>What is Genesys? Released in November 2017, Genesys is a pen-and-paper generic RPG system and toolkit by Fantasy Flight Games. It’s central mechanic is the Narrative Dice System, using pools made of specialized dice to create narrative results. fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/genesys/
Pants so tight, they might as well be painted on. Not sure what a game would look like there.
Nicholas Anderson
Roll result interpretation.
The party enters the lost tomb with a thud, A giant bolder that had chased them has sealed the entrance (and dealt some strain). Now the group searches the tomb for clues, treasure, and a way out. One player with the highers cunning makes a perception test of 2y 2g against 1r 2p and gets the following result:
Good news: The party has confirmed this is the Lost Tomb of the Traitor King and that the treasure rumored to be here is a thing. Bad news: The Traitor King, in credit to his foresight, knew the other lords would eventually come for his ill-gotten riches, so he constructed several golem sentries that wander the halls of the tomb and are immensely powerful. All is not lost, though. A small out-of-the-way note etched among the murals mentions there is a failsafe somewhere in the tomb that can deactivate the golems and permit safe passage deeper into the catacombs where the treasure awaits.
Working on a vintage aviation/adventure setup stealing from Warbirds and Skies of Fire for the aerial vibe; airships, dogfights, racing, expeditions across the world!
Am using all the archetypes- average human, laborer, intellectual, aristocrat. Am also stealing the Vanguard from the space opera setting and making them 'The Establishment' political elite archetype with a 3 in willpower instead of 3 presence. Advantages to Knowledge checks or Operating since astrocartography don't apply.
Also for anyone- I need help with the 3 cunning archetype (gangster/entrepreneur?)! I am totally blank on how to kind of label and explain them. What sort of starting skill to give, and what sort of unique talent?
Also was hoping for thoughts on a 3 agility archetype as a sporty type, I was thinking of giving them a rank in coordination and the swift talent?
I haven't made archetypes before so was hoping for input or thoughts from people who have, and was aiming on giving a native 3-1 option for each attribute at least!
>Also for anyone- I need help with the 3 cunning archetype (gangster/entrepreneur?)! You don't need one. The XP pool that comes with every archetype exists for a reason.
Matthew Roberts
Okay, I'm new to making archetypes so I might be walking into the unnecessary. I wanted a 3 cunning archetype to offer to the group, with a skill rank and unique talent or ability that fitted into the idea of a person who was very wily... if they don't need it that's cool, but thought it would be good to have something to offer. The way Intellect has the intellectual, Presence has the aristocrat, and Brawn the laborer for starting points.
Adrian Richardson
You're overthinking things a little. At its core, Genesys chargen is a point-buy system.
Daniel Moore
Of course, that may the lack of sleep talking, so what do I know?
Gundamfag here, I've been looking over talents to steal from Star Wars that would fit for Newtype characters.
So far I have: Prescient Shot (you can sense a target before shooting them, giving a boost die) Uncanny Reactions (you can sense incoming danger, hence a boost die to Vigilance) Uncanny Senses (maybe?) Modified version of Counterstrike (literally just have it be linked to Mobile Suit Melee instead of Lightsaber) Superior Reflexes (+1 Melee defense, since you can sense that shit coming) Sixth Sense (+1 Ranged defense, ditto) Sense Emotions Preemptive Avoidance
Any suggestions? Possible tiers to put 'em all in? Am I doing this all wrong?
You sound like you're on track, though it seems that at its core, a Newtype would just have boosted Vigilance and maybe Perception. Newtype-esque talents are good, but you don't want to encourage making a one-trick pony.
Elijah Moore
That's just it, a lot of Newtype abilities could easily be transferred to other PC roles if you thought logically. Amuro did dodge that one guy trying to slap him, and I'm pretty sure he'd never handled a real sword in his life before he duelled Char at the end of 0079.
But you're probably right. I have been considering drawbacks of being a Newtype to try and compensate.
If I wanted to do weeb fighting magic like in anima, would this ruleset support it?
