Sunday, February 10, 2013

Playing with the FATE dice

I was revisiting the result distribution of the FUDGE / FATE dice for the 4d6 option, when I thought about applying a variant of the classic Hero System BODY roll to reading the dice. In this option:

1 = -
2 through 5 = 0
6 = +

This results in this distribution (courtesy of www.anydice.com):



In essence, the chances of a +4 or a -4 are 0.16% combined. This means that the modification to someone's basic ability rating is more or less likely to take place between the -3 to +3 range. There's a chance that there might not be enough variance in the rolls during gameplay, but we'll see. Certainly not as varied as the range for the standard FATE roll below:


It makes me think that perhaps the standard FATE roll is better, but I want to tweak it because -- in the absence of actual FATE dice here in the Philippines, it may be easier to just explain that 1 is -1 and 6 is +1 and all the other dice faces are 0.

2 comments:

  1. If you have a black marker, you can turn normal 6-sided dice in Fudge dice in a pretty easy way.

    Draw a square over 6 and 4 covering all the dots: you get "0".

    Draw a X over 3 and 5 covering all the dots: you get "+".

    Draw a diagonal over 2 and 1 covering all the dots: you get "-".


    Once you've done, you have a free Fudge die.

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  2. Thanks! Though that does mean I'll have to deface someone's normal dice. And they have to have pips instead of numbers.

    Great idea though. Maybe I can find some cheap dice somewhere.

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That's my side of things. Let me know what you think, my friend.