Off the Shelf: Genesys

If you play the Edge Studio Star Wars game, you typically play Genesys. Star Wars is the entry point for this game and provides setting-neutral support for its unique dicing system. For Star Wars, you play Star Wars. For everything else, you play Genesys. This system transplants the cinematic system used in the Star Wars game to other genres, allowing you to use it for anything you can imagine.

These two are sister games, same rules, different dice, and less Star Wars.

This is "Movie: The RPG," the game. Any Hollywood movie from 1920 to about 2019 can be recreated with this system, and it works better than many of today's narrative and storytelling games since the dice leave "what happens" up to you, instead of "telling you what happens" through the rules. I put an end dat of about 2010 on this simulation system since Hollywood has changed so much in the 2020-2026 era that filmmaking is practically unrecognizable and alien compared to earlier times, due to streaming and the collapse of the theater model.

Genesys feels like a forgotten system at this point, with Cypher System feeling like it replaced it (and Cypher System fading), and these days, Daggerheart is the RPG darling of the narrative crowd. This was always in the same sort of narrative simulation systems, such as Cypher System, FATE, Savage Worlds, and other generic systems.

I bounced off Cypher System many times before I finally learned it. It is a good system, but a part of me preferred Genesys, since the dice in Genesys are more solo-friendly than Cypher's GM-driven narrative model, which is honestly better with other people. Daggerheart, I have, but never got into, partially because I have Nimble, which does everything I need for superheroic fantasy.

What I like about Genesys is that you are playing with oracle dice, there is no narrative control system, and you do not need to drop out of character to reference narrative rules and determine outcomes. There are no "hope and fear mechanics." I am not dropping out of character to accept a GM Intrusion (or trigger a Player Intrusion), tripping bennies, nor am I dropping out of character to create a situational aspect.

There is a pair of "story pools" for the GM and players, with each player getting one point and the GM getting one point. When a point is used by either side, it flips to the other. These are mainly used to upgrade dice (positive for players, negative for enemies), to activate talents, or to affect luck and slightly change the narrative (we find a crashed cache of survival gear).

The dice roll tells me "what happens in the world," and I can stay in character to make it happen, or suffer the consequences. It is simple, straightforward, and keeps the action in the "mind space" of the game and in-character" situation.

This is a classic, fun, and elegant system that relies on special dice, and it is the best "special dice" system out there. The pool mechanics are limited, and enforce a currency that flips between the players and the GM.

Weaknesses? Some people get tired of constantly interpreting the special dice symbols. The game does have a fatigue to it if you are constantly rolling the dice for every little thing, and having to look at charts, cancel symbols, and interpret the remaining pool with every single roll. I recommend that dice rolls in this game be used for the macro-level actions: one roll to sneak across the town, avoid guards, and stay out of trouble. Do not roll for every city block, and every action without consequence!

In many cases, just do not roll; let the character's skills and abilities grant automatic success, and only roll when it means something, when there are consequences for failure, or when the path forward is uncertain and potentially dangerous.

Landing your starship at a starport in normal circumstances? No roll needed; that is a routine action and should be covered by your normal training and ability as a pilot. If there were a situation that made it difficult, such as enemy fire or severe weather, roll. But - only if you need to! If the bad weather can't force anything to meaningfully change, then why roll?

"Just to see" is not really a good enough reason.

If there are others being chased by stormtroopers, and you need to stick the landing on the first attempt, or else that group will be stuck down there, playing a desperate defensive last stand, then, yes, roll. If the bad weather just means a sloppy landing, or landing in a far-off, clear spot where no roll is needed, then don't roll. Why? Does it matter?

Before you roll, think of the dice as the director of the scene "on the set" wanting to film "the best movie possible." Does the scene have conflict? Is there an uncertain outcome? Does failure have consequences? Is the scene interesting enough to even film?

If the scene is a nothingburger, assume success and move on to the next scene that the audience does want to see. Why waste film on filler? Why waste a die roll on the same?

Being frugal on your shot selection makes for a great movie.

Being selective in rolling the narrative dice will avoid burnout.

Part of why I fell out with Genesys was GURPS, and GURPS is its own amazing thing that can do anything, too. GURPS tends to enforce a gritty reality on everything it touches, which is amazing to see superimposed over Star Wars or any other "false reality" game (including D&D). However, gritty realism does not always work across genres, and it can dramatically change things.

