Fudge — 4dF (fudge dice)

At the table

Fudge (Freeform Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine) and many Fate games use fudge dice—often notated 4dF. Each die is a d6 with two minus (−), two blank (0), and two plus (+) faces. You roll four fudge dice and add the results, so the modifier is usually between −4 and +4, centered on 0.

That roll shifts your trait level on Fudge’s adjective ladder (Terrible → … → Superb). The dice rarely dominate a skilled character’s baseline, but +4 or −4 can still swing a check into critical territory—exact thresholds depend on the ladder and difficulty your table uses.

Physically, players read +, −, and blank; in the playground we model each die as −1, 0, and +1.

Try it

Copy the script into the playground editor and click Run. Output shows the full 4dF distribution plus the chance of hitting +4 or better and −4 or worse (common “extreme shift” bands).

The script

↗FudgeDie = die_faces([-1, -1, 0, 0, 1, 1])
four_df = FudgeDie + FudgeDie + FudgeDie + FudgeDie
output("4dF", four_df)
output("p_plus4_or_better", four_df.p_ge(4))
output("p_minus4_or_worse", four_df.cdf(-4))

4dF · DieRoll · mean 0.000

p_plus4_or_better · Prob

p_minus4_or_worse · Prob