FUDGE Starwars v2.0 by Jorge Arredondo

DISCLAIMER

This article is not authorized or supported by West End Games. This conversion is unofficial and has not been reviewed by anybody at West End Games or Lucasfilm, Ltd. Star Wars (R), TM, & (C) by Lucasfilm, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks of Lucasfilm, Ltd., used without authorization, that use isn't intended as a challenge to those trademarks.

ABOUT FUDGE

Fudge is a role-playing game written by Steffan O'Sullivan, with extensive input from the Usenet community of rec.games.design. The basic rules of Fudge are available on the internet at http://www.fudgerpg.com and in book form from Grey Ghost Games, P.O. Box 838, Randolph, MA 02368. They may be used with any gaming genre. While an individual work derived from Fudge may specify certain attributes and skills, many more are possible with Fudge. Every Game Master using Fudge is encouraged to add or ignore any character traits. Anyone who wishes to distribute such material for free may do so - merely include this ABOUT FUDGE notice and disclaimer (complete with Fudge copyright notice). If you wish to charge a fee for such material, other than as an article in a magazine or other periodical, you must first obtain a royalty-free license from the author of Fudge, Steffan O'Sullivan, P.O. Box 465, Plymouth, NH 03264.

DISCLAIMER

The following materials based on Fudge, entitled Fudge: Starwars and Starwars by FUDGE, are created by, made available by, and Copyright (C) 2002 by Jorge Arredondo, and are not necessarily endorsed in any way by Steffan O'Sullivan or any publisher of other Fudge materials. Neither Steffan O'Sullivan nor any publisher of other Fudge materials is in any way responsible for the content of these materials unless specifically credited. Original Fudge materials Copyright (C)1992-1995 by Steffan O'Sullivan, All Rights Reserved.

Introduction

This article covers the topic of the conversion of the old D6 Starwars system property of West End Games. It only covers the conversion of the basic playing rules to the generic system of FUDGE, and so I'm not adding information about the background of the game nor equipment beyond what is strictly necessary to being able to translate the original game to a new system.

Conversion of Difficulty scale

The difficulty scale to actions in Starwars first edition ran from 5 to 30, with steps of 5, unless you were rolling against another character in whose case those opposed actions could be less accurate. In the next editions the difficult tags became little intervals around the original difficult numbers, but for simplicity we'll work just with the classic scale. Besides, an action difficulty was measured by a tag, not in (usually) a precise number which let much space to the storyteller to fine tuning the game; in the end that will help us a lot to do the conversion.

Attributes Conversion

We'll use the same attributes (with the same meaning) that were used in the original Starwars, though we'll treat the skills of Willpower (Starwars second edition) and Stamina (Starwars first edition) after the conversion like FUDGE attributes (extra cost to enhance them, etc).

* Note: only exceptional creatures and droids can have such high attributes, and usually only in their Strength attribute. Thus, having in count that a great part of their strength will be due to a high mass scale, we've supposed a standard Great Strength level, which reduces the mass scale to more reasonable values.

For example: the Rancor, with its awesome Strength of 10D. will have a Great Strength, mass scale +7. If we don't add its Strength to its mass scale to soak damage inflicted to it, the monster "only" has a Defensive Factor of +7. Usual blasters, which have an Ofensive Factor of +4, won't hurt the rancor unless it is hit with a huge relative degree. On the other hand, a character with Superb Strength armed with a vibroaxe (Ofensive Factor +7), before adding relative degrees of success, barely scratches the creature!

Skill Conversion

Though theoretically there is no limit to a skill score in Starwars, almost no player character reached ever skill scores greater than 8D (did you? You munchkin!) ;) Nevertheless, many NPCs in this cinematic game reached epic skill scores, and so the scale of conversion reaches such high levels.

