This is going to be a slight change of pace for me, since today I'm reviewing a role-playing game. As you may or may not know, depending upon how much of the rest of this site you've looked at, one of my amusements is that I play role-playing games. Generally this is whenever I can, which hasn't been all that often post-college, but within the past year or so I've managed to get together a gaming group, and with a couple of recent additions to it we now have enough players who can meet regularly that we should be able to keep to a bi-weekly schedule. This is important, to me, because one of the things that I really like is long-running campaigns in a single game-world, so that the game has time to develop history and depth.
While I was playing only irregularly (generally with my friend Russell, whom I've mentioned before), I was using a system called Hero (the generic version of the Champions Superhero game system), but there were a number of points about it that I thought made it less than completely satisfactory for the campaign I was running, and the new players, who were used to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (a gaming system that I could never contemplate using myself, for reasons that someday I may go into on this site) found it difficult to understand. And, to be fair, Hero is difficult to understand.
So I switched systems, to one called Rolemaster, which was equally difficult to understand, but difficult to understand in a way that I hoped would be familiar to AD&D players. That worked for a while, but as I became more used to Rolemaster, I began to find more things that were more of a hindrance than a help to me when running my campaign, and then when two more players joined, who were willing to put up with Rolemaster but unenthusiastic, it seemed like it might be a good idea to try a system that was easy to understand, and at least didn't have the problems (generally to do with complexity versus the amount of time I had to work on the game world in between everything else that I was doing. When it takes an hour to make up a single inhabitant of the world in sufficient detail, and you only have an hour to prepare for the next session of the game, then you'd better be planning that the next session of the game consists of little more than meeting that inhabitant.).
I'd heard some good things about FUDGE in the Usenet newsgroup that I was reading (rec.games.frp.advocacy), and one of the new players recommended it, and so I downloaded it from Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge FAQ page.
FUDGE: Free-form Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine
by Steffan O'Sullivan
published by Grey Ghost Games, or available as Freeware on the Net.
rating: Neat-O
FUDGE is designed to be an extremely rules-light, configurable system. As such it's not intended for an inexperienced Game Master, although it's very well suited for inexperienced players. At it's heart, FUDGE consists of a scale on which characters' traits can be rated, and a simple dice-mechanic for testing whether an action attempted with that trait succeeds based on the difficulty that the GM assesses for performing that action. All the rest is optional and configurable, and even parts of that core are configurable (e.g. how many and what kind of dice to use for the action test, or whether to add or take away steps on the scale). The scale that FUDGE uses consists of adjectives (much like my rating system): Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good, Great, Superb, and Legendary. About the only thing you need to know to play is the order of these ratings (i.e. something that's Poor is always one level better than something that's Terrible, and one level worse than something that's Mediocre).
For a giving setting, the GM will decide what traits are necessary (FUDGE is open to having the players decide upon additional traits that they think are important for their characters). Traits that every person is going to have, to one degree or another, are called Attributes; traits that you only have if you're trained in them are called Skills. For one GM, Perceptiveness may be an attribute, for another it might be the skill of Perception. Or the GM could leave it up to the player to decide. In FUDGE different players can have completely different sets of Attributes (but since it's the GM who decides how they're used, it's harder to abuse.) FUDGE has a number of ways of making up characters, but the most straightforward is simply the players choose Attributes, Skills, Gifts (traits that don't have a rating, e.g. Perfect Pitch), and Flaws (traits that handicap the character) according to their conception for the character. A slightly more controlled version would place some limits on the conception, e.g. No trait higher than Superb, not more than 2 Great and 4 Good attributes, and no more than 1 Gift that isn't balanced with a Flaw.
Basic action resolution consists of the GM picking a difficulty for the task, and the player trying to equal or exceed that difficulty with the relevant trait plus a die roll. There are lots of ways to roll the dice in FUDGE, but the basic one (sometimes referred to as 4DF) gives a range from -4 to +4, in a bell-curve centered around 0. That sounds complicated, but what it basically amounts to is rolling a six-sided die and subtracting another six-sided die from it (and throwing out +5 and -5). There are a quick ways to do this without actually performing the subtraction, or you can buy "FUDGE dice" from Grey Ghost Games, which are six-sided dice marked -1, -1, 0, 0, +1, +1 (or make your own). Then you throw 4 of them and add them up: hence 4dF. A skill of Good plus a roll of +2 yields a Superb result. A skill of Good plus a roll of -1 yields a Fair result. If the GM had ruled that, say, trying to shoot an arrow into the center of the target so as to split the arrow that's already there requires a Legendary result (well, it became a legend, didn't it?) then an archer with a skill of Good would need a +3 or better to do it, while a Superb archer would only need a +1, and a Poor archer couldn't do it at all (the highest roll is +4, and Poor +4 is only Superb). One of the complaints about this is that it gives a pretty wide range of results. Even a Poor archer can get a Superb result a significant amount of the time; one of the most common customizations of FUDGE is to reduce the range of the result (to +/- 2 or +/- 3, say) or to increase the number of steps in the range of traits (so that Superb is, say, 6 levels better than Poor, not 4).
This way of doing things is amazingly flexible, and makes character generation and the mechanics of running the game a snap, but it does come at a price. The GM has to be comfortable making all kinds of rulings as to difficulty on the fly, and fairly confident of his ability to be consistent (it would probably annoy the players if one day splitting the arrow required a Legendary result, and another day it only required Great), and the players have to be comfortable with the GM doing so. It's a system that would have a lot of trouble with what's called "assumption clash." If the GM thinks that hunting a Cape Buffalo, the most dangerous wild animal on the planet, with a bow-and-arrow (when an elephant gun isn't always enough to stop its charge) is insanely dangerous, and the player thinks "It's just a damn buffalo" the player's character might end up dead before the GM and player realize that they didn't see eye-to-eye on the difficulty of the task.
At any rate, I'm going to give FUDGE a try for my campaign, and I'll be posting an update of some of the ways that I'm customizing it for this particular game.
See you tomorrow!