Review of Fudge 10th Anniversary Edition

Introduction

Fudge 10th Anniversary Edition (Fudge 10th, hereafter) represents a milestone on several levels. The first professional RPG designed with extensive input from the Internet roleplaying community and to enjoy a wide digital release, Fudge was a harbinger of things to come in our increasingly more Web-driven hobby. This new edition also marks the first time that the printed version of Fudge has been available in hardcover format.

So what is Fudge and how does it work?

In short, Fudge is a freeform, skill-driven RPG with no pre-set attributes and skills. Hence, it operates in a mode halfway between normal RPG and RPG construction kit. There's a simple framework presented for character creation, task resolution, combat, experience and such, but much of the details are left to individual GMs. A medieval knight might be represented by dozens of specialized skills in one GM's Fudge game (Sword, Lance, Horsemanship, Heraldry etc), while another GM might opt to represent the same character with a single extremely broad skill called Knight or Chivalry. In the simplest possible Fudge game, characters might be defined by only one attribute that is used for all rolls. While Fudge in general has a reputation for being "rule-light", some of the more complex implementations I've seen have more in common with GURPS than Risus.

My primary intention with this review is not to focus much on the core rules themselves or the sample game that's included with them, Fantasy Fudge. They're virtually the same as they have been for years, so anyone curious about the basics is advised to check out the other Fudge reviews here on RPG.Net, or, better yet, to download the Fudge core rules free from Grey Ghost Games' website and form their own opinions. The real news in Fudge 10th is the new material that is unique to this new hardcover edition. That is what I'll be reviewing in-depth here.

If you really want this reviewer's opinion on Fudge itself: I love it. It's simple, modular and encourages a freeform, "don't sweat the small stuff" playing and GMing style that suits me well. Still, the game is free, and your opinion is going to be more useful to you than mine.

Physical Presentation

Fudge 10th is a standard-sized 320-page hardcover book with a color cover and black-and-white interior. Durability seems to be top-notch, with a sturdy spine and binding and thick, tear-resistant non-glossy pages. The cover depicts the classic "building blocks" image that owners of the 1990s-era print versions of Fudge will be familiar with. The imagery is no masterpiece, but it's simple and uncluttered and represents the "do-it-yourself" approach of the game quite well. The main attraction is actually the color scheme, with deep blue-purple and orange-red patterns that suggest a cloudy sky at sunset. The overall effect is quite unique and attractive.

Interior art is a mixed-bag. Storn Cook's distinctive comic book-style art is prominently-featured whenever possible and is the easily best of the bunch. The rest tends to be clip art of varying quality. A lot of it looks to be taken from old woodcuts, encyclopedia entries, Rennaissance paintings, and such. These pieces attractive enough, but they're all over the map stylistically and suffer somewhat from obviously never being intended to illustrate an RPG book. They're sometimes not as closely-tied to the accompanying text as they could be. Overall mediocre interior art accounts for a point off the book's Style score.

Fonts are large and clear and the text is laid-out two columns to a page. The index is through, but has some issues. Specifically, there are page citations for every mention of a particular topic, but the page number that contains the primary definition of a given term is not highlighted to make it stand out from the others. If you want to look-up the basic rules on Wounds in the index, you'll be confronted by 47 seperate page references spread evenly throughout the book. Which citation refers to the actual wounding rules themselves and which ones only reference them in passing? No way to tell. Typos and broken tables are uncommon, but still present. A tough-to-use index and occasional preventable typos and table formatting errors combine to steal another point from Style.

Content

In addition to core rules and Fantasy Fudge sample game from the previous Fudge print release (Fudge Expanded Edition), Fudge 10th includes the following new content:

Skills, Gifts and Faults

Written by Kent Matthewson, this 36-page chapter details a list of sample skills and abilities for Fudge characters. After a brief discussion about selecting the ideal level of "skill depth" for your campaign, the lists of skills begin. I must confess some disappointment here. Fudge is known primarily as a rules-light game, but the list of skills provided he reminds me more of GURPS than anything else, with a hundred separate skills for each and every little thing. What one game might bundle together into a single Acrobatics or Tumbling skill is broken-up here into three skills: (Acrobatics, Aerial Acrobatics, Team Acrobatics). Furthermore, there seems to be some inconsistently in what merits it own stand-alone skill and what can be folded into a general "Knowledge (blank)" skill. Masonry needs it own skill, but Leatherworking can be subsumed under an umbrella skill? Apparently. Why, I have no idea. Pick a standard and stick with it, please.

Still, the assumption here is that the GM is going to customize this sample list to some degree, ditching some skills, merging others, and adding still more, as per the guidelines at the beginning of the chapter, so I suppose the list's eccentricities aren't terribly damning in that context.

