Back in November of 2017, Fantasy Flight Games released Genesys. Both Seamus and I wanted a fair shake at reviewing it, and in the process we learned why not to do two-part reviews. Still, a lot of people read it and we continued being excited for the gen
Back in November of 2017, Fantasy Flight Games released Genesys. Both Seamus and I wanted a fair shake at reviewing it, and in the process we learned why not to do two-part reviews. Still, a lot of people read it and we continued being excited for the generic version of the Star Wars RPG that many of us at Cannibal Halfing had spent a fair amount of time playing. Now, nearly three years later, it’s a perfect time to revisit the system. Asmodee, Fantasy Flight’s parent company, has reorganized their RPG development resources. In the near future new Asmodee-owned RPGs will be released from the new Edge Studio imprint, and based on a panel at GenCon 2020 this will include new Genesys material (the IP referenced there was Twilight Imperium). For now, though, the Asmodee RPG pipeline is on pause, at least until the last couple
... show more
Back in November of 2017, Fantasy Flight Games released Genesys. Both Seamus and I wanted a fair shake at reviewing it, and in the process we learned why not to do two-part reviews. Still, a lot of people read it and we continued being excited for the generic version of the Star Wars RPG that many of us at Cannibal Halfing had spent a fair amount of time playing. Now, nearly three years later, it’s a perfect time to revisit the system. Asmodee, Fantasy Flight’s parent company, has reorganized their RPG development resources. In the near future new Asmodee-owned RPGs will be released from the new Edge Studio imprint, and based on a panel at GenCon 2020 this will include new Genesys material (the IP referenced there was Twilight Imperium). For now, though, the Asmodee RPG pipeline is on pause, at least until the last couple Legend of the Five Rings supplements enter distribution. On my personal end, I have finally both played and GMed games in Genesys, which means it’s a good time to give Genesys the In-Depth treatment.
Genesys is a game many people had high hopes for. While the Narrative Dice System fell on its face as the backbone for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, it soared as a Star Wars RPG and brought more fiction-forward resolution mechanics into the mainstream. While years of playing the Star Wars systems (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny) meant that we knew Genesys wasn’t going to be *bad*, there were a lot of questions about how it would work as a generic system, both mechanically and as a product. Thanks to several Genesys supplements and more time with the game, a lot of questions that we asked back in November of 2017 have since been answered. In my opinion, how well Genesys rates depends heavily on whether you view it as a game or a product line.
The Mechanics
Genesys is well known for using the Narrative Dice System, also known as “those god damn fiddly custom dice” (either affectionately or not). The core mechanic uses six different colored dice of three shapes with different mappings of unique symbols. While this sounds overwrought, the basic idea is relatively straightforward: There are three dice for player rolls (Proficiency, Ability, and Boost, a yellow d12, green d10, and blue d6), and then three dice for building the difficulty pool (Challenge, Difficulty, and Setback, a red d12, a purple d10, and a black d6). Each symbol which comes up on the player dice (Advantage, Success) cancels out one of the corresponding symbols on the difficulty dice (Threat, Failure), and the result is however many symbols are left uncancelled. This means that you can have six different results which imply different situations in the fiction, and that’s before you add the ‘crit’ symbols, Triumph (positive, only on Proficiency dice) and Despair (negative, only on Challenge dice).
The basic tradeoff of the Narrative Dice System is simplicity for depth, and at an objective level this is done successfully. Combining Success/Failure, Advantage/Threat, and Triumph/Despair in every die roll makes them significantly more information-rich, and doing so with symbols makes interpreting the results much easier than is possible with alternative multi-axis result systems which use numerical dice (all of these require either multiple colors of dice and/or counting specific results which come up). That said, for the sake of your game you shouldn’t buy these dice. Rolling half a dozen to a dozen dice and then counting symbols which appear two to a face will slow down your game and cause eye strain. Instead, either buy the Genesys dice app or use a free dice roller like D1-C3. They’ll do all the cancelling for you and save time, money, and your eyes.
