Fudge: Popularity Wars

Episode IV

A New Hope of Renewed Interest in a 10+ year old game

There was some discussion a few weeks ago on the Fudge List about trying to make Fudge more popular in the mainstream. Specifically, twice in two months, two different people have come up with lengthy diatribes about how the fans and publishers are doing everything wrong and need to do it this particular way to make Fudge commercially successful. (These diatribes seem to have been triggered by Grey Ghost Games' recent release of the 10th anniversary edition of Fudge.)

A lot of the rant and following discussion has focused around making Fudge more appealing to people who don't play Fudge. Things like, publishers need to put out big genre books for three or four major genres, with strong worlds and customized, completely fleshed-out rules, and then follow them up with lots of support supplements.

Basically, do what the big publishers are doing with d20, GURPS, Hero System, and so on.

I was listening to the Ogre Cave Audio Report awhile back (http://www.ogrecave.com/audio/, 8/29 episode), and they were talking about GenCon, what was hot, and RPG sales in general. And they were talking about the general sales slump, and how the d20 bubble seems to have already burst. (WotC's big new products weren't RPGs.)

But there was one quote that stood out as applying to this discussion.

"…you can't beat D&D by being D&D."

Let's take a step back and look at the whole situation.

What is Fudge? Like GURPS, it's a set of rules with no particular world attached to the core book. But unlike GURPS, it doesn't say, "These are the rules." It says, "These are some rules, feel free to pick and choose; add, modify and remove to create the game you want."

This is what made Fudge popular. It was free, and it granted freedom to explore and modify and create the game you want it to be. You could do this with any game, but Fudge was the catalyst for forming a community in which "house rules" were the norm, not the exception.

Now, Fudge is over ten years old, and it's never done very well in the commercial marketplace, and it's online community has always been relatively small. It won't die because it has devoted fans and doesn't depend on a commercial publisher to keep it going, but it's never really caught on in a firestorm of commercial or non-commercial popularity. In part, because in its current form, it appeals primarily to experienced gamemasters who are dissatisfied with all the other systems out there, and who find it more desirable to build on Fudge than to write house rules for another game.

The common line of thinking is that worlds sell, systems don't. And that leads us to this problem of making Fudge popular. Because when Fudge fails to become a solid hit, some fans' response is to say, "Well, systems don't sell. Write really good world books that use the Fudge rules and those will sell."

And isn't there some weirdness to this logic? Because if you're selling the product on the strength of the world, has that made Fudge itself any more popular? And, if it has made the rules more popular, it's made that implementation of the rules more popular. Like theD&D3 version of d20 isn't made more popular by the popularity of Mutants & Masterminds.

And don't you think that if the publishers, or even the fans, could develop a great world to catch non-Fudge players attention, they would have done it by now?

Let me give you an analogy…

A few weeks ago, I bought a bunch of audio recording gear so I could try something I've been wanting to do for a couple years… record audiobooks. Now that I've got this equipment, I'm thinking I might like to try creating a podcast (essentially a MP3-based "radio" show). But I've got this problem… I don't know what I'd talk about. If I could just come up with something to talk about that I think people would listen to, I could create a podcast show and people would love it, and in making my podcast popular, I'd justify using my recording equipment.

So you see the parallel? Fudge is my recording equipment. The topic of my podcast is the yet-to-be-discovered "hit world" that will make Fudge sell. I'm putting the cart before the horse… I have this great tool, but I have no good idea as to what I should do with it to make my use of this tool popular.

Here these Fudge fans have this great tool. And they think, "Aww, man, this is a great tool. I want to use it to share something great with the rest of the world, so they'll see how great Fudge is. Now… I just need to come up with some content to help sell Fudge."

If it's the world that sells a product, then that world can be sold with any rules that work reasonably well. And if someone has a world worth selling, why pick Fudge when there are other free game systems with better (or more positive) name recognition which would translate into sales? If it's really good, license GURPS for it and you'll immediately have a much wider potential audience than if you use Fudge.

