The Bead Bag, another alternative to dice.

When brainstorming, you never stop at one solution. My problem is that I want an alternate to Fate dice that's more setting appropriate to the primitivist societies in my game. Related to this is a desire to make the game easy to play around a campfire. In the last post I described the Sacred Bowl Game, which is one way of doing this. But I'm not about to stop at just one way.

The bead bag is extremely simple. You need a bag, and 24 small tokens. The tokens come in 3 colors, eight of each. One color (say, green) is a [ + ], one color (say red) is a [ - ], and the last (say, black) is the blank. It's important that the tokens be similar in size and feel so you can't tell the difference by touch. Colored beads, polished stones of different types, or the tons of identical d6s most gamers have will serve for this purpose. 

To get a FATE spread, you shake the bag, reach in, and draw out 4 stones without looking. Total it up as normal, then put the beads back in the bag. 

Honestly the probability math on this is a bit beyond me: I can look up the equations online but understanding how to do them requires that I use math I haven't used since graduation. Obviously the first bead you draw will have exactly a 1 in 3 chance, but the chance of drawing a second, third, or fourth bead has decreasing probability. This is why I suggest 8 of each color, not 4. The more beads you have in there, the closer our probability will be to the correct FATE bell curve, but there's a practical upper limit to how many beads we want in the bag for ease of use. I figure 8 is close enough for our purposes.

Edit:  Jack Gulick was kind enough to do the math for me. To quote:

Here's the whole thing... not as hard as I'd thought.  Plus or Minus are still symmetric, naturally.

4     0.6588%
3     4.2161%
2    11.5942%
1    21.0804%
0    24.9012%

That means, relative to 4dF, 4 is 53% as likely, 3 is 85%, 2 is 94%, 1 is 107% and 0 is 106%.  A bit more centered, but not too terrible.

What is this good for? Two words: FATE LARPing. 

To use this method, you don't need a flat surface, or to be sitting. You just need a small bag or pocket with 2 dozen small stones. You can do this while walking without breaking stride. A fourth token (kept in your other pocket) for fate points, and your character's stats on an index card, and you're good to go. No need for an alternate set of rules for a LARP version of your game now. You can use the rules as written seamlessly. 

The Bowl game: an alternative to dice.

Apparently FUDGE dice can be a bit difficult to find sometimes, enough so that methods for using D6s in place of Fudge dice are described in the core rules. But I've always had a fascination for non-dice game mechanics, and one of the settings I'm working on is a game of tribal hunter-gatherers. So I did a little research into the gambling games of indigenous peoples and found The Sacred Bowl Game.

It's a traditional game played by North American Hunter/gatherers. The premise is pretty simple in RPG terms: you roll 6D2, and if 5 or 6 come up the same, you win that throw. It's kinda cool, and I bet you could base an RPG around that as a core mechanic. But I'm adapting this to FATE, so we're looking for a -4 to +4 spread on a bell curve.

So here's the idea. You'll need 8 of these two-sided tokens. Four of them have a [ + ] on one side and a [   ] on the other. The other four have [ - ] on one side and [   ] on the other. Toss them in the bowl, and count your + and - like you do for FUDGE dice. You'll get a +4 to -4 spread on a bell curve fairly close to the FUDGE die standard.

Here's the probability spread on normal FUDGE dice (taken from here),

4dF

   n                    P(n)   
  ---                 ------- 
  -4       1/81        1.235 %   
  -3       4/81        4.938 % 
  -2      10/81       12.346 % 
  -1      16/81       19.753 % 
   0      19/81       23.457 % 
   1      16/81       19.753 % 
   2      10/81       12.346 % 
   3       4/81        4.938 % 
   4       1/81        1.235 % 

And the spread on the my modified Bowl Game. 

8d2 Bowl
   n                    P(n)    
  ---                 ------- 
  -4       1/121       0.826 % 
  -3       6/121       4.958 % 
  -2      14/121      11.570 % 
  -1      24/121      19.834 % 
   0      31/121      25.619 % 
   1      24/121      19.834 % 
   2      14/121      11.570 % 
   3       6/121       4.958 % 
   4       1/121       0.826 %

So my idea is to use this as the core "dice" mechanic in my Hunter/gatherer game, for setting flavor. There's possibly more to get into here. For example, the bowl pictured has 4 quadrants, so perhaps how many tokens end up in each area might have some effect. But for now I'm happy just closely replicating the 4dF probability curve in an interesting way.