So you’re making fewer, slower dice rolls to get more narrative richness out of your die results. Does it work? The answer is yes, but the game fails to communicate an assumption about how dice are used which is fairly important. In short, this game is an awkward middle child in a family of dice rolling philosophies. On one hand you have the mechanics-driven task-resolution approach of games like D&D which imply that players should roll for anything their character is attempting that has a chance of failure. On the other hand you have the modifier and procedure driven conflict resolution approach of games like Burning Wheel where each die roll is important and each time one comes up the player should take time to understand the consequences and the options. The Narrative Dice System is designed for the latter, while Genesys the game is the former. When you get into important moments and are poring over your talents looking for every last possible Boost die, then deciding whether or not to spend your Strain or a story point, the system sings. If your GM thinks they should be calling for Perception checks in each new area and then stops to make sure everyone gets to ‘notice an important detail’ for every Advantage rolled, you will want to strangle them in short order. And while you can definitely play Genesys focusing on fewer, weightier dice rolls, the minute you get to any structured time conflict (combat, hacking, social encounters) it becomes clear that the game wasn’t designed in this way. Another big issue with the dice is that the more of them you roll, the swingier it becomes. It’s not just the introduction of more potential for Triumph and Despair (which don’t cancel out, remember). It’s also that because all the dice have blank faces, your results range gets larger. When you’re playing with 100XP characters (typical at character generation) a result of two Successes and a Threat is an interesting twist. When you’re playing with 500XP characters and one of them rolls one Success, seven Threat, a Triumph, and a Despair, I challenge you to make sense of it, especially if it’s not a structured time roll where spending Threat, Despair, or Triumph is outlined for you.
Let’s talk a bit about the most significant change between Genesys and Star Wars: Talents. Talents are one of the character advancement options you can purchase with your experience points, and each one gives a unique ability, ranging from extra strain and wound points to situational bonuses to a permanent attribute boost. Star Wars used a ‘Career’ system with Talent Trees, where purchasing talents in the tree would open up certain talents further down the tree, which were usually more powerful. Optimizers took note of which trees provided the shortest path to ‘Dedication’ (the aforementioned attribute boost) but the Talents along the way were good enough that the optimization decisions weren’t necessarily obvious. Genesys has no Talent Trees, the designers realized that creating enough interesting ones for a generic game simply wasn’t going to happen. They kept a simpler aspect of Careers (the ‘Career Skill’ proficiency system) but for Talents used a pyramid akin to how skills are organized in Fate Core. To get a Tier 2 talent you need at least two Tier 1 talents, to get a Tier 3 talent you need three Tier 1s and two Tier 2s, and so on. As most Star Wars players immediately picked up on, this increased the XP cost of that coveted Dedication from the end of the tree significantly, sometimes on the order of double or triple what it would cost in a relatively compact talent tree. This is absolutely a good thing, as it starts to fix one of several math issues with the character creation and advancement system. In Star Wars, character math was easy: sink every single XP you could spare at character creation into attributes, because you can’t purchase them with XP ingame. Then, race to Dedication to get that next incremental stat boost. Because the dice system favors rolling more dice to rolling upgraded dice, getting your pool as large as possible is almost always a better choice than investing in skills to get yellow dice. With the pyramid, that’s no longer as true. Since Dedication is so much more expensive, it’s no longer a no-brainer to invest all your points into just that one thing. Making the talents/skills decision more difficult solves some but not all of the decision collapse issues in Genesys character creation and advancement; it’s still a strongly optimal decision to boost attributes in character creation to the exception of everything else, and thanks to the rarity of those Dedication talents the consequences of not creating mathematically optimal characters can be quite high. Nonetheless, Genesys is closer to the Shadowrun side of the equation, demanding system mastery, than the D&D side, where a dozen choices are offered and only one or two of them are viable in an optimizing party.
Like several of the previous In-Depth reviews, this comes off as more negative than perhaps I intend. Fact is, I reviewed the game the first time around, while at least trying to be critical, still pretty dewy-eyed that there was going to be a new generic RPG. After taking some time to play and run it, I see more faults, though also appreciate the sort of playstyle these mechanics can encourage. I’ve highly enjoyed both running and playing this game, fiddly dice and all. I am, though, utterly disenchanted with any attempt it’s made to actually be generic.