If I am playing "D&D with GURPS," I can get those moments where a goblin is hit in the leg by an arrow, hobbling around, and bleeding to death. That is a dark, gritty, and hardcore level of reality that is cool to experience in a hyper-realistic system, and it gives a wonderful feeling to "see D&D through realistic glasses."

If I want to play a movie game, GURPS can do that with a few tweaks, but there are times I want to play a narrative, curated experience where the rules have a lot to help me. The dicing system in Genesys is fun and produces unexpected outcomes. This is good stuff, and things that GURPS does not give me without adding oracle dice or other tools.

The system is more weighty than Savage Worlds, FATE, or even Cypher. The dicing is simple, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes, special rules, and sections of the rules to master. Once you get the hang of it, everything runs smoothly, and you can mostly play with just a GM screen reference and be fine. There are fewer "toys" (cards, bennies, tokens) than Savage Worlds, and no XP and per-character pool economy like in Cypher.

Cypher is still a lot easier to convert into, requiring only one challenge number and a few special abilities for monsters (or any challenge). This requires source data and conversion, so it is par for the course for games like GURPS or Savage Worlds.

The real advantage here is that the dice are all oracle dice, and you are not taken out of character to figure out what happens next in the narrative. The flip-flop story pool between the players and GM is an acceptable extra pool to track, and accounts for momentum shifts and narrative control flips.

The characters are also top-notch, with the talent trees being an excellent part of the design, solving the character depth issue in a single page of the character sheet. The characters here are far more fun to build than Cypher or Savage Worlds, with only GURPS beating them in design flexibility.

Dated? Compared to the game-of-the-week that comes out on Kickstarter? Yes, a touch. Clunky? Not really, the narrative dice are the reason to play. VTT support? I haven't seen too much, so that is a minus, but I play solo, so not for me.

The community content on DriveThruRPG is excellent.

If you are playing Star Wars and want to stay in the Star Wars groove while playing in other settings, Genesys will work perfectly. The same types of dice are used here; the mechanics are identical, and there is not much more to learn to play.

This is still a solid generic system; it still holds up, and the solo-play factor is high due to the assistance from the oracle-like dice. A strong recommendation.

Classic Star Wars as the OSR

There is a parallel between Classic Star Wars and the OSR. We have a game, the Edge Studio 2012 Star Wars RPG, still licensed and in print, that feels like it comes from a time before the sequel trilogy. It does, and even though the books have Disney on the covers, the game predates the era, and to be honest, Disney did make a few good Star Wars movies and shows. I would put Rogue One up at the top, and something worthy of being considered canon.

I have to be fair and honest.

The feeling I get when I play the Edge Studio Star Wars game is the same as when I play an OSR game. The memories come back, the feeling is there, and that magic happens. Tooling around the universe as my smuggler, letting the dice fall where they may, and getting myself into all sorts of story trouble feels great, and it comes from a time before modern "story gaming," which has gone so far down the road of an artificial, curated experience that today's narrative games feel manipulative and far too controlling.

Sure, the Star Wars game uses special narrative dice, but they have a charm and mystery that add to the experience without detracting from the narrative flow. I am still interpreting results here, which can get tedious, but the results are up to me, and the game isn't getting in the way and telling me "what happens." There are suggestions, but the decisions on narrative flow are still up to me, and the game has not taken them out of my hands, unlike some narrative games today.

Nor is there a pool mechanic tracking different types of narrative currency. Cypher System has its XP, and Daggerheart has hope and fear. The dice stay a creative tool, up to interpretation, and the results are up to you to determine. Every roll is like an oracle helping you determine the next cinematic result.

Also, this is not a D&D-like game where monsters and NPCs throw their lives away. Like a movie, there is always something else to a fight, and the narrative flow and push-and-pull of the active situation are the real fun here, not killing everything in a room and looting the bodies. Playing a D&D-type dungeon crawl with this game would be less than ideal, while playing a D&D fantasy movie based on characters, a module, or a setting would be a lot more fun.

There is a generic version of this system called Genesys, ideal for other settings with the same rules but slightly different dice. This one is also still in print and great fun for simulating that classic "Hollywood" movie experience from the 1920s to about 2010. There is an innocence to this game that many other generic narrative-driven games lack. The dice are intended to be "tools of imagination" like a set of oracle dice, and most everything from that point is left up to you.