I want also to comment that the three jedi skills (Control, Sense, Alter) are still used as skills, though at first we could use them as attributes. Otherwise, any jedi character who tried to learn about the Force by his/her own, should pay double for an attribute, instead of just double for a skill, which would be excessive, much more expensive than the original idea in West End Games' standard.

Like in the original system, any skill which doesn't have points allocated initially or later through experience, will have the same value that the related attribute. Don't forget that attributes and skills don't use the same scale when converting them to FUDGE!

Scale conversion

In the Starwars rules supplement WEG introduced the concept of scale. Like FUDGE scale, it indicated the difference of mass or power between creatures and vehicles. The conversion is not easy due to the differences between WEG D6 and FUDGE systems, and though the original system covered movement, damage and aiming difficulty, by now we'll only cover the last two subjects, FUDGE style.

In the first case, the scale modifier is added to the damage that the weapons of a vehicle from the bigger scale would make to a target from the smaller scale. Also, if an attacker from the smaller scale attacks a target from the bigger scale, the modifier is added to the damage soaked from that target.

In some cases, the scale modifier is so big that you can't survive such huge amounts of damage, like for example a character trying to survive a direct hit from a turbolaser cannon... death is instantaneous unless s/he burns a big amount of FUDGE points ;)

* Note: if any of the combinations attacker/target is missing, it is because there is no modifier in that case, except in the case of the Deathstar, which can't aim to targets smaller than capital ships.

Equipment Conversion

* Note: a disadvantage is substracting a positive die from the rolls of the character, if he's rolled any, before calculing the total sum of his roll. If he didn't roll any positive die, the disadvantage has no effect.

** Note: wearing both the flak vest and the blast helmet doesn't give us a DF +2; wearing only one of those protects us when the attack that hits us is Good at best, a Great or better attack ignores this light protection. Nevertheless, if you wear both protections we'll only ignore their DF +1 with a successful attack of Superb level or better.

Epic level game

Starwars has always been an heroic game. This means that the character will face often impossible odds, and escape unscathed. SO, I'll try to give this cinematic orientation to the game in two different ways.

• First with the Wounds scale, which is a good indicator of the cinematic or realistic style of play.

  Both PCs and main villains will use the following Wounds scale:

  Scratch	Hurt	Very Hurt	Incapacitated	Near Death
  1, 2	3, 4	5, 6	7, 8	9+
  [] [] []	[] []	[] []	[]	[]

  It's still easy hurting the characters like in the standard FUDGE system, but at least there are two Hurt and Veyr Hurt tick marks, which will allow the characters to withstand more punishment in combat.

  Minor characters will have the following Wounds scale:

  Scratch	Hurt	Very Hurt	Incapacitated	Near Death
  1, 2	3, 4	5, 6	7, 8	9+
  []	[]	[]	[]	[]

  Cannon fodder characters, like for example hordes of battle droids are even easier to defeat. We can use the Ok, Hurt, Out of the Game wound scale for them.

  I also will use the optional rule that adds/substracts Scratch and Hurt wound levels if a character has Poor or worse or Great or better Strength, respectively.

• Finally, the other way to make this game cinematic is giving the players lots of FUDGE points and allow them use such points easily. An obvious use would be reducing the seriousness of their wounds! Nevertheless, don't forget that the main villains can also have many FUDGE points and will use them too if they deem it neccessary!

  My first proposal is giving the characters initially 6 FUDGE points, and use the experience system of FUDGE which gives X FUDGE points at the end of each game session, instead of experience points, which can be saved to use them in desperate later cases or converted to experience points to enhance attributes/skills/etc.

One step beyond: gifts and faults

One possibility of the conversion from Starwars to FUDGE is adding Gifts and Faults to the characters. This is an aditional step with no similar feature on WEG's original edition, but with the conversion it seems very interesting.

My proposal is this: as characters don't have initially gifts nor faults, if we wish to add any of them, we should as well add a fault or gift (respectively) to compensate each one.

