Genesys Core After Action Report

I completed a five session run on Genesys Core RPG Saturday night, and wanted to summarize my opinions and experience on the system now that I've had a fair shake at testing it out. Here's my observations:

1. The Symbol Dice

The core conceit of Genesys, like the Star Wars RPGs, is funny symbol dice. These are ultimately easy enough to interpret, but it still takes time....more time than just looking at a set of numbers. The problem mainly stems from density of information; one cluster of dice in a single check will carry a lot of information with that roll, such as:

If you hit or not in combat (or succeeded)

Extra damage done

degree and type of failure/success

If any special success/failure happened (triumph/despair)

If special effects from weapons/tools/abilities trigger

In and of itself, this mechanic works just fine, and in playing through it led to scenarios where the dice helped direct the narrative flow of what was going on to aid in justifying a series of advantage or threats. Indeed, for most events not related to combat or magic casting the mechanic is very straight forward, and the GM can interpret extra levels of success/failure/advantage/threat as he or she sees fit.

Of course, a lot of the game (in fantasy gaming, anyway) does involve combat and magic, which gets to part 2...

2. The Charts

Hidden throughout the book are a metric ton of charts you can use to interpret the dice symbols you may gain during combat, social encounters, magic and other situations. There are about eight pages of these charts, and on the Genesys forums some helpful fans have compiled them in to useful reference charts. FFE hasn't produced a GM screen (yet) for Genesys, and I suspect it's because they wouldn't know where to begin to narrow down key charts on a typical four panel screen; there will be no room for art when they are done!

The charts are what make this game less fun. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way, but what I found was that the following issues arose as a result of the charts:

A. You start referring to the charts as a quick work around to determining what the adventage/threat effects mean. This leads to...

B. Necessarily people recognize that consistency is important so the narrative value of the dice results gets eroded a bit in favor of the obvious best modifiers and results of the dice, which leads to....

C. A narrative die mechanic gets overwhelmed by a sort of rules lawyerism that it can't help, because it provided all the essential rules in the first place.

I started to get really tired of the charts. Not the dice, but the charts. The first few sessions were indeed narratively exciting and indeed even liberating, but by sessions 4-5 we were constantly referencing the charts and all sense of narrative purpose to the dice had been wiped out by the mechanical implementation. YMMV but for me I physically stopped wanting to play the game by this point, and especially no longer wanted to engage with combat. 

3. Magic

You might not use Genesys Core for fantasy gaming, but if you do you will be confronted with a fascinating open-ended magic system that seems to encourage creativity....except when it doesn't (especially in combat). The actual play implementation worked best when the player know what he/she was doing, but there tended to be a lot of variables to account for in any given moment, which tended to slow down the magic caster a bit. Not a huge deal (if everyone was on board) but one player who had not had time to learn the system but was trying to play a mage created a great deal of slow down in this process.

4. Combat Overall

Combat in and of itself, charts aside, was fairly smooth and only slowdown came from the pause, usually between 5 and 30 seconds, while people factored in dice symbols. I never got a good idea of how accurately assess difficulty against the party.....foes tended to be either deliberate pushovers or tough as nails but rarely did a PC seem to be at serious risk of death (until one occasion). This led to an interesting analysis of how the system addresses risk of death, and to be honest it's kind of evasive about the entire subject. 

5. Everything Else

I plan to run Genesys Core again with an SF setting of some sort, and hopefully they will produce an SF themed sourcebook soon. Unfortunately the sourcebooks are pretty clearly going to be focused on the FFE boardgame worlds, such as Realms of Terrinoth, which I found to be far less useful than I would have liked as a resource to design and populate my own setting. That said, if you like Terrinoth for a world setting, the book provides in spades.

I don't think I could run this system for more than a 5 session run at a time, though. The dice mechanic itself is absolutely fine, but those charts....oh man those charts. I could see getting used to it, but sometimes I end up asking myself, "Do I really want to?"

