now there's only one type of dice to count, and pools are much smaller, despite the many dice.

However, under this new system, Applause now needs a re-work.

Some things I like about Applause, however:

• Applause as a static, +1 bonus ensures that un-Talented characters, as well as those with low Attributes, necessitating a successful roll be discarded, can, with enough Applause, still succeed. I like that! It creates multiple ways to approach the same tasks, which will foster strategy-building and emergent gameplay.
• Spending Applause on a variety of different gameplay features, rather than purely a mechanical, "I add 20 to my roll and succeed"; an example I'm toying with is the idea of spending Applause to use your Talents in Skill checks where they don't normally apply (as you're using a different Skill).Were Athletics to be a Skill, Gymnastics might be a Talent. You could spend Applause to use Gymnastics in a Logic check (another Skill), framing it as mental gymnastics.
• Applause could also be spent to aid other players, though this idea is as-yet less well-thought-out.

But, how does one gain Applause? It can't be rolls in excess, because they're removing dice in excess.

I'm tempted to do something with the Skill die! Rolling an 8 would be a critical, this gets you an Applause die, getting a single crit would be the "golf clap" I talked about once before. Rolling an 8 AND succeeding would be a critical success! That might double the Applause you gain in that roll, and would be an especially enthusiastic reaction from the audience. But what if you fail? That's your sad canned "AWWWW" from the audience, and it might net the GM Applause instead?

A smaller die--say, a d6--would be easy to differentiate it from the Talent dice at a glance, and then we could do some fun stuff with it, like printable stickers for custom faces (or fully-custom dice?). It'd also make crits a little more common, but then I'd need to maybe make them more broadly useful. Instead of just empowering rolls, there could be all sorts of reasons to use them, so that the Applause is in a constant flow across the table.