The People's Die, or: What a Joke Variant Taught Me About My Own Dice

I got dragged into an argument recently about dice and accessibility.

The other person’s position was that requiring d10s is a barrier. Mine was that d10s are not exactly rare — you can get a set for the price of a sandwich, every game shop and half the internet sells them, and in practice nobody is sitting down to run a campaign with the single chalky d6 they liberated from a Yahtzee box in 2004. I still think that’s true.

And I spent a while afterwards telling myself I’d been wrong about it, which turns out to be the lazy reading.

Right answer, wrong question

Someone who read a draft of this post pushed back on that, and the correction was sharp enough that it reorganised the whole piece:

You say you were “wrong” about the accessibility point. Were you? d10s are cheap. They are common. The financial barrier is negligible. The fact that you can play with d6s doesn’t make those statements false — it makes them insufficient. “Wrong” implies a factual error. You didn’t make one. You made a category error: you treated “is it affordable?” as the relevant question, when the relevant question was “is it frictionless?”

That’s right, and it’s a more useful thing to have learned than “I was wrong.” Every fact I marshalled in that argument was true, and I’d still defend all of them. Polyhedrals are cheap and ubiquitous. The financial barrier is about four dollars. Nobody is running a campaign on a chalky Yahtzee die from 2004. I answered the affordability question correctly and comprehensively, and it simply wasn’t the question.

The question was friction. Fate’s Edge is an open game — the SRD is CC BY-NC-SA, and the whole point of a licence like that is that somebody can pick the rules up and run them without asking me for anything. “Without asking me for anything” should extend to “without buying a specific object first.” Four dollars isn’t a hardship; it’s a step, and a step is a place where people stop. I couldn’t see it because I own about two hundred dice, and someone with two hundred dice has no way to feel the difference between “cheap” and “already in the cupboard.”

So: right answer, wrong question. That’s a better description of my past self than “wrong,” and — I’d argue — a better description of most design mistakes than “wrong” usually is. Wrong answers get caught. Wrong questions get answered well, which is what makes them survive.

Anyway, I wrote the conversion, and I wrote it as a bit.

The People’s Die is a complete d6 variant of Fate’s Edge, framed as a struggle session. The designer has been re-educated. The d10 is counter-revolutionary. Its 10% critical rate was bourgeois propaganda. Story Beats no longer come from 1s — the 1 was a tool of oppression — they come from pairs, because pairs represent solidarity. There is a section where I thank the Harmonious People’s Union through what is transcribed as a choke.

It was extremely satisfying to write. And then, because I couldn’t help myself, I ran the numbers on it.

The joke had a real finding in it

Here’s the change that matters. In the core game, a Story Beat comes from each 1 you roll. In the variant, a Story Beat comes from each matching pair. Those feel like equivalent moves — swap one “special result” for another, retune, done. At small pools they are nearly equivalent: on two dice, the d10 gives the GM 0.20 Story Beats on average and the pairs rule gives 0.17. Close enough to call it a wash.

Watch what happens as the pool grows.

They aren’t the same mechanic at all. They’re not even the same shape of mechanic.

Counting 1s is linear. Every die you add contributes exactly one tenth of a Story Beat, forever, no matter how many dice are already on the table. The variant counts repeated faces: the first die showing a number is free, and each additional die showing that number adds a Story Beat. That follows the birthday-collision curve. Early dice usually find an unused face; later dice increasingly collide with something already on the table. Once the pool exceeds six, collision is certain. Tuned to look close at a small pool, the two economies diverge into completely different games by eight.

And then there’s the part that made me laugh out loud at my own spreadsheet.

The People’s Die abolishes the clean success

A Clean Success in Fate’s Edge is a roll that beats the difficulty and generates no Story Beats — you did the thing, and nothing bit you on the way out. It’s a real and important outcome. In the core game it stays available across the whole range: about 41% of the time at five dice, still 40% at eight.

In the variant it collapses. 27.8% at three dice. 7.7% at five. 1.5% at six.

At seven dice it is exactly zero. Not “vanishingly rare.” Zero.

