The Fudge trait ladder

Fudge geek-speak coming up. If you're not into the issues of "making Fudge work," you'll want to skip this.

The Fudge trait ladder: Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good, Great, Superb, (and sometimes) Legendary

That's the official ladder, with some folks tacking "Abysmal" down there below Terrible to balance out Legendary, with Fair as the balance point.

Fudge's use of adjectives instead of numbers is generally seen as one of its strong points. (Though it does end up translating those adjectives to numbers.) How much more elegant it is to say, "I am a Superb swordsman!" and "That was Great blow!" than to say, "I have a sword skill of 3" or "I rolled a 7 to hit." In a number-based system, you have to understand the basic math behind the system to know what a "7 Strength" means… is it good, is it bad, is it in the middle? But you can know that a Great strength can't be bad and isn't "average". The adjectives give Fudge a descriptive quality that is very attractive.

But I'm extremely frustrated with Fudge's adjective trait ladder. The elegance of adjectives work only for a limited set of conditions. Outside of those conditions, it can get in the way more than it helps.

So the scale runs -3 to +4 (Terrible to Legendary). Most of the time, our heroes are just that… they're heroic, and their best abilities are at the upper end of the range. They're more than Good, they're Great and even Superb at what they do. (See how smoothly those adjectives are in natural use?) This isn't so bad… their abilities are still described on the adjective ladder. But what about that ogre or a dragon? Oh, they have Legendary+n strength. Whoops… the adjectives broke down. They can't describe something outside of the human range without resorting to numbers.

Scale is supposed to be the answer to this problem. Aside from the fact that some people just don't understand how Scale is supposed to work, I find it also causes more trouble than it's worth. (When I say "Scale," I'm not talking about arbitrary, non-overlapping groups, where Starship Scale is so huge that Human scale just doesn't even register on it. I'm talking about Ogre Scale, which is just a couple steps higher than Human Scale, or Dragon Scale, which is a few steps higher than that.) The problem is that Scale uses the underlying "number line" that measures ability, except we access it through a set of filters. (I think Scale confuses people because it's basically used in three different ways, one of which doesn't involve the number line. The basic bit of Scale that says every level is 1.5x bigger or 1.2x faster than the previous works just fine. It's the overlaying the trait ladder at different points on the number line that I'm referring to here.)

So we can say that this ogre has Great strength on the Ogre Scale, which means he's Legendary+2 on the Human Scale (for instance). We can now describe the ogre with adjectives instead of numbers, but we can't compare him back to a human without using the numbers "hidden" in the background. To figure out what Great Ogre Strength means in human terms, we have to drop down to the number line and compare raw numbers.

And this is the problem: The point of giving abilities ratings is for comparison purposes, so we can know just how much stronger that ogre is when compared to our hero. Any system which obfuscates that relationship, or takes a simple relationship (Fred the Ogre is three steps stronger than John the Brave) and hides it behind a layer of complexity (Fred has Great Ogre Strength, John has Superb Human strength, is doing a Bad Thing, in my game-designer opinion.

Fudge has such good intentions here, but for me, it really doesn't pan out. The adjectives and Scale just get in the way when we're dealing with any mix of characters with abilities outside the "named" trait range. And that's practically every genre with supernatural elements… the meat-and-potatoes of roleplaying.

This gets even worse with superheroes, where the PCs themselves can be all over the map. When half of the important abilities in the game are described as Legendary+N, or worse, Poor Super Strength (on the Super Scale), I found it far, far easier and more elegant to just drop the whole adjectives and Scale thing and use the numbers directly than to filter adjectives through Scale modifiers.

The adjective trait ladder only works to describe a limited range of abilities, and it breaks down when a greater range of abilities needs to be described. (Note that I am not talking about the problem of describing rolls that go outside the ladder. That doesn't bother me much.)

The question is, what to do with it. Personally, I'm considering abandoning the adjectives entirely for my own games. I pretty much did so with the superhero game I ran… I've spent years looking for a more elegant solution, and I can't find one. I tried using multiple Scales (Normal, Heroic, Super … Cosmic, etc). But I ended up writing numbers in brackets after every adjective, and then ignored the adjectives.

