Fudge RPG thoughts

Carl Cravens mentions the lengthy 'What is Fudge' discussion on the Fudge mailing list, and mentions the problems he's been having with the system.

For me, it brings up something that's been bugging me again. I've claimed Fudge as my "exclusive" system for the past several years... I run all my games with Fudge. Thing is, I haven't had a lot of time to actually run games in the past ten years, so my hands-on experience has been lacking. The interesting part is that every time I get a hands-on experience, Fudge somehow comes up short for me.

There's a lot of niggly little reasons, no one of which is really a big problem in itself. But despite its "toolbox" approach, there are some core bits of Fudge that are tightly locked together and it's very difficult to tweak the system because some parameters can't be changed without changing other parts of the system. And some of those tightly-locked pieces are what, to me, make Fudge what it is. If you remove or change them drastically, then it's no longer Fudge

I realise that every time I've run Fudge, I've used a slightly different build. Sometimes I've used vanilla Fudge pretty much out of the box; other times I've run a very stripped-down version, inspired a bit by Castle Falkenstein, which merges attributes and broad skills into 'abilities', and drops gifts and faults altogether.

The one part of the system I haven't ever changed is the part of Fudge Carl's having problems with, the seven-level attribute scale and the Fudge dice. I have to agree with Carl, those are the very core of Fudge. I've always found they work tolerably well; but then my games have been modern-day or low fantasy. Carl's trying to use Fudge for superheroes, a genre that's never appealed much to me.

Anyway, here's my thoughts for future games using my own Kalyr setting:

• No Attributes: I'd already eliminated those attributes that overlap too much with skills, such as Dexterity or Intelligence, now I'm taking this a step further and eliminating them altogether, making some narrowly-defined ones as skills, replacing others with gifts and faults, or talents
• In character generation, use a Traveller-style career system to determine skills. You stack together a series of Templates (need to think of a snappier name), which represent backgrounds, professions or talents. Each grants one level in six different skills. Talents fill the role of those attributes that grant skill bonuses in other systems; for example, take a talent 'Agile', and you get one skill level in any six skills that an agile person would be naturally good at. It's not my intention to define every possible background, profession or talent; would-be players will be encouraged to define their own, subject to GM approval.
• Characters also have traits called Connections. Kalyr is a setting where social status and guild rank count an awful lot; so Connections represent your status with regard to the various powerful groups in the setting. They're rated on the same Superb-Terrible scale as skills; this takes account both of rank within the group, and the power of the group.
• Gifts are much the same as vanilla Fudge; haven't decided how many or whether they can be traded for Templates
• Faults are slightly different; they don't give you anything extra at Chargen time, but instead grant Fudge Points every time they come up and inconvenience the character in play. You can take as many or as few as you like, according to character concept. In essence, they're self-balancing, roleplay them and you get points for them; don't, and you won't.
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• Psionics still needs a bit of thought. My earlier attempt was more or less a straight conversion of the psionics rules from GURPS 3rd edition; each broad power group was bought in levels, and within each power you bought skills to make use of the power. GURPS 4th edition works in a completely different way; skills have gone, and each power is now it's own advantage. In many ways this is a better idea, because for many powers the concept of 'levels' isn't terribly useful; either you can do it or you can't. I'm thinking along the lines of a gift for each ability, accompanied by skills the represent the ways the power can be used.