Back to the Ogre Cave Audio Report… what was one of the big thing in RPGs at GenCon this year? Indie games. The Forge collective and The Wicked Dead Brewing Company especially. Little games, special-purpose games, even nearly one-time-use games. Some of them exist as an experiment in rules, but even the experiments have worlds attached to them. But all of these games have one thing in common: they are niche games. And they apparently sold like hotcakes. (And in many cases, I think the system did sell the product. Many indie games are experimental and have some really weird mechanics, and people want to check them out because of that. It's not like I was interested in the setting of Trollbabe when I bought it.)

Very few of these games have continued support. You get one book, and the author is off to work on some other project. You might get a sequel or two, but you're not going to get a new book every two months to support the world.

The big genres markets are already saturated. It's very difficult to create an innovative fantasy setting that really catches people's attention. What catches their attention is more off-the-wall stuff, like The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men or Dogs in the Vineyard.

We already have a double-handful of fantasy, superhero, sci-fi, and horror settings. Are we giving the customers what they want by creating yet another run-of-the-mill fantasy, superhero, sci-fi, or horror setting? Is that really what they want? I know, the pontificators aren't suggesting a run-of-the-mill setting… but that brings us back to what I said earlier: If any of the publishers had a innovative world in the wings, don't you think they'd be publishing them? They don't need the fans to tell them, "Hey! You need to come up with some really neat stuff for me to buy!" Duh.

And this brings me around to my really big question:

What is the point of making Fudge popular?

If it's the world that matters, there are plenty of great worlds out there. We already buy them and adapt them to Fudge.

Some people want Fudge to be like GURPS; the same level of support but with different rules. But you can't beat GURPS by being GURPS, to paraphrase the earlier quote. (But really, GURPS continuing support for any of their worlds was mediocre at best until GURPS Traveller.)

"Well, you're just a cry-baby and don't want Fudge to be popular! You want the community to remain small!" That came out in the discussion after both rants on the Fudge List.

I have nothing against Fudge being popular. I'm just trying to be realistic here. The arguments and "advice" for what would make Fudge popular just don't make any sense to me.

Gateway to Fudgie goodness? If all the fans of this new big, innovative world line want a complete game and not a construction kit (as is argued by those pushing for this), why would they somehow come over to the "tweak it all to heck" side that makes up the core of Fudge fandom now? If you're trying to create products for people who don't want to write up their own game system, why would experiencing an implementation of Fudge cause them to suddenly decide that they don't like your implementation and start designing their own?

And if the people you want to reach don't want to do their own designing, how is Fudge is any better for them than what they're running now? Why should they prefer Fudge over other games if they already do not find Fudge appealing?

I just don't think it's going to happen. The new F10 hardback only appeals to existing Fudge gamemasters. Any new product line that sells on the strength of its setting isn't going to make the do-it-yourself Fudge more popular. I can't imagine a "breakout" product involving Fudge that would make Fudge itself more popular.

FindPlay, a gamer database

FindPlay is a gamer-finder database provided by indie publisher Anvilwerks.

It's easy… it'll take you maybe thirty seconds to fill out your profile. No ads, no junk to wade through… it's clean and simple. You get to record the last three games you played, your three favorite games, and three games you haven't played but would like to try.

Of course, these things don't work unless people use them, so I encourage you to go fill out your profile.

On problems with Fudge Dice

Recently, Rob Donoghue commented…

Honestly, a lot of the necessity-to-offset-the-dice issue can probably be addressed with a more forgiving dice model. Default fudge is pretty darn fickle in that regard, since the size of the dice spread covers the whole range of skills. I admit, this is the main reason I keep being tempted by different curves (like success counting) or systems where plain old success is pretty easy (like TSOY).

Fudge Dice have given me fits for years. They appear, on the surface, to be so elegant, but deep down, the system just doesn't work well, and it's very resistant to tweaking.

