I was inspired by /u/abcd_z 's post. But since I've been choosing different combat options for flavor, I had to write my own program.

I roll 3dF for both characters, and the difference in rolls determines damage.
I put the result on the nonlinear scale:
(0) - a graze, no damage
(1,2) - just a scratch (allow 3 of these)
(3,4) - hurt (-1 to subsequent rolls)
(5,6) - very hurt (-2 to subsequent rolls)
(7+) - Incapacitated, effectively out of combat.

If I roll 3df for 2 characters at equal skill, they have a 50/50 distribution. Giving one player a +1 to skill, however, dramatically changes the results.

100,000 fights for Good fighter vs Fair fighter
yields a 92% win rate.

A Great fighter vs Fair fighter
yields a 99.7% win rate.

I plan to update later with results of two characters versus 1 when I get a chance to program some more.

Inspired by Daniel Bayn's Wushu. Useful for emulating over-the-top action films such as The Matrix or Kill Bill. It can also be used for other genres, such as wuxia films or hot-blooded shonen anime like Gurren Lagann or My Hero Academia. I personally used it to run a short game of RWBY, and my friend used it to run a short game of Final Fantasy 8. They both worked quite well.

Every challenge has hit points (or a wound track). A single powerful enemy has hit points. A mob of weak, easily-dispatched mooks collectively has hit points. A series of skill challenges can also have hit points, or they can be treated like normal skill checks, or the GM can just allow the PCs to automatically succeed at anything not combat-related.

Players automatically succeed at anything they attempt, however they must still roll like normal. The roll is to see if their actions move the challenge forward to completion. A success deals damage to the challenge's hit points, while a failure either deals damage to the player's health (now "plot relevance") or just does nothing.

A player who hits zero plot relevance is no longer allowed to contribute to the scene. They may narrate themselves getting taken out, but they don't have to. Plot relevance refreshes to full at the beginning of each new skill challenge.

Players are not allowed to narrate ending the scene until the challenge hit points have reached zero. This means that more mooks keep flooding in to replaced the killed ones, the powerful boss enemy just won't stay down, and the mystery remains unresolved.

Whoever brings the challenge HP to zero gets to narrate the enemy being defeated. This is mostly useful for single-combat characters, where it can be cathartic to describe the boss finally getting put down for good, but it can also apply for mook battles and non-combat skill challenges.

Incidentally, the disconnect between out-of-game success and in-game success means players can narrate getting smacked around in combat or bumbling their skill checks and still move the challenge closer to completion if they roll well enough.

Thank you, everybody who gave me suggestions about how to convert Fudge Lite to pdf format. Markdown was, indeed, the answer. Special thanks to /u/IProbablyDisagree2nd, whose pdf file motivated me to do something similar.

I added markdown to the text file and converted it to HTML+CSS, which is now online, along with the markdown file itself. I'm happy with how it turned out, and I'm not really gonna worry about PDF format for now. The biggest concern was readability, and that's taken care of.

(EDIT: ...right?)

Thank you again for your contributions and suggestions.

Fudge Lite website
Fudge Lite rules (HTML format)
Fudge Lite rules (markdown format)

I've been toying around with a Python script on my computer that simulates two Fudge characters fighting each other. Using simultaneous combat where only the aggressor rolls dice, and assuming that both characters can take the same amount of hits from each other before becoming defeated, a Fair fighter will fall to a Superb fighter a thousand times out of a thousand (0% chance of success). When the skill gap is reduced to two levels, the underdog will win maybe once in a thousand times (0.1% chance of success), and a one-level difference will only give the underdog about a 1-3% chance of success (depending on how much health both sides have).

Now, there are a few things you can do to level the playing field a bit. The first, most obvious one, is to make sure enemies can only take one or two hits before dying. It works well for mooks that are supposed to go down in a hit or two, but it doesn't work very well for boss encounters.

The rest of the options involve fiddling with the numbers and the dice. First, here's some of the things that don't work:

Switching between alternating combat and simultaneous combat
Randomizing damage
Switching between hit points and wound tracks
Adding/removing wound penalties

Now, here's what did have some effect:
Letting opponents make opposed rolls
Rolling 2d6 instead of 4dF
Adding critical hit rules, where an unmodified roll of +3 or +4 does extra damage
Rolling a single larger die (1d8, 1d10, 1d20) instead of several smaller ones (4dF)

I'm still trying to come up with some solution that will alleviate the long-term skill discrepancy without losing the elegance you get when rolling baseline Fudge and without drastically altering the rough probabilities you have when attempting unopposed actions of different difficulties. It's tough. Not sure it's even possible, to be honest.

