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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!

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!