The Supplements
I’m going to be frank: Genesys has failed as a brand, and Asmodee knows it. The fact that GenCon 2020 coverage refers to “Genesys which powers the Keyforge RPG” states plainly that Genesys has no brand equity and has sparked little interest outside of the IP it’s enabling. And this is a shame, really, because if Genesys continues to be managed this way in the future, neither it nor any of its supplements will matter in the RPG market. I’ve received flak for being critical of the Genesys supplements, but I pretty much call them like I see them: they are templated games with just enough core mechanics removed to require the main book, and minimal expansions of note to the core system (which are then sold for $50, which is laughable). I gave Realms of Terrinoth a pass because a) it was the first and b) D&D has so killed variety in mainstream fantasy gaming that seeing another derivative one felt so inevitable that I had difficulty imagining the alternative. Shadow of the Beanstalk is terminally uninteresting when compared to Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun…or even Heaven Over Mountain, a Space Elevator setting included in Guardians of Order’s Ex Machina and preceding the original Android board game by four years. Secrets of the Crucible is an interesting twist on Burroughs-esque science fantasy, but neither new setting tropes nor the setting implications of the card game itself manage to make a strong mark on the game materials.
This is a shame because the Fantasy Flight/Edge team is clearly capable of making interesting and expansive supplements. The Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide is excellent, providing a combination of rules expansions and GMing tools which really improve the game and make it possible to push into more genres. The Expanded Player’s Guide feels like a supplement which builds on a broader game, while the setting books feel more like they’re reinventing the wheel over again. While there are some interesting mechanical expansions in the setting books, like the crafting rules from Terrinoth, the hacking expansion from Shadow of the Beanstalk, and Æmber from Secrets of the Crucible, there’s no real guidance or work towards making them cohesive or cross-compatible.
I do have two caveats here. I might just be too early? Edge of the Empire, as an example, has eight supplements, and that’s not counting the cross-game setting books like Dawn of Rebellion. This happened over four years, from 2013 to 2017, and the other two Star Wars games were released in that same time period. Genesys development is clearly taking longer than that, and seeing the reorganization of Fantasy Flight behind it does explain why. That said…could I expect that that’s what Genesys is going to look like in the future? Half a dozen Terrinoth supplements and half a dozen Android supplements? I find it unlikely, but that structure could, possibly, resolve the issues I have with the thin-ness of each setting. More non-setting books like the Expanded Player’s Guide would also help, though with the words on everyone’s lips after GenCon 2020 being “Twilight Imperium”, I need not waste much wordcount on what I think the likelihood of that is.
My second caveat is that my expectations are likely a lot higher than many of the Genesys players out there. Most of the people who pushed back on my Shadow of the Beanstalk review just wanted an Android RPG, they didn’t care about how little was done to put it together as long as it worked. And to be fair, I don’t have many valid criticisms about the functionality of these games. These supplements have everything you need to run games in these settings, and everything you need to make use of the mechanical depth of the Narrative Dice System. But when you look around the generic RPG world, it’s hard to rationalize choosing Genesys if what you want is a generic RPG. It goes without saying that GURPS has superior supplements to Genesys; GURPS has superior supplements to nearly every game out there when it comes to broadly applicable material. The Fate Toolkits are all superior to the Genesys supplements; The Fate Horror and Space Toolkits actually made me feel like I had learned new ways to use the system, while the Adversary Toolkit was an extremely effective GMing textbook. These were my comparables, and maybe they shouldn’t have been. But when you look at the Narrative Dice System in a vacuum, it begs to be put to use in a robust, interesting, and fun ecosystem. Instead, we get an Asmodee IP monetization tool.
Generic RPG or House System?
