I'm working on a paranoid style rpg system/setting and I was wondering if anybody had any insight on the legality of using Fudge dice. ie can I use them without being sued.

I realize they arent patented and arent copyrightable or trademarkable but since I know little about how these laws actually apply I thought I'd find more out.

Thanks ahead of time and sorry if this is in the wrong forum.

Hi, and welcome to the forge!

Indeed, this probably isn't the correct forum for this. Publishing might be more appropriate for legality issues, although I'm not completely sure. IGD is more for discussing actual mechanics and system concepts that you plan to use in some form for a particular game. But no sweat, it's an inconsequential mistake.

As for your question, I'm pretty much 100% sure nobody is going to sue you. For the reasons you state, and for the fact that O'Sullivan probably just doesn't care that much--after all, it's just a dice mechanism, and RPGs never made anyone rich anyway.

Good luck with your game. Can you give us any more info? :^)
--Jeff

Thanks, and some.

The system's resolution is basically roll + mod compared to difficulty. Its alot less freeform than fudge though and is moderately mechanics based mainly when dealing with combat.

Basically I'm attempting to combine a mechanic moderate system such as d20 and a freeform story based roll like fudge and the freedom in character creation (not so much shown here as its in early stages) that can be seen in point buy systems like GURPS.

The system I eventually want to make public domain and free for anyone to use and abuse.


One question I do have that might be more appropriate to this forum however is about the magic system.

Basically, you roll a spellcraft or similar skill check. The degree of sucess in your check decides how many dice you get for your effect pool. You roll that many dfudge(1d3-2 implemented on d6 with 2 + sides and 2 - sides) adding the + signs and reroll the + and repeat (open ended style). The final result will be the sucess rating of the spell.

What the distribution looks like at high spellcraft sucesses (ie high die numbers) is really weird and flatish. What I'm hoping for (if possible) is a die mechanic that gives a graph that looks more like this:
[code]
Original:
|* |
| * |
| * |
| * | *
| * | * * *
+-------*- +*--------*
Sucess Rating Success Rating
At 1 die At about 10 Die

Wanted:
|* | *
| * | *
| * | *
| * | *
| * | *
+-------*- +*--------
Sucess Rating Success Rating
At 1 die At about 10 Die
[/code]


Changing the reroll trigger to both blanks and + helped a bit but it still wasnt much like what I wanted.

The reason I want distribution like this and have it open ended is that the concept of one not familar with magic nudging at reality and creating a magical avalanche appeals to both me and the setting. On the other hand I do want to make it at least more likely for those who level magic to use it in a less random chaotic way. While the current method does do this, it seems weak to me creating only basically linear line which disallows one ever truely "mastering magic."

I can think of a few ways to accomplish this:
1. Have your spellcraft mod add to your sucess rating (a little powerful...)
2. Have some other mod add to your sucess rating
3. Group all ratings higher than say... 8 into "Perfect Sucess" which would make it very likely to get a perfect sucess at higher levels but has the downside of defeating the point of having an open ended system (I feel.)
4. Have some sort of featesque thing magic users aquire at point x or for cost x that allow them to add a mod to the Sucess rating.

All of these seem to ignore the problem though that stems from how I advance characters' magic by advancing their magic dice pool. I will probably end up just getting rid of advancing their dice pool and instead advance a magic mod or some such.

If anybody has any ideas that I probably missed it would be of great help.

If you want I can post the jpegs of various graphs for these from a quicky program I wrote (or maybe I could just post the mac/pc program.)

Have you seen Walt Freitag's Symmetry dice mechanic? It might do what you want, and there's a thread about it on the forums somewhere. A search should pull it up lickety-split.

Well, the chosen dice typer has, I suspect, a lot to do with the distribution you're seeing.

The point of a Fudge die is that more of them does not increase your average level of success, it simply tweaks the bell curve centered on zero. Open-ending a Fudge die on any given result does very little to this effect.

If, as your post seems to imply, you're instead ignoring the minuses and thus using a die which is, effectively, four zeroes and two ones (1d3-2, min zero), open-ending on either the ones, or the ones and two of the zeroes, then this isn't quite as true... but it's still possibly the wrong die type to use for a "pool" type system since increasing the number of dice increases success chance quite slowly.

Open-ending on plusses only, the average roll on such a die would be 0.5 per die. Open-ending on plusses and blanks (with no other distinction between blanks and minuses, the minuses are simply not successes), you get an average roll of one success per die. (Both values are exact; I can provide the algebra if you like.)

So with either of these schemes you should be seeing a linear increase in average number of successes, with number of dice. If I'm misunderstanding you and the minuses are minuses (not ignored), then the average does not increase with the number of dice, period. Any observations to the contrary just mean your program needs examination and your random number generator may be at issue.

The shape of the distribution will, inevitably, become more bell-curve-like the more dice you throw at it, for any dice pool system. The shape you've specified for the "desired 10-dice result" may be one you want to question - do you actually want to make the most probable result the absolute max? In that case you might want to consider some kind of Silhouette variant (roll N dice, keep the highest one only)... if you don't do anything else with it, then the more dice, the more likely it becomes that you'll get the top possible result. At one die, however, it's still flat (equal chances of min and max result), so it fails to match your one-die desired graph.

IOTW, your expectations may be the issue. Perhaps you can clarify with words what you want to see lots of dice do. Increase the average, yes... but what about the "best" roll at lots of dice, do you really want that to also be the average roll at this point?

- Eric

Sorry I should have explained better.

Harlequin:

10 dice will be the absolute maximum which would represent say .. godlike ability. At around 5 dice I would like something similar to a bell curve. And at 1 its like shown. I suppose realistically I could ignore godlike since it *shouldn't* showup, but I wish to at least make it possible...

The use of fudge dice is only for one reason - if i'm going to require the player to have weird dice, i want it to be the only dice they need. I suppose maybe I should either a) rethink my dice choice or b) my magic system.

Shreyas Sampat:

Ill check on that and post back. Sounds promissing at least

hmm wow. that Symetry dice system is really neat. Thanks for the great tip, reworking my system.

Thanks again, for everyones help. And in advance I apologize for all the questions my n00bness is sure to bring in the future =-).