The die range is wider than the default trait range… hence performance is very erratic. A +1 bonus is considered "big" in the Fudge community, yet few seem to have a problem with a character's performance regularly falling into the +/-1 range. Reducing the number of dice doesn't help much… 2dF is too predictable while still creating +/-1 results too often. 3dF is much the same as 4dF. The curve is just too shallow, causing results to be all too random for my tastes.

I think a lot of this problem is present in other die systems, but just isn't so obvious… Fudge lays it out so plainly. And Fudge uses relative degree where other games usually don't, which makes the effects of the spread more important. In Champions, it doesn't matter if you make your roll by one or by five… in Fudge, there's a big difference between a relative degree of one and a RD of five.

The die range issue could be ameliorated by expanding the trait range… but you'd need to expand it to a lot more than to just nine or ten levels to really fix it. But the adjectives tie you down to a small number. To make 4dF really work, you need like twenty or maybe even thirty levels, and you just can't do that with the adjectives unless you implement some kind of half or third levels. And I think the Fair+, Mediocre- stuff is clunkier than just using numbers.

The problem I've had with ditching the standard Fudge Dice is that I'd feel like I don't really play Fudge anymore… the dice are a core "identity" of the game to me. Ditch the adjectives (which I've done for my superhero game) and I've done away with the two key identifiers, in my mind.

Fudge Dice with just one plus and minus and four blanks (4dF.1 as we've come to call it) could help solve a lot of this… but that requires modifying the dice or making them from scratch. I'm not happy with either solution… I and my players own a lot of Fudge Dice. (Don't ask me why… do I really need ten sets for my own personal use?)

And this is what frustrates me about having chosen Fudge as my primary game system for everything I run… I'm unhappy with its fundamental building blocks: the trait range and the die method. And if I drastically change those, I feel like I'm no longer playing Fudge.

But still, I'm looking at is switching to some d6-based mechanic, maybe some kind of dice pool system, if I can discover one that meets my needs. It'd be cool if I could come up with some new system that still uses Fudge Dice.

Too much talk, not enough play

I've been thinking and talking about this stuff without playing enough. So I'm going to quit talking it for awhile, until I can manage to get some of my ideas into actual play and see what happens.

BTW: to the recent commenter… Thanks for the recommendations.

I've played Dogs in the Vineyard, but we didn't have a very good experience with it. And it doesn't really address the issues I've talked about recently. Its combat is too abstract and separates character action from the outcome too much, in my opinion.

I read Vincent's blog, but it sometimes gets too "deep" for me… the whole Forge thing sometimes feels like it's out in left-field and not really talking about the issues that the common folk deal with in roleplaying games. The recent talk about the important feature of the game not having mechanics is interesting (The Mountain Witch has no Loyalty mechanic, Dogs in the Vineyard has no Faith mechanic, even though these are very important themes in the game). A lthough Vincent seems to be trying really hard to make people figure out what he means instead of just telling them. ("Ron says make a cube with a missing corner, I say make a whirlwind… what do we mean by this? Have you attained Enlightenment yet, young Grasshopper?")

I've also got Trollbabe, but I haven't managed to read through it. I have zero interest in the setting (I bought it just to read the rules), and I find it hard reading to slog through. But I've gotten the impression that it isn't addressing what I'm concerned with either. I'll have to finish reading it soon.

Emulating movies and television, Part II

Answering the recent comments first…

Mike: Yeah… if these were easy things to emulate, I wouldn't be writing hundreds of words about my struggle with how they fit in. :) Yes, in any form fiction, the outcome of the scene has been pre-decided, while in roleplaying games, we're usually trying to decide the outcome through action. Though some of the indie games do exactly what TV does… they decide the outcome, and then make you decide how you reach that outcome.

Rob: The Voltron example was in my mind when I wrote that post. I printed out Pace last night, but I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. Okay, strike that. I read most of it while watching Nathan take a bath just now… it's very interesting, and it plays into a lot of what I've been toying with, which I'll talk about more below.

