Review: Genesys Core Rulebook (part 5, GM toolkit and conclusions)

[Roger Bell_West's autoposter]

The final major section of the book is the GM's toolkit.

There's a continuing sense of tension here. FFG wants you to buy
the official! setting book and adventures; the authors of this book
want to tell you how you can make your own game the way you want it,
and go into a remarkable level of detail about it.

First we have rule customisation: new skills (how broad they should
be, how to avoid clashing with other skills, how to write the do and
don't examples), how to make a new archetype that's more or less
balanced with the existing ones (spending points out of the initial
customisation allotment to buy things that everyone based on that
template should have), how to make a new talent (including how often
you can use it and what it costs), new equipment including armour and
weapons (there's even a system that spits out a weapon cost based on
what nifty abilities it has), and of course new adversaries from
minions to nemeses. Mostly these are not so much formal design systems
as collections of notes and advice: for example, a minion group with
Soak more than 5 is unusually tough and will be hard to beat, so there
should be some reason for it to be like that.

Going further we get a grab-bag of alternative rules: extra turns for
nemeses (to balance them getting only one action while a PC group gets
one per PC), letting skills float to different stats, ways to
customise weapons and armour, magic (a fairly broad and
improvisational system which I haven't tried), vehicle action
including custom manoeuvres, and cinematic computer hacking.

The next chapter covers adventure construction: tones, story concepts,
and individual encounters. There's not much about how to string
encounters together, though; _Robin's Laws_ and its plot webs would be
a good companion here.

Finally, Tones are orthogonal to settings with their tropes, any of
them theoretically applicable to any setting, and sometimes introduce
some minor new rules: Horror has rules for fear effects (look here if
you want to go Lovecraftian), Intrigue emphasises relationships and
perceptions, Mystery is rather too short (_GURPS Mysteries_ would be
your friend here), Pulp introduces the Cliffhanger rule, Romance and
Drama emphasise the interpersonal, and Superheroes emphasises moral
codes. (Nothing about powers, though; if you wanted people throwing
energy blasts you'd need to build them as Talents or something.)

So that's that. There are more books (the Expanded Player's Guide
looks quite decent; and of course you can buy setting books for
Terrinoth and Android and even gawdelpus Keyforge) but this is a book
that goes out of its way to make it possible for the GM to build stuff
that will more-or-less fit with what's already out there. Seen as a
ready-to-run game it is of course a failure; seen as a generic system,
in the same general space as _GURPS_ or _Fate Core_, it's rather more
interesting, and I'm enjoying running it.

Not profitable, though. FFG fired their entire role-playing
department, and while I think in theory there's now a new publisher
it's not clear that anyone has an editorial vision, and the supply of
Genesys bits (dice, rulebook) has been pretty unreliable.

https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2020/10/Genesys_Core_Rulebook__part_5__GM_toolkit_and_conclusions_.html