You are not pushing and pulling narrative-currency pools against a referee. The game isn't telling you exactly what happens. You are not triggering boss abilities by rolling badly. You are not asking the players to "take an intrusion" in exchange for narrative currency.

You roll the dice.

They produce a result.

Your imagination takes it from there.

The rules stop here, and the narrative outcome remains in-game, feeding into the next situation. You are not tracking pools or stepping out of the game, into player or GM-mode, and making narrative flow choices based on an artificial rules framework. Oh, something cool happens: my blaster hits a nearby stack of clay pots, and they collapse onto the group of stormtroopers, allowing us a chance to make a break for it. Nothing in the pools has changed. No rule is activated. No special encounter ability has been triggered. Nothing on my character sheet is activated by my good-guy narrative pool. No player intrusion needed to be triggered by spending an XP.

Genesys uses the same dice, but with slightly different symbols. The Star Wars game comes with loads of "Star Wars toys," so it is a better experience for playing in that universe and for having classic, OSR-style throwback stories and adventures based on movie-like experiences.

I don't have to drop out of my character's head a moment and figure out what rule or ability was triggered. This is key. This is what keeps Genesys and Star Wars a cut above many other modern narrative games. You play the game with oracle dice, and you are not dropping out of character to reference the narrative flow rules.

The dice give me direction on what happens in the world.

And it happens.

I stay in character.

We move on to the next scene.

Playing classic Star Wars stories with the special dice feels like an old-school game to me. I am firing blasters, evading enemies,  shooting the controls to a blast door to try to get it to close, and doing all sorts of other "space hero" stuff that I can't get in a traditional OSR game. The OSR has this spreadsheet math going on when combat happens, and combat is typically a failure condition, so combat is punishing and to be avoided whenever possible. The moral and reaction roll rules in the OSR mitigate the "to the death" combat math.

In Star Wars? Combat is dangerous, but also a part of the film. In many ways, combat is fun and cinematic, as my character runs across a street with blaster bolts flying by, trading shots with stormtroopers, and figuring out "how to get out of this mess."

This is clearly in the realm of "combat is fun" narrative action games. If I want realism, I have GURPS. To live in this "movie reality," then Star Wars and Genesys work very well and provide that curated, action-oriented, popcorn-gaming experience.

And I can keep Classic Star Wars apart in my mind from the modern era, and in fact, treating the Classic era as an OSR-type experience helps me return to the fun, and put the not-always-so-good present in perspective. I still need to be fair and give new things a chance, since this is a licensed game and it will never replace new stuff that happens to be good.

But for classic throwback Star Wars romps and tales of two-fisted and blaster-firing adventure that bring me back to my childhood? This is good stuff. It makes me happy the way the OSR and BX do.

Gaming should transport us to a different world, a feeling, or a moment in time when times were good and the world looked infinite and full of possibilities.

This does that for me.

Mythic Game Master Emulator

My intent was to use Mythic GM Emulator (MGME) with Genesys to augment that game's situational based dice, but the more I read this, the more I realized that I didn't need the special dice or Genesys itself. I could get by fine without the overlaying system of Genesys and just use something simple like B/X as the core game and let MGME do all the heavy lifting.

Yes-No and Probability

The way the system works is interesting. This isn't a rule system, but more of a framework for determining the answers to yes-no questions given a probability you assign to the question being a "yes." You can go even, somewhat likely, very unlikely, a sure thing, impossible, and so on with the probabilities, and this is all modified by a global "chaos" type factor that goes higher the more things get out of control and goes lower the more the players get things under control.

There are limits to the types of number of questions you can ask to avoid cheesing the system, and it is recommended you avoid asking the question "do I find a suitcase with a million dollars in it?" in every scene. They say two questions per scene is a good number, like "is the room empty?" and if no "are these the goblins that escaped?" You answer questions until you figure things out, setup the encounter with the system of your choice, and go from there.

For the most part, you go by logic and what you would expect, but the system is engineered to throw you curveballs every once and a while to keep things interesting, As a solo-play system I can see this working well.

