Making Yourself as a Character in Fudge
Almost every roleplayer has, from time to time, used their favourite system to make themselves as a character. In general, this is quite difficult to do objectively. Most players have either too low self-esteem - "I'd be useless, I have no skills" - or too high self-esteem - "but one zillion experience points isn't enough to describe all the skills I have."
Why Do It?
Two of the essential elements of roleplaying are playing the role of someone different to yourself, and overcoming obstacles while doing so. Many players consciously choose a character similar to themselves in skills, attitudes and values, changed enough to be interesting. Many others unconsciously choose one making up for self-perceived deficiencies - thus, skinny nerds playing hulking barbarians, or slightly thick players playing sneaky cunning thieves - or they play characters which are a super-skilled version of themselves, such as a first year Chemistry student playing someone with an exotic drug lab. Others, still, game out some more lurid fantasy; thus, the large number of Lesbian Stripper Ninja characters running around. Others, of course, play whichever character comes to hand.
The "self" game falls more generally within the first of the these types of characters. That is, you play a character which is quite similar to yourself, but different in some way. I contend that a person can have a fun experience playing themselves with just two changes: more braveness, and more curiosity. I've long expained roleplaying to newbies in the following terms. You know how when you watch a horror movie, you sit there saying to the screen, "don't go back into the dark old house, don't go back into the dark old house". Well, the adventurer ALWAYS goes back into the dark old house. They are curious, and/or brave. If we just add that curiousity/bravery to the "self" character, then they become hero material, however terrible their skills may be.
In truth, all roleplaying is of an "alternate self." Playing yourself as a character simply makes this explicit, instead of implicit. This is not for everyone, of course. If "Kyle Schuant" gets shot in the groin, I'm bound to take it more personally than if "Grolkk the Destroyer" gets shot in the groin. It may also make me uncomfortable to have "me as a character" do horrendous things "me as a person" would never do; but perhaps this is a good thing.
If the "me as a character" survives for a while, it'll evolve and change, get new skills, quirks, ideas, and experiences, and evolve into a different person to that which I am ever likely to be. For this reason, I find it good to name "me as a character" some variation of my own name: perhaps my middle name, and mother's maiden name, something like that.
Which System?
There are three basic types of character creation systems.
Level-based: this is not very suitable for "self" games. The assumption behind it is that everyone starts off useless and then, if they manage to survive, become a great hero. Typically, they start with nothing, being about as competent as your average 12 year old who's received too many smacks in the head from his mother's wooden spoon over the years.
Point-based: this holds some promise for a "self" game, in that the GM may assign different power levels to the player-characters, one point per year of age, or something like that, and the players make themselves as characters as best they can from that. The danger here is the Self-Esteem Problem, again, where people under or over value their abilities, especially if your gaming group consists of the stereotypical young male nerds, who, despite their brash and noisy exterior, often have sensitive egos. Another difficulty can be the minute granuality of a point-based system. Suppose that Jim and Bob are both in wrestling class together, and usually come out even in matches against each-other, though Jim gets the upper hand slightly more often. Does Jim have 56% skill, and Bob have 50% skill? Can anyone really tell the difference?
Lifepath-based: In this system, the player describes the history and background of the character, and thus justifies the skills their character has, or the GM assigns what seems appropriate. This also holds some promise for a "self" game, in that going through this process helps quantify real-life experiences to put on a character sheet. The low self-esteem players will often find they have more skills than they thought, while the high self-esteem players may be brought down to earth a bit, or at least will tell some entertaining stories of their fantastic skills. Thinking like this leads me to say that Fudge is a good system for a "self" game, focused on the subjective character creation method. Descriptors like "Fair" and "Terrible" can be pretty easily understood by people, and related to their own abilities.
House Rules for Fudge
I like to keep character sheets relatively compact; not more than a dozen skills and attributes altogether. But I also note that in real life, people often have supporting knowledge which backs up some of their skills; that suggests they have heaps of skills. How to compromise between a short character sheet, and the many skills and supporting skills that people often have?
Here are my suggestions.
Base Abilities
Each person may be rated in the following areas. Each of these Base Abilities will be rated, on a simple scale of Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good, Great, Superb.
