Pyramid Pick
Fudge Expanded Edition RPG
Published by Grey Ghost Press, Inc.
Written by Steffan O'Sullivan
128 pages, $19.95
I thought I was going to have an easy review; after all, surely Fudge must have been reviewed at some point in Pyramid's past. So when the Fudge Expanded Edition came out, I thought, "Hey, I can just run a review saying what's different, take my $50 credit voucher, and spiral into the night with a handful of GURPS books." But, alas, no . . . somehow this book escaped Pyramid's all-seeing eye.
So, from the top:
In its basic form, Fudge is a worldless roleplaying game system, not unlike GURPS or the Hero System. But while these latter systems focus on numerical precision and accuracy, Fudge encourages you to . . . well, fudge it. In Fudge, all attributes, skills, and abilities (called traits) are rated on a word-based scale: Superb, Great, Good, Fair, Mediocre, Poor, and Terrible. Thus you might be a Great Doctor, or a Mediocre Gambler. A dice mechanic generates a step on this continuum from +4 to -4; thus your Great Doctor might roll a -2, resulting in a Fair job, while your Mediocre Gambler may have a phenomenal +4 roll, resulting in a Superb job.
These results are compared to the level needed to succeed; this is generally Fair but can be higher or lower if the task is more or less difficult. And contested actions are easy; two Gamblers would each generate a result and compare them.
This is pretty straightforward so far. But the beauty of Fudge comes from . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 6, 2000
Copyright © 2000 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.