Maybe that will be my compromise… I can use the adjectives in my published works and write the numbers after them. Then customers can use either. Except that will look clunky to newcomers, highlighting the fact that the adjectives don't work well. I'd like to present as clean and elegant a game as I can… and I find the adjectives and Scale working against me.

Why don't we practice?

Over on his "Uncle Bear" blog, Berin Kinsman touches on an interesting issue about [[http://unclebear.com/comments.php?id=P2732_0_1_0|teaching roleplayers]]. Now, he's talking about the future of the industry and a "what if" of writing shifting toward "how to" instead of rules material, but he ends with a comment about "what if" we had weekend workshops that focused on the craft of roleplaying… workshops on GMing and roleplaying, where you could get feedback and learn new things.

And this brings up something that has interested me for some time. I see roleplaying as a form of performance art. And of all the performing arts, roleplaying is the only one in which the participants do not practice for "the real thing." All of our practice happens "on stage," as it were.

Now, we're not performing for a non-participatory audience, of course… but we are performing for ourselves and the other participants. When I play a musical instrument, I'm not satisfied with the sounds that come out when I don't practice rudimentary scales and basic technique. W hen I sit down into a Celtic jam session, the other, more experienced players are expecting me to have a certain level of competence, and I'm not going to reach that without practicing outside the jam session. And some of the things I have to practice don't even resemble real music.

But in roleplaying, most of us don't practice our art out of the context of the game. It is only at the biggest gaming conventions that you will find a very few workshops aimed at improving roleplaying skills. Which is funny, because it seems like conventions would be the best place for this. Maybe there aren't many who consider themselves capable of teaching.

Even outside of actual teaching, though, we don't get together with our group, or just one or two people, and practice. And this is the thing… in-game, we're dealing with the future of my character. I'm a conservative player, slow to make up my mind because I tend to think through the consequences of my actions. Makes me a boring GM, too. I need a context in which I can practice my skills without worrying about how a certain decision is going to affect the remaining months of the campaign. The thing is, you're in a position where you really don't want to "fail" at the roleplaying thing… and avoidance of risk-taking in roleplaying can lead to stagnant play.

Improv actors take all kinds of classes, play all kinds of teaching "games," and practice regularly. But we don't, even though what we are doing has a lot in common.

Sometimes I think there are (have been) players in my group who would benefit from just reading a play together, to help build speaking confidence and work on voice development without also worrying about what to say at the same time. (Funny that so many introverts can be drawn to roleplaying, myself included.)

I've thought about this concerning the local roleplaying club, but I don't feel qualified to lead a workshop in much of anything.

Freelancers & Fudge builds

I'm going to make up for not posting for two months by posting several days in a row.

I got some responses from potential freelancers concerning my announcement. This is a good thing. I'm not entirely ready to hand out writing assignments yet, but I hope to get there in a month or two. That's going to be tough… I'm probably going to need to sketch out a "bible" of the world to help convey all the important bits. And I'm going to have to work hard not to step on freelancer's creativity by saying, "The entire book you wrote is not in line with my vision of the world! Go back and revise!" It's going to be hard to convey a vision without a substantial amount of pre-written world material.

On the Fudge rules I'm going to write… I'm trying to decide whether to edit down the original 1995 edition document, or just start writing from scratch and put it all in my own words. I'm starting to think that'll be easier to do than editing down a document that has a whole bunch of stuff in it that I don't want, and really has a different tone than what I'm aiming for.

Taking the publishing plunge

Not one to tout "vaporware," I've been reluctant to make any real announcements, but for various reasons I have decided it is beneficial to make an announcement before I have anything solid. I'll tell you about that after the announcement.

I'm starting a publishing company to publish Fudge-compatible PDFs, and eventually larger POD works.

Woo! Big surprise, eh? A lot of people already knew, and many more might have guessed, but I've not been talking about it publically because of the "vaporware" thing, and that's been getting in my way.

The number one reason I decided to make the announcement at this point is simple: I need more accountability. I've been watching Wolfgang Baur over on Open Design, and I see a lot of value in working closely with the customer.