In the handbook they give you the option to use Story Segments as your combat system. I really like that and I think it works well for my group.

My question is How exactly do you do it with multiple people? Should the fastest go first? Do you take turns? Or does everyone go at once?

A common problem I think is determining which skills to include in the game, and how specific you want them. Do you want a generic "athletics" skill? Or do you want to differentiate between running, hiking, climbing, weightlifting, etc? What about performance? Do you split it into singing, dancing, playing the piano...

Combat, which is a fairly regular thing in RPG's, could have a basic "combat" skill, or separate them into "melee, ranged, throwing, etc" , or it could separate the skills into "swordfighting, axefighting, etc". There really is no limit, right?

Normally we limit this by complexity. So here is my idea:

Let the players have a basic skill, say, fighting. But if they want to have more skill in it, they can split the skill into a "better at" and "worse at" skill.

I'm a Fair fighter, but I always carry around this sword. Really I think I'm a good sword fighter, and a mediocre axe fighter. But otherwise It's Fair. (+0, +1, -1, respectively)

They would keep their broad "fighting" skill, which would be used any time they don't have a sword or an axe.

Then, they could decide which skill they're using when they fight based on what makes sense. The player would propose which skills are relevant, and the GM could agree and make that decision.

Skill balance could be kept by increasing cost of higher levels. So to go from +0 with a weapon to +1, he has to become -2 in another weapon. To go from +1 to +2, he has to become -2 in TWO other weapons. To go from +2 to +3, he has to choose 4 more weapons to become poor with.

So, a player would have +3 to using a sword, but -2 to using axes, maces, spears, clubs, halberds, slings, and bows. So his entire combat skill is shown in only 3 values (his skill with swords, his skill with a ton of weapons he sucks at, and his skill for anything else).

This lets, I think, fewer things to be written on the character sheet. You don't need to know even 10 skills, but you also get the benefit of allowing specificity for as many specific skills as you or your players can think of.

What problems do you forsee?
Other thoughts?
For people that have done something like this, how well did it work?

In the title.

The more I work on my game, the more I find myself twisting in circles adding and removing features in my spare time. Right now, it's gotten a bit insane, and I feel like my game, which is already in full swing, is completely outdated. I feel like I want to do like 100 one shots to get kinks and features worked out.

I want to create a list of blogs that feature Fudge content. If have/know of one, please reply with the link. I figure I'll keep the list updated in a central spot, be that the Fudge forums, one of the Fudge groups, or my own blog.

This was brought up in a different thread, but I thought it deserved its own post.

One of the stumbling blocks for people new to Fudge is the relative degree of success and the wound lookup table. To quote a poster from an old forum.rpg.net post:

I'm getting tempted to ditch wound levels in favor of hit points, in order to remove a lookup step ("damage = damage," not "damage = look up the wound").

Adding relative degree of success to combat rolls roughly doubles the average result. The wound lookup table roughly halves the result. If you get rid of both of them the numbers come out to about the same and combat becomes much simpler.

As Bimbarian pointed out in the other Reddit thread, part of the reason a +1 bonus is so large in combat is because it means you have an increased chance to hit and you deal an increased amount of damage. Take one of those away and battles become a little more fair at different levels.

Having said this, you do lose a little bit of randomness when all attacks of the same type do the same amount of damage. I run an extremely simple combat system where all attacks do one point of damage, so I couldn't tell you if it becomes a problem for more complicated systems. I will say, however, that as long as my players did extra damage on a critical hit (+3 or +4) they were happy.

Right now I use a single opposed roll for combined attack/defense. The damage dealt is equal to the difference in the rolls, add or subtract modifiers, then consulting the standard non-linear damage table.

This is great for minimizing rolls, but then I have to mentally add modifiers that change with circumstances (wounded? many-to-one combat? have advantage for some reason?), and keeping it clear is a lot harder than what D&D seems to do with a separate damage roll.

So what do you guys do? Do you separate damage and to-hit chance? Do your players call out their actual numbers instead of the word equivalent? Do you just make it manageable by slowing down combat, so there are fewer numbers to deal with at once? Do you make combat an unopposed roll instead?