Example: Dack Zarkov, the well known mercenary, adds to his charsheet the gift "Favors due", from a few senatorial houses he worked with in the past. To compensate the gift he adds the fault "Enemies" with respect to a few criminal gangs he crossed his path with in some of his missions.

You can also buy Gifts and trade them for extra attribute or skill levels. Having in count that a newly converted character is much better than a fair character in other FUDGE settings, my proposal for the trade is this:

• 1 Gift = 1 extra attribute level
• 1 Gift = 3 extra skill levels

It's also possible compensate a Fault by lowering skills or atributes in the appropriate amount:

• 1 Fault = 1 less attribute level
• 1 Fault = 3 less skill levels

Other rules

With regard to the use of Force points, and pending a small dose of playtesting, I'd rule to give 4 Fudge points (points which can't be turned on experiences points) everytime a character burns a Force point. In the other hand, some Force powers require expending Force points, so jedi characters won't use them as easily as other characters.

Those extra Fudge points can be used in the same round they're earned. like for example to reduce an injury or make sure a blaster shot hits the target, but we must have in count that we'll follow the original Star Wars rules to see if a character will recover the Force point spent depending on the kind of actions he did with those fudge points.

If a jedi has Dark Side points and she uses a Force power, she has an advantage to such rolls (ignores a negative die). For each two Dark Side points, she has a +1, and so on. Like in the original system, the dark side seduces a jedi with quicker power...

Talking now about about roll modifiers for the Force skills, and in general any modifier you want to use according to the original rules of Star Wars, I've designed this table that simplifies the translation:

This way, if the base difficulty of a jedi power was Easy, with a Relationship modifier of +7 (approximate total of +17), in Fudge it would become a Fair+1, that is, Good.

The example is more clear when using Force powers, which are almost always modified by Relationship with the target and Proximity with it. Using the same table we have the following two:

For example: a human jedi tries to read the mind of a suspicious alien he's found in the scene of an attack. As the alien resists the attemp using its attribute of Perception, the base difficulty becomes that roll, for example Fair, modified by Proximity (in line of sight, +0) and Relationship (complete strangers and not of the same species, +5), which makes the difficulty become Legendary second level...

Let's notice as we've seen in the example, that some jedi powers generate huge difficulty levels, something which this translation does as well.

Optional rules

After a healthy dose of playtesting I've found some weak points in this conversion, and also problems that arise time and again. I've solved them in the following ways:

• If a jedi uses the Battle sense power, s/he adds Control to his lightsaber damage and Sense to its lightsaber skill, besides other advantages. In Fudge we'll add a single modifier based upon the following table:

  Jedi skill level	Modifier
  Terrible	-
  Poor	-
  Mediocre	-
  Fair	-
  Good	+1
  Great	+2
  Superb	+3
  Legendary	+4

  We can see that experienced jedi can get huge modifiers to their rolls. Thus, at legendary levels of swordmanship, it's a good option for them to attack with multiple actions (reducing their skill by a -1 for each extra attack) to mow down hordes of battle droids or other cannon fodder foes.

  Example: a jedi with Great Control, Sense and Lightsaber skills, after entering into the jedi battle trance, would add +2 to his basic lightsaber damage (increasing it from OF +4 to OF +6!!) and another +2 to his lightsaber skill (increasing it to Legendary).

• I've always used a single defense roll when jedi use they lightsabers to block ranged attacks (in melee fights it might be better rolling for each attack). With the first option, if a character rolls a good defense, he can keep it active without rolling again, but the price to avoid rolling each round would be a -1 penalty to other rolls made during the combat. However, he can roll again and thus lose the previous defense if a well placed attack was good enough to hit him even with the good defense rolled previously; if the new defense is better he can again keep it, if it is not he can keep rolling till he gets something worth the effort.