Tim: I've never read HeroQuest, though it shows up a lot in the indie RPG discussion. It's just darn pricey for a game I don't really want to play, but only want to look at the mechanics of. I have to admit to reading on the periphery of the indie scene, but I can't get deep into it. I have trouble with all the terminology, because I don't find that it helps me converse about roleplaying games. As Chad Underkoffler calls it, it's "crazy moon-language." And in some cases, the games they're producing get outside my main goal in roleplaying, which is to play out the story. Not to tell the story, but to create it through character action. Not player action, but character action. Which leads into my main theme for today…

–-

On the stakes and abstract mechanisms. I've been thinking about this a lot, including the abstract "hit points" form. But the more I think about it, the more I find that I'm really attached to direct causation. That is, the story is shaped entirely by actions in the game world, and not so much by meta-rules, unless those rules are fairly invisible… that is, it's not obvious that events in the game world are being warped by unseen forces. The whole Voltron thing is very telling, because it's such a pure and bald-faced form of the Fist-fight Model… the characters do something sub-optimal, and when all is nearly lost, switch to optimal tactics. And everyone keeps asking, "Why do they do that? Why don't they just form Blazing Sword first and get it all over with?" Well, because it'd make for a boring fight, but that's not an in-world reason, it's a cinematic reason. But I find that I don't want strong meta-game mechanisms that leave me asking, "Why doesn't he just pull out his vorpal sword and whack his head off? Why is he spending all this time fighting bare-fisted?" At the same time, I do have desires for cinematic battles… battles that last "long enough" and come out with "good" outcomes.

The Buffy Model works fairly well, because you can tie it into an in-world cause… Buffy has to be able to wear her opponent down or otherwise catch him off-guard to finish him off. And this works in some genres… but it doesn't work so well in others. The Fist-fight Model, on the other hand, doesn't really make so much sense… it's harder to explain why the hero suddenly comes back from the brink of defeat, unless you just decide that that's what heroes do: when all seems lost, they manage to win, just because they never gave up.

For all my thinking about the whole cinematic thing, I'm starting to wonder if all I really need is fudge/hero/drama points. It gives the player the ability to tip the balance when and if he feels it necessary. If conflicts are difficult enough, drama points will regularly be necessary to win, and if they're scarce enough, players may elect to lose a minor conflict in order to have enough of them for the major conflict later. Pace is pretty much pure drama points… success and failure are driven by them. (Very interesting that you gain drama points by intentionally allowing your character to fail. I might be able to use that.)

They can work for both the Buffy Model and the Second-Wind Model. They don't enforce these models, and I'm not really worried about forcing scenes into these patterns, but if a player feels that his character is evenly matched, me may choose to fight without the use of drama points until it's clear that he's going to need them to win. Or if I use a Pace-like form, he takes a beating to build up enough points, but that beating results in more long-term problems (via failure cards or "blots" in Pace). Gives me something to think about.

I always find it funny when I spend so much time thinking about these problems, and then find that tools we already have may address them well.

The big thing is that I've always looked at drama points as a fix for the dice… dice are inherently "broken" because they'll throw you a bad curve when it's not very good for the story. But in this case, I'm looking at drama points not as a patch on the dice problem, but as a necessary element… they're not something you use only when the dice are acting goofy, they're something you may need even when the dice are going your way. This echos Theatrix' "everyone has to spend a Plot Point trying to defeat the villain before he'll go down." Not that I'd play it that way specifically, but I'd balance conflicts so that the characters can't win without drama points.

And then I'd make drama points something the players earn by making their characters do desirable things… those things being involving their characters in subplots and the like. Again, that's Theatrix. There's a reason I've read that book cover-to-cover three or four times, even though I don't actually like to play it. (It's diceless, which is my issue with it. I'm very tempted to play it exactly as written, except with the addition of dice.)

