It's easy to state the change - it's very minor in appearance, though fairly major in application. To put it briefly, in my GMing, I've changed the standard Fudge word ladder to:This was posted in 2011 (which shows how long it has been since I looked seriously at Steffan's website).
- Superb
- Great
- Very Good
- Good
- Fair
- Mediocre
- Poor
That's it. No other major changes. Still seven levels, still easy to remember, still easy to know which is better or worse than any other level.
He added a level in between Good and Great (hence the "Very Good" name) and took out Terrible as a level. That may not seem like a lot but to someone who has played and GMed Fudge for a long time...that's a pretty big change. Personally, I think that removing Terrible is a much bigger change to the ladder than adding another "positive" level. taking away Terrible decreases, to me at least, the chances of a truly bad result during task resolution and coupled with the addition of the Very Good level (which I admit isn't the best of names) if really brings Fudge games to a whole new (pardon the pun) level. It adds a bit more granularity to the system, which I think is a welcome change to the game and its rules.
I will likely adopt this ladder in my Fudge-based games, although I think that I would probably rename Very Good into something that sounds better. Excellent, maybe? Play with it, and I think that you might find it interesting, too.