Random Events

When doubles are rolled and the singles digit of the doubles is less than the 1-9 Chaos Factor, a random event occurs.- so every question asked of the fate chart has the possibility of throwing a curveball into the story with every question asked. I like this since it puts some danger on asking questions for 5-10% of them having a possibility to throw a wrench into the works.

These can be decided on the spot, or there is a flavor table where you can roll two random words to help you interpret the event, such as "inform-ambush" meaning your group gets advance word of an ambush happing to themselves or others.

Adventure and Scene Frameworks

There is also a basic scene framework to build encounters with that string together for an adventure. You setup a scene, there are some chances for it to go off the rails from what you expected, and you begin the yes-no process to setup the situation. This felt like a section I would pass over, but one thing caught my eye - when a scene is setup, a 1d10 is rolled and compared to the current Chaos Factor. This roll can either alter or interrupt the scene you have planned in your head.

With an altered scene, what you thought was going to happen in the scene is changed in some way. The goblin fort you planned on attacking is empty. The lost starship everyone assumed crashed is actually intact. The casino the super criminal is supposed to be at is holding a carnival festival. Your assumptions about the setup for the next scene in your head are not correct, and you are forced to change them.

With an interrupted scene, you don't even get there. The goblins ambush you before you even get to the fort. You get a distress call from a remote moon before you ever get to the planet with the lost starship. Your superspy never gets to the casino, and instead, they are locked in the back of a runaway taxi as it careens towards a cliff!

You then play out the original, altered, or interrupted scene. After that, you make changes to the story threads (updating, starting, or stopping the threads in the adventure), the character and NPC lists, and update the current Chaos Factor either positively or negatively (depending on if the characters were in control or out of control).

I like the concept of story threads here. You can start with stop the goblins from attacking traders on the road. You learn of the goblin fort and you add, destroy the goblin fort. You learn of a kidnapped merchant being held for ransom and you add, rescue the merchant. You destroy the fort and rescue the merchant, so you cross those threads out, but you learn of the goblins were being paid by an evil cult to attack the merchants, so you add investigate the evil cult to your story thread list. Perhaps you find a map the goblins had with the location of a strange ruin, so you add investigating that to your story thread list as well.

I Like This, Well Put Together

This is a fun story framework system I can see myself using. It is interesting, lightweight, and it doesn't get in the way of the underlying rules with all sorts of special talents, abilities, and qualifiers. There isn't a lot of scaffolding here except for the Fate Chart, Chaos Factor, two ways of creating Random Events, and one-of-three possible Scene Setup rules. Just four pillars to consider when thinking about what happens next, and a solid yes-no method for creating the low-level details.

Very nicely done, and hlighly recommended for those into solo play.

Fantasy Flight's RPGs are now Edge Studio's

So I see Edge Studio (the new home of Fantasy Flight Games' RPGs) has their store up at DriveThruRPG:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/17946/EDGE-Studio

Looks like every game except the Star Wars RPG is up for digital downloads and that is a good thing. It also looks like they have a community-content program up for Genesys with a foundry program:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/cc/27/genesys-foundry

The program includes style guides, templates, and a 50-50 revenue split with EDGE Studio, plus retaining rights to your original IP (like the unique setting, characters, story, etc). I see that as fair given they need to make money in order to keep supporting the game with books and dice, plus the acquisition costs for the game. If you want 100% of revenue for your game, go B/X or roll your own, but I feel this is reasonable for supporting a system so many are fans of, and personally I want to see this game continue and have strong community support.

I am liking Genesys more as a structured story game. It is like a FATE-style story-system, but more geared towards cinematic play with easier to interpret narrative events built into the dice. It feels like the Star Wars game and movies with an ever-shifting balance or power, good things and bad happening, and lots of unpredictable things built into the rolls. The symbols on the dice make it easier to interpret "what bad or good things happen" on a roll, and the rolls are also macro enough to cover a large swath of action - like one roll covering a transition scene in a movie.

Roll Streetwise to find the seedy bar the suspect is known to frequent, and cover the hours-long task with one toss of the dice. Does anything good or bad happen while you are looking and asking around? Roll the dice and see. Do you even find it? Is there a possible cost, or did you gain a benefit? One roll does it all.

The only thing holding me back from fully enjoying the game was a lack of settings and genre-specific content. With the Foundry it feels like the community is being set loose on this problem, and that is a great thing.

Looks like some great stuff coming up and I am looking forward to what comes next.

