Post by maxinstuff on Oct 23, 2013 17:44:47 GMT -8
Well, as I understood Fred Hicks' explanation he does model the bell curve of the FATE roll, just not to the minimalist level you're aiming for with your example. He's also not aiming at the all inclusive model that Hour11 went for. He's got a 50-60 card deck (iirc) which mimics the bell curve numbers that the FATE roll creates. So, by his logic, you don't need the minimalist 18 cards, nor the comprehensive 216, but rather a managable number of cards, broken down to the rough percentages of results.
So if (and I'm making up numbers just for the example, remember math BAD!!) 9 shows up 25% of the time, and you've got a 100 card deck, then there would be 25 cards with 9 on them. Giving you a deck that should mimic the bell curve, while maintaining a managable number of cards to suffle.
I can't really comment on FATE as I'm not familiar enough with it.
The 216 cards models it exactly, by including all possible results on a single card. The only way to reduce this is to flatten the curve (making it more random) because you still have 1 card for 3, but less cards for everything else. Thats ok if that is the goal. The 18 cards has the opposite effect. So really this is a matter of preference.
With the 18 cards though you can continue adding 6 cards at a time and get a close approximation with a much smaller deck.
With 74 cards for example the odds of a crit become about 0.3% vs 0.45% on the true 3d6. That's very close with less than 100 cards.
If exactitude is what is required, you are left with either the 216 card single draw method, or 3 decks as small as 6 cards each. I personally don't like either as I feel 216 would be too unwieldly, and 3 decks would be too much like drawing chits.