Fudge

Note

This is still fairly incoherent; I intend to work on it some more.

There has been a lot of acrimonious debate in various places about whether Fudge is a complete game or just a toolkit. This seems to be at least patially because early in its development Fudge was thought of primarily as a gaming engine, and each GM was expected to do some customization. (See an early Fudge FAQ for some details.) Indeed, the subtitle of the Fudge rules is “Freeform, Universal, Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine”

So, which is it? Both, of course.

Clearly, Fudge is a toolkit. It advertises itself as being

…specifically for people who want a good bedrock to build their own system on. It provides the building blocks you need to customize your own rules.

It includes multiple systems for dice rolling, task resolution, character generation, combat, wounds, and character development, and sample magic, psionics, and super power systems. It gives lots of options and lots of examples.

But is it a complete game? Its author obviously thinks so.

The problem, I think, boils down to styles of play: someone who likes detailed, comprehensive rules will regard Fudge as only toolkit, because it doesn’t provide detailed, comprehensive rules for everything and it does provide lots of different options. Fudge can easily be used as the framework on which to build such a system, though: look at Gatecrasher[1], for example.

To someone who likes light, freeform rules, on the other hand, FUDGE is all they need to play. It provides word-based traits tied to a nice task resolution system and it provides lots of additional options and examples, but doesn’t require that any of them be used.

Here are some common objections to the idea that Fudge is complete along with my responses.

1. Fudge has no predefined list of attributes. Some people say that this makes Fudge incomplete because the GM has to pick some attbributes. That is incorrect: a GM can pick a list for their campaign, but it’s also possible to let each character pick the attributes they want.[2]

2. Fudge has no predefined list of skills, gifts, faults, or powers. It’s impossible to list all the skills, gifts, faults or powers that might be needed by every by character in a roleplying game, especially since different groups or even players will consider different things important. One group might be very interested in combat, and have skills like Dagger, Longsword, Hand-and-a-half, while another group might not be interested in combat and have only one skill the covers all of combat. Rather than try an denumerate all the possibilities, it’s better to give a list of examples of each and talk about how to choose them.

3. Fudge requires the GM and players to choose among many options. This may be confusing for beginning GMs[3] but having optional rules doesn’t make a game incomplete. (GURPS and Hero have many optional rules, and nobody complains about them being incomplete.)

4. The GM cannot just say “Make a Fudge character and bring it to the game tonight” and have everybody show up with compatible characters. A GM cannot just say “Make a GURPS character and bring it to the game tonight” either. The GM has to specify how many character points the characters are to be built on, what genre the characters will be, what weapons and armor are appropriate, whether magic or superpowers are allowed or not, what level of wealth is appropriate for the characters, and so forth. Fudge GM has to specify the number of levels available for attributes, the number of levels for skills with maximums for the highest levels of skill, the number of gifts, faults, and powers available, and optionally[2] the list of attributes. Section 6.3, “Character Examples”, discusses setting these limits and gives examples of how they are used.

5. Players can’t automatically produce characters in isolation that are balanced with the other players’ characters without having to compare characters.[4] No game provides the ability to automatically balance characters without taking them all into account: two players can create characters with the same number of character points (or whatever basis) but still end up with characters that are wildly different in effectiveness.

6. No two Fudge games are compatible. People who like crunchy, elaborate, tightly designed games sometimes look at characters from two Fudge campaigns and think that they can’t be used together because:

   1. They don’t have the same attributes.
   2. They don’t have skills of the same level of generality.
   3. They don’t use the same options for combat.

   And indeed, if you insist on approaching things from a rigid, crunch perspective, it won’t work. However, if you approach things from a more freeform perspective, they do work together. The GM wants the player to roll against an attribute their character doesn’t have? Use the default (Fair for attributes; see section 1.4, “Allocating Traits” for details on defaults), or use a similar attribute they do have.

[1]	Why isn’t Gatecrasher more popular? I don’t think it’s because Gatecrasher is a bad system. I think it’s because Gatecrasher targets an odd combination of genres (Comedy, SF, Fantasy, Parody) and provides a setting with many elements but little focus.

[2]	(1, 2) See the Fudge rules, section 1.31, “Attributes”, and section 6.354, “Squeegee Fizzle, Cartoon Chimp”, for details on attributes being optional.

[3]	plain Fudge describes itself as suitable for experienced GMs.

[4]	I’m not sure what this has to do with completeness, but it’s one of the arguments that usually comes up in these descriptions.