Fudge dice

[Finarvyn]

I bought a bunch of "Fudge Dice" for my Dresden Files RPG game. Actually, I bought them before DFRPG came out and used them to play my own version of DF.

I also botched the whole thing horribly.

I hadn't read FUDGE or FATE much at the time and didn't have a solid grasp on what I was doing, and for some reason my brain didn't process the probabilities involved. Fudge dice are d6's marked with two faces "-" and two faces blank and two faces "+" in order to generate a probability curve centered around zero.

My plan had been to award different numbers of dice, based on the situation. The actual way to use the dice is to roll four of 'em (notation = 4dF). The problem with my method is that I was in the "more is better" mentality but with dF more dice isn't really "better" since the average is always zero. More dF gives a higher extreme, but this is both good and bad. Obvious when I think it through, but I guess I was focused on other things instead of mathematics.

Anyway, I decided to work out the probabilities for Fudge Dice and thought I would share them here. I'm not sure if anyone can find a good use for them or not, but I figured this was the place to post it.

1dF:
-1 ... 33.3%
+0 ... 33.3%
+1 ... 33.3%

2dF:
-2 ... 11.1%
-1 ... 22.2%
+0 ... 33.3%
+1 ... 22.2%
+2 ... 11.1%

3dF:
-3 ... 3.7%
-2 ... 11.1%
-1 ... 22.2%
+0 ... 25.9%
+1 ... 22.2%
+2 ... 11.1%
+3 ... 3.7%

And the "right way" of 4dF:
-4 ... 1.2%
-3 ... 4.9%
-2 ... 12.3%
-1 ... 19.8%
+0 ... 23.5%
+1 ... 19.8%
+2 ... 12.3%
+3 ... 4.9%
+4 ... 1.2%

Anyway, they're kind of neat and maybe someone will have a cool way to use them in a non-FUDGE, non-FATE game.

[isomage]

Here are approximate probabilities for up to 10dF:
anydice.com/program/60a

[isomage]

My plan had been to award different numbers of dice, based on the situation. The actual way to use the dice is to roll four of 'em (notation = 4dF). The problem with my method is that I was in the "more is better" mentality but with dF more dice isn't really "better" since the average is always zero.

You could skew the bell curves upward by taking the best 4 out of higher numbers of dF:
anydice.com/program/60b

[Finarvyn]

A good point. I hadn't thought about larger dice pools mostly because all of my fudge dice are in sets of four of a given color. However, even if I stick with four dice I could do "roll 4, keep 3" or something like that to skew the results.

On the other hand, I have scads of the things so maybe adding extra dice isn't a bad idea either. Hmmm.