4 hours ago, lyinggod said:

It seems to me that it will be unlikely that there will be a Sanity type mechanic in the core Genesys book. This is fairly specific mechanic to a specific type of horror sub-genre. I think that, if they create one, it will be in a horror genre book as there are numerous other horror sub-genres that don't use Sanity such as those covered by most of that exemplified by the World of Darkness RPGs, Chill RPG, Buffy-verse, Monster Hunters, Zombies, and the various "Monsters in the Shadows" novels and RPG's.

WoD Vampire features Humanity and all the Lines have some sort of mechanic relating to that. Other games may feature corruption or other similar mechanic. They all represent the same thing, so I am curious to see if they have a suggestion to dealing with those mechanics.

10 hours ago, Popdart said:

They'll probably have a Cthulhu sanity mechanic at some point but I'm really hopeful for a corruption or alignment mechanic. Morality in F&D was okay but it felt pretty weird trying to apply it to non-Force users. Some properly defined rules for all of this stuff would be a dream come true.

Because it wouldn't work.

There should be something similar as in ME:1-3 for Tech Users, or "Muggles".

On 11/6/2017 at 3:56 PM, Richardbuxton said:

I’m really hoping there’s a robust Disease and Insanity system baked in. It would be fairly simple for me to rewrite the Crit tables and then come up with rules for when to roll on them, even talents that influence the rolls. But my preference is always to use the RAW systems.

If Strain represents mental exhaustion and many effects related to stress or mental damage are applied directly to Strain, what's to say there's not a Mental Critical Injury table that gets rolled under similar conditions to the one for physical injury (when the damage roll inflicts enough advantages, or when strain is suffered that takes the victim below 0)?

Reminds me a tad of what happens in Rimworld when your characters have mental break risks - low grade ones just result in characters just staring into space, being distracted, needing some peace and quiet to recover. Greater ones cause freakouts and destructive tantrums. Then largest ones permanently impose situational setbacks. (They just wouldn't accumulate the same way physical injuries do, at least that's not how I'd see it working).

"Death", rolling 150+ on the Mental Injury table, is basically the character completely breaking from reality and being stuck inside their own mind.

The FFG WFRP game had Insanities (linked to Strain and Chaos), Mutations (from chaos, particularly Tzeentch, and magic backlash) and Diseases (Thanks Nurgle and Skaven), all added through supplements. I could see Arkham Horror adding the Insanity stuff, perhaps something like Mutations and Disease is in their Runebound book, although both would fit well into the Weird War section of the core book too.

Whatever happens I like the direction they have taken to support home brew extensively.

On 11/7/2017 at 1:12 AM, DarthDude said:

An impressive list. I have played since around 85 and admitingly nearly exlusively D&D from 1ed on with a bit Warhammer 1st and 2nd edition, wee bit MERP and Dark Eye. Just recently I opened up for newer systems like Conan 2D20, Coriolis, Tales from the Loop, 13th age, Mongoose Traveller and of course FFG SW. But most of the time we play 5e as my group feels most comfortably (having not played any other system in years), we are so to say one trick ponies Out of necessity, we are getting old and the time is way too scarce for learning and playing dozens of new systems. If one fits the bill for all systems, it would be a dream come true.

Besides my greatest question, talents, I wonder if Genesys will have any mass combat rules.

Proffering an opinion that is both mine and humble, 5e is the finest edition of the D&D's...

Talents are top of the list for me... especially how a PC comes by them... Mass combat rules would be great, but I can't recall many systems that had decent mass combat rules... Birthright maybe (oh, that's one I forgot)... Savage Worlds... Not coming up with another...

37 minutes ago, dlw32 said:

Proffering an opinion that is both mine and humble, 5e is the finest edition of the D&D's...

I fully agree. When 4e came out I deserted D&D and was reluctant to ever come back, but 5e truly won me over again.

58 minutes ago, DarthDude said:

I fully agree. When 4e came out I deserted D&D and was reluctant to ever come back, but 5e truly won me over again.

I had left AD&D 2nd edition a few years after it came out when I discovered non-TSR games, the first was HERO but many others followed. These games had skills, character flaws, character merits, and such. Plus it became immediately apparent that Point Buy systems inherently offered options for character growth and diversity that D&D couldn't remotely compete with. About a year ago, I was pulled into a Pathfinder game that I found it to be a step in the right direction for d20 but still fell sort due a level system and similar very narrow character growth options. I dont know how this compares to D&D 3.5 or 4 but Pathfinder hadn't shed most of D&D's issues. Last week, a friend was trying to talk me into 5e by saying it was returning to the games roots. I took look at the system and it was a massive step backwards, at least compared to Pathfinder. Your not playing a character, your playing a stat block.

Genesys appears to have a lot of potential in regards to these. I think it will offer a fine middle point between the complexity of HERO on one end and OSR on the other without getting bogged down by either's issues. I dont think its LAZY, I think it's refreshing in that is not highly restricting or highly overwhelming.

