Saturday, January 07, 2023

A Little FUDGE

A player in my weekly face-to-face game mentioned that they’d hardly played anything other than D&D, and 5e at that.  I couldn’t let that stand, so I promised to run something for them after the holidays.  That was this past Thursday, and the game I picked was FUDGE.


I chose FUDGE because it has three virtues.  First, its flexibility allowed me to create a setting that was space opera; a nice change of pace from the usual fantasy.  Second, it’s easy to pick up and play; the player in question already mentioned how much simpler the math is.  Finally, and most importantly, the core mechanic is about as not-D&D as you can get while still using dice and not going deep into Forge-esque territory.


For those not in the know, FUDGE is a descendent of GURPS, and like GURPS, eschews the randomness of a single d20 for a bell-curved core mechanic.  The result is a very not-swingy game, where your stats and skills are very important.  GURPS uses 3d6, but FUDGE uses proprietary dice that have six sides with two marked +, two marked -, and two left blank.  You roll 4 (or sometimes 3) dice, add any modifiers, and compare to a target number.  Each + adds 1 to your total while each - removes 1.  It’s extremely rare to get outside the range from -1 to +1, so if you can’t reach the target number with just your stats and modifiers, you’re probably not going to reach it at all.  


This actually makes FUDGE a decent intro to Old School play since you can’t rely on the dice very much; if you’re going to accomplish the difficult thing, you’ve got to find a way to really rack up the bonuses or (better yet) find a way to succeed without the dice entirely.


On the DM’s side of the screen, however, I discovered how much I’ve leaned on random tables and the dice for inspiration.  Letting the dice describe elements of setting or situation has been a great boon in introducing elements that are different from my own usual go-to stuff.  But when the usual range of a roll is only three possibilities, that doesn’t leave a lot to hang randomness on.  


Labradorite Fudge Dice from URWizards.


1 comment:

Joshua Macy said...

So, here's what I used to do in my FUDGE variant to avoid special dice and give a little more variation (basically equivalent to 5dF instead of 3dF): roll 2d6 of two different colors, say red and white. Read whichever has the *lower* value showing as the result. If it's the red die treat it as negative. Read doubles as zero. This gives a nice bell curve centering on zero.

You could do 3dF by using the same technique with 2d4 instead, but I like rolling 6s better. Also, after a couple of years using this we changed it to treat double 6s as a crit and double 1s as a botch, because the players were always expecting them to be special when they came up and in had to keep reminding them b it was an ordinary zero result.