Fluff

Date: 02 Mar 08

After working on Zludge for the past few months and generally browsing the indie RPG sites for ideas, I started thinking about a quick, lite-weight rule system for playing "short story" games. That is, it'd be nice to be able to just sit down and whip up a quick, unplanned game to play through and finish in a single session. AnimalBall.com's Instant Game does this very well! But I wanted to use a Zludge-based rule system for gameplay, rather than Animalball's.

So, on a Sunday morning after a light run, S. and I were walking home after breakfast and I said, "We should just go home and play!. So we did. I spent about an hour writing the rule system out on 3/4 of a notebook page. About half that time and space went into converting a 3dF roll system to 3d6 though, since I didn't have my Fudge dice with me. I called the system Fluff, to highlight its light-weight, casual-play nature.

Here's the basic system design:

Roll 3dF, which gives +3 to -3. Adjectives: Best, Better, Good, Okay, Bad, Worse, Worst. (A bit cheesy perhaps, but clear and easy to remember.)

Skills default to Bad. There are no attributes or phases/levels. A new character gets five +1 ranks to spend on skills. A player can spend a rank to specialize (+2) in a subskill. She can also drop one skill by -1 to raise another by +1. (In an ongoing campaign, the GM can periodically give out one or two +1 ranks for players to improve their characters.)

Plot points. The player gets 5 plot points, which she can spend to reroll or tweak a roll, or introduce some coincidence, small world detail, or add some small gadget to their character on the fly. The player earns more plot points by good roleplaying or achieving certain story goals.

Combat is exchange-based. All characters announce what they're doing, and then all roll the appropriate (fighting) skill to do that. Attacked characters roll Defense in response, and the difference gives an idea of how much damage is inflicted. Damage levels include Clipped (-1 for next exchange), Hurt (-1 to rolls), Hurt Real Bad (-2), and Dying (-3/incapacitated).

A first aid check after battle lets a character drop the damage penalty by one. The wound is still there though, and a physical skill failure later might reopen the wound. Players heal about 1 damage level per week.

Equipment is pretty free-form: the player just jots down what their character has. Equipment doesn't usually offer a skill bonus or penalty; it just lets you do something or not.


The context for the first game was a post-apoc world, so we had the following skills (and subskills):
--Fighting (Melee, Ranged, Unarmed, Defense)
--Strength (Athletics, Endurance, Shoving/Lifting, Breaking shit)
--Grace (Speed, Reflexes, Acrobatics, Driving)
--Know-how (Book-learning, mechanics, etc.)
--Perception (Sight, Hearing, Other, Mental)
--Social (Diplomacy, Deception, Intimidate, Gather Info)
--Survival (Tracking, Foraging, First aid, Stealth)

Overall, it worked out pretty well.