Fudgerylog

Several years after posting Offensive Damage Factors Considered, I have decided to rethink the approach. I always thought the idea of starting weapon damage at +0 to be counterintuitive, and Fudge should never be counterintuitive. Therefore, I have moved the starting weapon damage (for small weapons) to +1. This allows +0 to be the exclusive [...]

Some time ago, I posted an article, The Very Idea: Variations on the Trait Ladder, about the lack of adjectives above Superb and below Terrible on the Fudge trait ladder, in which I offered a simple suggestion that was only half in jest. I suggested adding one “Very” to Superb or Terrible for every level [...]

Heroes in movie serials are often outnumbered by their enemies, but they are not without their own tactics to even the odds in a fight. One of these is the popular tactic of lying in wait on the ledge of a cliff or stealthily approaching from the roof of a building and then leaping upon [...]

For all the millennia that the shield was considered an indispensable part of a soldier’s arms and armor, it is baffling that it should be afforded so little significance in any war game or role-playing game concerned with ancient or medieval combat. In Dungeons & Dragons (at least the editions I am familiar with), the [...]

I have reached the conclusion that having multiple default skill levels is not desirable in my Fudge games. I had formerly believed that the standard default skill level of Poor (and skill difficulty of Average) was fine for free-form games and creating characters on the fly (with certain exceptions), but I now think it’s best [...]

One of the most infamous tropes of the cliffhanger movie serial is that of the superhero with the flimsy secret identity. Whether it’s reporter Clark Kent’s curious absence whenever Superman appears or Batman and Robin driving Bruce Wayne’s automobile (or even being chauffeured by Alfred),* somehow the hero is able to maintain a separation of [...]