I also need to be able to talk more openly about what I'm working on. I've asked some questions about what people want, but I haven't really opened up a dialog. I'd like to be able to dialog more, and I need to talk about what I'm actually planning in order to do that effectively. (i.e. In order to not waste time dancing around the "secret" that I'm working on starting a company.)

Yes, I have a company name and I've registered a domain name. I'm not going to tell you the name until I have something to show. Gotta keep you in suspense about something.

What am I going to publish, you ask?

My focus is going to be on short, interlocking books… I'm thinking around 32 pages max, unless that turns out to not work for what I'm doing. They should be fairly affordable… maybe $5.50 for 32 pages. (More expensive per-page than 3rd Edition GURPS books… but we're talking a niche market here.)

I'm going to start with a free "quick-start" fantasy rule set based on Fudge. It will be a "complete" rule set, with all the options set (no "toolkit" here), but it will be bare-bones. After that, I'll be building a fantasy world, about 32 pages at a time. The opening book will be kind of like The Keep On the Borderlands… it will contain a little bit about the world, some detail about a specific area, containing an adventure and enough material to get you started. The world is one that my wife and I started working on a couple years ago… it's familiar enough that your D&D-playing buddy will be comfortable in it, but it has enough twists and turns to keep things interesting.

Sure, you're not going to get a 200-page world book right out of the gate… but you'll start getting the material a heck of a lot earlier. After that initial product, future products (with a brisk release schedule) should cycle through various types of world material… details on races/monsters, magic items, and so on. (I expect I'll draw on some OGL material for some of this, translating it to Fudge. Those works will probably be longer, but have a lower cost-per-page.)

The magic system in the quick-start is going to be the core of the new Gramarye 2.0. Somewhere in the middle of that, I'm going to release a Gramarye "design guide," which is what the Gramarye was meant to be in the first place… the system that everyone calls "the Gramarye" is actually a sample system. In the design guide, it's very much a sample, and the work talks extensively about how to design and balance your own magic system. I've had this book about half-done for a few years… it's time I finished it. Somewhere along there, I (and my freelancers!) will translate the entire d20 SRD spell list to the system. Boo-ya.

Eventually, a line of "Department 13" books will cover the same kind of ground for that setting. A free Fudge-compatible "Modern quick-start" will come out to support that.

From there… scifi, probably, maybe supers. That's on down the road and we'll have to see what happens.

So, I'm no crazy-man, thinking I'm going to write all this myself. And this is another reason I want to get this out in the open… I need freelancers, and I'd like to get some of them in on the ground floor. I'm going to pay high royalty rates, but nobody is going to make any real money off of this… pizza money is about all I'm expecting myself. But I'm not doing this for the money… I'm doing it because I think Fudge needs a strong commercial success, and because I think PDF and POD publishing is "where it's at" for niche markets. I'm not giving it away for free, because: at least a little money is a good incentive compared to no money at all, the market takes you more seriously when you're not "free", and Fudge needs more commercial success.

So, if you like Fudge, can write reasonably well, like to write high-fantasy worlds, and want a chance to make a little pizza money doing it, drop me a line: raven@phoenyx.net. Remember, the PDF business is the only segment of the roleplaying industry that has grown in the last two years, and its growth is accelerating. And the Fudge community is used to getting their support material electronically.

I'm serious about this. I spent over 11 years managing the Fudge List, started and organized the Fudge List Guide to Fudge wiki, guided and often drove Fudge Factor magazine… I'm dedicated to the Fudge community, and I think this is what it needs now. Fudge Factor is retiring, I'm no longer managing the Fudge wiki, I'm training a replacement team to run the Fudge List, and I'm pulling way back from organizing local roleplaying club events because nobody comes to them. My plate is nearly clear… this publishing business is my main focus, and I plan to stick with it for a long while. (See, by saying that here, I get that accountability thing.)

On patrons and ransoms

Okay, to follow up on the "big bullet-stopper books" post, I thought I'd talk about something rather different… patronage and the ransom model of publishing.