In The Shadow of Yesterday, you'd gain drama points instead of experience points for hitting your Keys, which are a kind of like Flaws or Disadvantages in other games. When your character is faced with a choice that involves one of his Keys, he gets experience for being "true" to his Key. (The problem I've had with these experience-driven mechanics like in TSoY is that my players aren't into experience points… we don't look for lots of character "growth" and most of my players haven't seen experience as a "reward" for years, leaving Champions characters with twenty or thirty unspent experience points even back then.

So I think I've found my direction… I'm going to try incorporating a strong drama-point mechanic into my existing superhero game. I'll still use dice, because I don't like making the small decisions on my own, but drama points will be necessary beyond simply "fixing" bad die rolls. Players will earn drama points by involving their characters in "complications"… sub-plots with their NPCs, maybe even losing a battle at an "appropriate" point in the story.

My players could pipe up here if they like.

Emulating movies and television

This "essay" doesn't have a strong conclusion. But it's been stewing for three weeks, and it's about time to throw it out on the blog and forget about it for awhile. It's keeping me from blogging about anything else because I feel like I have to "finish" this one before I talk about anything else.

If you've read my blog for very long, you probably know that I use movies and television as examples for how I want combat to flow in my games. I want my combats to look like those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Die Hard, and all those cool movies starring Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Jackie Chan. So when I talk about the issues I'm having with trying to run a more freeform, fast-flowing combat, it's to this source… moving pictures… that I turn.

So, the other night, Karen and I were talking about combat, the "Buffy model," as I call it, and the "big fist-fight scene model," as I dubbed the point Karen brought up ("Can you tell, at any given point, who is winning the fist-fight?"). I want to talk about these a bit and compare it to the "hit point model." Maybe once I've set that ground work, I might be able to figure out a better direction to pursue the kind of combat I'm after.

It goes like this…

The Hit Point Model

The hero and the villain stand toe to toe and duke it out. The first one to run out of hit points loses. It's an over-simplification, but essentially what happens in many games… both the hero and the villain have a fixed resource representing their ability to stay in the fight, and it is reduced more or less linearly as the fight progresses.

The Hit Point Rule: Fights last until someone runs out of hit points, regardless of how excited or bored the players are.

Model analysis: Most of the time, you can, at any given point in the fight, look at the characters' abilities and their current hit points and know who is going to win. The story or cinematic influences don't matter, and "minor" fights can take too long proportional to the rest of the story.

The Buffy Model

Before Buffy (the Vampire Slayer, ya know?) can dust a vamp, she has to "soften him up." Knock him around until she can catch him off-guard and then stake him through the heart. But if you watch the show for awhile, it quickly becomes evident that the more vampire opponents Buffy has, the faster she can kill them. One vampire, a ten minute fight. Six vampires, a ten minute fight. (A generalization, but still a valid point.) Why is it that Buffy is a more capable warrior when fighting against a group than against a solo opponent?

The Buffy Rule: Fights last as long as the story says they need to last.

Buffy dusts the vamp (or vamps) when the story says it needs to happen… not because of her specific strengths, or the vampires' specific strengths. Usually, the more important the opponent, the longer they'll last, but that's still for story reasons. Nobody wants to see the main villain get dusted in a three-second match. Yet some moderately tough vamps have been dusted with a distracted, back-handed blow for comedic effect. This being a television show, the length of a fight is driven by cinematic and story needs.

Model analysis: You know Buffy is generally going to win because she's the heroine of the story. But most of the time, it's not immediately obvious that one or the other has the upper hand, or the upper hand passes back and forth, until Buffy suddenly ends the fight with the decisive blow. (Or, once in awhile, she loses but doesn't get killed.) Until that final blow, the whole fight could go either way. Story and cinematic influences are big players.

The Second-Wind Model (i.e. the big fist-fight model)

The big bad and the hero square off, and the punches, kicks, broken chairs and other implements of destruction start flying. At first, the villain gets the upper hand and starts beating the crap out of the hero. But at some point, usually just when we think the hero can't take any more, the hero gets his second wind and, usually without explaination, sometimes with a "magic potion," comes back for more and turns the tables on the villain. His blows become unstoppable, and the villain must fall under this sudden onslaught of newly-found strength and endurance.

