Blogging Blues

For some time, the tables I used for my Mass Scale Chart and Strength Scale Chart have been displaying incorrectly. This was not an issue when I first posted them, but I cannot account for it and therefore have no idea how to fix it. So, should I delete those pages, replace them with links to external files, or leave them as is? I do not know if anyone uses these charts or if anyone even knows they exist.

Speaking of not knowing how many human beings read this blog, Blogger's capacity to share details of a blog's statistics with its creator have become worthless. There is no way to know if the views are from people or bots, which makes the numbers meaningless. The majority of referrers are unidentified. In the last seven days, Creative Reckoning has had 32 references from six identified referring sites and 740 references from "Other." How useful. For keywords used to discover the blog, there used to be... a list of keywords! Now, it just says, "Other... 772 pageviews." How helpful. For top locations, I am supposed to believe that Singapore is number two and Seychelles is number five. Although I would be very pleased if there were indeed vibrant role-playing communities in these countries where people are fascinated by Fudge and somehow finding my blog, I confess to being a bit skeptical. As far as I can tell, the statistics have no value whatsoever, and my only gauge of whether anyone reads this blog (or any of my others) at all is when someone leaves a comment, which is very rare.

I keep several blogrolls on each of my blogs. One is a list of my blogs, one is a list of others' blogs, and sometimes I have a list of relevant podcasts. All of them are set up to display blog posts in order of newest first. Lately, these blogrolls have been updating far less reliably. It has been two days since I last posted in Omnia Pro Omnibus and all of my blogrolls are still displaying the previous post from two weeks ago.

In other non-news, I sort of wish I had picked a different name for this blog. I doubt anyone knows that the inspiration was the term "dead reckoning," which is the true meaning of "fudge" as it is used in the context of the role-playing game entitled Fudge, or that substituting "creative" for "dead" was meant to evoke the academic theme of most of my blogs' titles (Applied Phantasticality, Theoretical Swashbuckling, etc.). "Creative Reckoning" should make one think of Creative Writing as a subject and dead reckoning as a method of GMing Fudge (according to my thinking at the time). Instead, it is probably mostly misinterpreted or ignored, thus utterly failing its purpose.

Thank you (if you are a person) for reading this outpouring of frustration. It's hard to stay motivated in what increasingly feels like a ghost town.

Fudge: The Averaging

And now for something completely average...

Are you looking for a game that promotes extreme realism in character creation and action resolution in all its dreariness and drabbery? Try Fudge: The Averaging. With just three tweaks to the standard Fudge rules, you could be wallowing in ordinariness.

Step One

For each trait, roll 3d6 and consult the table below to find its trait level.

3d6	Fudge
18	Superb
16-17	Great
13-15	Good
9-12	Fair
6-8	Mediocre
4-5	Poor
3	Terrible

Step Two

To resolve actions, roll a number of Fudge dice based on the trait's level.

Any result above Superb or below Terrible wraps around to the other end. For example, if a character with a Great trait rolls +2, the actual result is Terrible, whereas if a character with a Terrible trait rolls −1, the actual result is Superb.

Roll	Trait Level
4dF	Superb
5dF	Great
6dF	Good
7dF	Fair
6dF	Mediocre
5dF	Poor
4dF	Terrible

Step Three

In any given social situation, the character whose relevant trait is closest to Fair or who has the most traits closest to Fair is granted the most respect and/or authority.

Advanced Option

A natural Mediocre is a critical success!

Improving the Trait Ladder 2

[The following article was originally a sequel to another article that has been lost to the astral void because I lacked the wisdom to make backups at the time and archive.org did not capture it. This is one of the articles that was captured, thankfully. I feel it has been superseded by "One Step Beyond", but I offer it here as a relic of my earlier Fudge-blogging activities.]

I am rethinking the improved trait ladder (q.v.), and it has occurred to me that trying to find four additional words that express increasing degrees of the Superb and the Terrible may be as fruitless as trying to assess whether Amazing or Incredible is objectively superior in an extended trait ladder for superheroes. My own solution for the latter was to arrange them alphabetically, so why not extend the same solution to the improved trait ladder? All we are essentially trying to express is the concept of Superb (or Terrible) only more so. Instead of fussing over whether Exceptionally is better than Exceedingly or Extremely (and there are certainly too many “e” words for comfort), I’ve decided to use synonyms for sense 2 of the adverb "very" (“in actual fact”). In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus, these are given as “actually, de facto, genuinely, really, truly, veritably.” Of these, the last four suit my purposes, which gives us this:

Fudge Traits	#	Improved Traits
Superb +4	+7	Veritably Superb
Superb +3	+6	Truly Superb
Superb +2	+5	Really Superb
Superb +1	+4	Genuinely Superb
Superb	+3	Superb
Great	+2	Great
Good	+1	Good
Fair	0	Fair
Mediocre	−1	Mediocre
Poor	−2	Poor
Terrible	−3	Terrible
Terrible −1	−4	Genuinely Terrible
Terrible −2	−5	Really Terrible
Terrible −3	−6	Truly Terrible
Terrible −4	−7	Veritably Terrible

Yes, they mean the same thing, but it has the sound of a more natural, intuitive progression, which is aided by their arrangement in alphabetical order. I think some playtesting is in order.

[Originally posted in Fudgery.net/fudgerylog on 24 May 2011.]

Situational Event Generator

The following is a simple table for adjudicating the results of situational rolls concerning large scale events such as weather, economics, politics, sports, entertainment, dating, etc. The details, of course, are the responsibility of the GM.

Result	Effect
Superb	Triumph
Great	Prosperity
Good	Comfort
Fair	Status Quo
Mediocre	Discomfort
Poor	Conflict
Terrible	Disaster

+1 modifier for Good Omens, Divine Blessings
−1 modifier for Evil Omens, Curses

Attributes as Saving Throws

In 2009, I posted an article in Fudgerylog—reposted here in 2014—advocating the "Separation Between Attributes and Skills" that is the standard procedure for Fudge. I continue to hold this opinion, but I thought it might be made more palatable to skeptics if attributes were described in a different way as saving throws (inspired by Steffan O'Sullivan's explanation for one of the three things he uses attributes for in his "Recent Thoughts on Fudge"). Attributes represent your ability to avoid, resist, survive, and withstand anything deleterious. They are your resistance rolls, survival rolls, morale rolls, health rolls, and saving throws. They are your last defense when skills cannot save you, for they are not skills themselves, but characteristics inherent to you. Your skills describe your competence; your attributes describe your essence.

They can save you.

Perhaps they can save us all.

Seriously, though, I think it helps the mind adjust to the Fudge concept of attributes by thinking of them as holistic saving throws instead of the soil in which skill trees are grown.