I don't use anything above Legendary myself, but if I did, I'd stick with the numbers. I understand your concern, but to try to come up with a further 14 adjectives (for +6 to +19) would be no small challenge. And even if you could do so convincingly, the time it would take players to look up what each value "meant" (numerically) would be an even greater disconnect in my opinion.

Mind you, I'm happy for my players to use numbers if they want.

Oh, I wouldn't try to come up with more adjectives.  You're right, that way leads to madness, heh.  I'm just wondering about ways to further isolate the words from the numbers.

*shrug*

Maximizing results at Legendary works too, though I usually add a Perfect after it if that happens. Rolls above Perfect are simply ignored, or in an opposed situation used to apply penalties to your opponent.

I squeezed Amazing in between Superb and Legendary and then added Beyond Legendary to the top.

I then cap all results at Beyond Legendary. 

My players still claim to have rolled Beyond Beyond Legendary though. 

Capping skill levels at Superb helps to stop the going over. Lowering difficulties rather than adding to skill levels also helps keep the results from going over the top.

Phill

One issue that cropped up with my group was the viability of the Fudge adjective ladder and I guess the group was split roughly 50/50 on the like / dislike scale.

The Yay camp (of which I'm one) argue, as iamtim postulated in his opening post, that adjectives give a clear indication to everyone of the capabilities of their character, and the Relative Degree an idea of how well they achieve or fail at something.

The Nay camp contend that when it comes to combat (in particular), numbers are the factors that we use to determine outcomes, so why worry about adjectives at all? They have a point.

To settle the matter, I'm happy for folks to use whichever method they prefer. Personally I tend to use a blend of both: I instinctively translate abilities / skills from their adjective to a numerical value, but declare Relative Degrees numerically and using an adjective, i.e. "So that's a Relative Degree of 3, which is Superb! You shoot the Big Bad in the head." Etc., etc.

Basically I think the adjective ladder's success depends on how much everyone buys into it (as well as how it is sold)?

I will agree that Legendary plus is usually still Legendary for me. The characters skills and the scale of the game in general, should limit how often someone is rolling Legendary+ though, especially as a player character. Probability wise, the Legendary + end of the curve makes differences there so tiny that statistically the +1 shouldnt' even be worth mentioning. (YMMV, of course, the math of Fudge is not my strong suit).

One argument for the adjective ladder, is that playing diceless or partially diceless (not rolling for every skill use for example) works very well when you are pitting your Great lockpicking ability against a Mediocre lock. That being said, I generally am flexible with players as long as they'll be flexible with me

Here's something I've been thinking about with regards to this topic, and maybe this is another thread in and of itself: what if we used 3dF instead of 4dF?

Robbie wrote:

The Nay camp contend that when it comes to combat (in particular), numbers are the factors that we use to determine outcomes, so why worry about adjectives at all? They have a point.

It was for reasons like this that I stripped the numbers out of my build - Phudge.

Your experience may be different but my players that never used adjectives because the numbers were right there adapted with no fuss and now my games are adjective only.

Phill

iamtim wrote:

Here's something I've been thinking about with regards to this topic, and maybe this is another thread in and of itself: what if we used 3dF instead of 4dF?

I tried 3dF in my early days.

I found that, as I wanted an all plusses or all minuses roll to be special (and players treat them that way regardless of the rules) it didn't leave enough room to move in the results spread.

In the end adding the extra top end adjectives solved the issue that I was trying to solve with 3dF.

Phill