Genesys

 

Genesys was always a strange game for us. Generic System is obviously the word play, and considering this game's pedigree, the system powered all of Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games, it should have been a shoo-in for a lot of fun play. But it didn't take off with us, despite us loving Edge of the Empire so much.

From what I read, quite a few people love this game, and it is one of their favorite "do everything" systems like a Savage Worlds, FATE, GURPS, or other generic systems.

I suppose our group was in the middle with giving Pathfinder First Edition a serious go with a complete set of electronic character creation tools and trying to justify a huge investment in books. Books that were more fun to read than play, honestly, for fantasy artwork and inspiration. This, and all we had was the basic book - no setting, gear, worlds, spells, monsters - just kind of a rules framework and that is it.

Special Dice Needed

The game even had its own special dice, which were cool but always looked like they were covered with Star Trek symbols to me. One of them, the advantage symbol, looked almost just like a Star Trek triangle chevron thing, like what Federation people have on their uniforms. Some of them even, the failure dice, even looked like Klingon symbols. When I first saw them, I was like, yep, Star Trek dice.

They work exactly like the dice in the Star Wars game, so if you know how those work, it is an easy thing to transpose the symbols and get going.

Suns cancel X's (four point symbols-ish). A's cancel chakrams (three point symbols). Big Sun and Big X don't completely cancel each other (in successes and failures, yes; in good and bad things happening, no). I wish they didn't use circle icons on the successes and threats, I thought those two cancelled each other at first.

I ended up calling the suns "bangs" and the X's "slams" and remembering, "bangs and slams cancel and determine success." I also called the A's "checks" and the chakrams "traps" and again "checks cancel traps and determine advantage/threat." The big sun? Big bangs! The big slams? Grand slams! And you could do a cool wrestling game with these rules.

We're Gonna Need Another Book

The base rulebook really isn't enough, it is a base selection of talents and gear, and to do anything really cool you will been a supplement or a player-created expansion adding genre-specific gear, talents, and opponents. They have a fantasy book and a cyberpunk style book, so you are covered either way you go since you could easily base modern or sci-fi gamer off the cyberpunk Android game book with a little work. Fantasy is fantasy so the Terrinoth book has you covered.

This hurt our adoption of these rules, honestly. Our lives were busy and converting a setting over just to use this set of rules was too much work for a nebulous benefit. Games like GURPS have a great selection of worldbooks and equipment lists to pick and choose from - you could throw a basic "most anything" together just using the basic book, from fantasy to sci-fi and many points between. To be honest I would have liked to see more in the basic book for standard gear and genre support, that would have helped get us started. There just doesn't seem to be much "gas in the tank" without buying either the Terrinoth or Android books to get playing.

Hopeful for New Things

I hope this game continues, if those rumors are ture and we are getting an announcement soon. It really is a cool rule system and it really deserves a chance to shine and get attention - despite it isn't a newer game it still does a lot of things really well and I know this system like I know Edge of the Empire, so my fandom for these style of rules makes me an instant fan of the possibilities.

I also hope they branch out and do new things, not just as the Fantasy Flight game engine. I know the perils of licenced properties, and those don't always make for great sales sense. I could run RPG versions of just about any movie with this, like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek in any era, Marvel movies, 007 movies, and just about anything you can think of.

Basing - and buying - games on licenced properties sucks, because you are darn well guaranteed the game won't last forever. No company is going to grant a perpetual licence, and very few will consider open-sourcing the rules so support can continue past the expiration date. It is cool to own "X the game" but ultimately it is more for a collectors market than it is for playing. A generic game and DIY or fan support is the way to go.

So in a way, it is probably a smart move to take a great system and de-link this from Star Wars, but I want to see more in terms of generic setting support than the books released. And certainly more than this being the FFG RPG - I want to see some new ideas and settings.

Genesys: The Toolkit Layer

I read the entire Genesys book last night and the above image I feel best summarizes my feelings about the game. I love the system, I love the macro-situation creating dice, and I like the idea of this being a generic system...

...but? The game, by itself, is missing what I like to call "the toolkit layer." This is all the setting-specific information that makes character builds matter - weapons, armor, equipment, gear, powers, magic items, foes, monsters, creatures, vehicles, mounts, and all that other fun setting-specific stuff that makes character builds matter.

