Once upon a time, a commonly heard complaint about Fudge amongst those who enjoyed writing about it in the Fudge List (an Internet mailing list of longish ago) was that it was counterintuitive for difficulty levels to use the Fudge trait ladder. Why, they opined, would someone say a task has a Good difficulty (for instance)? It sounds wrong, they insisted.
I addressed this issue in 2010 in an article entitled "Why Is It Difficult?" (originally posted in Fudgerylog, the blog connected to my no-longer-extant site Fudgery.net; reposted in Creative Reckoning in 2018). My view has not changed on the matter, but in case there are those who just cannot accept it, I can think of one acceptable alternative chart of difficulty levels.
Behold!
| Difficulty Level | Alternative Term |
|---|---|
| Superb | Very High |
| Great | High |
| Good | Moderately High |
| Fair | Moderate |
| Mediocre | Moderately Low |
| Poor | Low |
| Terrible | Very Low |
This way, instead of saying "The task has a Good difficulty" (their strange phrasing) or "The task has a difficulty level of Good" (my superior phrasing) or "Jumping the chasm has a minimum success level of Good" (also one of mine), one could say, "The task is of Moderately High difficulty," which everyone will instinctively know (I assume) requires at least a Good result to accomplish.
Now, is that difficult?
My stock phrase is "You are going to need a Good Piloting roll to succeed" or "That requires a Superb Athletics roll" and therefore don't need to convert either with a bit of linguistic sleight of hand.
ReplyDeleteAlong those lines, I might say "Your Piloting will need to be Good or better."
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