They don't all go that way, but there is a general pattern. The villain gets the upper-hand and seems to be winning, and then the hero turns the tables, usually without any explaination as to why, and rallies for a win. Some anime follows this model… Team Big Robot fights as a group of individuals until they are nearly beaten, then they merge into SuperHyperSwordHaxorRobot and kick the villain's butt handily.

As in the Buffy model, the length of the fight is driven by cinematic and story needs. But in this case, the mode of the fight is to make the hero look like he's facing a real challenge, and give the viewer reason to doubt the hero's chance of success.

Model analysis: Here, it actually looks like the hero is going to lose. Nothing about the villain or hero indicates that the hero might suddenly find an untapped source of strength and turn the tables. When the tables are turned, it's usually obvious that the hero is winning, but it comes late in the fight.

A Gunfight Model?

I've been talking primarily of hand-to-hand combat, and find myself wondering if there's any kind of a "gunfight model" to be found in movies that can inform our situation. In Christopher Kubasik's [[http://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/itoolkit1.html|"Interactive Toolkit"]] [1], he essentially argues that in reality, combatants are basically in one of three states… unhurt, inconsequentially wounded, or out of the fight. And he says fights should be dramatic because either combatant can deliver the final blow at any moment. And up to a point, I can kind of buy that.

But I do think that cinema tends to portray gunfights much the way Kubasik does… either the combatant hasn't been hit, has been minorly wounded with not-terribly-significant effects, or has taken a wound that takes them out of the fight. I think gunfights fit the Buffy model better than the Second-Wind model. (Although the protagonist might be hampered by a bullet wound, and later shrug it off.)

I'm going to lump gunfighting into the Buffy model. I think, for my purposes, they're effectively the same.

Observations

Now here's the deal. In all the cinematic models, a fight lasts as long as it needs to. It's almost a dumb thing to say, because that's the nature of cinema… scenes last as long as the writer or director feel that they should. But if we're to emulate the Buffy/gunfight model in a more traditional system, who wins becomes hard to judge at any given point in the fight.

And I don't think I want that in my game, exactly. If the combat really can go either way up until the deciding blow or bullet, then everything that preceded it… all the punching and throwing and smashing faces into brick walls… how did it matter to the outcome? And while it may be more "dramatic," I don't know many players who want to play in a game where death can come swiftly and suddenly, and they never got a chance to change tactics or retreat when things started "going badly"… because it never went badly until it was too late. Realistic, maybe, but not very popular from where I sit.

Now here's where my tinkering with non-simulationist, meta-world mechanics comes in… they do not correspond to anything actually in the game world, but provide a certain cinematic style by making the world work more like a movie.

My first thought is that the characters should have some meta-world resource that gets consumed as the combat progresses… basically, every thing I've worked on in this area ends up looking like D&D hit points. :) Except that "Cure Light Wounds" doesn't work on them… they don't represent any "in-world" feature of the character. They represent his position, ranking or somesuch within the story; the need for the combat to last as long as it needs to last, and no more.

So let's say it's as simple as a pool of points like hit points. Attacking and defending consume these points in some manner that allows for tactical use. Maybe they act mechanically as "ablative armor"… yeah, you "hit" mechanics wise, but these "hit points" turn it into a near-miss at the cost of losing some of the points.

Darn, it really starts to sound like the usual explanation of how D&D's hit points don't really represent the capacity for physical wounds. And maybe that works. It would be some real irony if I spend years trying to refine my style of play, just to settle for using traditional D&D hit points. :)

There's more to say here, but I'm going to call it quits for now and start fresh with another post later. Check out that second footnote for a hint about where the next post is going.

–-

Footnotes:

9 A series of articles published in Inphobia magazine ten years ago. It's a very, very interesting and inspiring article. Problem is, Kubasik tells us what to do, but he ultimately fails in telling us how to do it. The "how" is what I've been trying to figure out for, off and on, the past few years.