A rating of Fair will give no particular impression. A rating of Good or Mediocre will be apparent to those who know the person well; one of Great or Poor will be obvious within half an hour of meeting them, seeing them move and speak. One of Superb or Terrible level will, as noted above, be the dominant feature of the person, and almost immediately obvious.
Strength
The pure ability to move weight. This is tested in a gymnasium. To give a rough idea, find out how many complete full push-ups a person can do. If less than ten, that's Poor. If less than 20, that's Mediocre. 21 to 40 is Fair. 40 or more is Good or better. If the person can do 10 or more chin-ups with their full body weight, that's possibly Great Strength.
Agility
A measure of flexibility, quickness of reflexes, balance, and manual dexterity. This is difficult to assess. Anyone regularly performing gymnastics or similar sport will be of Good Agility or better. Being able to perform the splits indicates at least Good Agility, also. Someone who cannot even touch their toes will have a Mediocre Agility at best.
Fitness
The ability to recover from exertion, to push oneself physically, and general resistance to disease and such. This may be tested by a run, jogging at a decent pace until it becomes too uncomfortable to go on. Being able to jog for five minutes only indicates a Poor Fitness; 10 minutes, Mediocre; 20 minutes or so, Fair; 45 minutes, Good; 60 minutes, Great; and more than a couple of hours, since it's approaching marathon performance, is Superb.
Perception
How observant the player is, their ability to notice small details, to pick out patterns and so forth. This may be measured by an IQ test. IQ 70 or less, Poor; 90 or less, Mediocre; 91 to 110, Fair; 111 to 130, Great; 131+ Superb.
Education
Not merely raw years at school, but general knowledge. It's quite possible to find someone with a low Education ability who's an academic; they have a specialised area of knowledge. Contrariwise, it's possible to find a person who has a good general knowledge of the world and sciences, yet who never finished high school. Thus, the general rating.
Confidence
The assertiveness, bravado, and willpower of the person. It is this that will keep the person going when the fitness runs out. Anyone who refuses to perform any of these tests automatically receives a Poor rating in Confidence, and of course, a Poor rating in those tests as well.
Other Considerations
For most people, it's found that though the six Base Abilities vary widely, they may be ranked from best ability, to worst. The ratings are then, from best to worst, Superb, Great, Good, Fair, Mediocre, Poor. Where one Base Ability is higher, another is lower.
There are two additional Base Abilities. These need not be tested separately, since it's been found that they're aspects of the others. These are Speed, which is the average of Strength and Agility, and Toughness, which is the average of Strength, Fitness, and Confidence.
Speed
Speed is the quickness of movement and reaction of the person. To test, rate the running speed per second of the person by means of an 800 meter run (runs of less than this distance will give results too high; runs of greater than this distance require Fitness to be factored in). Each meter per second above or below 5 meters/second, is one level of Speed. Thus, Mediocre Speed is 4 m/sec, Good Speed is 6m/sec, etc. If Speed and Strength are known, the more difficult to assess Agility may be surmised.
Toughness
Toughness is the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, to recover from injuries and so on. Strength affects this because it grants the person physical bulk with which to absorb blows, dilute toxins and so on. Fitness contributes to it because it represents cardiovascular health, and a person with high fitness will be accustomed to recovering from or enduring pain or discomfort (ie, exercise). Confidence contributes to it because this is the ability of the person to mentally persist through difficulties, to "break through the pain barrier," and so on.
In rating the person's abilities, if any question arises as to whether they're Superb, then they're probably not. With a person who is Superb, there can be no doubt as to their ability. Any Superb ability is a dominant feature of the person's character, one which cannot be denied, as examples: the strength of Lou Ferrigno, the agility of Tatiana Grigorieva, the fitness of Robert de Castella, the perception of Sherlock Holmes, the education of Indiana Jones, or the confidence of Robert de Niro in most of his roles. The same can be said with a rating of Terrible: if there's a question, they're not Terrible.
Skills
Limiting Skills
To keep character sheets tight, the most different skills a character may have are six, plus the sum of Perception, Education, and Confidence (where Fair is zero). There is only so much anyone can notice, remember, or be bothered to recall.
If for example a character has Good (+1) Perception, Terrible (-2) Education, and Superb (+3) Confidence, then they could have a maximum of eight (base of 6 +1 -2 +3 = 8) skills. Note that this rule means that if a character has Terrible or worse in those three Attributes, they can have no skills at all! (There really are people like this.)