Degrees of Magic

This 28-page section details a new sample magic system for Fudge, making for a grand total of three in conjunction with the ones from the core rules and Fantasy Fudge. Degrees of Magic is a skill-based magic system where each type of magical effect (scrying, damaging your opponent, creating illusions, and so on) is treated as a separate skill. The greater the degree of success on a magic skill roll, the more powerful the spell you cast can be. For example, a first degree Harm Opponent spell might allow the spellcaster to deal an enemy a minor wound by touch, while a fourth degree one might take the form of a much more powerful explosive fireball. More powerful spells also cost the spellcaster a variable number of Wizardry Points as an additional balancing factor.

Overall, it works well. The only problem I foresee is that certain of the more popular types of magic are not detailed at all. Necromancy and creature summoning are two of the more glaring oversights. The author notes: "Many prominent spells found in fantasy literature and other gaming systems are frankly missing...This is deliberate, as the author feels such spells...are best left to NPCs." That's all well and fine for the designer's own games, but since this material is intended for a general audience, might it not have been better to have bitten the bullet and included them anyway? Oh, well. In any case, the relatively few "missing" effects are not hard to add, so the viability of the whole system remains intact.

Fudge Superheroes

This eight-page chapter is contributed by William Stoddard. It contains a series of brief guidelines for customizing Fudge for the comic book superheros genre.

There's definitely a good idea here. The author seems to be trying to create a system for describing all types of Fudge superpowers on a numeric scale, similar to how they were handled in TSR's old Marvel Superheroes game. Under such a system, regular human abilities are Scale 0 and each additional level acts as a multiplier. Scale 1 is 1.5 times more effect than Scale 0. Scale 4 is five times more effect than Scale 0, and so on. Under this system, it's relatively easy to figure out how effective Cyclops' Scale 10 laser blasts work against Juggernaut's Scale 12 toughness (that is, poor Cyclops will need a fairly lucky roll do to more than just singe the big lug). In addition, there are certain powers that don't have a Scale. Invisibility, for example. People can either see you or they can't.

One notable irregularity is the inclusion of a separate Scale table for superspeed powers. It doesn't "nerf" them, or anything, but is it unusual. One of these days I'll figure out why supers RPG rules always seem to get odd around speedster characters, but that day is not today.

Using the guidelines in this chapter, it should be possible to assign a Scale to virtually any superpower that has a degree of effect, including such diverse powers as superstrength, defenses, movement, weapon attacks, energy absorption and mind control. The cost of this is, as you may have guessed, a bit of extra "crunch", with players trading Scale levels between powers, cashing them in them for extra skill and attribute levels, and so on. The extra crunch here is almost entirely during character creation, though, so short of an occasional glance at the Scale tables, actual play shouldn't be much affected. There are definitely more "freeform" ways to do supers in Fudge, but this is a solid system if you don't mind a little more work during the character creation phase.

Cybernetics in Fudge

Don Bisdorf contributed this nine-page treatment of "classic" (read "Cyberpunk 2020/Shadowrun-style") cybernetics. It's a functional, but unsurprising read. There's your basic subdermal armor, metal limbs, weapons mounts, speed boosters, blood filters, computer links, infrared eyes, and so on. Each has some notes on suggested Fudge mechanics for the implant in question, as well as costs in terms of both gifts, a limited resource allocated during character creation, and "newdollars", a generic near-future currency. The painstopper implant, for example, costs 2 gifts and/or $5,000 newdollars. Pretty standard stuff. Also included are rules for controlling cyberwear in characters via the standard "the more you take, the more some attribute representing your humanity goes down" means. I've never been a fan of these mechanics myself, but the ones here seem simple and functional.

After the generic cyberwear, there's a shorter section on what happens when you're all-hardware. That is, a full-body cyborg in the style of Robocop. There are suggestions here for how to modify attributes for cyborg characters, as well as what happens when they're damaged (slightly-modified wounding and healing rules) and how to resolve attempts to "hack" their bodies via computer.

Netrunning

Shawn Lockard's five-pages of cyberpunk netrunning rules make a natural companion to the previous cybernetics chapter, both in terms of subject matter and the stereotypical way in which that subject matter is handled. If you've ever played a Gibson-inspired cyberpunk RPG, you know the drill: The hacker has a cyberdeck that he uses to access the virtual reality internet of the future, where the computers he infiltrate look like buildings and the guardian software and other hackers trying to stop him from getting the data he wants to steal look like people, monsters and so it. It's your basic D&D-style dungeon crawl adventure, except with cyberdeck programs instead of weapons, armor and spells, data instead of gold pieces and programs out to corrupt your hard drive and "flatline" you instead of monsters out to eat you. If you enjoy this sort of play in other games, you'll enjoy it here. If you don't, you won't. This implementation is much less detailed and crunchy than the version of the same in Shadowrun that I'm most familiar with, so that can definitely be a plus.