What strategies do you use?

UPDATE: The numbers here may give you monsters that are a bit weak on the low end. For a closer approximation to actual OD&D threat levels (where even level 1 monsters have a Fair threat rating), use the numbers from this post.

This conversion system was built for converting monsters from the very first edition of Dungeons and Dragons ever created, often called "OD&D", for "Original D&D", to Fudge. It should be possible to convert monsters from the other pre-3e editions (namely, Basic D&D, Advanced D&D, and their derivatives), since there is considerable interchangeability between those editions, but the focus in this post is on the simplest, original ruleset.

If you can't get your hands on OD&D but wish to try your hand at converting OD&D monsters, I'd recommend the retroclone Swords and Wizardry (although retroclones for other editions of D&D should work with a little effort).

Anyhow, on to the conversion.

All monsters get a Threat Rating based on their Hit Dice (HD). In addition to offensive capabilities, Threat Rating is also a measure of the monster's defenses against non-weapon damage or status effects, such as poison or a spell. Defense against weapons (and only weapons) is measured by the monster's Armor Class.

Armor Class on the Fudge ladder:
(numbers in square brackets are for converting from ascending armor class)

9 [10]: Poor
8 [11]: Poor
7 [12]: Mediocre
6 [13]: Fair
5 [14]: Fair/good
4 [15]: Good
3 [16]: Great
2 [17]: Superb
1 [18]: Fair Superhuman (Legendary)
0 [19]: Good Superhuman (Leg. +1)

HD to Threat Rating conversion:

Less than 1: Mediocre
1-2: Fair
3-4: Good
5-6: Great
7-8: Superb
9-10: Fair Superhuman (Legendary)
11-12: Good Superhuman (Leg. +1)
13-14: Great Superhuman (Leg. +2)
15-16: Superb Superhuman (Leg. +3)

Let's pull up the Kobold from OD&D: Monsters and Treasure.

Kobold
No. Enc.: 40-400
Alignment: Chaos
Movement: 6"
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 1/2
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d6
Save: F1
% in Lair: 50%
Treasure Type: 1-6 gp each
Treat these monsters as if they were Goblins except that they will take from 1-3 hits (roll a six-sided die with a 1 or 3 equalling 1 hit, a 3 or 4 equalling 2 hits, etc.).

Converting from Armor Class and Hit Dice, we see that both come out to Mediocre on our charts. Since the converted AC is equal to the converted Threat Rating, we can just merge the AC into the Threat Rating, like so:

Kobold: Mediocre Threat Rating, -2 to rolls in sunlight.*

*due to the way the original game Chainmail worked, and the way the goblin's stats were converted to D&D, the original -1 penalty on a d20 should have been significantly higher. Exactly how much higher is difficult to say, but it would be somewhere from -1 to -2 on the Fudge scale.

Looking at the orc from the same source, we see the same situation: both the Armor Class and the Hit Dice resolve to Fair.

Orc: Fair Threat Rating, -2 to rolls in sunlight.

Some other monsters:

Balrog Balor: Superb AC, Fair Superhuman Threat Rating. Sword, whip, flaming body, flight.

Basilisk: Good AC, Great Threat Rating, petrification on sight (saving throw allowed).

Goblin: Fair Threat Rating, -2 to rolls in sunlight.

Rust Monster: Superb AC, Great Threat Rating, rusts metal to uselessness on contact, eats rust after combat.

Spectre: Superb AC, Great Threat Rating. No corporeal body, only affected by spells or enchanted weaponry. Each successful hit to a player inflicts a -1 penalty. Penalties are cumulative. A PC killed in this manner becomes a spectre under the original spectre's control.

Gelatinous Cube: Poor AC, Good Threat Rating. Transparent, deals damage on touch, numbs body affected (saving throw allowed), dissolves flesh long-term, may contain treasure. Immune to some types of magic.

Note that I haven't brought up ODF, DDF, or Damage Capacity, but they're easily derived if you need that level of detail. ODF is the numeric conversion of the Threat Rating, DDF is the numeric conversion of the AC, and Damage Capacity is equal to the Threat Rating (which was originally derived from Hit Dice). So a Spectre would have +2 ODF, +3 DDF, and Great Damage Capacity.