Six faces. Seven dice. By the pigeonhole principle, two of them must match. There is no arrangement of seven six-sided dice with no pair in it, so there is no possible roll that generates zero Story Beats. A character competent enough to throw seven dice can never, for the entire remainder of their career, succeed cleanly at anything. Every roll they make hands the GM a complication, by arithmetic, permanently.

In the fiction of the bit, this is perfect. Under the People’s Die, no victory is ever truly without cost, and the most capable comrades bear the heaviest burden of consequence. That’s a genuinely good line. It’s also a complete accident, discovered three hours after I thought I’d finished writing the document.

The actual lesson

Here’s what I took from it, and it’s the reason this post exists instead of just the joke:

The load-bearing property of a dice economy is not its average. It’s how the average scales.

I tuned Fate’s Edge’s d10 curve for months. I have spreadsheets. I playtested until my eyes bled. And when I sat down to convert it to d6s, my instinct was to match the midpoint — get a five-die pool behaving about the same and call the conversion sound. That instinct is wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that hides: the conversion looks fine at the pool size you tested, and quietly becomes a different game at the pool sizes your veteran players actually roll.

If you’re converting any system to different dice — mine, someone else’s, your own — check the curve, not the point. Ask what happens at two dice and at ten, not just at five. Ask whether each die carries an independent chance of producing the result, or whether every new die changes according to what is already on the table. Those behave nothing alike once the pool opens up.

And now look at the shape of that mistake, because it’s the same one twice:

Both times I got a correct, defensible, well-supported answer to something adjacent to the actual problem. Both times the answer was true, which is exactly why it took an outside eye to notice it was the wrong shape — you don’t go looking for errors in a claim that checks out.

I’ve started to think that’s the characteristic failure mode of knowing a system well. You get fast at answering questions about it, and speed at answering is not the same skill as picking the question. I would not have learned either of these by being right in the argument.

On accessibility, more seriously

The two claims that got tangled while I was being defensive, pulled apart:

“d10s are a meaningful financial barrier” — I still don’t buy this, in most places, most of the time. It’s four dollars. This is the claim I was arguing against, and I was right to.

“An open game should be playable with what’s already in the house” — straightforwardly correct, and it has nothing to do with money. It’s about friction and permission. Someone reads the SRD on a Tuesday, wants to try it Tuesday night, and has a Monopoly set and a Yahtzee cup in the cupboard. Under the old answer, the honest response was “order some dice, see you next week.” That’s a week in which they don’t play, and most people who don’t play this week don’t play at all.

The conversion isn’t charity for people who can’t afford dice. It’s a door for people who want to start now. Those are very different arguments and only one of them is condescending. I was arguing against the condescending one, which nobody had actually made.

There’s also the plain accessibility point I’d not thought about at all: d6s have pips. A lot of people read pip patterns faster and more reliably than they read small engraved numerals, including people with low vision, and including people who just find a table of glinting numbers hard to parse at speed. That has nothing to do with cost either.

It’s published, and it’s the example

The People’s Die is up as a proper expansion, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 like the SRD, with the full comedy intact and a section at the end called The Commissar’s Appendix containing every real number in this post, exactly computed.

I’ve also made it the reference example of what a community contribution looks like, because in fixing it up for publication I ended up demonstrating the thing I’d want any contributor to do. The first draft had a rule that said both “5 or 6 is one success” and “6 is two successes,” which is two rules wearing one coat. It invented three skills the game doesn’t have. It carried a Position rule I’d retired from the core book months earlier. None of that was laziness — it’s just what happens when you write fast, and it’s exactly what review is for.

So the shape I’d ask for is this: say what you changed, say why, and show your arithmetic. A variant that states its departures plainly can be argued with, adopted, forked, or improved. A variant that hides them can only be trusted or distrusted, and neither is much use to anyone. The comedy is entirely optional. The appendix isn’t.

If you build something on this system, that’s the bar, and it isn’t a high one. Show your work. I’ll link it.

The People’s Die is available now. Bring your own d6s. The Party has already counted them.