Review: Genesys Core Rulebook (part 1, initial thoughts)

[Roger Bell_West's autoposter]

This universal RPG system suffers from conflicting goals, but ends up
producing a pleasantly fast-moving game.

If you know me as a gamer at all, you know the thing I always say
when I meet an interesting gaming setting: "why wouldn't I run this in
_GURPS_?" _GURPS_ does pretty much what I want an RPG system to do:
gives me characters with different levels of ability, lets them
succeed or fail at tasks based on those levels of ability, and
otherwise gets out of the way. So why am I even looking at another
system?

Because, much as I love it, sometimes _GURPS_ can be a bit slow in
play, especially when you have a multi-page character sheet and dozens
of traits. More seriously, generating a _GURPS_ character is a skill
in itself; it's very easy, if you don't know the system well, to end
up building a character who has mediocre skill levels in lots of
things but can't do any of them well enough to be useful. And thirdly,
some players (even ones who know me and are prepared to play a _GURPS_
game in the first place) just aren't fond of generating _GURPS_
characters, which can be an involved process – and for the one-shots I
like to run at conventions even I may not feel like putting together
five or six of them. There are patches round many of these problems
(I'm particularly fond of the _GURPS Action_ sub-series) but they're
not perfect solutions.

I've been looking at a variety of lightweight systems recently, with
the aim of finding something to support fast-moving action-based games
from say 1890 to the indeterminate future. _Savage Worlds_ has broken
probabilities, has many powers that don't really work if you aren't
playing on a gridded tactical map, and has a card-based initiative
system which doesn't play well over a video link. _Doctor Who_ (the
new Cubicle 7 version) runs on 2d6 which feels a bit blunt, and while
it does modern television action pretty well that's just a bit too
tightly focussed for what I want. _FATE_ does my head in. I did some
design of my own, to which I may yet return.

And then there's _Genesys_. (And this is where the story, or at least
the review, really starts.) There are certainly some problems, but it
ends up doing many of the things I want.

The system originates in FFG's _Warhammer FRP_ third edition in 2009,
which nobody much seems to have liked (though their Warhammer 40K
games including _Dark Heresy_, published at about the same time and
using a more conventional system, worked pretty well). It then got
somewhat modified in 2012 into the trio of _Star Wars_ games (_Edge of
the Empire_, _Age of Rebellion_, and _Force and Destiny_), and has now
had the _Star Wars_ stripped out to make this iteration in 2017.

What all these have in common is the thing that puts people off: the
silly dice. FFG is a company owned by a private equity fund, and
everything they do carries the taint of maximum revenue extraction to
a much greater extent than do most commercial games. I'll come back to
that later, but the immediate consideration is that for almost
everything one does the game requires custom dice, which can be bought
in the UK in packs at about £1 per die (and, as is standard for FFG,
while you can manage with one pack you'll ideally want two). There is
a table in the rulebook so that you can use your existing d6s, d8s and
d12s, but this would mean a lot of looking up and I've not heard of
anyone actually doing it; and you could mark or sticker existing dice,
but that would similarly be more work than the price of the dice can
really justify. I have bought several sets so that when I run games
face to face again I can simply leave a pool of dice in the middle of
the table and players can grab them as needed. Star Wars RPG dice also
work.

[](IMG_20201003_181819.jpg)

This is a dice pool system: you roll more "good" dice for high stats
and skills and advantageous circumstances, and more "bad" dice for
high difficulty and complications. If you get more success than
failure symbols, you've succeeded in whatever you were doing. But
where this gets interesting, and to some extent justifies the custom
dice, is that you also generate "advantage" and "threat" points, which
lie on a separate dimension from success and failure. A net advantage
gives you some sort of beneficial consequence other than simple
success or failure: you cracked the computer _and_ remained unnoticed,
or you missed the shot _but_ you found a bit of cover or helped set
things up for your mate. Similarly, net threat might mean that you
took longer than expected to pick the lock, or you dropped your weapon
while evading incoming fire.

The most potent dice can also generate triumph and despair, which
produce especially good or especially bad effects – along the
advantage/threat axis, _not_ the success/failure one, though they also
count as success and failure symbols.

There are suggestions for ways to implement advantage and threat
points (some of them directly game-mechanical, some of them more
fuzzy), but they're not exhaustive: once you get a feel for how
significant two advantage points or three threat points should be,
both players and GM may come up with new consequences. In other words,
this is one of those systems which invites the players to participate
in the narrative at an authorial/editorial level as well as just
thinking about what their character would do ("what would be an
interesting way for your success at this task to generate a minor
drawback for you"); but, perhaps because of this scale of advantage
and disadvantage that defines fairly clearly how good or bad the thing
that happens should be, I find it doesn't kick me out of my
character's mindset the way such systems usually do.

This does mean that the act of making a die roll can be a bit more
complicated than in something like GURPS, but at its worst it might
go:

Player: I'll shoot him. Agility 1, Ranged Combat 3, one yellow die and
two green. And I'll aim first so that's one blue.

GM: He's at medium range, so that's three purple, and in partial
cover, so add a black.

and of course as the players get used to this process it becomes much
faster.

(to be continued)

https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2020/10/Genesys_Core_Rulebook__part_1__initial_thoughts_.html