I've been looking at trying to run an Adventure Path in Genesys, and this is going to be of invaluable help. Thanks for all your hard work!

So I am making some changes to cost. Having part of the cost be Genesys and the other a conversion of gpx5 was just way to convoluted and I ran into problems with magic items prices being ridiculous when multiplied by 5. As such I have deiced not to touch the monetary side of things. Straight 1 for 1 cost. That would also mean you would have multiple types of currency. Also player starting money wouldn't be straight up 500. It would follow what is written on page 140 of the Pathfinder Core. Also I want to upload a new version when I have a more stable an concrete version. rather than making constant revisions and force you to make changes you have already done.

11 hours ago, sevick said:

Also I want to upload a new version when I have a more stable an concrete version. rather than making constant revisions and force you to make changes you have already done.

if you release "often and early", might get you some good feedback and make work more fun.

1 hour ago, Terefang said:

if you release "often and early", might get you some good feedback and make work more fun.

True. as long as people realize things might change and expect it.

11 hours ago, sevick said:

True. as long as people realize things might change and expect it.

a changelog might help

1 hour ago, Terefang said:

a changelog might help

I already have a changelog. Also not sure if anyone would be interested, but I am also making Fantasy Ground Libraries for the setting as well.

I have an idea I have been playing with and want to get your idea on. Monsters in Pathfinder and the way it handles encounters is very different than it is in Genesys. In pathfinder there are not separated by type such as Minion, Rival, and Nemesis. This creates a problem because the way you encounter them is usualy circumstantial. For instance you are converting a pathfinder module and the players are at level 1 and they come across a bugbear. That might be tough for them at this point but when the PCs are at higher levels bugbears could treated as minions. At this point though the PC see the Bugbear as a Rival or possible Nemesis and so you see the problem. I feel to get the best of both worlds I would have to create 3 versions of the same monster. It would be a lot of work, but I would cover all the bases.

12 hours ago, sevick said:

At this point though the PC see the Bugbear as a Rival or possible Nemesis and so you see the problem. I feel to get the best of both worlds I would have to create 3 versions of the same monster. It would be a lot of work, but I would cover all the bases.

Genesys classifies adversaries into Minion/Rival/Nemesis power levels, but how does this relate to the PCs ?

For me this looks like classifications for PCs in the 0-200XP range and then they seam to degrade and break down -- especially if you are coming from d20/PF structured play -- for narratives it holds out a little longer (400-600XP?) at that point combat resolution becomes somewhat comical.

i would convert PF monsters as normal to Genesys, but disregard the Rival/Nemesis classification and create a minion version if needs to be.

calculate the XP needed to build the monster using PC creation rules and you have somewhat of a challenge/threat rating you can compare PCs XP to.

c

6 hours ago, Terefang said:

Genesys classifies adversaries into Minion/Rival/Nemesis power levels, but how does this relate to the PCs ?

Its not necessary to scale monsters minion->rival->nemesis. A minion on its own scales itself. If you add WT or soak and damage. They scale quite well. Also
minion scale with numbers. Take your bugbear minion add 2 more to a group and 4 wounds 2 soak and a better weapon.

For rivals its the same take same rival add wound, soak, adversary talent and damage.

I guess the best way to compare it to pathfinder its when you take a monster and add levels. So take your average CR 4 troll in pathfinder. Now add 2 figther levels.
Its still a troll but a much more dangerous foe.

As you say you cant really transfer it to CR as in pathfinder. While you can craft some powerful foes this game scales more in
numbers then in power. So add a extra minion group or rival to your encounter and a lot changes.

Minions are your rank and file they should fill up a lot of your encounters dangerous in a group but weak
on their own.

Rivals are just that they "rival" the pc in power 1:1. So when you think om them they probably have a 3 in their main stat maybe a 4 if particular powerful
and WT to match the pc roughly in the 12-16 range. If your pc are rocking 600 xp you should put adversary 2-3 on them.

Nemesis are that they should surpass your pc in power 1:1 - But nemesis might not be physical match maybe they have resources or minions to back them up. Again scale them with soak, WT and lots of adversary talents. And other talents and special abilities.

The system lets you do this almost on the fly. But for your project if you had the bugbear i would recommend you keep it as minions and make a scaled block with say +3 wounds +1 soak and a slightly better weapon. Or maybe make it a line in your stat block as tips for the GM. Even 600 xp pc could be challenged by minions.

Hope it makes sense

I guess I could do my best to place them into the category they go then GMs can modify it for their games as needed. Thanks for the feed back.

3 hours ago, Archellus said:

Even 600 xp pc could be challenged by minions.

but by which statistics can a GM judge this?

throwing 40 minions at a 600xp group isnt fun at all, and IMHO does not make sense either, unless you like beating dead corpses.

i only suggest that the monsters creator/convertor gives its "rebuild xp value" as a relative measure (scale) of power level.

c

2 hours ago, sevick said:

I guess I could do my best to place them into the category they go then GMs can modify it for their games as needed. Thanks for the feed back.

a way to do it

c

Right now I am converting an Ancient Red Dragon to see how well my Conversion guidelines measure up with Higher Level enemies. So far it doesn't seem unreasonable.