Hunter Taylor
If you're willing to be narrative about it, nothing's stopping you.
Dominic Rivera
>'The Establishment' political elite archetype with a 3 in willpower instead of 3 presence But Presence is an important social stat. How can you make a political elite if you don't show off their prowess in social encounters?
Mason Parker
Should have made the note I am referring to the dice colors.
Solid.
Jonathan Campbell
>weeb fighting magic like in anima Define?
But probably. There is 'epic melee' rules in the Special rules link in the OP. Made for personal and high tension fights.
Hunter Long
I'm unfamiliar with the specific gimmicks that might be in Anima, but just by maintaining the right tone and assuming the player baselines are at an epic scale compared to banal bits of the world you should be able to do that fine. Actually, now that I say that, you could use the 'No Mere Mortal' and/or 'Puny Minion' rules options, and it's really easy to make a Tone rule variant if you're not satisfied with either of those.
If it's a matter of representing insane maneuvers or sword-magic then you can just encourage the Story Point economy to be more active, and justify the ability upgrades as those mystical techniques. Aside from that, Heroic Abilities in the upcoming fantasy splat will help round out the limit break/super saiyan options.
Henry Jones
Can you play Genesys with normal dice?
Samuel Butler
Tell me more about story point stuff since I haven't gotten around to reading the book.
Cuz the thing I'm focused on is like doing sword magic stuff in an amusing enough fashion since that's what drew me into anima in the first place.
Aiden Richardson
yes but it's kind of a pain to convert the symbols over. There's a table for it
Kayden Turner
Yes but it is a lot of table referencing. I would say use a website or free app to do the rolling.
Cameron Gonzalez
Story Points are one for every person at the table. Both the player and the GM have access to them, You can spend them to upgrade the dice in your pool, downgrade the dice in the oppositions pool, activate one-per-turn special abilities and inject reasonable deus-ex-machina's into the session. Whenever one party uses the Story Point, it is spent and flips over to the others side. So a GM spends a story point to improve an NPCs chances on a roll, and the point is flipped over to the Players control. You're encouraged to spend them frequently and often to create a neat flow of boosts both ways. For an Anima game, you'd probably have a lot of abilities that need story points to work, but by spending them you'd be cutting through wallls with swords, blocking surging rivers with your Ki and kicking people into the Stratosphere and chasing them up running on the clouds. Or something, I don't know anything about Anima.
Parker Torres
Sounds about right for a late game group
Ian Russell
Theoretically, yes. Practically, it's an immense pain and not worth it.
Adam Williams
How does Early game start out? It sounds like you'd want to use a mix of Talents and Magic, but refluff the magic because as it stands it's very much "wizard casting spells". You have a load of options, but a lot of the rules as written steer your magic towards combat usage. Talents have a set cause and effect but at a cost, typically Strain but sometimes Story Point. I'd say perhaps combat techniques and/or fighting styles would make sense to use as Talents that cost Strain, and lock the late game stuff behind higher tier Talents.
The hard part as I imagine it, would be differentiating the power levels because if late game is crazy weaboo fighting magic, is that "once you have Tier 4 talents and 3 level 4 skills everything becomes awesome", or is it "once you've spent so much XP" or is it something else?
Connor Roberts
Early game has your character pretty competent but not super human yet. There's a masquerade element in that like the human world is pretty mundane to the commoner, but deeper in the world there's vastly more powerful entities at play which will become more relevant once the PC's get strong enough to become either like a liability or a potential asset.
The issue is that half of it based on boosting into skill ranks which is partially how the game which is very crunchy communicates your power getting stupid high.
As in anima you can raise your skill ranks to triple digit levels and at certain thresholds you reach Inhuman and Zen levels by buying those respective feats which in game translate being able to do over the top feats. Inhuman is basically super hero type feats, and Zen is more ridiculous stuff like sword fighting while hopping around on raindrops.
As you get to level 10 you should be getting inhuman and then your teens you should be getting into Zen I think? Anyway the other half for certain martial classes getting super strong is just having enough XP to have been able to further invest in their punch magic subsystem .
