For the past few weeks, I’ve been discussing some of the ideas I’ve had about giving more variety to a campaign or session without just using the Offensive Damage Factor (ODF) and Defensive Damage Factor (DDF) that come with the rules. This week I thought I would bring in another area that might add a challenge without having to level up your players or the enemies they face.

I have found with my group that the introduction of weapon/powers immunity has been great at not only spicing up the fight but making the players think outside of the box. When I was running A Fudge Tale: The Ice Princess, I gave the ice golem an immunity to ice or any sort of cold damage which caught our resident sorcerer off guard. As they team had been building everything around this magic user, the introduction of the immunity really forced them to think of new tactics to fight off the creature. It also made sure that the sorcerer player started looking at his other spells instead of just relying on the more common ones he liked to use.

One of the things you would have to be careful with is giving a weapon immunity to broad that nobody can really hurt it or to specific that it’s just a stat that is never used as that type of damage isn’t inflicted.

I have only had a limited experience using this as my group has been playtesting Blood in Space RPG and those rules do not have any weapon limitation or immunity (as of yet).

What do you think of weapon immunity? Do you have your own methods of throwing some spice into fudge combat? Let us know over on the forums!

In the years that I have been playing Fudge, one of the more difficult things that I have tried to do is finding a way that players continue to stay challenge in stories thare are more episodic instead of a one off adventure. With the way Fudge is, when players skills start reaching Superb, it is very hard for these battles do not come automatic successes for players. Without a challenge, nobody is going to be interested in playing.

It was about a year ago that I finally hit on a way that can help alleviate this type of pain for campaign settings and it has been working very well. What I did was create four new levels above Superb and did not allow players to achieve these levels. For example I create a Impressive (+4), Most Impressive (+5), Legendary (+6), and Mythic (+7). In my campaigns I made sure there were ODF and DDF abilities for weapons and defenses to help add some variety to the rolls. An example would be the Emerald Fire Dragon I created as a bad guy for my group of knights that were trying to free a kingdom.

Emerald Fire Dragon

~Attributes~

Strength: Mythic
Agility: Most Impressive
Stamina: Impressive
Intelligence: Legendary
Charisma: Impressive

~Skills~

Claws: Impressive (+2 ODF)
Frost Breath: Superb (+2 ODF)
Hide: Impressive (+3 DDF)

This dragon gave my team of four (with a bunch of superb skills) quite a hard time making them think instead of just strutting in and battling the creature. The biggest drawback that I have found (and in a way I do not consider it a drawback) is that if the player does not roll well, he could wind up being insta-killed if the campaign does not allow expansion on the amount of wound boxes that the player character has. Sir Roderick battled the dragon and went sword to claw. Sword Skill was Superb with a sword of ODF +3 and a DDF +2 (Leather armor). He rolled a -3 dropping his end result to Fair while the Dragon rolled a +3 on Claws. The Margin of Failure was a whopping 6 points plus the +1 for ODF giving a massive 9 points of damage. The armor did cut this down to 7, but that seven incapacitated him. Suffice to say, the players were very happy to have their fudge points now.

So, those are my thoughts. Do you have any other ideas on making it challenging for players when the level is getting high? If so, please share them on the fudge forums!

When it came to roleplaying, Fudge was the very first system I was introduced to. That was back in 2010 while I was deployed to Afghanistan. Since then I have had the opportunity to try all sorts of different systems and sample how their mechanics worked.

I have playedD20 version 3.5, Pathfinder, Cortex, Fate, and D6. They all were very interested in the way they brought the adventure to the table. Even though many of these systems felt more robust than Fudge, they were always missing what Fudge truly had. The Fudge RPG system had the ability to flow.

I found that it was much easier to go from the roleplaying aspect into the combat/action aspect in a fluid way that never occurred with the other systems (especially pathfinder). Pathfinder had a lot of math and a lot of die rolls. Instead of just going into the battle, I had to collect initiative, get everybody’s stats and spend most of my time with a calculator than roleplaying the fight.

It was this fluid, easy story-telling method that made me decide that Fudge was the system for me. I have not looked back since. As many of the readers here might know, I’ve developed the Blood in Space Universe to try to create a full science fiction setting with its own complete ruleset. Fudge has sat on the shelf gathering dust long enough and it was time to get more people interested. That meant more content.

So, what is this long winded post about? It is about an amazing system that captured my heart and will not let go. The dynamics of the roll, the ease of dragging and dropping different rule variants into adventures and the ease it was to mesh other adventures together with little to no prep work.

Fudge is a system that is underrated and sadly not very popular. There is no good reason for that. So, this post is about why Fudge is amazing so that anyone who stumbles upon it can read a true believer and know this is a system not to pass on. Fudge has brought me a lot of adventures and it continues to do so with my family and friends.

Thank you, Fudge!

It all started with a discussion with a Dungeons and Dragons player about the differences between our two systems and it was a very lively conversation. The thing that made me stop and think was when he asked, “Well, what do you do about traps? Avoiding them or when they trigger? Do you just make it a story element or do you have stats like D&D?”

Though my answer was both, it made me think that there were not any rules out there governing traps more than a story element. Could rules like that be made if a GM wanted more than just “This is a spear trap? Roll minimum of a Fair to get away”?

When it comes to Fudge, the nicest thing I have found about it is that rules can be easily added to the system without it causing other rules to bunch up or fail to work. A GM can choose to make his game as rule crunchy or rule creamy as he or she wants.

I decided to take it upon myself to write a set of rules that would govern traps reminiscent of Pathfinder trying to find a way to present the information in a Fudge way but with enough crunchy to give concrete information but loose enough to not stop the flow of the story (like going to initiative rounds).

For those who are not familiar with the D20 or the Pathfinder system, traps are dictated by their actuation method and delivering the attack while the player would be required a saving roll against one of the skills to either avoid or halve the damage.

With Fudge, there are no hit points in the sense of “You have 50 hit points and you take 4 damage leaving you 46” but more of a “Your Margin of Failure is 2, so you are scratched.” It was important to find a way to inflict damage without having to give every trap a type of skill.

The rules that I did come up with (which can be found in the FudgeRPG repository once approved) took in the idea of each trap having an advantage when it came to being sprung with acted like a skill. When the 4DF dice are rolled for the trap in a simultaneous combat round, adding the advantage will help act like a skill and get a total MoS or MoF.

Once that was figured out, the rest of the rules came simply and so far, they have been popular among those who have read them.

What do you think about traps? Is there a way you handle them in your Fudge adventures and campaigns? Come let me know in the Official Fudge Forums and discuss it!