Does System Matter, part VI – FUDGE

Last week I started a Thought Experiment in supers games, looking at what changes a character goes through when converted from one system to another. This is meant to test the validity of most supers games claims that you can use the system to build “any” character or run “any” kind of game. The character in question – Dr. Zachary Zevon, the Indestructible Man - started in Villains and Vigilantes, and now exists in Silver Age Sentinels, HERO, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes and now, thanks to whswhs,

( FUDGE. )

Notes from Brian: This looks like a very solid translation of the character, with minimal loss of fidelity. All the key aspects are clearly listed, with the opening for FUDGE point expenditures to get things like his super-breath tricks.

With a Legendary 2 Mind and Experimental Physics his lowest possible roll is a Good, which is equivalent to normal people doing pretty well. That feels about right. I’m not familiar enough with FUDGE Supers to comment on the damage mechanics, but I’ll trust Mr. Stoddard when he says that the force field will bounce small arms fire and conceivably withstand an anti-tank weapon– that’s good enough to capture the feel of things (assuming we don’t have a circumstance like DC Heroes where people whose fists are as potent as anti-tank weapons grow on trees). The 25 charges tie nearly with the Power scores and Energy points in the other two games, so Zach can still get tired out or overwhelmed – important things to keep the character from being immune to threats. It’s interesting that HERO and DC Heroes don’t have that, where the threat is not time but people having standard access to amounts of force that would break the wall. The more systems we see him in, the more that distinction becomes clear and changes how he would appear in play.

As with V&V, all of the gear is just handwaved away – he’s a genius, he invented it, and it’s secondary to the character concept. I still feel that’s the best way to handle it, with second best being SAS’s “spend some points on having general gear”. Thinking it through, this would be much less viable if one of the other PCs had the power of super-senses, in which case Zach’s scanner would have to be considerably less useful than his teammate’s power. HERO tries to make this less of an issue by charging points for the scanner, but I’d still feel bad if my character’s secondary gear stomped all over someone else’s primary power.

Thanks for the help, Mr. Stoddard. Tomorrow we look at chadu’s Truth & Justice write up.