Fudge Vehicles

My vote for best new chapter is Jonathan Benn's 15-page Fudge Vehicles. It's a simple system that still allows for modelling of any type of vehicle. Vehicles in this system are rated for size (from human size up through Death Star or Dyson Sphere scale), speed, durability and maneuverability. In addition, they can possess various gifts representing useful special capabilities. Some of the examples included for vehicle gifts include armor, shields, weapons, stealth capabilities, artificial gravity generators, sensorts, ejector seats and on-board computers (both intelligent and non-intelligent).

A brief selection of sample vehicles includes the four-door sedan, battle tank, helicopter, stealth fighter and the ever-popular Giant Killer Robot.

Vehicle combat is a simple procedure that calls for pilots to choose from a series of six basic manuvers each round that include aiming, attacking, jockeying for position with other pilots, taking various levels of evasive action, and so on. Vehicle damage is handled similar to character damage with "Damaged" replacing "Hurt", "Immobilized" replacing "Incapacitated", and so on. There are also some rules suggestions for large-scale battles and a useful detailed combat example.

Simply put, Fudge Vehicles is awesome. Any vehicle can be modelled very quickly and they all really do feel different without the need for extreme crunch to differentiate them. There is also no "point-mongering" as with the vehicle systems in many other generic games like BESM, GURPS and HERO. Fudge is not about caring whether your exact model of shield generator costs you 45 vehicle points or 47. Combat is fast and the list of maneuvers has been pared-down to the base minimum that still encompasses a full range of offensive and defensive tactics. Fudge Vehicles is also fully-consistent with baseline Fudge assumptions, and can be plugged-into virtually any campaign without significant modification.

Fudge Dogfighting

J.M. "Thijs" Krijger's fourteen-page Fudge Dogfighting is definitely one of the more detailed and elaborate sets of rules options to be found in Fudge 10th. All things considered, it may be too much detail for most. Unless you're running a game that revolves around fighter pilots and their exploits, the combat rules in Fudge Vehicles should be more than enough. If dogfighting is important enough to your game that you want fourteen pages of rules for it, though, this has you covered. There are rules here for distance, positioning, cover, concealment, tailing, different types of missile as well as how to evade and deploy countermeasure against them, a chart for determining precise damage effects to specific vehicle subsystems (engines, afterburners, etc) and so on.

Basically, Fudge Dogfighting combat rounds are broken into four phases: Distance, Positioning, Missle and Firing/Damage. Pilots take turns rolling to improve their relative positions and then pressing any advantages with attacks and compensating for any disadvantages with defensive maneuvers.

All-in-all, Fudge Dogfighting is a good take on what it models, but its real usefulness is limited to hardcore air combat fans. I won't say this is a bad thing. It actually illustrates a couple of Fudge's main virtues as a game: Rules that can encompass any level of detail and the modular nature of the game that allows hyper-specialized mini-rules sets governing things like dogfighting to be easily plugged-in as desired without weakening the whole.

Weapons and Armor in Fudge

Alex Weldon's sixteen-page chapter serves two basic functions: To describe the various ways in which RPGs in general tend to handle arms and armor and to present a set of expanded rules for such in Fudge.

The most useful part of the chapter is the opening, where the hows and whys of different RPG weapon systems are broken-down in some detail. As a GM, do you want the rules to favor "kindness" (cinematic survivability for the heroes) or "brutality" (one-botched-roll-and-you're-dead for everybody)? Perhaps you'd prefer something in the middle? Do you want lots of codified tactical options, or a more freeform approach without set "manuvers?" Do you want armor to increase the odds for total attack avoidance (as in D&D) or to simply reduce the damage after a hit had been scored (as in most other systems)? What do you want to be the overall most important factor in determining combat victory? Skill, equipment, tactics? It's important in a generic system with few pre-set assumptions, for a would-be GM to ponder these questions.

After that, we get to the rules and charts and such. The standard Fudge rules handle this aspect of the game extremely simply: Weapons give you a bonus to damage and armor reduces that damage by a set amount. The rest of this chapter is suggestions for "adding-in" more detailed options reminiscent of from other games. things like: Weapons broken into specific types like piercing, slashing and bludgeoning, armors that protects better against some of these types of weapons than others, the grenade scatter diagram (if all RPGs are someday decimated in a nuclear holocaust, I'm convinced that the grenade scatter diagram, cockroach-like, will still manage to survive and thrive), armor movement penalties, weapon-specific critical hit results, the effects of various kinds of real world firearm ammo, and so on. You likely know the drill.