Wolfgang Baur is the author of a great number of D&D books, and he's started this Open Design project in which patronage pays for the development of a new D&D adventure. You pay up-front from $5 to $50 and get to influence the design. For $5 you get to vote on the level of the adventure, for $50 you get to put some of your own ideas in, and everybody gets to discuss and make suggestions.

Without strong editorial control, such design-by-committee projects are usually doomed to failure… but have no doubt, Wolfgang is writing the adventure, not the crowd of patrons. Patrons get to make suggestions, but in the end, it's Wolfgang who makes the decisions.

I went in for the $5 level… not because I'm interested in a D&D adventure, but because Wolfgang is writing about the process of adventure development while he does it. He's presented outlines of the top four picks (he gave eight proposed setting titles to vote on initially), and has written four design articles so far.

This isn't terribly unlike the ransom model that has produced various wargames and some of the Godlike RPG supplements. Basically it works along the lines of "when we receive $1000 in pre-orders, we'll print the book" kind of stuff. Generally, if they don't reach the goal within a specified period of time, all money is refunded. (Fundable.org manages this process for you and doesn't take money from the customers unless the goal is reached.)

The patronage model just takes it one step further and gives the customers a way to influence the process, saying "Will you pay more to get more control over the outcome?" Interestingly, Wolfgang is enjoying the process, because he's never received this much feedback during the planning of a project. (He hasn't written anything specific to the adventure but the outlines.) I'm wondering what happens when one of the $20 or $50 patrons feels that he didn't get anything close to his money's worth when it's all over.

While I'm not sure that paying to influence the design is a highly useful model, I do think the ransom model has something going for it. The only trick to that is, you have to be fairly well-established with your target audience, and you really have to come through. Nothing like collecting $1000 of customer money and then finding that writer's block is killing you. (I believe the Godlike ransoms were for projects that were fully written before they went up for ransom.)

I keep wondering how people in the Fudge community would react if I said, "Pay me ten dollars and I'll write a fully-realized Fudge Fantasy book, complete with basic world information, character templates, skill trees, weapons and armor lists, monster writeups, a Gramarye-based magic system with over 100 spells and so on." Ten bucks would get you the PDF, and you could pay more to get a print-on-demand paper book.

I'd even discuss the development in public on a blog for people to give feedback. :)

Are "bullet-stoppers" the answer?

Have you seen The World's Largest Dungeon, The Shackled City and Ptolus? They're campaign setting books (of one sort or another)… but not just any kind of book. They're all big and expensive.

• The World's Largest Dungeon - $100. 840 page hardback with color maps.
• The Shackled City - $60. 416 page hardback.
• Ptolus - $119 pre-order. 672 page hardback with a CD-ROM containing another 350+ pages of material. Over 1100 pages total.

AEG has, in addition to The Shackled City, several other $50 hardbacks of campaign material for various settings. Just three books for "Warlords of the Accordlands" can set you back $140.

What's weird about Ptolus is that you'll be able to buy it all as eight separate PDFs, divided logically. (All told, the PDFs cost $70.) What I don't get here is, if they've got the material all partitioned up into eight books, why sell it in one huge cost-prohibitive chunk, that's physically unwieldy?

The thing that's bugging me here, about all of these books, and the general trend toward huge $40 and $50 game books, is that I think such high-priced items cater directly to the stalwart core, and they exclude anyone who isn't really serious about it. I'll admit, I'm a cheapskate and I still think $25 is a lot of money to drop on a book. And I live in a low cost-of-living area, so that a $50 game book is a more significant percentage of my income compared to someone living in a big city. For comparison, I can get a ticket to the nicest movie houses in town on a Friday night for $8.00. And that reflects a fairly recent price increase. So where a $50 book might represent a night at the movies (with popcorn and all) with a spouse for some people, that fifty bucks represents two such outings to me.

Considering that you can get TWLD on eBay for less than half of its cover price right now, I'm thinking maybe I'm right about the "driving customers away" thing.