Genesys is a House system for Asmodee, it’s not a good standalone generic RPG in any of the ways that gamers who like generic RPGs would prefer. This is a choice made often by other game studios, it’s not even a bad choice necessarily. It does imply a different product strategy, though, than a generic RPG would. A generic RPG would be built around a combination of settings and mechanical supplements that work together in a broader ecosystem. A house system is built around mechanically similar but independent and distinct games employing different settings and conceits. The difference between the two has been muddied before; while GURPS is clearly a generic RPG and 2d20 by Modiphius is clearly a house system, Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying is another example of a game which straddles the line. Genesys clearly leans further towards house system, though the opportunities to make Terrinoth, Beanstalk, and Crucible mechanically distinct have, with superficial exceptions, not been taken. Still, if Asmodee were to add to those games individually, they could build up into robust and dare I say interesting products. Alternatively, if Asmodee continues making new settings (like Twilight Imperium) but supplements them with more rules expansions like the Expanded Player’s Guide which facilitate mixing, matching, and worldbuilding, then Genesys would shift back toward the Generic RPG side of the equation.
The missing data point among all of this is exactly how long the Genesys product tail is. A lot of the preconceptions about the Genesys product strategy came from the impression we got that Fantasy Flight was going to release Genesys, five or so setting books, and then call it. Given how the setting books look now, that makes for a pretty disappointing system (and with the vast majority of Genesys Foundry titles being small, self-contained supplements, no help there). Now that we see Asmodee reorganizing their RPG capabilities, we both get a backstory as to why Genesys was developed so much more slowly than Star Wars, as well as an indication that the line could still get back on track in the near future.
It’s easier to review a single book than it is to review an entire product line. Genesys as a core book was (and is) a solid execution of a generic Narrative Dice RPG. Genesys as a product line has been more uneven. The setting books accomplished what they set out to do, but broadly failed to provide a value proposition to anyone who wasn’t already a fan of the existing games and properties. The fact that these are solid IPs and do have many fans has also made critique somewhat difficult, as for many if not most people the support of the IP is much more important than the game design itself. Nonetheless, my opinion is solidified, and I’ve been consistently underwhelmed by the design work around Genesys. The core game is a good one; the success of Star Wars is not just built on the license. That success of Star Wars makes the scattershot approach of Genesys even more confounding to me; it’s not like the product managers at Asmodee don’t know how to run an RPG line. As time passes, we may see if the new Edge Studio props Genesys up with the support and product portfolio it deserves. Maybe it’s just me though. There’s a decent Runebound RPG out there, a decent Android RPG, and a decent Keyforge RPG. I just wanted Genesys to become something, to be the generic RPG that we were promised.
Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @LevelOneWonkon Twitter for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with (including the ones needed for this article)! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!
At a Gen Con Online 2020 discussion hosted by Fantasy Flight Games, Sam Stewart the Roleplaying Games Manager for Edge Studios strongly indicated a new a Genesys powered Twilight Imperium RPG.
Genesys, the universal roleplaying game system from Fantasy Flight Games, is starting to land in mailboxes and game stores this week, and sure enough both of us here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming got our hands on a copy! Billed as a ‘toolkit’ that GMs and players can use for any setting they want, we’re naturally excited and curious to see how it shapes up. Does the system work? Is it as adaptive as it claims to be? As universal systems go, where does it land on a scale of Fate Core to GURPS? Will it actually be fun to play? Read on and let’s find out together as I take us chapter by chapter through the book for the first part of CHG’s review!
Part I: The Rules
Chapter 1: Core Mechanics
Genesys uses the Narrative Dice System, which got its (modern) start with Fantasy Flight Games’s various Star Wars RPGs: Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. If you’re experienced with those games then a lot of this is going to be familiar to you, but there are a few important differences, so pay attention 007.
Genesys uses custom dice, which will rub some people the wrong way, but between Star Wars and Legend of the Five Rings there really isn’t any room to be surprised. The good news is that if you’ve played Star Wars, or know someone who has, you can simply use those dice; the symbols are different, but their number, name, and purpose remain the same (but you can leave the Force die at home).