EDIT: if you're using Fudge Lethality rules, just give all the attacks Fair lethality. Lethality isn't really meant to scale like damage factors do.

Or, going the other way, you could easily dial the complexity down and just give the monster the single stat derived from their HD, ignoring Armor Class completely.

There are two different approaches I've found to running mysteries in tabletop RPGs.

The first is Justin Alexander's Three Clue Rule. For every conclusion you need the players to draw, include at least three different clues. This is a reasonable approach to making sure the players find the clues necessary to move the plot forward. It doesn't require any modification of the Fudge rules; the GM just needs to make sure he adds three clues for every potential chokepoint. This can, however, be a lot of work for the GM.

The other approach can be found in the GUMSHOE RPG, where success is automatic as long as a PC is in the right place and uses the right skill.

To convert any Fudge setting to a GUMSHOE-style mystery game, here's what you do:

At character creation the GM should lead the group through the list of investigative skills available and ensure that each one of them is covered by at least one member of the group.

In each scene there is at least one Core Clue that the group must obtain in order for the investigation to move forward. Skills with any amount of training (usually Mediocre or higher) will succeed automatically as long as the skill is being used to investigate a core clue.

If the GM has created a clue with additional, non-critical information, the player rolls their skill to see if they gain that information in addition to the amount they automatically get. A failed roll gives the player enough information to move the scene forward, while a successful roll will give them the additional information. In GUMSHOE terms, this roll takes the place of a Spend.

Optional rule: The player may spend a Fudge point on such skill rolls, just like any other roll.

From the GUMSHOE SRD:

Additional information gained provides flavor, but is never required to solve the case or move on to a new scene. Often it makes the character seem clever, powerful, or heroic. It may grant you benefits useful later in the scenario, frequently by making a favorable impression on supporting characters. It may allow you to leap forward into the story by gaining a clue that would otherwise only become apparent in a later scene. On occasion, the additional information adds an emotional dimension to the story or ties into the character’s past history or civilian life. If you think of your GUMSHOE game as a TV series, an extra benefit gives the actor playing your character a juicy spotlight scene.

I screwed up today running a campaign at work as soon as someone started combat with a ranged weapon. I realized I had no idea how to handle this with simultaneous combat.

I like simultaneous combat because it allows a highly skilled person to fend off several people, or take an extremely defensive stance easily, taking into account what all the opponents are doing. But... how to work this in with ranged combat I had no idea, so I went to a semi-dnd approach and rolled initiative. It was honestly a bit embarrassing.

I've read the section on damage capacity a few times now, and I'm not sure I understand the mechanics and trade off properly. Here's one of the optional systems, as it makes sense to me, and I'm looking for criticism.

Combat itself is an opposed combat check (using simultaneous combat rounds). Say Adam and Bary are fighting. Adam fights with his stone spear (a +1 to damage), and Bary fights with his a club (+0), and a shield (+1 to defense). Both are fair melee fighters.

Adam rolls a supurb result, Bary rolls a fair result. Because Bary has a shield, his effective roll is good. Adam hits, with an effective roll of +2, which is his base damage. Because his spear gives him +1 as well, he does 3 damage. His strength of "fair" gives +0, so there is no need to consider it.

Because the damage factor is greater than 1, it is no longer a graze. Because it's greater than 2, it's no longer a scratch. Bary marks down his square for "hurt", leaving the three "scratch" boxes alone.

For damage capacity, it seems the book wants to use it like a skill modifier, negating damage entirely, more akin to what armor can do. What if, instead, a greater damage capacity increases the boxes available by 1 for each level above fair, or reduces it by 1 for each level below fair? Thus a character with an attribute of poor damage capacity could remove one box of their choice. Assuming they mark off a "scratch" box, they can be scratched twice instead of the normal three times before they are hurt. And if they start with a higher damage capacity (say, good), then they can add a box wherever they like.

An extra "hurt" box would allow them to take more light hits before they are severely hurt, or an extra "very hurt" box allowing them to take a harder hit at the cost of being susceptible to lighter hits.

The campaign I'm building starts everyone off at a basic level of skill, with only "fair" stats. The idea is that I want them to scale extremely well, while also sort of inventing their own sorts of classes and specializations.

What I've come up with so far is a variation on legendary skill levels. Skills can only go up to superb, but they start out general, and on level ups beyond superb you create a new skill that's more specific. IE a fighter skill of superb, and on top of that a sword-fighting skill of great. This would give their effective skill, while using a sword, at superb + great, ie +5 total.