Angel Robinson
That does sound like it'd be a case of locking Inhuman and Zen traits behind tier 3/4/5 Talents. You'd make your Superhero feats (not exactly breaking the laws of Physics) require Strain to be spent, and then you can be uprooting Trees as an action and jumping really high. For fighting on raindrops, perhaps demand a Story Point be spent at the start of the encounter, and this then retroactively alters your Inhuman Talents. Oh, you jump high? Now you're scaling skyscrapers. That sort of thing, this way your players wouldn't inherently always be fighting at maximum power, but they'd have a level of control over when they do.
Strain is a mechanic in Genesys that functions as a pseudo 'special bar'. Every PC has a Strain Threshold, and you can spend Strain to activate talents, make an extra move in combat, and cast spells. You can also inflict Strain on enemies, and they can inflict it on you. When your Strain reaches its threshold, you faint (or some equivalent for Anima, maybe you've run out of Chi or something). You'd want to use Strain and Story Points in tandem to provide a good flow in your engagements, a ying yang style situation where both ebb and flow as the fights escalate.
Again, I don't know anything about Anima, but it sounds like you'd want to create a decent amount of Talents for what you want to do, and then either create further improved versions of those Talents, or allow Story Points/further Strain expenditure to upgrade those Talents to allow things to get really crazy.
She comes across as one of those special enforcers for some nebulous government entity.
Eli Murphy
I was going to say, I reckon it's some Scottish version of a Kingsman/Statesman.
Jason Young
Or that's just her codename because she's ethnically Scottish.
Easton Hughes
That makes sense too
Isaiah Rodriguez
Dragon guy here so starting to get into the nitty gritty of the setting after I kinda accidently wrote a mythic cycle. But got my five races more or less sketched out just not sure how they should stat wise.
Thomas Long
>If anyone remembers I did a character design a while back for a series called Anvil Chorus. This particular sketch was of Scotland Scarsdale, one of the main characters of the series. A Government agent with a signature BFG. A good friend, Erika asked me to do a turn around of her. I admit that it wasn't on the top of my list of things that I was supposed to get done but after a talk with her a while ago, I decided to wrap this one up. Which reminds me that I need to get Belladaire done at some point.
Also her pistol is totally just RoboCop's Auto9, with a less-crazy compensator extension.
Anyone else feel like Talents in the book are way too over convoluted? And the way proficiency dice is handled is flawed. I point to this article: illuminatinggames.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/star-wars-age-of-rebellion-a-deep-dive-on-dice-probabilities/ >Another odd thing was that it seemed like having high characteristics (Agility, Perception, Brawn, etc.) was a much bigger deal than actually having ranks in skills. A skilled character with a lower characteristic (so, say, a character with Piloting 2 and Agility 2) did not seem to do as well as a character with a slightly higher characteristic (so, no Piloting skill but Agility 3).
So now I have to simplify Talents and on top of that come up with a better way of handling dice. I was thinking instead of upgrading ability dice into proficiency dice, simply add proficiency dice to the pool. Albeit then, skills end up more powerful than characteristics?
Oliver Jones
What exactly is convoluted about the Talents? I'm not a mathematician by any stretch of the word, but; A Proficiency die has success faces on it, 3 Advantage faces, 3 success/advantage faces and 1 Triumph which counts as all 3. An Ability die has 3 success faces, you've got higher odds of getting a success on a Proficiency, which you can only get by levelling skills (or your stat), plus more beneficial combinations and Triumph. Stats are more powerful because they affect more things while the skill only has its set applications. That's why you can only level up stats in Character creation, or once with a tier 5 talent.
Jonathan Gutierrez
>(so, say, a character with Piloting 2 and Agility 2) did not seem to do as well as a character with a slightly higher characteristic (so, no Piloting skill but Agility 3). What that example doesn't consider is that both the premises driving the roll and the application of results are contextually dependent. Generally if you have no training and trying to fly a fighter you're not rolling to excel, the way that trained pilot is, you're rolling not to crash.
