VG Fudge is “Very Good Fudge” by Steffan O’Sullivan

In 2011 Steffan O’Sullivan, the author of Fudge, introduced Very Good Fudge (VG Fudge). This is simply Fudge with a “Very Good” level inserted between Good and Great, and no Terrible rating.

The rational for this change is to increase the relative effectiveness of “Superb” characters relative to “Good” characters. Fair enough really. The standard Fudge ladder doesn’t have many positive levels, particularly when compared to Fate.

Steffan wanted to retain only seven named levels in the ladder so dropped the lowest negative level, i.e. “Terrible”. The logic being that few characters have “Terrible” attributes or skills anyway.

Steffan’s page on Very Good (VG) Fudge doesn’t give the numeric values of the new ladder. Luckily some of his character sheets include them e.g. Musketeers in VG Fudge. “Good” is still +1. “Very Good” is +2. “Great” goes to +3 and “Superb” goes to +4.

Suggestions appreciated

What do you think about “Very good” as an adjective in the ladder? Got any better suggestions? Is “Excellent” intuitive to you?

I agree with Christopher Helton, in his Dorkland post on VG Fudge, that the new level ‘Very Good’ “isn’t the best of names”. Christopher suggests “Excellent” instead but I’m not sure the progression “Good” to “Excellent” to “Great” is intuitive. Or perhaps that is just me.

Number1 Adjective EP Cost2 Default
+4 Superb 12
+3 Great 8
+2 Very Good 4
+1 Good 2
0 Fair 1 Attributes
-1 Mediocre 1
-2 Poor 1 Skills

Notes
(1) The numeric values of the new ladder are from Steffan’s VG Fudge character sheets e.g. Musketeers.

(2) EP Cost is the number of experience points to raise skills to that level. Also from the VG Fudge character sheets.

4 thoughts on “VG Fudge is “Very Good Fudge” by Steffan O’Sullivan”

  1. When in doubt, defer to Orwell: Good, Plusgood, Doubleplusgood.

    Incidentally, he too rated ‘great’ as less than ‘excellent’, mapping them to Plusgood and Doubleplusgood respectively.

    Reply
  2. Yes Excellent is a good (very good 😉 ) option.
    I was wondering how this new level map int the cost of skills in objective character creation chart:

    traditional chart is:

    Easy Most Hard Very Hard
    Terrible -2 -1 0 1
    Poor -1 0 1 2
    Mediocre 0 1 2 3
    Fair 1 2 3 4
    Good 2 3 4 5
    Great 3 4 5 6
    Superb 4 5 6 7

    … should become maybe … :

    Easy Most Hard Very Hard
    Poor -1 0 1 2
    Mediocre 0 1 2 3
    Fair 1 2 3 4
    Good 2 3 4 5
    Very Good 3 4 5 6
    Great 4 5 6 7
    Superb 5 6 7 8

    What do you think?

    Reply

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