How can I build a Wild West gunfighter and specialize in a certain...um, where is the six-gun, scattergun, lever-action, horse, throwing hatchet, knife, buffalo rifle, TNT stick...? You get my point, without all these cool "rules-ed out" items and things to build characters around, what is there to do?

As a game master, it puts me in a really bad situation without having setting-specific information because I have to wing it. And when I wing it, nothing really has a cool defined list of attributes and features that the players can look at and sort through as they build their characters. As a game master, it is easier for me to create adventures with a full toolkit, because I can better design opponents and encounters when I have a huge box of toys to play with, all fully-statted out and working with the rules so both me and my players understand how they work with the game's systems.

I could wing it and make up stats on the fly for all my Wild West items, but I feel it does the players a disservice because they need to know about all this cool stuff before I make it up, because they are the ones who have to create characters to take advantage of all this stuff before I throw them into a situation where I say "oh yeah, that guy has a buffalo rifle" and they sit they feeling, "I wish I would have known about that cool piece of gear because I might have wanted to create a character who could use one and take advantage of the item with my character build."

You get into a situation where the player's first characters built for the game feel generic and not built for the world they live in, and only after playing a couple times do you build enough background data that the next set of characters will be able to take advantage of all of the stuff you house-ruled in, and you still risk not knowing about that next cool thing or situation characters may encounter (Gatling guns, derringers, poker games, quick draws, Calvary officers, Marshals, etc).

Six Sample Settings Included

To be fair, the game does come with six really basic sample settings with sample equipment and foe lists. They are by no means complete and I feel just serve as a starting point for you to create your own. They feel more like "sample adventure" seeders than "these are the official gear and stuff lists" for the game to me, because the fantasy section feels like it lacks enough for a long-term game for me. This will be solved one the fantasy book comes out later this year, so we shall see. I could wing fantasy better by pulling in tropes and creatures from other games, but again, these things mater when players build characters, so my default feeling is I want a complete "toolkit layer" before I start palying becuase it gives players more to work with than just a sample list plus "make the rest up."

The other sections for steampunk, modern, sci-fi, space opera, and other settings feel like similar "taster sections" for the genres than full-fledged support, and this is understandable because of their length and brevity. But again, I can't play with them as-is, because for the game to work at its best, I feel players need a full list of stuff, foes, gear, powers, and options to play with and design characters around.

I feel you get the best with this game when you can find an official toolkit (like the fantasy one coming with Terrinoth), or a fan-created one for a particular setting (which there are on the Genesys forums, and more are being shared there as time goes on). I feel the more detailed and more fully fleshed out the toolkit, the more fun you and your players will have with the game.

Contrast With FATE

FATE is a strange game, as it does away with the toolkit layer almost entirely. Weapons are weapons, gear is gear, and if you want a character build that takes advantage of something specific, you just take it as a character aspect or devise a stunt for a skill and you are good. If your character is a "Wild West big game hunter with a coon-skin cap" well then of course your character is going to be good with that buffalo rifle, you get your bonus then and there, and the world is good. Yee-haw, make it up, write something down, and keep playing.

I enjoy a more structured, mechanical game like Genesys where you can build a character to take advantage of a certain weapon or play style through stats, skills, talents, and gear - but you need that gear fully fleshed out in order to be able to build a character like that in the first place. With FATE, yes, things are less structured and therefore you get less of that "character build addiction and obsession" feeling you do with Genesys.

If I were doing pick-up-and-play games, I would use FATE because I do not need a lot to simulate anything. Everything is made up on the fly. I do not need a toolkit, just the English language and an understanding of "this would cover that." The game works well without toolkits and settings, and it is designed more to play off our assumptions and understandings of things through natural language constructs and "X to Y means Z" relationships.

If I want a longer-term game where players could get more deeply involved, I would more likely use Genesys with a fully-fleshed out toolkit and setting for the game, because that is where the players play and the referee derives inspiration from to create the challenges of the world. This is not to say Genesys is weak in any way, as if I had a Star Trek style toolkit I would jump on that and play Star Trek with "Genesys plus toolkit" a lot faster than "FATE plus nothing." I feel the support, and the quality level of that support, makes a huge difference.

But having that support I feels really matters, if it is my work, a fan work, or an official work.

Structured Builds vs. Do What You Want

To me, FATE is like a box of crayons plus some paper.