Especially with Cypher System waiting to be played! But more on that soon....after Genesys wrapped, we rolled some Cypher System PCs up and started a game with that ruleset right away. One hint on my feelings about it: Cypher is definitely game aiming to provide lots of busywork for players while catering to the lazy GM. 

Genesys Core - Session Four

I'm four sessions in to a Genesys Core game now, set in a fantasy world borrowing from Realms of Terrinoth and the copious resources over on the FFG forums.

Magic- Session four is demonstrating some interesting new learning hurdles for the game system. Notable among these are the magic system, which is very free-form, but also "menu driven" in that you pick your spell type (Attack, Barrier, Curse, etc.) and then add on to the base effect with a series of options that increase effect and difficulty. It's an interesting system, unless your group is very tired and unfocused....then things can slow down a bit (and yes, it seems like many of us were kind of tired and unfocused last night).

Right now in terms of the magic learning curve I have two players with mages who are picking it up nicely, one player who is behind the curve, and a GM who gets the concept but in reality isn't thinking quickly on his feet at the table when it comes to aiding in these calculations. Yaaaay for me.

The Dice- Interpreting the dice is getting much easier with practice. That said, I realized that I as GM sometimes like to reach for the dice to check an NPC's reaction to something players do. "Is this person stupid enough to believe X? Is this guy clever enough to realize Y?" And in Genesys it is simply quicker and easier to decide that as the GM rather than let fate call upon the dice, since the dice can make the GM spend thirty seconds staring at them, which is narrative flow time lost. I'm not entirely unconvinced this isn't stripping me of a bad habit, actually.

One thing I don't suggest if possible is to mix Star Wars dice with Genesys dice. The new player was using Star Wars dice but it was clear when we gave him Genesys dice this time that it threw him for a loop.

Initiative- the way this game handles initiative is fine, but I feel it needs refinement. Everyone rolls initiative, and the player group can essentially trade off their slots in the sequence to others. How this is done is described poorly in the rules, and has led to moments where I ask who goes next, and no one is sure who wants to go. I think I'm going to implement a "house protocol" where I tell the players they can hand off their initiative if they want, but I will otherwise call on them in sequence.

Battles- Combat remained interesting and dynamic, and we actually ran through roughly three major encounters for the evening, two of which ended up in battle. Gauging foes in Genesys can be a bit of a trick, though. Seven trolls using a doc I got from the forum proved to be a bad idea for a minor encounter, but it was easy to demote six of them from rivals to minions. That said, I find the damage/soak mechanic a bit weird at times. Spells have to get through soak, for example....unless you add an effect that lets them pierce soak. This leads to the counter intuitive result of a guy taking a lot of fire damage with the burn effect but it's okay because he had plat mail on so he only took a bit of it. I could rationalize it as the idea that most of the burn effect was splashed off on his plate, but in practicality I'm not sure getting doused in flames while wearing any medieval armor is a good idea.

There were a few rolls with a lot of density in the combat roll, but the players who are catching on quick were good at parting out the flow of data from the dice into their advantage effects, attacks, crits, threats, etc. This was good.

Overall, despite the muddy moments with the "rules to dice to narrative account of what is happening" process as relates to certain spells and effects attempted, I still was impressed that the system manages to help create a distinct evocation of storytelling that makes the adventure memorable. Very good plus there!

As a total aside, while I am really enjoying a "build from scratch" new world design for recent games, the Realms of Terrinoth book is a blast to read and a great setting. I even caved and picked up Descent 2nd Edition to play with my son, and am debating picking up some of the other board games. Well played, Fantasy Flight.

Genesys Core RPG: Bringing something new and exciting to the table

Saturday we had a smaller group than usual so we decided to try out Genesys Core RPG. The Realms of Terrinoth sourcebook had just arrived in print, providing a substantial boost to the fantasy-related content of the system, and also helping a great deal in demonstrating how the system can work for the fantasy genre.

