A player in my weekly face-to-face game mentioned that they’d hardly played anything other than D&D, and 5e at that. I couldn’t let that stand, so I promised to run something for them after the holidays. That was this past Thursday, and the game I picked was FUDGE.
I chose FUDGE because it has three virtues. First, its flexibility allowed me to create a setting that was space opera; a nice change of pace from the usual fantasy. Second, it’s easy to pick up and play; the player in question already mentioned how much simpler the math is. Finally, and most importantly, the core mechanic is about as not-D&D as you can get while still using dice and not going deep into Forge-esque territory.
For those not in the know, FUDGE is a descendent of GURPS, and like GURPS, eschews the randomness of a single d20 for a bell-curved core mechanic. The result is a very not-swingy game, where your stats and skills are very important. GURPS uses 3d6, but FUDGE uses proprietary dice that have six sides with two marked +, two marked -, and two left blank. You roll 4 (or sometimes 3) dice, add any modifiers, and compare to a target number. Each + adds 1 to your total while each - removes 1. It’s extremely rare to get outside the range from -1 to +1, so if you can’t reach the target number with just your stats and modifiers, you’re probably not going to reach it at all.
This actually makes FUDGE a decent intro to Old School play since you can’t rely on the dice very much; if you’re going to accomplish the difficult thing, you’ve got to find a way to really rack up the bonuses or (better yet) find a way to succeed without the dice entirely.
On the DM’s side of the screen, however, I discovered how much I’ve leaned on random tables and the dice for inspiration. Letting the dice describe elements of setting or situation has been a great boon in introducing elements that are different from my own usual go-to stuff. But when the usual range of a roll is only three possibilities, that doesn’t leave a lot to hang randomness on.
Labradorite Fudge Dice from URWizards.