Using Fudge Dice linearly!
I love Fudge. I love that lovely bump in the probabilities, making it likely to roll near your character’s actual trait. But I wanted to do something different. I actually want a result, from my fudge dice, that was randomly linear.
So I’m working on character creation for Lost Heroes and I’m putting into the system this idea I had a while a go. Essentially Magic-using characters are burdened with “Magic Rules” or rather consequences that go off when they use magic.
But when the player is picking the conseqence for their character, I wanted it to be randomly selected.
So I hit apon the idea of using a number of tables. Roll on one table/column, then the next and then next and then create a consequence from the three random elements. (Technically this is called Morphological Forced Connections apparently).
In my example:
| Column A | Column B | Column C |
| Limb | Animal | Remains depending on how powerful the effect |
| Head | Material | Remains for x days |
| Body | Impossible | Until it grows back or dies off |
| Nearby Object |
So a player may roll on column A, get “Limb” and then on column B, get “Material” and then finally on column C and get “Until it grows back or dies off”. The player then use this as a constraints to come up with a consequence, for example: “A characters Limb transforms into a Material and remains Until it grows back or dies off”.
But I can’t use a standard 4dF (four fudge dice) as this one mean most people would get something in the middle of the column, every time.
So I asked on Fudge’s yahoo page and the answers were great!
The one I liked the best came from Tim Hall:
I’d just roll fudge dice of different colours, and make each die
significant rather than adding them up. 2 dice give 9 options, 3 dice
gives 27, 4 dice 81 and so on.
So two Fudge dice would give you a sequence of values like this:
-1, -1
-1, 0
-1, 1
0, –1
0, 0,
etc.
This gives a very simple linear gradient from 0 to 9. It’s simple and it’s visual and it also constrains me to limit to either 3 or 9 or 27, etc.
But Mike Harvey suggests another interesting technique. Using 5dF, but treating anything greater than 2 as 2 (and anything less than –2 as –2). This gives a surprisingly linear gradient. (I plugged it into anydice if you want to see it visually).
If you look carefully at the 4dF probability table and “squint your eyes”..
.
18.519% +2 or more
19.753% +1
23.457% +0
19.753% -1
18.519% -2 or less…notice that these steps are very close to even 20% increments. Close enough for horseshoes or FUDGE!! That there’s a linear d5! In fact you can get even closer rolling 5dF:
20.988% +2 or more
18.519% +1
20.988% +0
18.519% -1
20.988% -2 or less
(Original yahoo groups thread here)