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🎡 The Paper Table
Resource Printable No dice required Accessibility Author: Nicholas A. Gasper
Where dice are dangerous.
Everything in this document prints on ordinary paper and replaces a set of dice. There is a spinner you can cut out, three methods that need no spinner at all, a lookup table that resolves a whole dice pool in two spins, and paper trackers for clocks, Boons, Story Beats, Harm and Fatigue. Print it in black and white; nothing here depends on colour.
Fate's Edge is played with ten-sided dice, and dice are not always available. Some tables have lost them, or travel light, or are playing on a bus. Some are playing where dice often aren't allowed. And some people simply read pips faster than they read small engraved numerals. The game does not actually require the objects — it requires a fair way to get a number from 1 to 10, and there are many.
1. The Wheel
Cut it out, or just lay the page flat and spin on it. Each sector is one tenth of the circle, so every number is equally likely — this is a d10, drawn instead of moulded.
Three ways to spin it
With a paperclip. Open one end, hold it at the centre with a pen or pencil tip through the loop, and flick. Read the sector the long end stops in.
With a pencil alone. Stand the pencil on its point at the centre dot, pinch the top, and spin it like a top. Read the sector it falls toward.
By dropping. Hold a pencil about a foot above the page, eyes on the centre, and drop it. Read where the point lands; drop again if it misses the circle. Slower, and the fairest of the three if your spinner is warped.
Is it actually fair? A spinner is fair if the sectors are equal and the spin is long enough to lose its starting position — two or three full turns is plenty. Sectors here are exactly 36°. The usual way a paper spinner goes wrong is a bent clip or a soft centre hole that drags; if one number starts coming up more than its share, re-cut the centre or switch to dropping.
2. If you have no spinner at all
All three of these produce a fair number from 1 to 10 using things you already have. None need a printed page.
Let a thick book fall open and read the last digit of the left-hand page number. 0 counts as 10. Any book over about two hundred pages works, and page numbers are uniform in their last digit regardless of where the spine likes to open — which is why this method is more robust than it looks.
Two digits, for the table in section 4: read the last digit of the left page, then the last digit of the right page.
Number ten short lines across a page, or use the printed wheel. Drop a pencil from a hand's height and read the nearest number. Re-drop if it lands off the page.
If you can see a second hand, glance away, then look: the seconds' last digit is your number, 0 counting as 10. Fair, instant, and needs nothing at all — but only once every few seconds, so it suits one-off rolls rather than a full pool.
Picking a number "at random" in your head, or stabbing a numbered grid with your eyes shut. People are reliably biased at both — middling numbers come up far too often and edges almost never. If it feels random, it probably isn't; use one of the three above.
3. Rolling a pool
A Fate's Edge roll is Attribute + Skill dice, so most rolls are four to seven spins. Spin that many times and tally as you go — a stroke for each success, a dot for each 1:
| Spin | Counts as |
|---|---|
| 1 | No success, and 1 Story Beat to the GM |
| 2–5 | Nothing |
| 6–9 | 1 success |
| 10 | 2 successes |
Position works normally. Dominant: re-spin one failure (a 1–5), your choice. Desperate: re-spin one success (a 6–9); a 10 is never re-spun. A re-spun 1 keeps its Story Beat — mark the dot before you re-spin, and mark another if the new spin is also a 1.
4. The fast table — two spins for any pool
Spinning eight times gets old. This resolves an entire pool in two spins: the first is the tens digit, the second the units, giving a number from 01 to 00 (that is, 100). Read your pool's column and take the successes and Story Beats straight off it.
What this is, exactly. Each column is the true probability distribution of that pool, computed by enumerating every possible roll, then divided into a hundred slots. It is not an approximation of the game — it is the same maths the dice do, sampled in one step instead of eight. Slot allocation rounds each outcome to the nearest percent, so any single line is at most about one percentage point off, which is far below what anyone notices at a table.