  Example: the character we used in the previous example rolls a +1 in the dice and keeps the total value of Legendary+1 as his active defense. After 4 rounds of deflecting blaster shots from a horde of battle droids, he reaches them and can attack with a penalty of -1 (reducing it to Superb) but keeping his awesome Legendary+1 defense. If a mayor villain hits him in this moment with for example a melee blow he can break his defense and hope to roll better than a +1 to increase his previous defense to something good enough to avoid the blow.

• To avoid jedi using powers like eating popcorns, hand a counter of any type (poker tokens, Chessex crystal stones, dried beans, whatever) anytime they use a Force power "in the same scene" (that will have to be evaluated by yourself, the gamemaster). As soon as he gathers enough counters, make him roll Control against a fixed difficulty as shown in the following table; if the character doesn't roll high enough use the degree of failure as a damage factor in the wound scale but as a fatigue modifier. Powers that are kept active are only rolled once, though.

  Counters gathered	Fatigue roll
  1,2	Fair
  3,4	Good
  5,6	Great
  7,8	Superb
  9+	Legendary

This option is designed mainly to avoid jedi characters from overusing their powers. It also will help to avoid hundred of rolls to try some uses, forcing them to use their minds as well.

• Combined fire: if more than one character combine their fire against a foe, they'll make a single roll using their average skill level with a modifier due to the extra number of shots:

  Shooters	Modifiert to attack
  2-3	+1
  4-7	+2
  8-15	+3
  16-31	+4
  ...	...

• Force skills simplification: use only the three basic skills (Control, Sense and Alter); any time you need to roll with combined uses of two or more of them, use the lowest level of the involved skills to make a single roll which will evaluate the global success of the attempt.

  With this simplification jedi characters won't have to spend points for 7 skills, only for 3. As without a master these skills should require twice as much experience to grow, it will be much less expansive this way.

  Example: a jedi with Great Control and Fair Sense tries to enter into a battle trance; as it is a power which combines Control and Sense he'd make a single roll to see if he succeeds using Sense, which has a Fair level.

• Less powered lightsabers: I noticed too late that in WEG original system jedis only added to the lightsaber damage their Control skill and there was nothing like the degree of success of Fudge added here as well. In my first conversion you added both a modifier for your Control and another for your Sense skills (as long as you did hit with a +2 rolled degree or better), so you had two different sources of damage bonuses. To make the lightsabers a bit less powered, add no Control modifier to the weapon damage but keep the Sense modifier to their Lightsaber Combat skill.

  Alternatively, use the Control modifier as a maximum to the extra damage earned by the Sense power. This way you balance a bit more having a better Control level in combat, instead of having none.

  Example: a jedi with Great Lightsaber skill and Great Sense would add 2 levels to that skill when in jedi combat trance. If the same jedi had only Good Control, reduce 1 point the maximum damage he'll inflict with his lightsaber (a +1 bonus instead of a +2) when he hits someone with a success degree of +2 or better, but don't reduce the total skill level with which he hit.

• Force pushing things: I can't remember seeing jedi move large objects with the Force, either in the middle of a fight or just quickly. They usually push people, get items (lightsabers, blasters), move levers, etc, but don't stop swoops in thin air or throw freigthers to their enemies (no matter how much they might like that!). In short, make much harder moving large masses around if done quickly or in stressful situations (-2 to the appropriate roll), and even harder if those objects are moving! (another -1). Don't forget that if those objects are vehicles, besides their raw mass you have to keep in mind the power with which they move...

• Maiming people with ligthsabers: having in count the few situations in which it can be useful (why not incapacitating a foe instead?) request a rolled result of +2, also high enough to hit and with a success degree of at least +2, to severe a member. To disallow finishing combats too quickly, request a rolled result of +3 for a killing blow also with a success degree of at least +2 (heads off!). If you don't reach the rolled score but roll high enough to hit, you just hit but not where you intended.

• Limiting fudge points: even for a cinematic game, keeping 17 Fudge points because you don't need one or because you don't bother to buy skills seems too much. Set a limit of 10 Fudge Points for the characters and let them burn them as partial XP to enhance already high skills.