Genesys is like a video game console with controllers. The toolbox is like the video game cartridge you stick in the machine. Without a cartridge and a game to play, you have that excitement of having a cool game console, but nothing to play with it yet. The console is open enough you could write your own game or find something on the Internet to play, so there is still that DIY freedom.

For character builders, Genesys has that Lego style appeal as well of building things and putting together character builds. But you need all those special pieces in the toolkit to be able to build anything really cool, and all those special parts like doors, hinges, windows, wheels, mini-figures, and plastic trees matter - more so than just the sample settings in the main book and their collection of straight blocks.

With FATE, I will just come up with and draw all those pieces myself when I draw my picture of my fire-station or whatever I want to "build."

Both are fun and have different strengths for what type of mood I am in and my current group of players, but they are different enough to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each. I would not give up FATE because I now have Genesys, and I would not shelve Genesys because I prefer playing with fully fleshed out toolkits. Both are cool and have their places at our table.

Mail Room: Genesys

Revised narrative system that powers Fantasy Flight's Star Wars role-playing games? Check.

Expensive dice? Check.

Dice app on my phone that does a faster, cheaper, and better job than the dice? Check.

But I still like the physical dice.

Generic system with a name that sounds like something Hollywood would slap on a movie franchise? Check.

Do we need another narrative storytelling system? Well, Fantasy Flight's game system that powers the Star Wars line was one we liked, and we could see using it for more than just the venerable and slightly culturally over-saturated franchise that we love.

Then again, I am still a fan of the old Expanded Universe, a work of so many different artists and creators that throwing it all away feels like trashing a shared creation that I grew up with and that defined my ideas of the franchise more than today's interpretations of a place that defined so many dreams and set the stage for so many role-playing adventures. It can be said the EU was defined by role-players and I feel was a more inclusive place for speculative fiction creators and game players alike.

So the game system we like gets a revision and a clean break from the licensed world. Was this something we always wanted to see?

Dedicated Fantasy World? Check.

This feels like a good break and evolution for the strong underlying system, and my initial reservations about "what do I do with this" were washed away when I heard that a companion volume, a fantasy world book covering the worlds created in Fantasy Flight's fantasy board games was being published this year called Realms of Terrinoth (covering Descent, Legacy of Dragonholt, Runebound, and Runewars).

Okay, we have a dedicated fantasy world with an admittedly strong and pedigreed line-up of source materials and games that were just begging to be explored and used as a base for storytelling. For me, it always feels better for a generic system to have some sort of 'official' setting for the game as it gives my investment a fall-back position in case the generic appeal wears off. And this feels like a good one since we were a fan of the Descent system and all the miniatures and games we played over the years. Color us interested and excited by this one, and to us, this at least has the same appeal of playing in a Warcraft style universe or even Warmachine.

The only problem is that I don't have this book in my hands yet, so I can't start diving in and planning some adventures. I do have some of the Descent boardgames, so that is a start, but I want to see what they do with a full-sized, dedicated rules-plus-world book with the production quality level that we saw with the Star Wars line.

Strong Fan Support? Check.

The second, and very surprising thing that attracts us to this game is the amount of fan-support this is getting from the Fantasy Flight forums themselves. There is a fifty-page free PDF of talents for character creation, fan-created worldbooks, conversion guides,  character sheets, and other resources. This is a really great sign of community support, and it raises my excitement level for using this system (which we already like and are used to after our Star Wars sessions).

The level of excitement and fan support really is a cool thing to see. I like this because it gives me confidence that there will be enough of a fan base to support this as a dedicated product line going forward, and I hope we will see a lot of nice, high-quality supplements released in the future.

Book Quality? Looks Good.

I have heard some complaints about the art-style in the Genesys book, that the art in some way seemed unfinished and it has this sketchy, sort of drafting-table industrial arts look. I actually like this style for the book, as the line-art plus unfinished nature of the art tells me "you finish the story." You color this in, you tell your adventures, you make it happen, and you craft your world. the book itself feels high-quality, at least equal to the Star Wars hardcovers we have in this line, and I just get that intangible feeling of crafts-work and attention to detail when flipping through this that I like.

