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!

For anyone who has played a lot of roleplaying games, there is much more to characters than what is on the character sheet. We weave a wonderful backstory of successes, failures, achievements and sacrifices but there really isn’t a way to track the inherent nature of who they are and how they were raised except for Gifts and Faults. What if we introduced a new slot called Background?

A gift (to quote the 10^th anniversary Fudge rulebook), “is a positive trait that doesn’t seem to fit the Terrible…Fair…Superb scale that attributes and skills fall into.”. Many times Game masters use the gifts and faults to describe character personality that isn’t covered by the rest of the skills and attributes available.

If Attributes are who a character is, Skills are what they learned, and gifts and faults cover their personality. What about the way they were raised? The influence family, friends, and environment influence. Yes, gifts and faults can be used for this but it will limit characters to have to use a background trait for that information.

A background trait is something that is chosen by the GM based on the information provided by the player. The GM would read the background or listen to what they have to say and then come up with a trait that will fit. Is the character grow up in the forest because their dad was a carpenter? This character could get a background trait like “Woodsman (+1 survival in forests) or Carpenter (+1 in bargaining).”

This type of setup would work very well for campaigns where player characters would be more in-depth and played much more often than a one-shot session or a short little group. It is a way to give more life to a character on the sheet and not just in the player’s mind.

Do you have any opinions on how you could expand a character’s background with more than just gifts and faults? Stop by the Fudge RPG forums and tell us!

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!