FUDGE is the Free-form Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine. It's an RPG system that is completely flexible, completely customizable, and free. It has elements that I consider highly important to RPG design and gameplay. The only downside to FUDGE is that it requires a lot of work to build a game around a genre, but you can choose absolutely any genre at all.
FUDGE can be found -- and downloaded for free! -- at Grey Ghost Press, Inc.
If you are totally unfamiliar with FUDGE, some of the discussion below may be difficult to follow, if only because I am using FUDGE terms for game and character elements, and writing from the assumption that you are familiar with the basics of FUDGE. For a quick summary, consult Fudge in a Nutshell, also from Grey Ghost Press.
One way to use FUDGE, and the way that I will probably start with this game, is to convert existing worlds and game systems to the FUDGE system. Why would you do that? Because FUDGE addresses the weaknesses of many other game systems. To whit, FUDGE has:
The last item is an interesting one, as nearly every other game system ties task resolution or skill levels to attribute levels. FUDGE supports this separation with the arguement that skills can be refined without regard to an underlying attribute. I think the separation during game play and character creation is good, but I still want attributes to matter a bit more when determining skills than the core FUDGE rules require. My solution is quite simple. Every skill is related to one of the attributes. When increasing that skill, it costs double (in terms of EP's) if the new skill level will exceed the level of the related attribute.
Given that I play a few game systems, and have done extensive work tweaking some of them, it is only natural to expect that I would consider FUDGEing some of them. I have. The question to FUDGE or not to FUDGE is difficult. Below are several short discussions of whether it makes sense for some of the other games I play.
I will soon put up a set of pages with the results of my conversions, and any other FUDGE resources I create.