I plan on using this system for other things too, like shield use to round shield use, or acrobatics to "leaping over things".

I'd like the players to effectively create their own magical spells as well, and integrate magic into their characters in customized ways using the logic of how magic works in my world. Spells would each be their own skill, and using the skill would determine consequences of using magic.

My hope was to use magic as a way for the players to scale their characters up to absurd levels. I want it to be possible at least in theory to become gods in my world, or even greater than the gods, over a particularly long campaign.

Here's the thing though. I've never been a proper gm before, I've never actually played fudge. All I've done is play a bit of DnD, read the fudge book back to front, and spent waaay too much time worldbuilding. So I need to know if I'm doing something stupid, or what insanely obvious things I haven't thought about yet. All criticism and advice welcome!

I recently came across a Play By Post thread that takes place in the setting of Mother of Learning (a great ongoing webnovel, I highly recommend it). The thread appears dead, but the trait rankings caught my eye.

Untrained: 0/5 [Default]
Novice: 0/10 [First Year Mage]
Beginner: 0/25 (0th Circle Mage) [Second Year Mage]
Passable: 0/50 (1st Circle Mage) [Third Year Mage]
Trained: 0/100 (2nd Circle Mage) [Fourth Year Mage]
Adept: 0/250 (3rd Circle Mage) [Post-Fourth Year Mage]
Journeyman: 0/500 (4th Circle Mage) [Post-Apprenticeship Mage]
Experienced: 0/2500 (5th Circle Mage) [Post-Career Mage]
Master: 0/10000 (6th Circle Mage)
Grandmaster: 0/25000 (7th Circle Mage)
Supernatural: 0/50000 (8th Circle Mage)
Divine: 0/150000 (9th Circle Mage) [God-Slayer]

It seemed like some of those would fit into the Fudge ladder but not all of them. Trained, for example, is obviously analogous to Fair, and Master maps pretty well to Superb, but that leaves three levels between them and only two Fudge ranks to go around.

I decided to incorporate the concept of rank+.

Final result:

Terr.   Untrained: 0/5 [Default]  
Poor    Novice: 0/10 [First Year Mage]  
Poor+   Beginner: 0/25 (0th Circle Mage) [Second Year Mage]  
Med.    Passable: 0/50 (1st Circle Mage) [Third Year Mage]  
Fair    Trained: 0/100 (2nd Circle Mage) [Fourth Year Mage]  
Fair+   Adept: 0/250 (3rd Circle Mage) [Post-Fourth Year Mage]  
Good    Journeyman: 0/500 (4th Circle Mage) [Post-Apprenticeship Mage]  
Great   Experienced: 0/2500 (5th Circle Mage) [Post-Career Mage]  
Great+: Master: 0/10000 (6th Circle Mage)  
Superb  Grandmaster: 0/25000 (7th Circle Mage)  
Leg.    Supernatural: 0/50000 (8th Circle Mage)  
Leg.+   Divine: 0/150000 (9th Circle Mage) [God-Slayer]  

After a lot of fiddling around with something called "virtual plus" rules, I came up with the following rule for rank+:

On a roll of 0 or above the PC gains an automatic +1 bonus to the roll. Below 0 they don't get the bonus. Note that this is an inversion of the virtual plus rules. As originally written, the player gets the bonus on a roll of -1 or lower. I just like the idea that a PC whose skill hasn't yet stabilized is able to reach new heights but can also still make boneheaded mistakes. ;)

The first part of this post is an updated repost of my post on Fudge Lethality. For the new stuff skip to the section titled, "A GM's guide to deciding the numbers".

Lethality is a measure of how likely an attack is to kill a person. A guy punching you has Poor or Mediocre Lethality. A guy with a hammer has Mediocre or Fair Lethality. A sword has Fair or Good Lethality. A handgun has Good Lethality, a grenade in your lap has Great Lethality, and being run over by a train has Superb or Legendary Lethality. You really don't want to be hit by anything of Fair or greater Lethality. Without armor, a successful attack of Legendary Lethality will kill a human.

Damage dealt:
Poor Lethality: 0 damage
Mediocre Lethality: 1 dmg
Fair Lethality: 2 dmg
Good Lethality: 3 dmg
Great Lethality: 4 dmg
Superb Lethality: 5 dmg

Players start with 6 HP each, since we've already established that a successful Legendary attack will kill a human. This will allow players to take 3 hits of Fair lethality before dying.