*edit had to make some adjustments. The Default WT was 81 when using the current guidelines lol.

8 hours ago, Terefang said:

but by which statistics can a GM judge this?

throwing 40 minions at a 600xp group isnt fun at all, and IMHO does not make sense either, unless you like beating dead corpses.

i only suggest that the monsters creator/convertor gives its "rebuild xp value" as a relative measure (scale) of power level.

c

There is no scale (spoon)

Are you talking 40 individual minions or groups ?

Your right 40 minions dont make sense as individuals. But 40 minions like 8 groups of 5 minions thats nasty at any xp level i wouldn't recommend more then 3-4 minion groups at a time. Or go nuts and have 5 groups of 8 see how it changes up.

If you want statistics try and judge your pc and say ok if i have a say 3 brawn orcs with skill in melee in a group of 5 they are rolling 3 yellow and a green for their attack. Judge against the pc defenses judge if they can hit them or at least cause them strain a few rounds. If you give them a soak of 5-7 and wounds of say 10 your pc are not going to kill them fast.

Anyways getting off topic here sorry for that since its a PF conversion thread should not take focus away from the excellent work.

8 hours ago, Archellus said:

If you want statistics try and judge your pc  and say ok if i have a say 3 brawn orcs with skill in melee in a group of 5 they are rolling 3 yellow and a green for their attack. Judge against the pc defenses judge if they can hit them or at least cause them strain a few rounds. If you give them a soak of 5-7 and wounds of say 10 your pc are not going to kill them fast.

IMHO, if you had rebuild xp values for monsters this judgement could be a lot faster.

also sorry for the OT

c

This is looking very cool. I'm still reading through it but can't find much fault with your options so far.

Quote

Gloves of Storing

This device is a single leather glove. On command, one item held in the hand wearing the glove disappears. The item can have an encumbrance of 3 or less and must be able to be held in one hand. While stored, the item has negligible weight. With a snap of the fingers wearing the glove, the item reappears. A glove can only store one item at a time. Storing or retrieving the item is an incidental. The item is shrunk down so small within the palm of the glove that it cannot be seen. If the glove’s effect is suppressed or dispelled, the stored item appears instantly. A glove of storing uses up your entire hands slot. You may not use another item (even another glove of storing ) that also uses the hands slot.

Is it bad as A GM, my first thought when reading this was "what if the gloves were made of Silk and you couldn't snap your fingers: Cursed Gloves of Storing!

I noticed that in pathfinder modules, more often than the Narrative System, put a PC party a against a single creature. In Genesys a huge part of balancing encounters is having the enemies act about the same amount times as the PCs. Yes there are Nemesis, but I feel they are more reserved for the "Big Badies". To adress this I have made a talent that function similar to the Nemesis Extra Activation Rules on page 204 of the Genesys Core.

---

Menacing

Activation: Passive

Ranked: Yes

Tier: NPC Only

When rolling for Initiative, roll an additional time per ranks in Menacing, recording the results. These become NPC Initiative slots.
Your adversary may take one extra per rank during a single round. Any abilities that last “until the end of their following
turn” last until the end of their first turn on the subsequent round.

---

I haven't tested this and could be wildly unbalanced, but it being a talent it can be applied to Rivals which might give it that extra little boost in a 1 vs Party encounter. Otherwise a party of 4 against a Rival would be a joke. It being ranked also means you can come closer to the number of PC activations.

If you guys are feeling brave you could try it . I am running a game with 5 players so I will have some results of my own. As always feedback appreciated.

So the new update is out. Sorry it took so long. I added My fantasy grounds modules for this setting as well, if you use that. The Player Handbook isn't finished but closer than before. I should have an update for the Bestiary soon as I have converted some that show up in the Fantasy Grounds Modules but are not in the PDF. It's just a matter of copying the stats and getting the formats and placements right.

These things are nasty in Pathfinder. I wanted to do them justice in Genesys 😈 . The WT may have to be raised. 8 doesn't seem like enough. As a good attack could potential 1 shot it. Adding a half damage rule just increases complexity and I want to avoid over-complicating it.

Spider Swarm (Rival)

Brawn: 1, Agility: 3, Intellect: 1, Cunning: 1, Willpower: 2, Presence: 2

Soak: 1, WT: 10, MD: 0, RD: 0

Bite - See Swarm Attack

Skills

Athletics ( hhh ), Perception ( h ), Cool ( hh )

Talents

Adversary 1: (upgrade the difficulty of combat checks targeting this character once)

Abilities

Agile Climber: Uses Agility for Athletics checks.

Poison: When bit by the spider swarm the target must make an Hard ( fff ) Resilience Check as an out-of turn incidental or suffer 2 additional wounds, 2 Strain, and must check again on their next turn if the check generates h . hh maybe used to add s to all Brawn skill checks till the end of the encounter.