For the uninitiated, you are rolling ‘good’ dice (Ability, Proficiency, Boost) and ‘bad’ dice (Difficulty, Challenge, Setback) at the same time, canceling out various symbols in order to get your result. Good dice provide Successes, which are canceled out by Failures from the bad dice; if, after canceling, you have at least one Success remaining, you have accomplished your goal. The other symbols are what make the system Narrative. Advantage from the good dice can be used to activate abilities or introduce narratively beneficial facts, effects, objects, etc. into the story. Threat from the bad dice can be used by the GM to do the opposite. The two cancel out, but it’s important for newcomers to note that they work independently of Success and Failure. You are going to have successful rolls with leftover Threat, and rolls that failed with leftover Advantage.
The final two symbols are the good Triumph and really quite bad Despair. They each also count as a Success and Failure, respectively, but while those aspects of the symbols can be canceled out nothing can get rid of the Triumph or Despair aspects. These are big, powerful effects; they can be used to activate particularly powerful abilities, but they can also have a huge narrative impact, far beyond what Advantage and Threat have to offer.
So, basically, whenever you want to do something, you figure out what Skill you want to use (more on those later). Each Skill is associated with a Characteristic. Whichever of those is higher grants you that many of the green Ability die. Then you ‘upgrade’ a number of those green Ability dice into the yellow Proficiency die (where Triumph can be found). You might be able to add a few light blue Boost dice for beneficial circumstances or assistants. Then the GM will tell you the Difficulty, which gives you the number of purple Difficulty dice to roll, and tells you if any of those are upgraded into red Challenge dice (where Despair can be found). They might throw in a few black Setback dice for hindering circumstances or interference. Roll, cancel, and then see what happened!
The final facet of the system that forms the basic engine are the Story Points. At the start of every session there are two Pools of these points, one for the players and one for the GM. The GM’s Pool starts with a single Point in it, while the Player’s Pool starts with as many Points as there are players. Story Points can be spent to upgrade dice (but not downgrade them), but they can also be spent narratively to establish a facet of the story. When a Point is spent it leaves its original Pool and goes to the other one, creating a little mini-economy; the book highly encourages GMs and players to spend points liberally to keep that economy healthy.
This is one of the changes from the Star Wars games, where every player rolls a die to determine how many Destiny Points are in the universal Pool and how many of them are usable by the GM or the players. I think this was a good change; while Star Wars has the whole ‘will of the Force’ thing going for it, that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense here. Plus, this guarantees that both sides have the resource available; it isn’t common, but it is possible for a Star Wars session to start with the GM or the players being point-less. While there’s a chance the players could hoard Story Points after the GM spends their starting one (which should be highly discouraged), at least they can’t be tempted right away.
There are is one last rule change that stands out when it comes to upgrading dice with Story Points. When you’re upgrading good dice but there are no Ability dice left to upgrade, you can then add a new Ability die to the pool, as you can in the Star Wars games. However, if there are no Difficulty die left you cannot upgrade the bad dice: you do not add an additional Difficulty die, and have to make do with all those red dice you’ve got on the table.(Whoops! Turns out I got this part wrong. Thanks to reader VerdantSF for pointing that out in the comments. – Ed.)
Chapter 2: Creating Characters
Creating characters is a pretty simple process for Genesys (something future Meet the Party articles will probably benefit from). There are a couple simple steps. First, you determine your character’s background. There’s nothing mechanical here, no sort of lifepath or anything like that, but it’s good to see the book pointing out that you should have an idea of who you’re playing before what you’re playing.
Next, you choose an archetype or species. Now, in this core section there are only four archetypes of human: Average, Laborer, Intellectual and Aristocrat. Species are only going to come up depending on the setting you’re in, and we’ll address that later. The important thing to note is that your chosen Archetype/Species determines your: starting Characteristic scores (Brawn, Agility, Cunning, Intellect, Willpower, Presence), how much XP you start with, and at least two special features that can be bonus skills, extra uses for Story Points, etc. Depending on Archetype/Species your various Characteristics will range from 1-3; the Average Human has everything start at 2, which forms the measuring stick for everything else.