Think about this… you buy Ptolus, and you have over 1,100 pages to absorb. Plus the free 96 page adventure if you pre-ordered soon enough. Plus all of the freebies on the website. I think there is literally more information here than a single gamemaster can realistically absorb and use effectively. I remember buying a bunch of used Forgotten Realms 2nd edition stuff all at once and being rather overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available about the world.

I think big worlds need to be absorbed in small chunks. There's certainly more Forgotten Realms stuff available in just one edition than there is in the Ptolus initial release. But that stuff was developed over years. Gamemasters started with a small chunk and learned it as it came out, in relative bits and pieces.

I know there are people who will buy Ptolus "just because". I'm almost tempted to myself, just to see it. But if TWLD is any indication, I'll wait until I can get it for $60 on eBay.

But this rant isn't about what I can and can't afford. It's about what I perceive as an industry driving fans away by making their products bigger and more expensive until only the most dedicated can afford them, or are willing to risk that much of an investment in one go. And don't think I want companies to charge less for these same books. I think the books they're making are too freakin' huge!

This is why I've spent a lot more money on PDFs in the past three years than I have paper books… there isn't a lot of risk in a $5 product. And I can't find many paper books that I'm willing to risk the money on. Overall, I've gotten my money's worth and spent quite a bit of money at RPGNow in the last three years.

It's an interesting dichotomy, watching the paper publishers get bigger and more expensive, while the PDF end of things has gotten into some really small and inexpensive products. (And I'm not talking about PDF versions of paper books, which in some cases are more expensive than the discounted books on Amazon.com!)

I can understand that there are economic factors that favor larger books over smaller. I remember years ago when Iron Crown Enterprises said they wouldn't publish a book smaller than 128 pages, because it was too hard to make money on books smaller than that. And I can grok that… but I'm trying to figure out why all books now need to be full-color hardbacks at the 250 pages and up mark. Is the profit break-point really that large? Or are the game companies thinking that they can just make bigger and more expensive books and not lose any customers. I know most of them have lost me. And they've lost me on material that they probably could have gotten me to buy if they'd broken it up in to two or three smaller books and sold them individually, spread out over a reasonable length of time.

Many things happening

I've got so much stuff I could talk about lately, and some stuff going on that I can't talk about yet, that I've really avoided blogging for awhile. A bit of a "I have too much to talk about and not enough time to talk about it all" thing, I think. Plus what I really want to talk about is the stuff I can't talk about yet.

The disappointed social organizer

The Wichita Roleplayers had their second Game Day. I was pretty disappointed at the turnout. I even had a no-show GM. Between that and the social meetings not being able to pick up any momentum in nearly two years, and I'm about ready to give up on actively coordinating events of any kind. I'd leave all the web resources in place, but I'm just not getting what I want out of the whole deal. (And that's to network gamers so we can find like-minded gamers to hook up with more easily.) So I've been kind of bummed out over that.

My whole family has been sick during the past week. I missed the first WRP social meeting after Game Day. But that's not such a big deal… there were only two other people who showed up. Unfortunately, they were the two I wanted to talk about Game Day with.

The struggling writer

The other thing I'm struggling with is trying to turn an 8000-word mini-setting magazine article into a 32-page (19,000 word) core book. It's proving harder than I expected… I'm almost tempted to start writing the whole thing from scratch. The need for being concise (keep it under 8000 words) really influenced much of how the article was written… now when I'm trying to get close to 2.5-times that, it's not as easy as just writing more stuff.

I think the big thing is that the article assumes a lot of things about the GM… the GM has to do a lot of work of his own to use the setting. In a setting book, the GM is going to expect a lot more of the work to be done for him.

I think that's where I went wrong… I had this setting I wanted to expand into a bigger book, but I didn't know what that book should look like.

It took me awhile to realize that the article doesn't address creating characters for the setting, or give stats for anything in the setting, and so on. I think I've got a clearer picture of what it is I'm trying to accomplish… to break the Fudge fandom mold and stop leaving all these gaps that expect the GM to be a game designer in order to run a game in the world.

That's probably enough for now. I got to get to work on the "can't-talk-about-it" project so I can get it along far enough that I can talk start talking about it.