Silhouette (2): This creature is a silhouette size of 2

Swarm Attack: When a swarm of spiders engage with an enemy they occupy the space of their target and deal 3 damage ignoring soak and applying poison as their action. The target must spend a maneuver sweeping away the spiders before he can disengage with them. Attacking the swarm while currently engaged with a friendly target gains hh instead of the usual h .

Swarm: Halve the damage dealt to the swarm before applying soak, unless the weapon has the Blast or Burn quality [regardless of whether the quality is activated]. The GM may spend h to heal 1 wound. Swarms cannot be crited.

here abit of swarm feedback I like your idea of the swarm not attacking per say but just moving in and be more of a environmental threat then a monster. The wound threshold is very low for a rival and with 1 soak it will die very fast. The scorpion swarm in ROT has 36 wounds. Your version of swarm attack sounds quite fun though

Some more mechanic feedback.

• Think your poison should be a Hard (3 difficulty) check makes it inline with other poison abilities in the game.
• The setback die should be to all checks makes it easier to remember. Does it stack ? its kinda the same as disorient quality. You might consider this poison to be just more damage or strain on a target and write it in with the swarm attack since its not really a separate ability.
• On the poison stuff note that the check is a out-of-turn incidental

Dont know if you seen the swarm in the core rule book or in ROT.

The wording in genesys for the swarm trait is just for comparison.

Swarm : Halve the damage dealt to the swarm before
applying soak, unless the weapon has the Blast or Burn
quality (regardless of whether the quality is activated).

There is also an ability on the nano swarm in the core rule book :

Consuming Swarm (may spend a maneuver to
make an opposed Coordination versus Coordination
check targeting one engaged opponent to immobilize
that opponent until the end of its next turn. At the start
of its next turn, the opponent suffers 3 wounds, and the
swarm heals 3 wounds),

Note of the wording "suffer wounds" if you read this it means ignore soak. While "takes damage" means soak applies same goes for strain. Otherwise cool little critter. I love swarms they can be nasty. I remember one adventure in pathfinder and no one in the group had AOE attacks nearly wiped the whole party with a swarm of bees.

Thanks for the feedback. The change in wound threshold isn't as cut and dry as it appears at 1st glance. If you taking into account all the swarms defenses the difficulty gets up there. The swarm becomes less of a meat shield and more of something you just cant seem to hit. That said I might bump it up to 10 WT but other than I don't want to stray too far from that feel.

• 1st you have its silhouette size is -2. While I know that there is no such thing in Genesys core it helps with monsters with different size categories. The PCs are mostly going to average in the 1 silhouette which means the difficulty of there Melee checks would be a Hard ( fff ) Check .
• 2nd They have a defense of 2.
• 3rd The engaged range upgrade is a beast.

All in all for someone attack them before the swarm gets too close is looking at a pool difficulty of ( fff s s) base.

Now if they manage to not kill it before it reaches them, which is likely especially if you give it the Menacing Talent mentioned in an earlier post, the players are looking at a ( hh f s s) .

Yeah the Poison was left over from the conversion formula. So Hard would feasible.

Wow I didn't see that Swarm Rule in ROT. I will probably use that.

I did realize about the Suffer. I added clarification for those who might not be as familiar with that wording.

I made some buffs in places and Debuffed Defense. These might change when working with the other swarms. I want them to act similar but be unique. Not sure about the Characteristic part of the poison. I know generally that is how pathfinder deals with poison. Other options could be a straight up 1 setback for the rest of the encounter that doesn't stack. The thing is I want poisons from different creatures to mean something. Maybe spider poison gives a setback to Brawn while Scorpion venom gives a setback to Reflex.

I can understand the trade off in Hard to hit and less wounds.

The silhouette - 2thing seem Odd. Since its a Rival you could just give it adversary 1 and be done with it 😁

For poison there are many more mechanic then just setback. Strain damage or lower strain and or wound threshold until cured. But your right in just more damage is a boring effect of poison 😁

1 hour ago, Archellus said:

I can understand the trade off in Hard to hit and less wounds.

The silhouette - 2thing seem Odd. Since its a Rival you could just give it adversary 1 and be done with it 😁

For poison there are many more mechanic then just setback. Strain damage or lower strain and or wound threshold until cured. But your right in just more damage is a boring effect of poison 😁

Yeah I took your advice on the negative silhouette mechanic, but dang how long before this thing becomes a nemesis? Some times you get so invested in creating rules you lose sight of the KISS principle.

As far as the Characteristic change I think it might be a little too much paper work, so to speak that, that I am comfortable doing. So I switched it up and had the setback not be a for sure thing on a failed Resilience check but can be activated by threat.

On 11/3/2018 at 9:27 PM, sevick said:

I already have a changelog. Also not sure if anyone would be interested, but I am also making Fantasy Ground Libraries for the setting as well.

I am interested, i have already run a pathfinders Goblins adventure in Genesys, and other d20 games like Dragonlance.