Land of Neng

Yesterday I talked a bit about an RPG system called FUDGE. Today, I'd like to talk a bit about how I'm configuring FUDGE for my current campaign.  A campaign, for those of you not used to role-playing parlance, is a series of games in a single setting.  Sometimes there is only one set of players and characters in the setting, while other times, particularly for long-running games, the same players will take up different characters, or different players will play at different times.  One of my current goals is to keep the setting that I've developed active for the forseeable future, so that the campaign will develop a depth and sense of history that I've found impossible to achieve with short campaigns and settings which are interesting for their novelty value, but pall once you've been exposed to their various surprises.
     The current setting, which I co-developed with my friend Russell Impagliazzo, is called the Land of Neng.  I'll have more to say about it anon (and probably devote part of this website to it), but for now I'll briefly say that it's a pre-modern fantasy setting, and that one of the design goals was to the extent possible to avoid the clich馘 pseudo-European vaguely Tolkeinian settings that are a staple of fantasy worlds.  There wouldn't be elves, dwarves, orcs, feudalism, chivalry, and so forth, not if I could help it.  As it turns out, that's harder to do than it sounds, since players' default assumptions tend to have that flavor unless you specifically over-ride them, and explicitly over-riding an entire world's worth of assumptions all at once is a daunting task.  Still, that's a story for a different day.  For now let's say that I wanted it to feel exotic, but remain comprehensible to players who, after all, are trying to portray character who've grown up immersed in that world and its culture.
     In customizing FUDGE for Neng, I started with the attributes.   Because Russell and I had actuall spent some time working on the metaphysics of the setting, and we had created important roles for Body, Mind, and Spirit (particularly in classification of the entities in the world, and as an explanation of how magic worked in the setting), I wanted the attributes to reflect this.  I admired the concision and usefulness of the attributes from CORPS (another RPG), which divided them into Strength, Agility, Health, Awareness, Will, and Power.  Strength, Agility, and Health seemed like enough to describe the physical side of things in enough detail for a rules-light system.  Awareness (which is what CORPS uses instead of the more common Intelligence, but is supposed to represent not just being smart, but being able to use that smarts to notice the world around you and draw conclusions from it) and Will corresponded roughly to Agility and Strength, but I felt it would be nice to make it symmetrical and have an attribute for mental health (particularly since there are things within the setting that can directly attack mental health), so I dubbed that Sanity.  Then Power would do for spiritual strength and magical power, but for symmetry's sake it would be nice to have stats to represent the ability to manipulate that power and to regenerate that power and resist spiritually debilitating influences, so I created Intuition for the former, and Spirit for the latter.  The full list of attributes was thus:

Then, because I felt that standard FUDGE was a little too granular for what I wanted to do (particularly because there were non-human races in the setting that were significantly stronger and more magically powerful than humans) I decided that instead of the eight levels of Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good, Great, Superb, Legendary, I'd add two intermediate levels padding out the high end, called Very Good, and Really Great.   This also let me assign numeric ratings to them in the 1-10 range, since my players didn't really like the FUDGE use of adjectives. (I still think it's pretty neat, so I compromise by using the number, which is convenient for adding to a die roll or plugging in a formula, but I write the adjective next to it.)
     As far as the die rolls went, the usual FUDGE range of -4 to +4 was larger than I wanted (since I tend to think that a Poor archer shouldn't be able to make Great shots, at least not under combat conditions), and the die rolling methods sometimes seemed rather tricky, unless you made or bought special FUDGE dice (labelled -1,-1,0,0,1,1).  Instead I adopted a die-roll proposed by one of my players, John Kim (keeper of the rec.games.frp.advocacy FAQ), of rolling 2d6 and throwing out the higher die (throw out both if it's doubles).  This gives a range from 0 to 5, weighted towards the lower end of the scale. This also gives the nice quality (similar to the resolution in CORPS) that you'll never perform lower than your rating in the skill.  One of the things about FUDGE that you're warned about when GM'ing is that because of the high variability of the 4dF (-4 to 4) or 3dF (-3 to 3) die rolls, you have to be careful not to make players roll for tasks that they ought to accomplish easily, for instance driving a car to work, or even if they have Great skill they'll fail far more often than people do in real life.  If you never perform less than your skill, the issue of whether the GM ought to require a roll for a task of less difficulty than the skill goes away: such tasks always succeed.  This might not be completely realistic (sometimes people do get into accidents when driving to work), but it's better than an unrealistically high chance of crashing, and makes the game quicker and simpler, too.
     That took care of the basics. Then I went to work cutting and tucking on the combat and magic systems (still haven't finished magic, although we've played two session w/FUDGE so far, and everyone seems to like it), which I'll talk about some other day.

  See you tomorrow!