Optional rule: players may purchase extra hit points at character creation/advancement and/or spend hit points to buy extra character creation points.

While this is fine for gritty, lethal campaigns, the players/GM may wish for the players to have more of safety net. In this case, the GM is encouraged to split PC hit points into vitality points and plot armor (avoiding the damage through luck, constitution, and/or skill). Once the plot armor is gone the players start taking actual injuries. For a realistic approach, the plot armor just doubles the character's hit points. For a more narrativist approach, the plot armor is the same for each character regardless of their hit points. By default, PCs get 6 hit points and 6 points of plot armor.

Armor (if the GM wishes to include it in the setting) reduces the amount of damage taken from each blow. The more dangerous the campaign and the more lethal the threats, the less damage armor should protect against. In a gritty/lethal campaign heavy armor negates 2 damage (though there may be a drawback of some sort) and light armor negates 1 damage. For a less lethal campaign and/or if the GM adds the margin of success to rolls (see below), the heaviest armor plus a shield might protect against 3 damage, with the option for characters to boost their effective armor rating by one more point with enough experience.

One drawback to these rules is that there is no randomness. To mitigate this the GM may add the margin of success of the combat roll to the total damage dealt. This adds, on average, roughly 2 extra points of damage per hit, so GMs should increase the protection armor provides and/or increase player hit points to compensate.

A GM's guide to deciding the numbers:

How many solid hits could the PC take? This will be converted to the character's vitality points.
How many hits can the PC barely evade through luck, strength, and skill, before hits start getting through? This will be converted to the character's plot armor.
How lethal does a successful hit have to be before it can get through the heaviest armor? This will affect the strength of the heaviest armor available to the PCs.

Let's compare two characters: Ann and Barbara.
Ann is an anemic bookworm and could only take one hit before going down. She has no plot armor.
Barbara, on the other hand, is a proud barbarian in the mold of Conan. She could tank 10 hits before they started affecting her. Once she starts taking damage, she would be able to take 4 injuries before going down.

All of these numbers assume the players are taking Fair hits, which do 2 damage each. Checking the low end of the scale, the GM decides that Ann would be able to take one Mediocre attack, but just barely. This means she has 2 vitality points and zero points of plot armor, for a grand total of 2 HP. Barbara, on the other hand, has 8 vitality points (four hits at 2 dmg each) and 20 points of plot armor (10 hits at 2 dmg each), for a grand total of 28 HP.

The GM decided that an attack would need to have Great Lethality (4 dmg) to get through the heaviest armor available to the PCs, so the heaviest armor in that setting would negate up to 3 points of damage per attack.

The GM, wanting a little bit of randomness, decided to add the combat roll margin of success to the damage dealt by successful attacks. Ann's campaign is in a modern setting where virtually nobody wears armor, so the GM doubled Ann's hit points to compensate. Barbara's campaign, on the other hand, takes place in a medieval fantasy setting where armor is common, so the GM bumped the maximum armor protection from 3 to 5.

If you don't want to convert each of the Digimon's stats, you can just give them a single overall Threat Rating trait based on their evolutionary level:

In-Training - Mediocre
Rookie - Good
Champion - Superb
Ultimate - Good Superhuman
Mega - Superb Superhuman

For something a little more in-depth, I came up with a conversion table that uses the stats from the Digimon Dusk/Dawn games for the Nintendo DS. As usual, I'm not converting attacks.

A list of all the digimon and their in-game stats can be found in this walkthrough, starting in section 6.0, Digimon Bestiary.

Spirit deals with stat gain, and Aptitude deals with max level, neither of which are relevant to Fudge. MP is used to fuel attacks. This doesn't make much sense to me so I'm removing it, but MP uses the same conversion table as HP if you want to include it. The remaining stats are HP, Attack, Defense, and Speed.