Brody Ross
>What exactly is convoluted about the Talents? A Talent just gets rid of setback dice in a social or combat encounter (simple), B Talent removes threat in a very specific instance (getting more convoluted), C Talent spends 3 strain to add 2 advantages if opponent's Willpower is lower than the PC's (getting really fucking convoluted)
I like the simple ones like under A.
Cooper Reed
>What that example doesn't consider is that both the premises driving the roll and the application of results are contextually dependent. Generally if you have no training and trying to fly a fighter you're not rolling to excel, the way that trained pilot is, you're rolling not to crash. Maybe, but in an opposed roll, why does the Agility 3 character with 0 in Piloting have an advantage over the trained Agility 2 Piloting 2 character?
Jose Lopez
Typically they wouldn't. This is a scenario where boosts, setbacks, and pool upgrades would be leveraged by a GM.
>Anyone else feel like Talents in the book are way too over convoluted? No? It's a pyramid: you can't get a higher-tier talent unless you have enough talents below it to hold it up. This is opposed to talents in the original Star Wars RPGs, where they were explicit trees that were tied to your career that you had to work your way down. The talent system in Genesys is far more freeform.
Leo Bailey
Mechanically convoluted. Being freeform or tied to a career has nothing to do with that.
Camden Rodriguez
Have you read the "Create a Talent" section in the back? They give you guidelines for what works as a talent in any given tier. You can see FFG's methodology there.
Austin Morales
Plus, the character with 2/2 is far more likely to roll favorable results with their Proficiency dice, especially since they get access to Triumphs, which are a big fucking deal.
Colton Jones
Read the article. Triumphs are more rare than you think.
Michael Nelson
They're getting Advantage far more reliably, which *is* what makes a bigger long-term difference over the course of a scene, but the initial complaint isn't wrong. Having more dice, Ability or Proficiency, is what makes the larger difference if you just want Success. But then, this is also ignoring certain Talents and Story Points. If the 2/2 pilot spends a Story Point they're going to eliminate any possible upper hand the 3/0 pilot had, and this is before considering that in a straight contest roll they'd potentially get a free pool upgrade for the other pilot not knowing how to actually pilot whatever it is they're in.
Joseph Cox
It's just a means of specialising your character. A lot of games do this. If everything was a broad-strokes solution there'd be very little depth to the system. Mad Inventor isn't exactly a talent I like as it feels a little too much like a curveball with no precedent. Same with "How Convenient!" Stuff like "Can't we talk about this?" is essentially a talent allowing every social-players dream of "I roll diplomacy to stop them attacking me". The Talents feel broad enough where they need to be, and specific enough to quantify certain instances that you wouldn't necessarily want to be winging on the spot, especially if they seem to be something that might frequently occur.
>I was thinking instead of upgrading ability dice into proficiency dice, simply add proficiency dice to the pool. Albeit then, skills end up more powerful than characteristics? Plus, you're inflating the dice pool, which the game is actively trying to avoid. If you're going to use the rule of "just add more proficiency dice," you have to do the same with the Difficulty/Challenge dice in turn as part of an opposed check, since they follow the same rules, and I'm pretty sure people aren't going to like the greater chance of Threat and Despair that comes with it. It feels like a change like that will provide swingier results, which I'm not a fan of.
Can I roll a charm check? >What fine armour you're wearing, my lady. Perchance may I talk you out of it?
Nathan Carter
The huntress glowers at you underneath her mask before trotting off to go speak with the field commander. However, you do note she steals the occasional glance at you during her talk.
Ryder Garcia
Im going to need to know what I am rolling against difficulty wise. I have 2 charm skill and 3 presence.
The huntress, while she keeps her emotions hidden behind her mask, clearly likes what she sees and is certainly thinking about, well, something. Unfortunately, your pass at her did not go unnoticed by the resident Lord Hunter, who is very visibly annoyed that someone like you is making a pass at one of his subordinates, to say nothing of distracting her from her admittedly crucial duties. You're also not certain whether the lord had taken a shine to that huntress. You get the distinct feeling there will be words about this later, and that's putting things extremely mildly.