Next, you choose your Career. Careers do two things: they determine which eight Skills count as Career Skills for your character (making them easier to buy ranks in than Non-Career Skills), and then gives you a rank in four of those Career Skills.
There are actually two broad categories of Career: Role-Based and Setting-Based. Role-Based are very broad, and thus pretty much universal: a Scoundrel is a Scoundrel whether they’re a D&D-style rogue, a cyberpunk edgerunner, or a modern day conman. What I really like about what they’ve done here, though, is give you leeway to change some of those Career skills. To keep the Scoundrel as the example, they have the Ranged skill. The book says that if you’re playing a Scoundrel in a setting where it’s relevant you should change that to Ranged [Light] to represent the Scoundrel’s preference for pistols and thrown weapons.
Setting-Based Careers are a little more particular about where you’re using them, and while not all of them have hard requirements many of them have logical ones: you can’t play a Wizard in a setting without magic, nor a Fighter Pilot if there are no Fighters to Pilot. Some of these Careers still have alternate Career Skill options depending on their setting, while some have everything they need no matter what (a Hacker can use their skills anywhere the hacking rules are being used).
Overall, I don’t think the Careers presented here are exhaustive by any means, but they’ll cover most of what any given game will need. For being a universal system I quite like the Role-Based Careers, and the precedent has been set to fiddle around with the skills.
Next you spend the XP you got from your Archetype/Species. Pretty standard fare as the Star Wars players would reckon it: you can’t raise a Skill higher than 2 (which includes the ranks you got from your Career), Non-Career skills cost 5 more XP per rank, this XP is the only way to increase Characteristics aside from a special Talent, and you can’t raise a Characteristic higher than 5. One change is that 5 is actually the highest a Characteristic can ever go, while in Star Wars the cap was 6. It’s thus possible, depending on Archetype/Species, to start with whatever you consider your primary Characteristic to be maxed out. It’s costly, and it’s not usually what I’d usually do personally, but I know that’s going to appeal to some people. The lower cap is also, in my opinion, a better one for game balance. It keeps the dice pools a little more manageable in general, and if either side of the pool reaches 6 or more dice the system . . . starts to shudder a bit. It doesn’t break, not quite yet, but the cracks are there, and that problem’s been avoided here.
There are some Derived Attributes to worry about, like Wounds, but those are pretty straightforward. The next interesting part is determining the character’s Motivation. Star Wars players will perk up a little here, but it’s gotten much more interesting: rather than one or maybe two singular Motivations, Genesys Motivation is split four ways: Desire, Fear, Strength, and Flaw. You’ve got one of each, and I think this is a great roleplaying tool. You’ve got more than one touchstone to tell you how your character might act in a given situation, and the best part is that these are going to be important in-game. You’ll see more why later.
So, buy some gear (you get 500 of whatever the setting’s currency is), determine your appearance and personality, and boom! You’ve got yourself a functioning Genesys character. I like what they kept the same, I like what they’ve changed, and I think they’ve done a good job of giving you the starting tools to create characters for whatever setting you use.
Chapter 3: Skills
There’s not a whole lot to talk about when it comes to Skills, as they’re pretty straightforward in function. You determine what Skill you need to accomplish your goal, you assemble your dice pool, and off you go. But there are a few interesting bits.
The majority of skills are going to be universal in nature, and some are only going to be appropriate for certain settings or for settings that use certain optional rules. Handily, the big-ol’-list-o’-skills includes that information right there with the page number you can find the skill on.
Each skill has a basic explanation, followed by “Your character should use this skill if…” and “Your character should not use this skill if…” bullet point lists. I quite like those lists, as they seem very helpful when determining which skill to use in a given situation.
Skills are organized into five groups: Social, General, Knowledge, Combat, and Magic. Most of them are self-explanatory, but I want to address Knowledge and Magic. The only Knowledge Skill is Knowledge. That’s it. This could be used very broadly or broken up into all sorts of sub-skills, and there’s even a sidebar encouraging that if it’s what you want. But note that it’s going to be up to you to do it: the book doesn’t bother providing examples of different Knowledge Skills, probably because we could fill a GURPS book with the number of potential options. As for Magic, there are actually three Skills: Arcana, Divine, and Primal. I just wanted to tip my hat to the book for creating those different flavors of magic, which will cover a lot of options.