A Set of Weapons and Armor for Fudge

Kent Matthewson contributes this fifteen-page equipment chapter. What's that, you say? Another equipment chapter right after the last one that covers the exact same material? Yup. Fitting with the Fudge philosophy that there's more than one way to stat a cat, you get not one, but two takes on how much damage a battle axe does. There are a lot of differences in the details on how the two chapters are presented. Different ideas on how to handle things like automatic gunfire and grenade scatter, for one, and an overall less detailed approach in this chapter versus the previous one. Overall, I like this chapter better, as less detail is more for me. Neither one was really able to sell me on the idea that my Fudge games need additional detail on weapons and armor, though. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

Fudge Martial Arts

Duke York's twelve-page chapter is a chart-based, fairly "realistic" martial arts system designed to plug into Fudge. Each martial art is rated as a skill, with different levels of skill having their own column on that art's move chart. Thus, a Mediocre-level wing chun boxer has access to only the Graze/Strike and Positional Advantage moves, while a Good one also has access to Kick, Takedown, Grapple and Close-in Strike. There are no descriptions for chi fireballs, wire-fu or any other "cinematic" uses of the martial arts. Overall, this section reads like a good choice for a game where martial arts were treated with a relatively-high degree of realism and differences in style are more concrete and detailed, rather than simple being different ways to describe the application of the same generic maneuvers. It definitely won't scratch you wild and crazy wuxia itch, though.

Fudge Fu

Rob Neumann's twenty-page Fudge Fu is a very different take on the topic and probably my second-favorite new chapter after Fudge Vehicles. There are no charts here, instead we have a only a few general maneuvers like Disarm, Feint, Grab, and so on. Characters have their martial arts broken-down into three separate sub-skills: Technique, Speed and Stance which are rolled to determine the success of attacks and defenses using the various maneuvers. All things considered, the basic martial arts are very simple.

Where this section shines is in its treatment of not just the real aspects of the martial arts, but also the cinematic aspects, which are likely more popular among gaming circles. There are rules here for fighting drunk, fighting in crazy locations like underwater and in zero gravity and a series of character gifts representing special powers like Feather Stride (walking over things like sand and leaves without making noise or tracks), Fist of Ch'i (fireballs!), Leap into the Sky, and Master of the Dying Touch (aka Dim Mak). There are also faults appropriate for martial arts campaigns, like Code of Vengeance, Old Injuries and Susceptible to Secret Disciplines. Sample characters include a ninja, a John-Woo style kung-fu cop and a tournament fighter of the kind you might remember from the video arcades of your misspent youth.

Just Fudge It!

Perhaps the most universally-useful chapter in Fudge 10th is this four-page essay by Carl Cravens. What makes Fudge different from a lot of other games? Among other things, very few codified rules other than what an individual GM chooses to add. So how do you handle specialized situations that most other games gave detailed rules for, like falling damage and such? Either you add them yourself or...you fudge it. Carl's suggested method for resolving these actions is simple: Think of the both the best and worst possible results that are still acceptable within the context of the campaign and then roll the dice. Standard Fudge dice generate a result between -4 and +4 when rolled, so -4 would indicate the worst possible result and +4 the best, with intermediate rolls indicating results between those extremes. So let's say a fantasy PC falls out the tenth-floor window of a castle. The GM rolls and gets a -1, a below average, but by no means abysmal result. The character might slam into the ground and break both legs, becoming Very Hurt (and unable to walk until healed), but surviving and still remaining conscious. If he had rolled a +4, he might have landed in a cart of hay, suffering some bumps and bruises, but no real damage at all. A -4 result might have left him Near Death, with virtually every bone in his body shattered.

It's a simple method at heart and a good alternative to drawing-up a whole chart or elaborate formulae for a given situation just because, say, GURPS or HERO does it that way and that's what you're used to. The point that freeform play doesn't have to be ruleless or even diceless is well-taken. There's also a lot of good encouragement here to "unlearn what you have learned" and play to Fudge's strengths as a freeform system rather than to use it as a tool to reverse-engineer an exact copy of a more codified one.

As a way of presenting a simple game mechanic for resolving unusual situations logically and fairly and as an inspirational essay for Fudge enthusiasts, Just Fudge It! is a success and a great way to cap off the book.

Final Analysis

Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Fudge 10th. It takes one of the most unique games in the hobby and gives it a deluxe and durable hardcover presentation that should please any fan. It also integrates a large amount of high-quality new material, which will not only please the current fanbase by giving them more ready-to-use "plug-and-play" rules bits, but will also help new Fudge players and GMs to "grok" the game more quickly and easily than ever before due to the sheer breadth and depth of the examples present. All 320 hardbound pages are currently available from online seller for less than $30, as well, so it's a great value. There are some issues with the index, with the mostly-lackluster interior art and with the occasional typos that crop up, but don't let them deter you.

As for me, I have a new "desert island rulebook" and it's Fudge 10th. Happy anniversary, baby.

Style: 3

Substance: 5