The core rules are actually pretty decent at this, but leave the impression that you have your work cut out for you if you want to develop more archetypes, species, professions, gear and special talents/abilities for specific settings. That said, I had a a pretty good idea on how I could run a futuristic Cyberpunk setting using pretty much just the rules content in the core for the Modern and SF genres. However, hen it came down to experimenting and learning the rules with a "learn as we play" game session, fantasy is hard to beat.

After a little over an hour of character generation and plot-assembling I worked out a scenario with some encounters that I cribbed from various sources (including copious pregenerated material on the Fantasy Flight Forums where Genesys has a lot of productive fans). I also borrowed some content from the only introductory module out so far (albeit wedded to a new plot).

The result was pretty interesting as well as fun. My three players drafted up a catfolk primalist, a burrow gnome rogue and a rough orc warrior who all worked in the city state of Keranos in a setting I drafted up specially for Genesys, inspired by what I had read of Terrinoth (and whether the region of Keranos fits somewhere in the Genesys default setting or will become its own thing I have yet to decide.....*)

Some role play events mixed with one distinct battle, in which local thugs hired by a rival of the PC's patron to steal the maguffin they were tasked with protecting and delivering. A group of five thugs and one boss thug proved to be a fun fight, albeit less of a threat than I expected. Playing the combat in Genesys Core was an eye opener....the dynamic of a single dice roll that determines level of success/failure as well as levels of threat/advantage and triumph/despair provided a fascinating scenario in which narrative intrusion into what was going on not only was encouraged, it was practically necessary. It was like a game system which not only asked me to do what I tend to do as a GM already when I run games (describe things in a manner that makes it illustrative and fun) but gave me a mechanical reason to do so, and to reward players for assisting in this narrative, too.

The same thing applied with social encounters, or really any skill encounter. For example, a Lore check on the gnome to see what she knew about her people (she's a gentrified gnome) could result in a couple successes (so she knows a thing or two about her heritage), but imagine a success with a threat or two....that could mean she knows something, maybe something that she shouldn't, or her information is not the kind she wants to divulge. A failure with lots of advantage could mean she doesn't know much about her people, but she bluffs her way through it so people think she does.

There are a lot of interesting way to interpret the dice, though in most cases where it is useful (such as in combat) to gain an immediate mechanical/situational benefit the rules have charts on how to proceed in case the GM is at a loss.

The net result of all of this was a moment in play where the gnome, cornered by a foe (the thug leader) such that she couldn't maneuver to disengage, made an attack in desperation and failed to connect but got five advantages (which look like chevrons, or arrows)....that was enough by the rules to suggest she did, in fact, manage to slip between the thug's legs even as he dodged her attack, and then let her sprint down the alley to medium range with a blue advantage (boost) die for her next action against him.

I don't know of many games that let you get all of that out of one die roll, which was initially just a missed attack.

Anyway: I'm really enamoured with the way Genesys Core RPG plays now. We're going to tackle it again this Saturday, and I'll report more as the play experience evolved. I haven't felt this excited for a game system in a while: a system which is decidedly new and unexpected to me, one for which I can't say I have a strong grasp on, but which is challenging in a fascinating and fun way, that I really want to learn through and through in play. Genesys Core has me very, very intrigued.

*As a habitual setting creator who can only run homebrew with any reliability, my money's strongly on "devise my own setting, even if I borrow cool bits from Terrinoth," such as the rune stone mechanic which is quite cool and distinct, as well as the heroic abilities.

Genesys Core's first sourcebook release will be Terrinoth

While perusing the strange but surprisingly informative website over at Fantasy Flight Games I discovered the listing for Genesys Core's first supplement: Terrinoth. So the first sourcebook will focus on the world of the Runebound boardgame, but it sounds interesting and ought to provide all the tools necessary to extract what one needs for fantasy gaming in the Genesys system.