Chapter 4: Talents
Skills are the get-stuff-done part of a character, the basic things they need to accomplish their goals. Talents, then, are what make them truly shine. They are special techniques, unlocked strength, and extra abilities. While those coming to Genesys from the Star Wars games are going to recognize a lot of the Talent names, how to get them is an entirely different crate of gizka.
Talents are divided into five Tiers, each one being progressively more powerful in a general sense but accordingly more expensive and harder to get. Aside from Talents that can be enhanced (you need the Tier 1 Parry Talent in order to buy the Tier 4 Parry [Improved] Talent, for example), there aren’t anything like talent trees that you have to follow. From Tier 1 to Tier 5 the Talents cost 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 XP. Some Star Wars specialization Talent trees let you take a relatively straight shot to what Genesys would call a Tier 5 Talent, while others send you on a winding path that loops around and may have the actually-strongest Talent in the tree be relatively cheap itself if you don’t count everything you had to buy along the way. None of that sometimes arcane tree design here.
However, you can’t just save XP and buy a Tier 5 Talent. Like the skills in Fate Core, Genesys requires that there be some progression. Unlike the Fate skills, however, you can’t build a ‘tower of power’, where you have one of each Tier. When buying Genesys Talents you must explicitly have more Talents in the lower Tier than you’ll have after you get your new one. If you want to have a single Tier 3 Talent then you need two Tier 2 Talents and three Tier 1 Talents. Want to then get a Tier 4 Talent? You’ll another from Tiers 1, 2, and 3 first. Behold, the Talent Pyramid (there’s a handy worksheet in the back of the book)!
This makes getting to Tier 5 Talents pretty difficult, and you’re not going to be able to get many of them. The payoff is pretty good, granted, but it might be frustrating for people who really want that One Cool Thing. On the other hand, I can personally admit to considering some Star Wars character trees simply because they offered me a quicker route to the always-coveted Dedication Talent, the only way to increase Characteristics after character creation. Having no ‘easy’ path to the really good stuff will, I think, keep player heads from getting too far up into the clouds when it comes to building their characters as they focus on what they can get in the meantime.
And, like with Skills, Talents are noted as to which types of settings they’re appropriate for, with most being perfectly fine no matter what setting or rules you’re using.
Chapter 5: Equipment
This chapter is more about the rules concerning equipment than anything else: how to acquire it, how to maintain or repair it, what qualities it might have, that sort of thing. What might be surprising is the actual equipment that’s listed. Here, I can list it all right now: Knife, Revolver, Heavy Jacket, Backpack, Painkiller, Rope. That’s it, that’s all you actually get in the chapter devoted to equipment.
The stated reason for this is that the setting is what really determines what sort of equipment is going to be available, which makes sense to me. In the Settings part of the book, we’ll see that each example setting has its own lists of weapons, armor, and gear. So, rather than presenting a single list of stuff like, say, Savage Worlds, and then figuring out what’s setting-appropriate, what would seem to be the idea here is creating a list (or at least some guidelines) yourself for what’s available once you’ve determined the setting you use. Seems a bit more work for the GM, who can’t list off something like GURPS’s Tech Level and be done with it . . . but on the other hand, it might offer a bit more control.
Anyway, the best thing this chapter does is lay out the building blocks of what goes into an item and how to describe it for the players, which should come in handy when you get to the section of Part III that involves creating your own items!
Chapters 6 and 7: Combat/Social Encounters
I’m not going to get too far into the nitty-gritty of Combat Encounters, as not much of anything has changed and it’s all rather straightforward anyway. Turn order is built of PC and NPC slots, which can be used in whatever order as their respective owners prefer. You get an Action and a Maneuver a turn, and can spend Strain to get another Maneuver. Damage reduction, range bands, healing, etc, are all the same. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and after three rounds of Star Wars I guess it wasn’t broke.
