Keeping Things Level With “Fudge on the Fly”

I have been revising Budge heavily, because I believe that it needs a massive overhaul. To be precise I am happy that I wrote Budge v1.0, but I know that it is not a playable system. It is the first part of an ongoing design process where what I released was a brain dump. I needed to get everything out of my head in order to take an inventory. Now I can see clearly what works and what should be discarded.

One of the parts that doesn’t work is levels and character advancement. The points system is too complex. The level as a modifier is just bean counting. Neither of these things make play interesting.

Enter Rob Donoghue’s excellent “Fudge on the Fly” article from Fudge Factor! Fans of FATE, Spirit of the Century, The Dresden Files Role Playing Game, and Evil Hat’s many other titles will recognize who Rob is. In case you don’t know who he is though let me say that you want to read his stuff. He has designed some very cool things for Fudge and its derivatives, and he has an insight into games that I find very interesting. Trust me, go read his stuff. You will thank me later.

With “Fudge on the Fly” he gave the Fudge community a way to play Fudge without the need to generate characters beforehand, and without needing pre-determined lists of traits (attributes, skills, aspects, etc.). Players have a limited number of slots that they populate as needed while playing the game. I’ve used it for several games both in-person and on-line, and it works great.

Now one thing that I do like about the levels that I used in Budge was the idea that the players decide what in-game event will level them up. The players might say “When we retrieve the ancient sword of the last true king we level up.” and then the GM has an idea of what the players are interested in and can shape the campaign around those interests.

I combined the design of “Fudge on the Fly” with the levels from Budge and I came up with this:

The way that this idea works is that first level characters are limited to 6 core traits that define what it is that the player wants that character to focus on. You conceive of a gritty soldier type? Then put traits like “Rifle”, “Jungle Warrior”, and “Thousand Yard Stare” in the yellow boxes with the label “1” for the ranks from Fair to Great.

You also get 4 traits for character depth. These are traits that don’t contribute to that core concept that you have for the character, but that give the character a sense of depth. Our soldier might have traits like “Blues Harmonica” and “Horse Rancher” to reflect the things that make the character unique amongst other soldiers. These skills are always Mediocre and may never improve in rank.

When the character levels up the player may shift traits into the orange boxes with the label “2” if they are adjacent to the side of an existing trait or share a corner with an existing trait. Or the player may create a new trait that builds upon the skill that is adjacent to the side or that shares a corner with the new trait.

So if the soldier had the trait “Rifle” at Fair the player could bump the trait to Good by moving it into an adjacent slot for level two, or the player could add the new trait of “Sniper” that builds upon the “Rifle” trait. Any trait that is bumped into a new location allows for other traits to be bumped into the vacant spot, or for a new trait to be created that builds off of the adjacent traits.

At level two we also receive one more character depth trait that can be completely unrelated to any of the other depth traits. It is just there for flavor, and it may never be improved upon.

There is one more trait that the character receives, and this trait is at the level of Poor. It is a negative trait that a player may invoke for challenges that rewards the player with Fudge points. Since the trait ranks are incredibly low the character is likely to fail. This is very similar to the concept of compelling an aspect in FATE (which Fred Hicks also of Evil Hat and all of the previously mentioned titles originally wrote about for Fudge Factor, and you should be reading his stuff as well). These negative traits may shift position with other adjacent negative traits as the character progresses.

As you can see, at every level new slots open up for the player to fill in on the character sheet. Core traits and negative traits are shuffled around or built upon, while depth traits are simply acquired. The levels are acquired when the players reach an in-game event of their choosing, and the GM just has to approve those new traits as they emerge.

I am going to start play testing this design soon, but feel free to comment on it and to suggest changes if you have any. If you have a customized version of “Fudge on the Fly”, or a unique character advancement system share it with us in the comments section below.