For me as a GM how they achieved a result past Superb (Legendary or higher) is important. If their character is at skill Superb and the task requires only a Mediocre success, the could role 4 minuses as still succeed. So if they role a +2 (a great role) and get a Legendary +1 result is just doesn't really seem very 'Legendary'  to me. So I ask my players to inform me of their result with Legendary being the cap but if their role was 4 pluses (we role 4dF) then its was a "Perfect" shot or "Perfect feat of whatever". Even if their result was only Good or Great - if the task was very difficult and the only way to get a Good or Great was by +4 on 4dF, then it was still a "Perfect" success. I think the occasion of being very lucky on the dice and getting a extraordinary roll should be rewarded.

My wife Ann's character, Jackson Adams, in our Terra Incognita pulp campaign was recently having a friendly target shooting competition with two NPCs - one a potential rival and one a woman who is infatuated with Jackson. Ann rolled something like 4 or 5 +4s on 4dF in a row! It was one of the most impressive strings of dice luck I have seen in many years. Specific skills of the 3 characters aside, needless to say, the rival is now seriously intimidated by Jackson's marksmanship, and the woman is even more infatuated with Jackson!

Freeloading Phill wrote:

It was for reasons like this that I stripped the numbers out of my build - Phudge.

Your experience may be different but my players that never used adjectives because the numbers were right there adapted with no fuss and now my games are adjective only.

Phill

I think it comes down to players' experience and everyone's comfort? I love Fudge and its light touch on the story we are trying to tell, but one person in my group is a human calculator (he's a maths teacher, economist and stock market trader) and he loves all "the maths stuff".

We completed a three-part scenario a week ago using the old Chill RPG rules. We were rolling 3 x d100 each combat round and circa 20 x d10 for wound damage and a further handful of dice for stamina loss ... This is my kind of system mechanics nightmare!    Good game; good GM; but shall we say ... not my kind of rules.

He's willing to put up with me Fudging, I'm therefore rightly obliged to show pleasure at his mathematical shenanigans.

iamtim wrote:

Here's something I've been thinking about with regards to this topic, and maybe this is another thread in and of itself: what if we used 3dF instead of 4dF?

First off I can state that this works, and quite well at times. However, the distributions are very different in a lot of ways. Looking from extremes in (both are symmetrical distributions)
3 dice: (3) 3/81, (2) 9/81 ,(1) 18/81, (0) 21/81
4 dice: (4) 1/81, (3) 4/81, (2) 9/81, (1) 16/81, (0) 21/81

There is a lot of potential interpretation that can be done here. A few points are the same, the odds of a +/- 2 is equal in both systems, as are the odds of a 0. However, with the elimination of 4 in the 3 die system, the odds of 1 is increased and 3 decreased, with a significant increase in the odds of the extremes. Its not a huge difference by any means, but there is some tightening of the curve visible. Standard deviation allows a more direct comparison. Variance*81 produces an integer, and as such will also be shown.
3 dice: (162) 1.414
4 dice: (172) 1.457

Its pretty tiny in short. 3dF can replace 4dF without any major changes to the curve. What changes are extreme results, whether that is a good or bad thing is entirely subjective. I, personally, prefer 3dF and adjectives. I like math, I like RPGs, I just don't think that in play the two merge very well past basic addition and subtraction. Sure, health systems as integrals with wounds tracked by the highest points on the remaining portion of the curve have their potiential, but their place is not in an RPG, despite what some of my crunchy houserules have to say on the subject.

As a reader of role-playing systems more than a player or GM, I do not add experience to this discussion.  But, in the manner that our numeral system (base 10) recycles its ordinal words (one, two, three, ...) within each decade (twenty, thirty, forty, ...), it would seem a simple solution for the verbally inclined Fudge GM/player to reuse the existing adjective scale to modify "Legendary".   I.e. "Conan scored a legendary +1 hit against the bandit." becomes "Conan scored a Fair Legendary hit against the bandit." (where Legendary +0 is Mediocre, a result hardly worth demeaning with the qualifying adjective; legendary heroes are never less than our least expectations or we would not write legend about them).  Personally, I like the additions of "Amazing" and "Perfect" (but only in the Legendary range, above Superbly Legendary), but would agree that in terms of meaningful results, a character (or NPC) cannot do better than Perfection (the statistically undefined 100%-ile (everything is beneath it including itself), Legendary+6).

If I recall discussion with Steffan way way back in the day, the idea was that the verbal trait scale could be revised to suit the setting flavor. So, from the Vermonster's idea above, in a high fantasy setting, using wording such as "a "Fair Legendary blow" or a "Superbly Legendary battle" are very much the sort of phrases a Bard might use to describe a hero 9or heroine's) epic struggles. In a hard core Space Marine setting "Legendary" might become "Wicked" so you have "Good", ""Great", "Superb", "Wicked", "Wicked Good" "Wicked Great", "Wicked Superb" and perhaps, since beyond having a Superb Skill and rolling +4 on 4dF, high-tech weapons add additional modifiers, a "Ultimate Badass" for anything +8 or beyond 

I think the best way is to look at the ranks as Target Numbers, like the Difficulty Classes in d20 (as an example). In a d20 game when you have a DC 30 you don't worry about whether you got a 31 or a 35, just that you beat the DC. Fudge goes much easier (IMO) if you think of it the same way. You don't need degrees of success or failure (most of the time) in Fudge, so whether or not you won at the test is all that matter. "The rank is Legendary." "OK, I have Good skill with my sword and I rolled... a +3. Woot! I did it!" The rest is describing the results.

Unless you want to tack on a system where degree of success impacts damage, or something like that, you don't really need to worry about if your result is Legendary +X, just that you met or beat the target.

cjh wrote:

Unless you want to tack on a system where degree of success impacts damage, or something like that, you don't really need to worry about if your result is Legendary +X, just that you met or beat the target.

Do you mean something along the lines of the default combat system for simultaneous and alternating rounds? Relative degree is a powerful tool, it would be a shame to ignore it.

As I said, unless you're using degree of success in some manner to determine damage, it really isn't that important in actual play and using the rules like this speeds up play dramatically. It also eliminates pointless bits like worrying about what "Legendary +X" actually means in game terms.

cjh wrote:

As I said, unless you're using degree of success in some manner to determine damage, it really isn't that important in actual play and using the rules like this speeds up play dramatically. It also eliminates pointless bits like worrying about what "Legendary +X" actually means in game terms.

Degree of Success, aka Relative Degree is among the best tools Fudge has. I would consider using it the default, though there are cases where that doesn't happen.

Knaight wrote:

Degree of Success, aka Relative Degree is among the best tools Fudge has. I would consider using it the default, though there are cases where that doesn't happen.

I don't agree. I don't think it's all that important at all, and if you're looking for faster play out of the game it does bog things down.