Geoide

David Dorward — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 12:29:59 +0000

A lunchtime game of Words With Friends resulted in:

wow. Geoide isn’t in my dictionary!… ah. that’s because the word was Geoid.

I now have a new piece of technobabble for my upcoming Star Trek FATE game. One of my players was talking about having his character be a terraforming engineer so:

Geoide: All in one tool for controlling terraforming systems.

FATE dice rolling methods

David Dorward — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:59:30 +0000

I own a couple of games based on the FATE system (which is, in turn, based on the FUDGE system), and there are a couple of different approaches for rolling dice that appear in them.

The classic system is 4dF. A dF is a FUDGE die and has six faces representing the numbers -1, 0 and 1 twice over. It is a d3-2.

Starblazer Adventures uses a different approach and rolls d6-d6. This has the advantage that you don’t need to run out and buy dice that are so specialised that your friendly neighourhood gaming store doesn’t sell them.

This morning I decided to invest a few minutes into doing some analysis and comparison of the two systems (no doubt duplicating other people’s work, but entertaining myself in the process).

I generated all possible results that each of the two systems could provide, and converted them into percentages and then charted them.

Total	4dF	4dF %	d6 – d6	d6 – d6 %
-5	0	0	1	2.78
-4	1	1.23	2	5.56
-3	4	4.94	3	8.33
-2	10	12.35	4	11.11
-1	16	19.75	5	13.89
0	19	23.46	6	16.67
1	16	19.75	5	13.89
2	10	12.35	4	11.11
3	4	4.94	3	8.33
4	1	1.23	2	5.56
5	0	0	1	2.78

There isn’t much to choose between the results, although the FUDGE dice give slightly less variance and are more likely to hit closer to zero.

The Core Worlds » Starblazer Adventures

Geoide

FATE dice rolling methods