The Pros and Cons of Fudge
There's some debate on Fudge Mailing List and RPGNet about the pros and cons of Fudge. What makes it a great system, and what are it's downsides?
What's Great about Fudge
- The adjective-based trait ladder, which makes a character sheet comprehensible without any prior knowledge of the system. Swordfighting of Great is far more meaningful than Broadsword-16.
- The Fudge dice, which are a very elegant resolution mechanic. It manages to combine the ease-of-use of a dice pool with a decent bell-curve distribution. It also produces a range of results beyond simple 'success' or 'fail'.
- The fact that the system is infinitely customisable, and is sufficiently modular that changing one aspect won't break everything else. This makes at a great tool for worldbuilding GMs.
- The generally rules-light nature of the system. It produces free-flowing play which doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary detail. It doesn't take hours to run a barroom brawl. It also means you can create NPCs on the fly really quickly.
- The way the system is scaleable, both in power levels and realism levels. It doesn't take either gritty realism or cinematic action as it's baseline.
What's Mediocre about Fudge
- The system is a bit granular, a necessary consequence of the adjective-based trait ladder.
- The troubled relationship between Attributes and Skills. It's very much a sacred cow with a large section of the Fudge community that you don't mechanically link Attributes with Skills, and the grainyness of the system makes it awkward anyway. The trouble is, you either find half of your attributes not really doing anything because they overlap with the skills, or you end up with a list of attributes that seems incomplete. Neither feels quite right.
- The downside of Fudge's customisability; no two Fudge GMs run quite the same system. I'm not sure how big a problem this really is; how many people swap characters around between different GM's games outside of tournament-style DnD?
- I find the implementation of Fudge most strongly promoted commercially, 5 Point Fudge, a rather bland flavour, with a character generation system that feels too strongly like training wheels for people used to DnD classes and levels.
- Fudge dice are not always easy to get hold of. My FLGS doesn't stock them, although it does sell Fudge books.
I don't have time to read the sites Tim links to, but I must take issue with some of the observations Tim makes here.
Adjectives are not useful measures of ability. How good is "Great"? Is it better or worse than "Expert", "Master" or "Legendary". If you are going to put these keywords in an order, why not just use numbers?
There are people for whom the fight sequence is the whole point of the game. These are the sort of people who like "Swashbuckler". (Anyone else remember that series of games which came out in album covers with the boards printed on the back?) And this is the reason I've only tried Fudge once, a long time ago: it is not suitable for that sort of world.
I agree that there is a problem with Attributes and Skills. I now prefer the system adopted by the people I played RPGs with most: no attributes, no skills, just abilities. It doesn't make any difference if you open a door by brute strength, find weekness and a gentle tap, casting a Knock spell, or throw togther an arrangement of levers: the ability to open a door with a certain level of probability costs the same.
Why do you need special dice for Fudge?
Posted by: Michael Orton on March 2, 2006 01:04 PM>>Adjectives are not useful measures of ability.
Oh yes they are, provided you choose appropriate ones.
>> How good is "Great"? Is it better or worse than "Expert", "Master" or "Legendary". If you are going to put these keywords in an order, why not just use numbers?
Perhaps some people find it easier to think in worse than in numbers?
>>There are people for whom the fight sequence is the whole point of the game.
And there are people for whom it isn't. I'm one of them.
>> These are the sort of people who like "Swashbuckler". (Anyone else remember that series of games which came out in album covers with the boards printed on the back?) And this is the reason I've only tried Fudge once, a long time ago: it is not suitable for that sort of world.
I don't get the point your trying to make. If you really, really like games like Star Fleet Battles or Advanced Squad Leader then Fudge is possibly not the game for you. I personally find complex tactical combat systems a completely different beast from roleplaying, and get bored with any RPG where a combat seems to take forever to resolve. YMMV, of course.
>>Why do you need special dice for Fudge?
You don't; you can play Fudge using d6s. But it's just a lot more fun with proper Fudge dice.
Posted by: Tim Hall on March 2, 2006 09:59 PMI've done Fudge implementations of several settings, and run a few Fudge games. For a game with basically normal people, Fudge works fine, but for other settings I always seem to wind up switching back to a more "specialized" system that is less granular and has rules specifically geared towards the setting.
Posted by: Amadan on March 3, 2006 11:49 PMI've long since given up finding the 'one true system', and recognise system is just a tool to do a job. Saying that, Fudge seems to work pretty well for most things I've tried it with; the one thing it doesn't do is detailed tactical combat, where you're better off with GURPS or even (cough) d20.
Didn't you do a Fudge In Nomine conversion once?
Posted by: Tim Hall on March 4, 2006 08:07 PMYup, it's still available here: http://www.amadan.org/Innomine/IN-Fudge.htm
Posted by: Amadan on March 5, 2006 08:13 AMYep, in truth there cannot be one universal RPG system for all genres.
In my experience Champions was (and I presume still is) the best system for the Superhero genre: I remember rolling a 30d6 power neutralisation attack to stop a fireball taking out Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Rolling that many dice does show just how over the top that genre is.
However, at lower levels "The Hero System", as the generic version is called, doesn't work as well as many other sets of RPG mechanics.