Posts tagged with keywords "Fudge"
There is currently such a change in the Fudge community. After the FudgeList shut down I was expecting a period of quiet and apathy before something started off. I couldn’t be more wrong.
Looks like we may finally shake off that “Drudge” misconception! Ann Dupius of Grey Ghosts setup this yahoo community: fudgecommunity and it’s been busy ever since. A lot of Fudge projects came out of the wood work and I even end up revealing some of my “secret project” LH, which is cool because I’m planning to get it out there in a free-ish format soon anyway. There is certainly a lot more openiness and sharing and I do hope it lasts. One of the best things though was that Ann spent several days online in the “official” chat and it connected a lot of the members, made the list a lot more personable.
If this is what killing off the FudgeList did to the community, then I wish they had done it earlier! 
phoenyx.net are finally closing it down. Unlike the last time I said the Fudge is dead, this time it’s official. The FudgeList will be gone by August 26 (archives will still be available). I think perhaps in the long term this will be a good thing (for many reasons that I’m uncomfortable saying in public). I do hope in the short term, perhaps, that this might consolidate the remains of the community around something new or alternative, such as fudgeforum (though I’ve barely used it myself), but I suspect it’ll just disappear for a while, subsumed by the Fate community (which isn’t a bad “fate” I guess).
I still have Reboot, though I should kick Brad about where its at. Also my “secret” project L___ H_____ was a Fudge-based roleplaying game, that I’m quietly working my way through to putting it online, in some form of free (though originally I had planned to try and get it published). I’ve even already put some of it online on here (here and here) and even had Chris of Seraphim Guard interested in buying the rights for the Story Hooks bit. But I admit that I was beginning to feel that the FudgeList wasn’t going to be the place to announce it. In short, I’m not stopping being a fan of Fudge.
In the meantime, I plan to setup a small website that generates a monster FudgeRPG feed pulling in the known FudgeRPG feeds out there since the phoneyx.net one disappeared quite a while ago.
BTW for those reading from the Fudge community, you can see just my Fudge posts using this tag (or even better Fudge and Roleplaying posts using this link). There is even unique RSS feeds, so you don’t have to read about Fringlish or TDOMF updates.
See ya all on the other side I guess, where ever that might be.
I’ve been struggling with a roleplaying-gaming design issue. It’s probably just my own pet-hate. It’s something I call the “Big Pile of Skills” problem.
When creating a roleplaying character, there is nearly always a section on “Skills”. Most of the time you can choose any Skill you like and invest points into them. Some systems have some concept of grouping Skills like D&D’s Class system and Riddle of Steel’s Skill Packets. But most of the modern day systems I’ve played just let you pick any skills you like. I’m under the impression that most players considered this a good thing and limiting character choices to a select set of groups is considered Badtm.
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Continuing on from Story Hooks, this is the second part of item 8 of the L___ H_____ system.
Update #1: 
Fudge Passions by Mark Cunningham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Fudge Passions v2.0
Fudge Passions was originally conceived as a way to link a character’s emotional state to other parts of the system (like Gifts or Powers). It is built as an addition to the Fudge RPG system but also replaces Fudge Points (Passion Points replace Fudge Points). It was designed and tested in parallel with my Story Hooks system but both can be used independently.
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Part 1 of to do item: number 8. Part 2, Fudge Passions, will be online soon.
Update #1: Story Hooks by Mark Cunningham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Story Hooks v2.0
Story Hooks is a system I created to replace the creation and management of players’ characters’ histories (see here for more). The first version, which I designed and wrote-up for L___ H_____, was very basic and involved a lot of hand-wavy “use as you see fit”. It consisted of the “Back-Story” and a non-delimited list of “Story Hooks”, which were practically Story/Adventures Seeds.
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This is a cut down version of TDO Combat Fudge v0.1 (a game system for roleplaying “combat”): Just the rules, zero explanations, zero context and zero examples. As requested, to make it more blog-digestable.
The scope of this Fudge build is very specific. It only applies to combat (or drama in social context). It doesn’t cover character creation and development or general conflict and checks. However it applies to all combat and scales. It can be applied to overt combat, goal-oriented combat (i.e. races), detection-based combat (i.e. stealth-based), chases and political combat (and anything else you can think of). It can be applied to large-scale conflicts (wars and battles) and small scale. If you don’t see how the rules can be applied to these situations, please check out the original version as it contains examples of all these cases.
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An Example Fudge Implementation of “Combat Profiles”
If you don’t have time to read all this, then check out the cut-down version v0.1.1!