  Example: a character with 10 Fudge points and a Great skill would need 8 experience points to become Superb, so the character would need 16 Fudge points to increase it a level. The character could burn 6 Fudge points, get 3 XP for that skill and still have 4 Fudge points just in case. Later with time the character could get more Fudge points to finish the upgrade.

  Aditionally, I think the amount of Fudge points with whom you reward your players should be limited according to their boldness, measured by the kind of charactes in question. If a character doesn't run risks at all in this inherently cinematic game, he shouldn't get as many Fudge points as his mates. This doesn't mean they should all look for trouble anytime they can, because taking risks doesn't imply fighting, necessarily.

  As said, if an specific character is a quiet guy, or just unable physically to undertake bold actions (a 3PO, maybe), probably it would be unfair penalizing him for playing his role.

Five Point Starwars

In this variant of the conversion, we'll create the characters directly with Fudge rules instead of creating them first with WEG's original system and translating them to Fudge later.

For this goal we'll use a part of the original rules of Five Point Fudge from Steffan O'Sullivan. We'll use the skill groups of WEG as skill groups in Five Point FUDGE, and thus the players will buy skills in those groups as true Fudge skills from the start.

Let's remember that the six skill groups in WEG's system were Dexterity, Perception, Knowledges, Strength, Mechanical and Technical. Those are 6 groups when in Five Point Fudge we have 8. Anyway (and depending in the actual edition of WEG rules you used, the first or the more complete second one), the number of final skills is similar (around 150).

Note: to see the distribution of skills given by Five Point Fudge you can just download that article (which is very useful for many Fudge variants) and see what you can get for how many points.

Likewise we have to keep in count the jedi skills, which will have its own group where we'll include related skills, like Lightsaber, etc.

In this variant the three classic Force skills (Control, Sense, Alter) which were combined in rolls to get some effects or powers, will get simplified in a final skill for each combination of them (only 7), which are included in the following table of jedi skills:

When a roll for a Force skill is called, we'll use the higher ease factor of the base Force skills involved (Control, Sense and/or Alter) and we'll modify it with all the modifiers used (Relationship and/or Proximity). This way with a single roll a jedi can check a power success or failure instead of slowing down the pace of the game with two or three.

Nevertheless, to control the new skills in a logical way, a character with Force skills can't have combined skills at a higher level that any of the base skills involved.

Example: if I have Good Control and Fair Sense I can't have a Good or better Control+Sense, only a Fair Control+Sense.

Example characters

Now I'll list a dew example characters ready to use for your games. For now only a few droid foes.

Baktoid Combat Automata B1 Series

Atributes: Strength Mediocre, Dexterity Poor, Knowledge Terrible

Skills: Blasters Poor (ODF +3), Melee Mediocre, Dodge Poor

Health levels: Ok, Damaged, Out of Order.

Special: no armor, Initiative -1.

Baktoid Combat Automata B2 Series

Atributes: Strength Fair, Dexterity Mediocre, Knowledge Poor

Skills: Blasters Mediocre (ODF +3), Melee Mediocre, Dodge Mediocre

Health levels: Ok, Damaged, Out of Order.

Special: light armor DDF +1

Destroyer droid, Droideka series

Atributes: Strength Good, Dexterity Fair, Knowledge Terrible

Skills: Blasters Great/Fair/Mediocre (ODF +4), Melee Great/Fair/Mediocre, Dodge Poor

Health levels: Ok, Damaged, Out of Order.

Special: light armor DDF +1, shields DDF +3 (soaks 30 points of damage until recharging), Initiative -1, Blaster barrage (Blasters: Good / Good / Good / Good / Mediocre / Terrible or Fair / Fair / Fair / Fair / Fair / Poor / Terrible).

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Jorge Arredondo
Last update: 02/October/2006