Slot 00 is not a rounding bin. The very best and very worst results are rarer than one percent and would round away to nothing, so instead of quietly deleting them the table sends you to 00: spin the long way — one spin per die, per section 3. It comes up about one roll in a hundred and it is the only way the spectacular results stay reachable.
These columns are for Controlled Position. For Dominant or Desperate, spin the pool the long way and apply the re-spin; Position turns on a single die, and a table that has already added them up cannot tell you which one to change.
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01–16 | 0 | 0 |
| 17–24 | 0 | 1 |
| 25 | 0 | 2 |
| 26–56 | 1 | 0 |
| 57–64 | 1 | 1 |
| 65–88 | 2 | 0 |
| 89–90 | 2 | 1 |
| 91–98 | 3 | 0 |
| 99 | 4 | 0 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01–06 | 0 | 0 |
| 07–11 | 0 | 1 |
| 12 | 0 | 2 |
| 13–31 | 1 | 0 |
| 32–41 | 1 | 1 |
| 42 | 1 | 2 |
| 43–66 | 2 | 0 |
| 67–73 | 2 | 1 |
| 74–89 | 3 | 0 |
| 90–92 | 3 | 1 |
| 93–98 | 4 | 0 |
| 99 | 5 | 0 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01–03 | 0 | 0 |
| 04–06 | 0 | 1 |
| 07 | 0 | 2 |
| 08–17 | 1 | 0 |
| 18–25 | 1 | 1 |
| 26–27 | 1 | 2 |
| 28–45 | 2 | 0 |
| 46–55 | 2 | 1 |
| 56 | 2 | 2 |
| 57–74 | 3 | 0 |
| 75–80 | 3 | 1 |
| 81 | 3 | 2 |
| 82–92 | 4 | 0 |
| 93–94 | 4 | 1 |
| 95–98 | 5 | 0 |
| 99 | 6 | 0 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | 0 | 0 |
| 02 | 0 | 1 |
| 03 | 0 | 2 |
| 04–08 | 1 | 0 |
| 09–13 | 1 | 1 |
| 14–15 | 1 | 2 |
| 16–27 | 2 | 0 |
| 28–36 | 2 | 1 |
| 37–38 | 2 | 2 |
| 39–53 | 3 | 0 |
| 54–62 | 3 | 1 |
| 63–64 | 3 | 2 |
| 65–77 | 4 | 0 |
| 78–83 | 4 | 1 |
| 84 | 4 | 2 |
| 85–92 | 5 | 0 |
| 93–94 | 5 | 1 |
| 95–97 | 6 | 0 |
| 98 | 6 | 1 |
| 99 | 7 | 0 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | 0 | 1 |
| 02–03 | 1 | 0 |
| 04–06 | 1 | 1 |
| 07–08 | 1 | 2 |
| 09–15 | 2 | 0 |
| 16–22 | 2 | 1 |
| 23–25 | 2 | 2 |
| 26–36 | 3 | 0 |
| 37–45 | 3 | 1 |
| 46–48 | 3 | 2 |
| 49–61 | 4 | 0 |
| 62–69 | 4 | 1 |
| 70–71 | 4 | 2 |
| 72–81 | 5 | 0 |
| 82–86 | 5 | 1 |
| 87 | 5 | 2 |
| 88–93 | 6 | 0 |
| 94–95 | 6 | 1 |
| 96–97 | 7 | 0 |
| 98 | 7 | 1 |
| 99 | 8 | 0 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | 1 | 0 |
| 02–03 | 1 | 1 |
| 04 | 1 | 2 |
| 05–08 | 2 | 0 |
| 09–13 | 2 | 1 |
| 14–15 | 2 | 2 |
| 16 | 2 | 3 |
| 17–23 | 3 | 0 |
| 24–31 | 3 | 1 |
| 32–34 | 3 | 2 |
| 35 | 3 | 3 |
| 36–45 | 4 | 0 |
| 46–54 | 4 | 1 |
| 55–57 | 4 | 2 |
| 58–67 | 5 | 0 |
| 68–74 | 5 | 1 |
| 75–76 | 5 | 2 |
| 77–84 | 6 | 0 |
| 85–88 | 6 | 1 |
| 89 | 6 | 2 |
| 90–93 | 7 | 0 |
| 94–95 | 7 | 1 |
| 96–97 | 8 | 0 |
| 98 | 8 | 1 |
| 99 | 9 | 0 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
| Spin | Succ. | SB |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | 1 | 0 |
