Here's some ideas for how to improve FUDGE. They're not necessarily connected with each other. 1. Magic items In Mike Harvey's article, he points out that magic items can be a problem, because even a small +1 bonus can unbalance things. http://www.io.com/~sos/rpg/fudadvice.html The solution is to shift away from permanent magic items and instead use items with charges or daily charges. I'm trying to do something similar in another freeware RPG rules system, encourage creators of magic items to create items that have a number of daily uses, instead of a permanent bonus. Both because such items are less unbalancing and because it can be more dramatic. Sometimes you get the exact same effect, only just part of the time instead of all the time. For instance there's a spell which increases the damage that a weapon does by +1. So a character can either spend the time, energy and materials and create an item which does +1 more damage than normal, every time it's used, or he can spend the time, energy and materials to create an item that casts the "+1 damage" spell on itself 1, 2, 3 or more times a day. Currently the balance of the rules for item creation is in favour of making permanent items, but I've changed that. FUDGE doesn't have rules (as far as I know) for how characters can create permanent magic items, but that doesn't mean that it can't be used to differentiate between types of magic items. You could make permanent bonus-items extremely rare, close to what most games calls artifact-level. The question is, what do you do with the more common magic items? Most RPG systems have charged items. The item can be used X times, then it has run out of charges. I think that's unsatisfactory. Characters gets very anxious about not spending. Maybe so anxious that the game ceases to be fun? Also, why would a character spend the huge amount of time, energy and materials to create such an item? Or if you encourage the creation of such items by lowering the "cost" of them, why aren't the world flooded with them? The concept of charges per day is better, I think. The default could be one charge per day, but you can go both ways, both fewer, as in one charge every third day, one charge a week or one charge a month. Or higher, as in two charges a day, six charges a day and so on. Unused charges are lost. Also note that while you don't need rules for how these items are created, you still need to have a general idea about how difficult and costly it is to create each type of item, so that your campaign world can have a consistent economy. If it takes 1N days to make a sword that can cast "+1 damage" on itself once a day, and it takes 3N days to make a sword that can cast "+1 damage" on itself five times a day, and it takes 4N to make a sword that can cast "+2 damage" on itself once a day, then this will affect how common each type of item is. Random thoughts. This system also allows more serious bonuses. You can actually have an sword that does +1 to skill *and* +2 to damage. To avoid making it unbalanced, it can be acticated once a week. The rest of the time it works like a normal sword. My campaign world does has few swords of a type similar to the one outlined above. A kind of "emergency" blades, worn by under- cover agents of the Icelandic Godhar Council. These agents aren't supposed to be involved in combat at all, they only fight if something goes wrong. Any time the sword is drawn from the sheath, the spell is activated (if there is charge left). And it has one charge per month. But the activated spell is quite powerfull (as in +1 to skill and +2 to damage), which is fitting for valuable and highly trained agents. Another game balance issue is the stealth concern. In some campaign worlds, like mine, magic is illegal (in part of the world). So you don't want to be known as a user of magic. Even if magic is legal, you may not want potential enemies to know that you're a highly competent adventurer who owns magical equipment. That could attract unwanted attention. In the RPG rules system I'm using, the spell that makes a weapon do "+1 damage" also sheathes the blade in a sparkling field of electric-blue energy. Highly visible. You can make the blue stuff invisible with illusion magic, but that's not always doable. Anyway this effect means that for some characters, a sword that is quietly but permanently +1 damage is more desirable than a charged sword, even though it costs maybe ten times as much. Also, it can be dramatically interesting. There's more signifi- cance in spending a charge of a magic item, more decision involved, than in just using a permanently useable item. Plus there's the visuals and sound effects if you're so inclined. And don't stick with damage-increasing magic. Do the same with armour (or rings) that improves your damage absorption ability, items that improves attributes or skills, and items that casts other types of spells (flight, invisibility, haste). That's one way of giving out magic items, without unbalacing the game. -- Peter Knutsen -- ----------------------------------------------- The Fudge List FAQ is at http://fudge.phoenyx.net/ ** Don't start deliberately off-topic threads. **