Hey guys, Got a new release with overhauled Humanity rules and a slightly expanded Bestiary. I'm posting over on the FFG forums also as it's easier to keep a changelog, track critique and whatnot there. >drive.google.com/open?id=1wLbOgreKUd8hrXmXZEPbQAGwTA2l51cj Version 1.1
Carson Green
Update has been made to the pastebin
Landon Bell
So what tips would you give you someone building races/archetypes.
Nathan Brooks
Read the book. There's an entire section that answers this better than I can.
Jace Watson
Make each archetype worth picking. My first archetype I made was a Skeleton for a WW2 game and it had too many drawbacks and not enough benefits beyond not needing to breathe in space. Make the archetypes special ability something thematic and cool. What setting are you building for?
Samuel Thomas
Basically high fantasy, in setting the main source of adventure is harvesting materials from the giant floating corpses of dragons which form sky islands.
Christopher Hughes
In particular there's five races, ones humanity and ill probably just use the everyman archetype for that.
Connor Watson
Eyy it's you again! If you're continuing the Elemental motiff from earlier discussions, perhaps consider giving races a kinship with certain elements, granting Boost die in certain circumstances? As the book says, Races are incredibly broad-strokes things that function to paint each member of a Race as the same person with the same gifts. "Why of course all Dwarfs are tough, and all Orcs are strong!" Consider perhaps tricksy gnomes who play pranks with Wind sprites, they can spend a story point once per session to make an out-of-turn Move Manoeuvre as an Incidental as their Wind-friends spirit them someplace with a mischievous giggle. Keep the abilities fun and flavourful, and any drawbacks flavourful too.
Jonathan Baker
Thsts the plan after some thinking the four 'elder races' are tied heavily to,the elements. Hang on, ill give you guys an example description.
Jayden Hughes
So,the Earth Race the Durna are stout humsnoids between four and five feet in height. Their skin is often the color of their homelands soil which gives people the impression they're quite dirty. They have no hair in its place they have plate like scales that grow on their heads that resemble stone though are organic in nature. In addition male durna typically will have similar scales form 'beards' on their chins and chest over time. Though they mine durna prefer a quiet life and often are focused on an agrarian lifestyle and more peaceful existence. I think they should get maybe an ability to soak a bit of damage but take penalties to things like iniat
Isaac Baker
Why are they tough? Because they're not-dwarf/halflings, or because of the stone scales on their scalps? I'd say a boost on Stealth checks in natural locales sounds appropriate. For a special ability, maybe something like this? Earthen bond: Once per session, a Durna may spend a story point to merge with any body of earth beneath their feet. This is an out-of-turn manoeuvre, and can prevent a Durna from suffering damage as they are hidden within the Earth. They may also converse with the Earth while in this state.
Urban disquiet: While in overly Urban areas with little natural flora or fauna, Durna find themselves anxious and eager to return home. They may be made to add setback die at certain moments until their anxiety can be quelled.
Just as an example.
Joshua Price
I actually really like that and it fits well with how they should play out. If you don't mind of course
Noah Johnson
Not him, but knock yourself out.
What are your other archetype concepts?
Kayden Young
Go for it man
Alexander Lopez
I've really only got the durna and Kyrth in any sort of shape right now. Earth and fire respectively btw. So one race, the Kyrn who were made by the fire goddess are larger than humans, they typically stand between seven and eight feet tall and typical have orange, red, blue or white skin. Both genders sport horns that sweep up over their heads as well as manes that rundown their backs. Kyrn thrive in heat and prefer areas thst most would find uncomfortably hot. Rash and easy to anger they have in the past been portrayed and at times rightly so as violent and tribalistic. But, though first of temper are also intensely passionate. Kyrn metalworking is said to be some of the very finest in the known world.