| 02 | 1 | 1 |
| 03 | 1 | 2 |
| 04–05 | 2 | 0 |
| 06–08 | 2 | 1 |
| 09–10 | 2 | 2 |
| 11 | 2 | 3 |
| 12–16 | 3 | 0 |
| 17–22 | 3 | 1 |
| 23–25 | 3 | 2 |
| 26 | 3 | 3 |
| 27–33 | 4 | 0 |
| 34–41 | 4 | 1 |
| 42–45 | 4 | 2 |
| 46 | 4 | 3 |
| 47–55 | 5 | 0 |
| 56–63 | 5 | 1 |
| 64–66 | 5 | 2 |
| 67–74 | 6 | 0 |
| 75–80 | 6 | 1 |
| 81–82 | 6 | 2 |
| 83–88 | 7 | 0 |
| 89–91 | 7 | 1 |
| 92 | 7 | 2 |
| 93–95 | 8 | 0 |
| 96–97 | 8 | 1 |
| 98 | 9 | 0 |
| 99 | 9 | 1 |
| 00 | spin the long way | |
5. Paper trackers
Cut these out, or copy them by hand — they are only boxes. Fill a box with a stroke; erase or cross out to clear. Clocks come in four legal sizes and no others.
6. Trackers you already own
The printed strips in section 5 work, but anything you can move or stack works better — a filled box has to be erased, and a bead just gets picked up. Two lists: things a game shop sells or another game already contains, and things that are simply lying around.
From a game shop, or another game on the shelf
| Item | Best used as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Glass gems / bingo chips | Boons, Story Beats | The default. Two colours covers both economies at once, and they stack. |
| Wooden cubes (from almost any Euro board game) | Clock segments | Small enough that a [10] clock still fits on a character sheet. |
| Poker chips | Boons | Denominations are handy when someone is holding four or five. |
| Meeples / pawns | Position, range bands | One pawn on a three-space strip reads Position at a glance from across the table. |
| Dominoes | Harm and Fatigue | Pip faces are readable upside down, which matters when the GM is opposite you. |
| Condition rings (sold for other systems) | Harm on a miniature | If you are already using minis, they keep Harm on the figure instead of the sheet. |
| Scrabble tiles | Named clocks | Spell the clock's name; flip tiles as it fills. |
| A dry-erase sleeve | Everything | Slide this document in and the trackers in section 5 become reusable. |
Ace through 10 of one suit, shuffled, is a perfectly uniform ten-sided die: draw one, read it, put it back, shuffle. If you would rather not reshuffle between every die, take Ace through 10 in all four suits — forty cards — shuffle, and deal one card per die in your pool. That is sampling without replacement, so it is very slightly tighter than real dice (drawing a 10 makes the next 10 marginally less likely), but at a pool of eight from forty cards the difference is far too small to see across a session. Reshuffle between rolls, not between dice.
This is worth knowing because Fate's Edge already asks for a deck — the Crown Spread and the Deck of Consequences both use one. If you own the cards for those, you own the dice too.