There are some interesting things going on with Social Encounters, though. First, the book discusses the possibility of using structured time for Social Encounters, just like with Combat Encounters. There’s no Initiative slots or anything, but they do bring up the option of using Rounds: everyone in the Encounter can take one turn during a single Round, in whatever order they prefer. While they won’t be needed for small stuff, I think I like these for the bigger, more complicated social events, particularly because they could keep the encounter from being dominated by a single particularly vocal player.
There are some Tables for using Advantage, Triumph, Threat, and Despair in a Social Encounter, which is nice, and many of those uses drew my eye to something really cool: using Motivation in a Social Encounter. Many of these narrative results can be used to discover (or reveal, if things have gone wrong) a facet of a character’s Motivation. Then, if the character who has discovered that facet plays to it (offers money after learning their opponent has the Flaw of Greed, for example) they can add Boost dice to their pool! By the same turn, if a character is playing against a facet of Motivation, whether by accident or because a bad roll has given them a false facet, then Setback dice can be added.
Interestingly, there’s another way to learn Motivation facets: a Perception vs. Cool check. I see a party’s quiet sniper observing the target and then communicating information to the party face that can be used in the negotiations. Overall, it’s a really cool way to bring those personality aspects into play.
Chapter 8: The Game Master
This chapter is pretty short, as it doesn’t have all of the tools that a Game Master will use for setting creation and so on. It has the basic building blocks for a GM: how to work with the dice, how adversaries work, how to prepare before a session, the universal resources at your disposal, and a general fair bit of advice on how to run any given Genesys game.
The chapter actually starts by stating, defining, and giving advice about Rule Zero. GMing veterans know (or at least we think we know) what Rule Zero is, but it’s really nice to see FFG putting it front and center and letting GMs know that they’ve got the power to do what they want with the system.
Newcomers to the system or to RPGs in general are going to find this chapter useful, and I think even some veterans will benefit from going through it as a refresher course.
Part II: Settings
There are six example settings in the book: Fantasy, Steampunk, Weird War, Modern Day, Science Fiction, and Space Opera, with each getting a chapter devoted to it. The second page of Part II is actually a really handy-looking Setting Worksheet that can be used to record information about the setting that a game is going to be using: what sort of tone, the basic genre, what tropes it’s emphasizing, what skills and species will be included, that sort of thing. It looks like a great handout to give to players before they start making their characters, and a great reference tool going forward.
As for the settings themselves . . . they’re not full settings. Now to be fair the book admits as much up front in Part II’s second paragraph, and to be more fair the book as a whole would’ve ended up huge if there were six full settings. It’s still a bit of a letdown, and I wonder if maybe they should’ve had fewer examples that went into more detail.
For instance, the Fantasy setting. There are a few pages talking about the tropes that can be used to make up a fantasy setting, which is good reading. The book then uses FFG’s own Runebound setting as an example of one. We get some new Species: Dwarf, Elf, and Orc, each of which is quite different from the humans in Part I. We get some setting-specific gear. And we get five new setting-specific adversaries.
That’s just not a lot to go off of. Where’s the Halfling, the gnome, that sort of thing? Aside from a piece of armor and a Backpack of Holding there aren’t any magic items to speak of, and five types of bad guys will get old fast. Now, it all looks very well designed! It’s all very useable. But it’s not a setting: it’s a jumping off point to making a fantasy setting of your own.
There’s a point in the book that mentions that supplements for Genesys will likely be full setting books, with almost everything you need to run that setting alongside the core rulebook. So, maybe, while it’s a useful section, Part II should’ve been called ‘Setting Ideas” or something along those lines.
But wait! What about alternate rules like magic and hacking? What about Part III? The rules to make your own archetypes, species, items, skills, talents, settings? Where’s the toolkit? What about the tones!?
Well, you didn’t think I’d hog this game all for myself, did you? That’s right, Aaron’s taking the reins from here, so check out our Genesys Review: Part Two!
Genesys can currently be found in all of the usual places, now including a PDF version.
