The Difficulty with Difficulty Levels

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?

Why Is It Difficult?

It is rather late to address a minor complaint about Fudge I first encountered in the now defunct Fudge List (even though I saw it raised several times), but I suspect the complaint is a perennial one and I would like to offer my viewpoint. The complaint is that Fudge expresses the concept of difficulty using the same terms as the trait ladder. Referring to a difficult action as having Good difficulty or Superb difficulty is counterintuitive, the argument goes. Therefore, the rules are flawed. The flaw, however, is in the complaint, because actions do not have difficulty per se, but difficulty levels (as first defined in Action Resolution Terms in Chapter 3 of the rules). Describing an action as having a Good difficulty level or Superb difficulty level makes perfect sense. It seems obvious that a Superb difficulty level requires at least a Superb result. Part of the confusion may lie in the fact that skills themselves may be described in terms of their difficulty as in the Cost of Skills in Objective Character Creation chart in the Skills section of Objective Character Creation. Here skills are listed as Easy, Average, Hard, or Very Hard, and it is this skill difficulty that determines both the default level and starting level of a given skill. At any rate, if one were to use other terms to describe an action’s difficulty level (which is the frequently proffered suggestion), it would require another layer of translation to utilize in the game, which is unnecessary.

Instead of creating a new list of adjectives to learn that are functionally identical to the trait ladder, it would be simpler just to use a term other than difficulty level, such as minimum success level. “Jumping the chasm has a minimum success level of Good.” I can’t see how that could possibly be misunderstood. Of course, I have no problem with “Jumping the chasm has a difficulty level of Good.” Perhaps it’s a matter of where one places the adjective. “A difficulty level of Good” (or even “difficulty level: Good”) sounds better and makes more sense than “a Good difficulty level.”

So the solution is simpler than one would imagine. Use the correct term (difficulty level) and place it before the trait level. A piece of cake!

[Originally posted in Fudgery.net/fudgerylog on 7 October 2010.]