List of Attributes by Game Celebrates 20th Anniversary

Recently, I mentioned that this year is the 10th anniversary of Creative Reckoning, and it would have been the 20th anniversary of Fudgery.net had I kept it going. It is also the 20th anniversary of the List of Attributes by Game. The list serves as a resource for Fudge GMs, game designers, game historians, and anyone else who is curious about how different role-playing games define the inherent capabilities of characters. I update the list as often as I can, and I welcome suggestions and comments.

Painting Characters in Broad Strokes (Part 2)

[This article originally appeared in 2010 in Fudgerylog, the blog connected to my defunct Fudgery.net site. (Read Part 1.)]

In Part 1, I suggested a method for creating the supporting cast—whether player characters or non-player characters—in a Fudge game adapted from television shows or movies, but there is another method that has been part of the rules since the 1995 edition, and that is the Alternate Section on Character Creation by Ed Heil. In this method, none of the attributes or skills are listed until a situation arises during play when a player must decide whether to use a trait and allocate the necessary levels from his starting pool of levels or refrain from using the trait. The character begins as little more than a description of one or two sentences and a skill level pool (which may also be traded in the traditional manner for attributes or gifts if so desired). Given the sketchiness with which most characters are initially defined in television and cinema, this would seem to be an ideal method of character creation. Characters in these media often evolve as a show progresses, revealing skills and background details the audience didn’t know they possessed (and which probably didn’t even exist until a particular story required them). In a show such as classic Doctor Who, even Companions rarely seem to begin as more than a couple sentences’ worth of description. For my own purposes, however, a compromise might be more effective.

In my current Whovian project, Classic Doctor Who: The Unofficial Role-Playing Game, I will be presenting multiple character creation options, and this will probably be one of them. Companions may begin with a brief description and 3 free levels to be distributed amongst the following attributes: Strength, Stamina, Coordination, Intellect, Willpower, and Charisma. They may choose 1 gift, with further gifts costing an equal number of faults. They will have a skill level pool of perhaps 30 free skill levels that may be distributed or held in reserve or traded for attributes or gifts (or any combination thereof). This makes adapting characters from the original show especially easy. Instead of inventing abilities for Barbara Wright that she never demonstrated in the show, we can simply assign her some skill levels in Teaching, History, and Negotiation, and the rest will be the hands of the player who role-plays her in the game. Who knows what other abilities she may reveal in the course of an adventure? This could make playing an existing Companion just as interesting as creating one’s own.

[Originally posted in Fudgery.net/fudgerylog on 6 October 2010.]

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.]

In Search of Fudge RPG

I just read in a "StackExchange" (whatever that is) someone's answer to a question about alternatives to Fudge dice (c. 2010), and my name was mentioned: "There is more than one Fudge die roller on the internet. Gordon A. Cooper's roller is simple and easy to use." My old Javascript dice roller on Fudgery.net (R.I.P.) was linked in the comment. Ah, the days when a few people could find my Fudge essays and Javascript random generators in search engines... Any search of "Fudge RPG" or "FudgeRPG" now yields little more than endless links to FudgeRPG.com or Reddit. The independent blog articles and resources have largely disappeared from results, and Creative Reckoning is nowhere to be found unless the search terms are quite specific. I know some of this is symptomatic of the eclipse of Fudge by other games, but the continuing sabotage of search engines by their owners is compounding the situation. I shan't belabor the point, but the only way to reverse this trend might have to come from the grassroots level and a different approach. I hope a Fudge community still exists to find it.

Creative Reckoning Celebrates 10th Anniversary

In March 2014, I started Creative Reckoning as a blog centered on Fudge, one of the most innovative role-playing games ever created. Ten years earlier, I had started Fudgery.net and its accompanying blog, Fudgerylog, for the same purpose. Fudgery.net, had it continued, would be celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The majority of its Fudge-related content lives on in Creative Reckoning, so it's a dual anniversary of sorts.

Ten years ago, I expressed my wish "to see a rebirth of Fudge-related Web logs." It has not happened (yet), but I would like to repeat that wish. Play and write about Fudge. Spread the news via blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and 'zines. Keep on Fudging.

Minus

Apparently, the most popular pages of Creative Reckoning are, in descending order:

1. List of Attributes by Game
2. Fudge 1995 Edition (rendered in HTML and hyperlinked by me)
3. Alternate Rules
4. What Is Fudge?

The reason I was curious about the numbers is that I was thinking about "correcting" a minor typographical error for #2 on the list (substituting a proper minus sign wherever a hyphen appears in its place) and I wanted to ascertain whether it was worth the effort as it is a laborious process. On the one hand, it is the second most popular page on the site; on the other hand, no one has ever commented about it (or much of anything else here), which leads me to question whether the views are accurate. If I bother to make the changes, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? Probably not. But I am a perfectionist, and I might do it just to alleviate the annoyance it causes me. Of course, if I correct the issue on that page, I'll feel compelled to correct it throughout the site (and all my other sites). 'Tis a fool's errand.

Conclusion? None at this time.

Sherpa: d6 Variant

This article is intended for use with Sherpa, a role-playing game by Steffan O'Sullivan published by Two Tigers Games. Access to Sherpa is necessary to utilize these rules.

The d6 Variant of Sherpa utilizes a standard six-sided die or d6 dice-rolling app instead of a ten-sided die or d10 simulator (also known as a digital stopwatch). Any rules not specified below are unchanged from standard Sherpa.

3. Character Creation

Each attribute starts at a base allowance of 2.

The GM allots a number of points to each player with which to improve the attributes:

• 0 to 3 points for "Average Folk,"
• 4 to 6 points for Potential Heroes, and
• 7+ points for True Heroes.

Attributes may range from 1 to 6.

7. Action Resolution

7a. Modifiers

• Overwhelming advantage: +2
• Significant advantage: +1
• Average situation: 0
• Significant disadvantage: −1
• Overwhelming disadvantage: −2

7b. Randomizer

Use a standard six-sided die marked 1-6 or use a d6 dice-rolling app.

7d. Wounds

The damage level may be announced as:

• no effect (just a scratch or bruise),
• a light wound (1 damage or stun point),
• a moderate wound (2 damage or stun points), or
• a severe wound (3+ damage or stun points).

Reading Sherpa in Public

It seems I may have participated in the last (loosely) organized observation of Read an RPG Book in Public Week as there have been no updates to the site since 2018 and no updates to the Facebook group since 2020. It was winding down even before the global pandemic, and that's a pity. It was a nice tradition.

Incidentally, the last time I participated (on 11 March 2018), I photographed myself holding a copy of Steffan O'Sullivan's second masterpiece, Sherpa, at the original Tim Horton's in Hamilton, Ontario. My wife and I were in Canada to see Brent Butt doing stand-up comedy, and we always make a point of stopping at two places whenever we are in the area: the original Tim Horton's and The Mule (home of the best tacos I've ever tasted).

Never travel without your Sherpa.

Fudging Blades

"Fudging Blades: Swashbuckling Combat for Fudge!" (from SpiritMusketeer's Blog) is a simple swashbuckling combat system for Fudge by Thijs Krijger and Jay Shaffstall with help from François Letarte. It lacks the detail of simulationist fencing rules, but it appears to be relatively fast-paced. It looks promising.

[This article has been cross-posted here in Theoretical Swashbuckling.]

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?