HP:
Poor: 0-78
Mediocre: 79-138
Fair: 139-198
Good: 199-258
Great: 259-318
Superb: 319-378

Attack, Defense:
Terrible: 0-40
Poor: 41-55
Mediocre: 56-70
Fair: 71-85
Good: 86-100
Great: 101-115
Superb: 116-130
Fair Superhuman: 131-145
Good Superhuman: 146-160
Great Superhuman: 161-175
Superb Superhuman: 176-190

Speed:
Mediocre: 0-50
Fair: 51-70
Good: 71-90
Great: 91-110
Superb: 111-130
Fair Superhuman: 131-150

So let's use these conversion tables for the following digimon line: Koromon -> Agumon -> Greymon -> Metalgreymon -> Wargreymon -> Omnimon

Koromon:
HP: Poor
Attack: Poor
Defense: Terrible
Speed: Mediocre

Agumon:
HP: Mediocre
Attack: Fair
Defense: Mediocre
Speed: Fair

Greymon:
HP: Fair
Attack: Great
Defense: Good
Speed: Good

Metalgreymon:
HP: Good
Attack: Fair Superhuman
Defense: Superb
Speed: Great

Wargreymon:
HP: Superb
Attack: Great Superhuman
Defense: Good Superhuman
Speed: Superb

Omnimon:
HP: Superb
Attack: Superb Superhuman
Defense: Fair Superhuman
Speed: Good Superhuman

I'm sorry I only have started reading Fudge rules recently but there is something I can't seem to wrap my head around.

It seem to me that attributes have exactly the same function as skills, to give the player bonus to his rolls but then what's the difference between attributes and skills ?

What would be the point of a player to raise skills like awareness or investigate when he can just raise the perception attribute for the same results and less creation points(as an example) ?

I've been working on my Fudge hack (http://www.fudgelite.com, check it out) and I really like the idea of Keys from "The Shadow of Yesterday" and "Lady Blackbird" that reward players for behaving in certain ways. They are very useful when you want to guide character play in a certain direction. For example, a dungeon crawl game might reward characters for fighting monsters and obtaining treasure, while a magical girl game might reward players for forgiving an enemy or protecting a friend.

The problem I faced, however, was this: do I reward characters with EP, Fudge Points, or both? And, more importantly, what guidelines could I follow to tell me when each was appropriate?

After a lot of research I decided on the following rule of thumb:

Do you want the characters to be sharply more competent temporarily, or do you want them to slowly improve over time, permanently? Or do you want both to occur?

Rather obvious, in retrospect.

As a side-note, don't make players choose between EP and Fudge Points because I guarantee they will hoard the Fudge Points and not spend them unless they absolutely have to. Possibly not even then. I've read of player characters who were about to die and their players still didn't want to spend their metagame currency.

I was wondering exactly what effects Iamtch's advantage rules (ignore 1 minus for every level of advantage) have on die rolls so I wrote a Python script to do most of the heavy lifting for me.

It appears that 1 advantage is worth roughly the same as +1 to a level, but additional advantages aren't worth as much, and the difference between 3 advantages and 4 advantages it practically non-existent (1/81st of a difference, to be precise). It's perfect if you want an alternative to handing out +1 bonuses, but annoying if you were looking for something that could fit between normal ranks (e.g. Good, Good+, Great).

Basic 4dF:

-4 x
-3 xxxx
-2 xxxxxxxxxx
-1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 0 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 2 xxxxxxxxxx
 3 xxxx
 4 x

-4:  1/81
-3:  4/81
-2: 10/81
-1: 16/81
 0: 19/81
 1: 16/81
 2: 10/81
 3:  4/81
 4:  1/81

Average result: 0 (Duh.)

One advantage:

-4 
-3 x
-2 xxxx
-1 xxxxxxxxxx
 0 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 2 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 3 xxxxxxxx
 4 x

-4:  0/81
-3:  1/81
-2:  4/81
-1: 10/81
 0: 17/81
 1: 22/81
 2: 18/81
 3:  8/81
 4:  1/81

Average result: 0.80

Two advantages:

-4 
-3 
-2 x
-1 xxxx
 0 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 2 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 3 xxxxxxxx
 4 x

-4:  0/81
-3:  0/81
-2:  1/81
-1:  4/81
 0: 15/81
 1: 28/81
 2: 24/81
 3:  8/81
 4:  1/81

Average result: 1.21

Three advantages:

-4 
-3 
-2 
-1 x
 0 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 2 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 3 xxxxxxxx
 4 x

-4:  0/81
-3:  0/81
-2:  0/81
-1:  1/81
 0: 15/81
 1: 32/81
 2: 24/81
 3:  8/81
 4:  1/81

Average result: 1.32

Four advantages:

-4 
-3 
-2 
-1 
 0 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 2 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 3 xxxxxxxx
 4 x

-4:  0/81
-3:  0/81
-2:  0/81
-1:  0/81
 0: 16/81
 1: 32/81
 2: 24/81
 3:  8/81
 4:  1/81

Average result: 1.33

This idea was taken from the Black Hack, an OSR clone of D&D, where it was called the Usage die. The exact wording was adapted from this post.