If, after the game has been running a while, a new skill takes a character beyond this maximum, they must forget one of their old skills. The actual level of the skills is not affected. So Joe Average could have six skills at Terrible, six skills at Fair, six skills at Outstanding, whatever; he could only have six skills, though.
This isn't as bad as it sounds. Your character might not officially have the skill, but still be able to give it a go anyway - they get to use their default skill.
Default And Similar Skills
In this implementation, there are two types of skills, Specialist, and Anyone. Specialist skills are those that you need a teacher to learn; Anyone skills you can teach yourself. The trained skills are in bold on the list below. The difference is in their default.
Anyone skills default to the relevant Base Ability -3. So for example someone with Excellent (+2) Agility would have default Swimming of Mediocre (-1); whereas someone with just Fair (+0) Agility would be a Terrible (-3) Swimmer.
Specialist skills have no default. So if for example someone without Surgery skill tries it -- they don't try it. They simply don't know where to begin. Of course, if they have a similar skill, they may be able to try it anyway.
Similar skills default to each-other at -2. These are skills which are somewhat related or have some overlap in education, for example Chemistry/Biochemistry, Big Guns/Smallarms, Computer Operations/Computer Programming, etc. So if, for example, someone has Superb (+3) Chemistry, they will have Good (+1) Biochemistry as their default. Without any particular effort towards Biochemistry, they use their education, their knowledge of general Chemistry to figure some things out. Of course if they just had Mediocre (-1) Chemistry, then their Biochemistry wouldn't be up to much, being Terrible (-3). Since it is a Specialist skill, they'd be grateful at least to be able to roll, try to scratch up the relevant knowledge from somewhere.
Don't bother writing your Similar Skills in; they will be determined as relevant during play.
A skill with a default worse than Terrible may not be attempted.
The Specialist skills in the skill list are italicized.
What is a Specialist skill, and what an Anyone skill, will vary from campaign to campaign, and place to place and person to person. For example, Computer Operations (as opposed to Programming!) is in the modern developed West an Anyone skill. Anyone can give it a go and do reasonably. But if you take a Kalahari Bushman and show him a computer, for him it's a Specialist skill. But the reverse would apply with regards to Survival (Savannah) skill.
Rating The Base Abilities And Skills
Subjective Method
It's already been described how you might rate the Base Abilities. As to Skills, the following guidelines should apply:
Terrible: The default rating of an Anyone skill for a person with a Fair attribute. "No, of course I don't know what I'm doing."
Poor: Better than useless, but you're still nervous watching him. It's plain he's largely just guessing.
Mediocre: This person is stumbling along, but they'll get there.
Fair: The minimum requireed to use the skill day to day in a profession. They won't be promoted or congratulated on a good job, though.
Good: This person shines on some days, or does fair jobs quickly, etc. They're confident with their work (but don't confuse that with Confidence!).
Great: This person, as soon as you see them doing the job, you know they know what they're doing.
Superb: This is a stand-out guy. If they tell you, "this is how it's done," it doesn't occur to you to doubt them.
Game Balance Method
The alternate method of rating is the one that saves measuring things and risking fragile egos. Arrange the six Base Abilities from best to worst. The best one is Superb, the next Great, then Good, Fair, Mediocre, Poor. Now figure out the other two, Speed and Toughness, from those.
As to skills, assume the Native Language is known to the equivalent of Education; this doesn't take up a skill slot. Now, select two Professional skills (used in your most recent paid profession), two Background skills (learned while growing up and two Hobby skills (stuff you do for fun). Rate the Professional skills as Superb and Great; the Background skills as Good and Fair, and the Hobby skills as Mediocre and Poor.
Those who claim a plethora of skills in support of their Professional skills, generally we can take care of that with the similar skills. For example, someone who has Superb native language, will have Good knowledge of their native language's literature. Someone with Great Surgery, will have Fair First Aid at least.
This method provides not the "real you," but a caricature of you. It has the same relationship to you that your passport photo does. It's probably not very flattering, but it's recognisably you.
Generous GMs may let the players add one or two new and different skills at Mediocre. "If you had the time, money and patience, what might you go and learn about?" This fills out the character a bit, and makes up for the Average Gamer who's a bit useless.
Add in the courage and curiousity, and you've got an adventurer.