Narrative Dice

And this seems like a revised game built on the lessons of the Star Wars line as well, with a lot simplified, streamlined, and cleaned up. Yes, this is a generic game, but it has this "do anything" feel like a "DIY movie game toolkit" that appeals to me for certain genres that doesn't seem like it needs a lot of work to get started.

Yes, the dice are relatively expensive. And yes, you likely need two sets if you are serious here. I can see that as a problem for some players as we played with groups in the past who can't afford to spend that much on dice for a weekly game. The 5-dollar app-store app for both Android and iOS works well, and better than physical dice in some cases (when a lot of dice are being rolled and the app auto-tallies and sorts the result), so that is an option. If I had to play this with strangers or semi-regular groups I would take an old tablet, install the app, and leave that on the table for players to use if they didn't have dice. And no playing games or surfing the web on it either!

Part of why we like the system lies with the dice and how we liked they had this "macro" element to them in regards to storytelling. As a player, you could lay out a big course of action, such as, "I go to the red light district and start asking around if anyone saw the strange man in town with the scar on his eye and red cape." You make a Streetwise roll, and the dice not only determine success, they also direct the game master if anything else - good or bad - happened. Not only that, the possible good or bad related events also have their magnitude of goodness or badness all determined on the same roll.

Do the bad guys show up and try and stop you? Do you get a lucky break and find someone who knows something? Do you find the bad guy himself and get the jump on him? Do you wander into an ambush? Do you find another piece of information relating to something else you are looking into? Are you hot on the trail or following a dead end? Do you attract attention from other bad guys in the area? Does a street thief try to pickpocket you? Do you have a chance to assist a fellow citizen in need from a snatched purse? Does nothing happen and you get no where?

One roll - that first Streetwise roll - determines all that. You have to be able to 'read' the dice, but this is a skill that we found we picked up quickly for all the fun this interpretation delivers. You also have to be able to accept atomic success, where you do not let repeated Streetwise rolls force the issue, as letting players try and try again reduces the impact of each narrative result and practically guarantees success with that sort of 'take a 20' thinking.

You get your roll, this happens, and if you fail try something else. A good referee should be able to keep things from dead-ending, but I feel you have to make macro rolls like this mean something, good or bad, and not let players buffalo their way through a situation by letting them roll and re-roll the same skill until they get the result they desire, all while trying to ignore or minimize negative consequences.

We felt the game works better if you really celebrate the results and make them mean something. The minute you roll the dice repeatedly to get the result you want while ignoring negative consequences or minimizing positive results the game loses its charm. It pays here to aggregate, keep tries to one per skill, and really describe the result as best you can without picking up the dice to 'try again' or 'roll the dice to interpret or clear up the first roll'.

Let the dice stand. Let that course of action matter. If you fail, try something else.

The dice also scale pretty well into the micro, turn-by-turn combat style of roll, although we feel there is still a little bit of a macro feel to combat where you are not going blow-by-blow but more action-scene by action-scene and determining the winners and losers of each scene rather than 'this blow penetrated my right flank, hitting my plate torso guard and puncturing my spleen' sort of combat result.

To be fair, I need to read the game to see if there are any further clarifications to what we found worked well when we were playing Star Wars with this system, as I am sure there are some suggestions and directions in the game that they found and shared in this revision of the rules. But really, when you ask yourself, 'why play this game?' the dice and the wide variety of narrative results they produce should be considered. It is a vastly different experience than a d20 system when done right, and it is a huge part of the appeal of this system for us, more so than a simpler narrative system such as FATE or other generic games.

Though FATE has some cool dice too, especially the metal ones we collected.

More Soon...

This looks like a fun game, and I am looking forward to diving in and reading this from cover to cover. I like the system, my players have bought into this with Star Wars, and the idea of using the same narrative dice system for other games and worlds with that same action-movie vibe really has me excited. I was surprised by this, and my expectations were this was another game I would read for fun and eventually shelve, but my mind now is racing with possibilities and all of the adventures we could have and stories we could tell with this one.

That keeps this one on my table and the cover calling us to crack it open and find a world to explore. When the dedicated fantasy world comes out this year, hopefully soon, that will be a whole new world to explore that we are sort-of familiar with but entirely unprepared for - and that is an exciting thing as well. Overall, I am impressed with this one and very pleasantly surprised by both the quality and possibilities of this, along with how well the fans of this game stepped up to support it. Nicely done, and a game I am looking forward to play.