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<blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1681170" data-attributes="member: 10201">[Fudge dice]For Fudge. One of the niftiest features for cutting down on teh mechanical workload in an RPG is having an auto-success mechanism. Various games do it in various ways, but it often comes down to something like &quot;if your skill exceeds the difficulty&quot; or &quot;if 10+ your skill exceeds the difficulty&quot;, or something of the sort. What's even niftier is if the autosuccess and rolling mechanics produce the same results, or at least the autosuccess mechanic is just a simplification of the rolling mechanic, rather than something distinct. Fudge (along with Feng Shui, TBP, and some other games) accomplishes this by using zero-centered dice. That is, the average result on the dice is 0, instead of 10.5 (D20 System) or something else. So you don't have to add anything in to the roll to calculate autosuccess, since &quot;compensating&quot; for the roll you're not making just means adding 0.&nbsp; To this end, the fudge die was invented: it's a (d3-2), so it generates a number from -1 to +1 with equal probability. However, in those situations, you can just drop the numbers and simply have -, +, and &lt;blank&gt; on the die faces, because the 1 or 0 are redundant. When you add up a whole bunch of dice, it is heavily center-weighted. When the range of those dice is small, especially when it's small in relation to the number of dice being added, it is very strongly center-weighted. And when those dice are themselves 0-centered, the whole result is. So you end up with this nice, tight, heavily-center-weighted bellcurve, ranging from -4 to +4. And, 4d3 gives you roughly 1% odds of either of the most-extreme results, and sufficient center-weighting that taking the default is merely a natural progression from rolling, rather than a sudden jump: When you roll, roughly 1/3rd of results are a zero, and another 1/3rd are +/-1.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="woodelf, post: 1681170, member: 10201"] [Fudge dice] For Fudge. One of the niftiest features for cutting down on teh mechanical workload in an RPG is having an auto-success mechanism. Various games do it in various ways, but it often comes down to something like "if your skill exceeds the difficulty" or "if 10+ your skill exceeds the difficulty", or something of the sort. What's even niftier is if the autosuccess and rolling mechanics produce the same results, or at least the autosuccess mechanic is just a simplification of the rolling mechanic, rather than something distinct. Fudge (along with Feng Shui, TBP, and some other games) accomplishes this by using zero-centered dice. That is, the average result on the dice is 0, instead of 10.5 (D20 System) or something else. So you don't have to add anything in to the roll to calculate autosuccess, since "compensating" for the roll you're not making just means adding 0. To this end, the fudge die was invented: it's a (d3-2), so it generates a number from -1 to +1 with equal probability. However, in those situations, you can just drop the numbers and simply have -, +, and <blank> on the die faces, because the 1 or 0 are redundant. When you add up a whole bunch of dice, it is heavily center-weighted. When the range of those dice is small, especially when it's small in relation to the number of dice being added, it is very strongly center-weighted. And when those dice are themselves 0-centered, the whole result is. So you end up with this nice, tight, heavily-center-weighted bellcurve, ranging from -4 to +4. And, 4d3 gives you roughly 1% odds of either of the most-extreme results, and sufficient center-weighting that taking the default is merely a natural progression from rolling, rather than a sudden jump: When you roll, roughly 1/3rd of results are a zero, and another 1/3rd are +/-1. [/QUOTE]

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