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.