Painting Characters in Broad Strokes (Part 1)

[This article originally appeared in 2010 in Fudgerylog, the blog connected to my defunct Fudgery.net site. (Read Part 2.)]

Here is another option for character traits in a cinematic Fudge game. Some genres, especially those adapted from movies or television shows, do not lend themselves to detailed descriptions of a character’s specific skills. Any attempt to adapt such characters to a role-playing game with an extensive list of skills would require the designer to resort to guesswork in order to make the character "whole" and ready to play. The problem with this approach, apart from the necessity of invoking poetic license, is that most characters in these media are notable not so much for the skills they use, but the decisions they make. This is especially apparent with the majority of the Doctor’s companions on Doctor Who (which I am currently attempting to adapt). Non-player characters, too, of any genre, typically need only the barest of details to fulfill their functions. What is the best way to describe such characters with an economy of traits?

Taking a cue from another role-playing game I hold in high esteem, Sherpa, one possible answer is to discard skills completely and rely on a combination of attributes and attributes-as-occupations. Sherpa has the following attributes in order of importance (according to the author, Steffan O’Sullivan): Profession, Experience, Reasoning, Agility, Strength, and Health. The first two attributes are not the usual inherent characteristics one expects to find, but are actually embodiments of large clusters of skills. Profession must be specified by the player, and this attribute covers all the skills logically related to it. Profession (Knight), for instance, would include such pertinent skills as Riding, Jousting, Swordsmanship, Heraldry, Tactics, Court Etiquette, etc. Experience is an attribute that includes all of the other skills a character has gained in life unrelated to Profession. In Fudge, it is simply a matter of determining some standard attributes for all characters and allowing players to designate one or more occupational attributes. As per the standard rules, the GM might allocate a number of free levels equal to half the total number of attributes to be distributed by the players as they choose.

For my own projects, I think I would rename Profession and Experience as Vocation and Avocation (as in Quasi-Standard Descriptive Traits for Sherpa). I would allow up to four Vocations and/or Avocations in any combination, but each one must be specified. (In my games, Vocations and Avocations are functionally identical, but are differentiated for the sake of describing which attributes are, or have been, professional occupations vs. amateur interests.) The rest of the attributes would be Strength, Stamina, Coordination, Intellect, Willpower, and Charisma. The default attribute level for player characters and extraordinary non-player characters is Fair. The default attribute level for ordinary non-player characters is Mediocre. Characters with four vocational/avocational attributes and the usual six inherent attributes would have 5 free levels to distribute amongst them and may further increase some attributes by lowering others. Any character attempting to use a skill not encompassed by one of his Vocations or Avocations has a default level to be determined by the GM based on her assessment of the skill’s difficulty, i.e. Easy skills have a default level of Mediocre, Average skills of Poor, Hard skills of Terrible, and Very Hard skills of Nonexistent. Apart from this, Vocations and Avocations function in all other ways as normal attributes.

This is one option I will probably include in Classic Doctor Who: The Unofficial Role-Playing Game for creating Companions and non-player characters. There is another option I like, however, which I will describe next time.

[Originally posted in Fudgery.net/fudgerylog on 5 October 2010.]