Fudge is a universal system for roleplaying games, currently published by Grey Ghost Press and available for free at the Fudge Website. Instead of being a complete game in and of itself and trying to provide rules for everything like Dungeons and Dragons, it doesn't provide any kind of setting, or lists of abilities or anything like that; instead, it simply provides a set of rules with which the players and Game Master can make up their own settings. The rules are also rather flexible, and the rulebook often recommends that you "just fudge it."

"Fudge" originally stood for Freeform Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine, and even though the acronym has since been dropped, it still reflects the system's philosophy. It's also customizable enough that player of Fudge can make their games as simple or complex as they want; really, the intention is that the players enjoy role-play more than "rule-play."

How the rules work

Everything that can describe a character for the purposes of the game is called a "trait." Unlike nearly every other RPG system out there, instead of using a number, Fudge uses one of seven descriptive words to rate attributes and skills in ascending order: Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good, Great, and Superb. Instead of being affixed to any specific "level", they simply describe how well that trait is compared to the average: for instance, if a human character has the "strength" attribute, Fair refers simply to the average strength for humans, Good is a bit stronger than average, and Mediocre is not quite so good. There's also Legendary, which is the best for that trait, and Sub-Terrible, which is the worst.

Fudge uses a custom type of six-sided dice, represented using the notation "dF", as in "4dF" means "four Fudge dice". Two sides have plus signs on them (representing +1), two sides have minus signs on them (representing -1), and the other two are blank (representing zero). If a player wants to do perform an action which requires any skill or luck, he or she (or the Game Master) usually rolls four Fudge dice; they add the results on the dice together (which can be anywhere between 4 and -4), then add it to their trait, and hope it beats the difficulty of the task set by the GM. The intended beauty of using four dice is that getting an "average" result is much more likely (and realistic) than getting an extremely high or low result, whereas with, say, a single twenty-sided die, the odds of getting any given result are the same.

Fudge characters can also have "Gifts" and "Faults", which are positive and negative traits respectively, and can be used to describe a character in ways that don't quite fall on the Terrible-Fair-Superb scale and it wouldn't make sense to use the dice with them (i.e. "terrified of penguins" would be a Fault).

A brief history

It started out as a project in 1992 on the newsgroup rec.games.design by a man named Steffan O'Sullivan. Back then, it was in vogue for RPGs to have names that were acronyms, hence the name FUDGE, for "Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine." "Donated" was replaced with "Do-it-yourself" for Grey Ghost's 1995 edition; by 2000, they decided the forced acronym was a bit silly, so they decided to leave that out.