What started as some rough ideas and thoughts on the combat experience in roleplaying games, developed in a kind of simplistic theory I called “Combat Profiles”. After some discussion, I put together this system as an example of using these concepts. In fact, putting together this system has helped me scope and define the ideas into something more tangible, but that’s for another day. This system priorities player-experience over strategy or realism but doesn’t try to exclude anything either. I don’t know if it delivers, as I haven’t tested it yet.
It uses Fudge and Story Elements, as I believe they are uniquely suited to “Combat Profiles” compared to the other systems I’ve played (of course I haven’t played every system out there). It is task-based (i.e. not “conflict resolution”), another of my biases I guess. However I believe the general principals can be applied to other systems. It’s geared as a system that can be applied to all settings and all combat situations. The system attempts to define what combat is to understand how to apply it.
This system is in part inspired by the Shadow of Yesterday RPG, Riddle of Steel RPG, Spirit of the Century RPG, Fate System, several Fudge Factor articles and the FudgeList. If you are familiar with these sources, their influence should be obvious.
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I haven’t been blogging as much as I would like. It’s certainly not from lack of material but simply time-constraints. Such is the life of a working father. I do have a narrow bandwidth to work on personal projects (i.e. not work or family) and recently that has been consumed by my Fudge Reboot work and TDOMF. Blogging has come in a weak second to these projects.
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Does anyone else have difficulty separating the author from the book?
I prefer to know little or nothing about the author of a book before I start reading it. This equally applies to roleplaying books and it’s a roleplaying book that I’m having difficulty at the moment separating the creator (and his/her actions/opinions) from the writing. I don’t have a problem with dead authors. Once they are dead, everything about them is becomes simply “context” (historical).
The FudgeList has awoken and it got a bit heated there for a little bit. But I saw a comment from a writer on a blog about when the whole “Fudge is dead” debacle started. He hadn’t gotten involved in the list or this particular argument and had no idea what he was talking about yet he said something nasty about the Fudge community. It was only one line. However, all I could think was “asshole!” It’s a pity, because I would have bought one of his forthcoming books, now I won’t. I’ll probably never look at his work. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, but that opinion has tainted my perception of his him and his work. If I pick up a book of his, I’ll remember the comment. I could get over it and let it drop, but the problem is that it creates a barrier to overcome and therefore it makes reading one of his books effort. Why should I bother reading a book if it’s just going to be work instead of enjoyment?
I think Fred Hicks was right when he talked about prompting RPGs and always being positive. A single negative can lose you a customer and then the power of the internet is that if you hit the wrong person, it can have a much bigger impact then just one dropped potential sale.
It’s another reason why I find it hard to objectively read the work of friends. I see my friend’s personality in the work and it, well, becomes hard to separate my opinion of my friend from my opinion of his writing. It becomes especially difficulty if the writing is in a field of shared interest like roleplaying, because more than likely we’d have argued and discussed RPG design issues and I’ll see that shining through their work.
Which is perhaps why it’s a good idea for me to keep some distance from many of the RPG design forums like RPG.net, theForge and story-games. My perspective of people’s work will become tainted by my opinion of the them, not their work. (TBH I think it’s more than likely that I have a tendency to shy away from very large online communities), I guess also perhaps that’s why I’m quite closed about my writing and my ideas. Afraid they’ll judge me rather than the work itself.
Anyone else feel the same about books?
Or rather: Should I know who Doc Savage is?
In less than 5 seconds I can get answer from the wikipedia pipe, but that’s not really my question. I got my copy of Spirit of the Century (and this is not meant to be a criticism of SOTC, I’ve only flicked through the introduction) which is a roleplaying gaming about “pulp” and specifically “era pulp”. I know what pulp is and I recognise it’s influences. But my first taste as a child was Indiana Jones. What came before that I don’t’ really know anything about. Should I? Have I missed some sci-fi cultural element? Who is Doc Savage, the atypical pulp hero? Am I a sci-fi philistine?
It just occurred to me why, after seeing the cover of White Wolf’s “Adventure!” when it was released, I never bothered to even look at the blurb. I knew what pulp was but I had no interest in it. Likewise SOTC, shrug, yea pulp looks fun but it’s not something I completely get. It’s not part of my… actually is there a word for that? Personal/historical culture/media/history? If it wasn’t for the internet noise (and that it uses Fate, a tangent/brew/derivative/insert-word of Fudge), I probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid about it.