From around the house
| Item | Best used as | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Dried beans, rice, pasta | Boons, Story Beats | Free, quiet, and endless. Different shapes for different currencies. |
| Coins | Boons, clock segments | Denominations separate the economies. A stack is also a legible count from a distance. |
| Buttons | Anything | The classic. A button tin usually has enough variety to give every track its own look. |
| Toothpicks or matchsticks | Clock segments | Lay them side by side and remove them as the clock fills — or build the clock up as it advances, which some tables find more legible. |
| Bottle caps, bread tags | Harm, Fatigue | Distinct enough that nobody confuses them with the Boon pile. |
| Torn paper scraps | Named clocks | Write the clock's name on it; tear one corner off per segment. |
| Paperclips | Clock position on a printed strip | Clip it to the strip and slide it along. Doubles as the spinner arrow in section 1. |
| A pencil and a margin | Everything | Tally marks have never failed anyone — though remember the game only uses clocks of 4, 6, 8 and 10, so the usual gate-of-five grouping cuts across every legal size. Group in pairs instead. |
One rule for whatever you use. Boons and Story Beats should never look alike. They move in opposite directions and are spent by different people, and the single most common tracking mistake at a real table is a player scooping up a Story Beat because it was the same colour as their Boons. Different object, different colour, or different side of the table — pick one and keep it.
7. If you have six-siders but not ten
A board-game box usually has d6s in it. The People's Die is a complete d6 conversion of the game — and if you have no d6s either, here is the wheel for it. Six sectors, same three spinning methods.
8. Printing notes
- Print at 100% — "fit to page" will shrink the wheel and skew the sectors slightly.
- Black and white is fine. Nothing in this document carries meaning in colour alone.
- Card or a glued-on cereal box back makes a wheel that lasts; plain paper works for a session.
- The wheel is about 3.5 inches across. Two fit side by side on a sheet if you want a spare.
- Everything here is under the same licence as the SRD, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Copy it, hand it out, put it in a zine, mail it to somebody.
None of the above changes a single rule. The dice pool, the Outcome Matrix, Position, Boons and Story Beats are all exactly as written in the core book — a spinner is just a d10 that lies flat, and the table in section 4 is the same distribution the dice produce. A character built at a paper table is playable at any other table, and the reverse. That is the whole point: the rules were never the part that needed the equipment.
9. Sending a paper session to the web client
A player can write these blocks by hand, type them in an email, or ask a trusted person to transcribe them. The recipient opens Settings → Data Management → Import from Paper, pastes the text, previews every value, and imports. No account or device is needed by the person writing the paper sheet.
Use the field labels exactly as shown, in English even when the client is in Spanish; names and notes can be in any language. Copy the completed values, not blank worksheet lines. Print the one-page Paper Import Reference for all supported fields.
Character sheet — import block
Copy this block at the bottom of a character sheet. For a new character, omit ID. To update an existing character, copy its exact id from an exported backup; keep Name and only the fields you want to change. Omitted fields stay unchanged on an update. New characters receive the client's usual defaults for omitted fields. Skills listed here update those skills only.
=== Character === Name: Rowan Body: 2 Wits: 3 Spirit: 1 Presence: 2 XP: 32 Skills: Melee=2, Lore=1 Fatigue: 0 Harm: 0 Boons: 1 Notes: Arrived at the old bridge.
GM session tracker — import block
Each Timer block adds a new clock; each Journal block adds a new wiki entry. Use a distinct session title so it is easy to find later. Story Beat totals and other campaign details can be recorded in the journal text; they do not change the live counters automatically.
=== Timer === Name: Patrol returns Segments: 6 Current: 2 === Journal === Title: Session at the bridge Content: We promised to return before dawn. Tags: session, bridge
Check the recipient's campaign connection before importing: these changes use the existing campaign sync and offline queue. Review OCR output carefully. In numeric fields only, O becomes 0 and I, l or | becomes 1; every such repair appears in the preview. Unknown labels, invalid values and repeated fields block the import. Other ambiguous text must be corrected by the transcriber. Import each block once; pending delivery is not a reason to import it again. This flow accepts text, not image uploads.
© Nicholas A. Gasper — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0