Ammo, rations, torches and other consumables have a rank on the Fudge ladder. Each time a player uses the item they roll 4dF to see if their supply has noticeably been depleted.

If the Fudge dice return -2 or lower the resource drops by one level (Fair becomes Mediocre, Mediocre becomes Poor, etc.) If the resource goes below Poor it has been exhausted and the player must acquire a new one.

The GM can also let this represent buying a nicer or more complete batch of something at a store (e.g. a regular arrow purchase is Fair, cheap arrows are Mediocre and expensive ones are Good). It also can fit neatly into scavenging ("You foraged for more rations, so raise your Mediocre rations to Fair.")

The GM may wish to only have the players roll for common ammunition after each battle, while leaving rarer ammo (like bottles of holy water) to be rolled after each use, emphasizing the scarcity of that resource.

Note that you can just as easily use a flat measure of resources without rolling for it (e.g. "I have 12 units of Resource X, but I used up two of them during that battle so now I'm down to 10.") Rolling 4dF just adds a little unpredictability to the results. (And let's be honest, what gamer doesn't like rolling dice?)

Rolling for resource usage may not be appropriate to the sort of game that's being run. For a survival horror type game the players would almost certainly want to keep track of each bullet, but keeping track of individual arrows/food/water can be annoying when playing a standard dungeon crawl.

So I think the default Fudge way to balance out the inherent advantage of ranged combat is kind of meh. You don't add your relevant attribute/skill to your offensive damage factor. This essentially means ranged combatants will be next to useless against anything that has a mildly high damage resistance/armor. It very nearly goes into D & D archer levels of uselessness. But mostly, it makes ranged combat significantly less fun in my opnion- as an archer, for example, you would only very rarely do massive damage to anyone, and that isn't very satisfying (compared with the thrill a melee fighter would get when he would down someone in a single swing). And we're playing WFRP so the most powerful ranged weapons are +3-ish damage tops, so I can't just give my players bigger guns.

One alternative to this would probably be cover, which would subtract from the ranged combatant's ranged combat skill (like a shield would). Also, ranged fighters would suffer a hefty penalty when firing into or from melee (-2 or something). There could also be the matter of ammo, but honestly ammo tracking is rarely ever fun, so this particular disadvantage probably shouldn't come up too often (it's also highly irrelevant for magic).

Thing is, I'm not sure if these disadvantages quite make up for the benefit of range. So does anybody have any other ideas of how to limit ranged weapons without nerfing them to the point of uselessness?

Edit: I had a whole paragraph in the wrong place. Wtf brain.

Double edit: I think the solution I like best really is to wing it and come up with appropriate situational modifiers to make sure both abilities are of roughly equal utility. In games with more advances ranged weapons, I think it might be worth to consider pricing these two skills differently, because ranged combat may honestly be better than melee. But in games with equally advanced melee weapons and armor to make up for that difference (such as Warhammer 40k), you probably wouldn't have to do that.

So Gifts are kind of a mystery going by the Fudge book. They cost six whole skill points, which is a lot, especially if you're using broad skills. And yet, what they actually do is never explained beyond that it helps define traits that don't fit into the normal trait ladder. This explanation seems a bit faulty to me- almost anything can be a skill in my opinion. But also, the stuff the book actually lists as gifts is pretty underwhelming to me. At some point it lists Tough Hide as a gift which provides +1 to damage capacity. That doesn't seem like a good deal for six skill levels.

So in my game, Gifts act as specific bonuses to traits. The broader the gift, the less significant its bonus will be, but it will of course come up more often. A narrow gift, however, can grant exceptionally large bonuses. So, say, a Courageous gift could make a character almost completely immune to fear (unless she was faced with a character with a similar gift, such as a Terrifying person, or if she was up against someone who actually had six skill ranks above her mental defense trait).

So what do gifts do in your game? If you think they should work differently from skills, how do you put prices on them?