From the Blurb:

"Realms of Terrinoth explores the world of Mennara featured in the Runewars Miniatures Game, Legacy of Dragonholt, Descent, and Runebound. As a fantasy setting, Realms of Terrinoth features many races, weapons, gear, careers and more that can both be found in the world of Mennara as well as expanded to any fantasy setting you create as the Gamemaster. "

Death Bat's Top 5 RPGs of 2017

2017 was a flood year for new RPGs, as well as the year in which many big Kickstarters finally saw fruition. Here's my list, as best as I can manage it....too many games this year to ever play!!!

5. Best New Fantasy RPG of 2017: Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of

This game is gorgeous, the character generation mechanics are impressive and provide an elaborate character for you to play, it has loads of support on the way, and the entire game is a very smartly designed tribute to Robert E. Howard's character and world. Even if I never get to play the game I am very much enjoying reading it. Modiphius is doing very good work here.

Runner Up: Zweihander RPG, the OSR retroclone of classic Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. It's a beast of a tome and the most comprehensive new RPG I bought in 2017.

4. Best Universal RPG System of 2017: Genesys Core RPG

The funny-dice system by Fantasy Flight Games which previously powered the Star Wars RPGs is an amazing design and despite a toolkit approach is really accessible and easy to work with. I definitely look forward to trying this game out in  depth in 2018.

Runner Up: FATE Core Adversary Toolkit is a great resource for FATE GMs who would like more tools for building opponents.

3. Best Comeback: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Boxed Set

The GURPS Kickstarter for Dungeon Fantasy bore delightful fruit, in the form of a meaty boxed set, Companion book, GM Screen and pretty much everything you need to stealthfully teach your players GURPS without them realizing it. DF demonstrated beyond a doubt that GURPS has a bright future, especially in the form of focused "all in one" titles.

Runner Up: Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea 2nd edition released in 2017 and this monstrous tome is a fantastic package and easy way to introduce your players to a dark, alternate-reality swords & sorcery themed version of AD&D 1E.

2. Best Sourcebook: Xanathar's Guide to Everything for Dungeons & Dragons

This was a much needed sourcebook for the D&D 5th edition system, with content split between useful new class options for players and tons of delightful DM content. And not a moment too soon! Everything in this book has already proven invaluable to my gaming table. More like this WotC, please!

Runner Up: World War Cthulhu: Cold War is already one of my favorite tomes of this year even though I've only had a few days to read it. Check it out for a great in-depth take on Cold War spying, Mythos style.

1. Best New Science Fiction RPG of 2017: Cold & Dark RPG

This deep delve in to the dark and horrific blend of science fiction and horror provides a fantastic experience, one which I have many plans for in 2018. Excellent art, a robust setting with plenty of details to customize and make it your own, and an excellent all-in-one book design makes this one of my favorite RPGs of 2018. Thanks again to Modiphius for bringing this amazing game to print.

Runner Up: this was a tough choice, as a lot of SF RPGs were released in 2017. In the end, I had to go with Starfinder, even though it's arguably "science fantasy" and not straight SF. That said, it's streamlined Pathfinder rules, excellent focus and design and beautiful art make it a very distinguished game and one I suspect a lot of people (including myself) will be playing more of in 2018.

0. Game of the Year Award: Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of

I was very tempted to give this to Dungeon Fantasy, which gets runner-up, but the Conan RPG is really a masterpiece, and easily one of the nicest designs and most carefully developed books I've seen. Even if you never play it, this book remains worth owning for any fan of Howard or sword & sorcery in general.

Runner Up: Dungeon Fantasy Boxed Set is an amazing all-in-one purchase and an excellent gateway drug to GURPS proper. Even if you never touch another GURPS product, Dungeon Fantasy will serve you all on its own just fine, though.

Honorable Mention: Star Trek Adventures RPG is, like all other games produced by Modiphius, pure gold. Alas, I have found myself having a hard time "returning" to the Star Trek universe once more after all these years and so it has been neglected.