Hi, everyone! I've been lurking on the list for a few weeks now, and
thought I'd introduce myself.
I've been a roleplayer for years, but not GMed a huge amount in that time.
I've played various systems over the years, starting with Basic D&D and
ranging through numerous others, but they've all been fairly rules-heavy.
I "discovered" Fudge in the late 90s, in a period when I wasn't doing any
roleplaying in my life, and really liked the philosophy and design of the
system. I didn't start playing Fudge when I started gaming again,
though... I was invited in to an already running game as a player, and was
just happy to be playing again! So I forgot about Fudge for a few more
years.
More recently, my group has been doing rotating GMs with one-shot scenarios
each fortnight since our long-standing Mage: The Ascension game finished,
and so I looked up Fudge again. I think I'll try running a Fudge one-shot,
possibly "Bad Day at the Lab" from FF, to try to introduce the group to
Fudge.
Style-wise, I'm trying to wean myself off reliance on rules. I'm one of
those gamers who read roleplaying systems just to see how the system works,
and I have a moderately good memory for them, so I have the reputation of
being a walking rulesbook in our group. However, after all those rules,
I've come to believe that there should be something better, and it might be
a GM embraced "just fudge it", so I'm going to screw up my courage and give
it a shot myself.
Anyway, enough about me. I had an actual Fudge thought that I wanted to
share and get feedback on. In working through the Fudge List archives, I
came across some posts from 2002 linking to this site:
http://septemberquestion.org/lumpley/
which seems to be the site of Vincent Baker, who is called "Lumpley" on the
Forge RPG group (which is something I haven't read, but I'm peripherally
aware of it). He has various interesting ideas about narrative-ist RPing,
but one comment he makes in his "hardcore" section stuck out for me:
----
*Suspense doesn't come from uncertain outcomes.*
I have no doubt, not one shread of measly doubt, that Babe the pig is going
to wow the sheepdog trial audience. Neither do you. But we're on the edge
of our seats! What's up with that?
*Suspense comes from putting off the inevitable.*
What's up with that is, we know that Babe is going to win, but we don't
know what it will cost.
...
Acknowledge up front that the PCs are going to win, and never sweat it.
Then use the dice to escalate, escalate, escalate. We all know the PCs are
going to win. What will it cost them?
---
He has a mechanic derived from this in one of his games ("Chalk Outlines")
that can be adapted to Fudge (or to any dice-based game, really) which I
can see working quite well: if a character tries to make a roll and fails,
allow them to "buy up" to a marginal success (i.e. up to exactly what they
need to /just/ succeed) by offering up personal setbacks... Bad Stuff that
happens to their character to achieve the task anyway, but at personal
cost. The player, rather than the GM, would narrate the setback(s),
getting to describe how it all works, and then the GM would (hopefully) run
with it from there.
The Bad Stuff would have to actually /matter/ to the character: something
that's a significant short-term setback, or which escalates the situation,
or which is a permanent loss. You'd decide on a baseline injury for a
1-point setback, and then work from that baseline to gauge other things.
Maybe suffering a Hurt (in a setting without magical or techno-magical
healing) could be your baseline. Of course, if the player was prepared to
suffer the setback of "dying heroically to achieve their goal", then that
should be worth any amount needed to succeed.
This system could either replace or supplement Fudge Points, at the group's
discretion. Unlike Fudge points, you have a near-limitless number of
personal setbacks to offer up, if you're prepared to pay the price. I
think you'd need to require that the whole amount needs to be payed... you
can't buy up one level to make a catastrophic failure into a normal
failure, for instance, you need to go up all the levels to a marginal
success. If you're unwilling to take (say) six setbacks, then you can live
with the failure. Also, you can't use it to *exceed* a marginal success,
just to scrape by.
What I like about this idea is that it's entirely in the player's hands, so
it comes down to whether they actually care about this particular roll,
like Fudge Points, but doesn't require or encourage bean-counting. You
won't put off paying on a somewhat important roll based on a concern that
you'll need your Fudge Points later, but rather based on whether you're
prepared to suffer some Bad Stuff in order to succeed. A player would most
likely choose to exercise this option in the sort of plot-breaking roll
that kind GMs traditionally want to do out of view of the players, in case
they need to fudge the result.
First example: your group of dungeon-bashing vagrants are camped out in the
wilderness, as is their wont, when suddenly a black-cloaked assassin leaps
into the circle of light of the camp fire! He lunges at your character as
you leap to your feet, poison dripping from his razor-sharp blade. Roll a
dodge!
"Oh, missed it by two. Hmm. Hang on - I grab his dagger-hand and stagger
backwards as I try to halt his momentum and stop the blade touching my
skin. Off balance, I'm forced to step into the campfire... Ahhhh! I take
a Hurt result, and my pants are starting to smoulder... is that worth two?"
Second example: Trying to defuse the nuke before the timer reaches zero,
Jack (of all) Trades is out of his depth, but he's the only one still
standing with any chance. He rolls well, but not well enough...
"Ok, trying desperately to trace those wires, I have to remove the
shielding around the plutonium case. I don't know how much of a radiation
dose I just exposed myself to, and that may have been a whiff of powder out
of one of the screw holes I just stirred up into the air, but I managed to
work out which wire to cut..."
Third example:
GM: Ok, you enter into the cavern, and before you are the Cracks of Doom.
Lava swirls in the depths and the air shimmers with heat; it's almost
overwhelming, you can't stay here long. What do you do?
JRR Tolkien: I approach the crack and throw the Ring in!
GM: You approach this end to all your trials, ring in hand... but then your
eyes are caught by the ring. It's so beautiful, perfect. You stare at it
in wonder... how could you think about destroying it? Make a Willpower
roll, and I'm afraid that here in the heart of its power, you'll need a
Legendary result.
JRR Tolkien: (rolls). Damn.
GM: You place the Ring on your finger instead. Instantly, you sense
Sauron's mind, and know that he perceives you, and where you are, and the
mortal danger he's in. In your mind, he cowers before you. You feel that
you are more powerful than anything or anyone in the world...
JRR Tolkien: Hang on... suddenly, Gollum leaps on me from behind! We
struggle for a moment, then he lifts my invisible hand to his mouth and
bites my finger off! Shrieking with glee, he dances around with his
Precious, until he slips and falls down the crack. I collapse to the
ground, clutching my maimed hand.
GM: (brief silence) Awesome!
(obviously, the GM in the 3rd example is willing to let players take
significant control of their situation. Also, in this example, while the
end result of destroying the Ring was the same as if he'd made the
Willpower roll, it wasn't simply "I pull myself together and toss it in".)
So, do people think this could work? I feel that it could add a lot to
certain make-or-break rolls. It won't grant players immunity in combat,
because a Hurt result for each level of relative margin is likely worse
than just taking the blow, unless the weapon is poisoned or similar, like
in the first example, or say if the opponent is enormous.
My worries are
a) it might be hard to decide exactly how much a given example of Bad Stuff
is worth. I wouldn't want to have to interrupt what is probably a pretty
pivotal scene to argue the relative worth of setbacks.
b) Players might start to expect rewards or payback for bad things that
happen to their character in normal play... "Hey, if that's what happens
when I fail, I might as well take it as Bad Stuff and succeed!"
c) GMs may throw nastier situations at the players, expecting them to
suffer Bad Stuff in order to succeed... for example, it would be a pretty
harsh GM who would inflict the second example on the players, giving them a
live nuke with a character that isn't highly skilled in defusing such
things.
d) You might get lots of "hang on"s as players try to decide if they really
failed or not :)
Have fun,
Rob Rendell.
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