Fudge Psi-Wars: Vehicle Descriptions

Fudge does not have nor ever will have a system for designing realistic vehicles. What Fudge does have is a system for describing vehicles as characters that can interact with other characters across various scales. Today’s post provides a general overview of vehicles in Fudge and an initial set of guidelines for converting Psi-Wars vehicles to Fudge.

The Fudge 10th Anniversary Edition has a Fudge Vehicles section by Jonathan Benn which provides guidelines for detailing vehicles. I will reference Fudge Vehicles extensively.

Describing Vehicles

Vehicles are simply characters in Fudge. Like other characters, they have attributes, skills, gifts and faults.

Attributes

Vehicle Attributes

Fudge Vehicles defines four attributes for vehicles:

• Durability: the vehicles ability to work properly when damaged
  • analogous to HT
• Size: the size scale of the vehicle
  • a scale rather than an adjective
  • humans are scale 0; each level is double the previous level
  • doubles as Damage Capacity
• Speed: the vehicle’s ability to move quickly
  • a scale rather than an adjective
  • humans are scale 0; each level is 1.2 times the previous level
  • vehicles have separate speed for each type of environment
• Maneuverability: the vehicle’s ability to maneuver quickly
  • also based on environment type

Note that Fudge Vehicles uses size instead of mass for Damage Capacity or uses size as a proxy for mass. This is similar to GURPS Spaceships.

I will discuss scale at greater length in my next post.

I would not use the speed scale for hyperdrive speed. Hyperdrive speed should be its own attribute or gift.

Weapon Attributes

Many vehicles have weapons, and weapons can have their own attributes. The Fudge Fractal is real. Fudge Vehicles defines three attributes for weapons:

• Damage: how dangerous the weapon is
  • an adjective rather than a scale
• Range: the weapon’s maximum effective range
  • either objective or subjective
• Target Size: the size of the target it is designed to hit
  • a scale rather than an adjective
  • doubles as damage scale

The weapon attributes seem reasonable. I would like to integrate vehicular weapons and standard, human sized weapons using scale. I plan to address that in a later post.

Skills

Not all vehicles skills. Animal mounts typically have them, and vehicles with AI controls may have skills too. But even vehicles that don’t have their own skills have skills that the driver, pilot, rider, etc. uses to control the vehicle. When describing a vehicle in Fudge, list the skills that it has innately and the skills necessary to operate it.

Gifts and Faults

Any trait that isn’t an Attribute or Skill is a Gift or Fault. Since we aren’t using Fudge rules as a vehicle design system, we don’t have to worry about Gifts and Faults being equally valuable. Any notable feature can be a Gift or Fault.

That doesn’t mean that vehicles don’t have impactful Gifts and Faults. A spaceship with particularly heavy armor can have a Heavy Armor Gift, and a old speeder bike that always needs maintenance can have a Past its Prime Fault. I will save defining specific traits for a later post.

Conclusion

Fudge doesn’t have a system for designing realistic vehicles, but it does have a simple system for describing them. Fudge Vehicles seems like a reasonable starting point, but it has a few issues we need to address.