My opinion is not humble

40 minutes ago, lyinggod said:

I had left AD&D 2nd edition a few years after it came out when I discovered non-TSR games, the first was HERO but many others followed. These games had skills, character flaws, character merits, and such. Plus it became immediately apparent that Point Buy systems inherently offered options for character growth and diversity that D&D couldn't remotely compete with. About a year ago, I was pulled into a Pathfinder game that I found it to be a step in the right direction for d20 but still fell sort due a level system and similar very narrow character growth options. I dont know how this compares to D&D 3.5 or 4 but Pathfinder hadn't shed most of D&D's issues. Last week, a friend was trying to talk me into 5e by saying it was returning to the games roots. I took look at the system and it was a massive step backwards, at least compared to Pathfinder. Your not playing a character, your playing a stat block.

Genesys appears to have a lot of potential in regards to these. I think it will offer a fine middle point between the complexity of HERO on one end and OSR on the other without getting bogged down by either's issues. I dont think its LAZY, I think it's refreshing in that is not highly restricting or highly overwhelming.

My opinion is not humble

I think the high XP surcharge cost of spanning careers/specializations in Edge of the Empire punishes a PC for broadening their knowledge. Having more than two specializations becomes extremely expensive, especially since going wide instead of deep has a built in cost of putting the level 5 talents that much further on down the road.

Pure point buy systems (TORG, Savage Worlds) offer superb flexibility with escalating costs the more uber you want a characteristic or skill to become (or impose other costs such as only allowing some buys to be selectable once per "tier" of a character's career or imposing some other prerequisite perk or minimum tier requirement). I like these point buy approaches far more than Edge's, and once we see what the talent trees actually look like, will likely build custom ones in that direction and dramatically reduce the surcharge for cross-specialization training (within the same career, I might drop it to 0, honestly). But then I'd actually like to see some of the redundant skills like Grit and Toughness moved to universal trees. Locking in the mindset that every specialization needs to be exactly 4x5 skills feels like an imposition just for the sake of filling a page with a nice grid of boxes.

On the whole, I'm not a big fan of classes in general, but you do get something for picking up another specialization... other than access to the trees (admittedly the big plus). You get new career skills. For example, my Pilot picks up Scoundrel and now Charm, Cool, Brawl, and Ranged(Light) are career skills. Every rank in a non-career skill costs 5 more xp than it would as a career skill. So though it costs me 10 xp to add the specialization (or 20 if it is out of my current career), adding two ranks of Charm pays for the Pilot's purchase of Scoundrel (you'd need 4 ranks in the Charm for the Merc to pay off the purchase of Scoundrel).

Talents: Though it does seem like the designers set the goal of a 4x5 grid of talents unnecessarily; the truly bizarre part is the apparently random way the talents are linked. Why they all don't just go bi-directional or even uni-direction bottom up, I don't understand. And it creates oddities like for the Fringer to get to Dedication (a thing everyone would want) it costs 90xp to go up one branch of the tree, slide across two branches to get to it. But the Scout just goes all the way up one branch and it's just one branch over... for 75xp. It's just wacky.

I hope they skip talent trees and instead tie talents to skills.

I made a few Agent Talents today, just to get a break from my other work. I'll be using it for running Nights Black Agents at some point, but may allow my players to pick up one or two talents in our current CoC NDS-hack campaign.

I've just set the Agent Talents up so there are skill prerequisites, and in some cases Agent Talent prerequisites. Wing Chun for instance requires Brawl 3, while Wing Chun Sifu requires Wing Chun and Brawl 4. The system has no experience points and uses a progression mechanic similar to CoC where you gain advancement attempts for skills you successfully use during a session. To gain a talent you can use a successful advancement from one of the prerequisite skills instead of getting the advancement.

It would work just fine for an experience based system too though. They could include some optional broad descriptions if they want to allow it to fit a class based system too. Prerequisites like: Fighter, scholar, magic user, rogue etc.

While I enjoy SW RPG, I do find the talent trees rather arbitrary. Here's hoping that Genesys is a second edition of the rules and uses a point buy system.

Classes don't really work well in generic systems, see Cypher. I wanted to like Cypher so much but the class system held it back. It's so much harder to design a setting if you are restricted by classes and levels in those classes.

26 minutes ago, TrainedMunkey said:

While I enjoy SW RPG, I do find the talent trees rather arbitrary. Here's hoping that Genesys is a second edition of the rules and uses a point buy system.

Classes don't really work well in generic systems, see Cypher. I wanted to like Cypher so much but the class system held it back. It's so much harder to design a setting if you are restricted by classes and levels in those classes.

Exactly, classes limit the developement of characters and make special rules for multiclassing a necessity. The chars shouldn't be defined by strict class limitations, rather by the choice of talents and ranks in skill (and stats maybe).

If talents are rather tied to skills instead to classes, similar like Conan 2D20 , this would make Genesys the most perfect generic system of all

Few points,

we already know that genesys is using classes. Specializations or whatever weird, generic label they put on it.

classes and levels are different things, though they frequently go together. I can’t stand class and level systems, but you can have a class and buy system where your class defines your initial starting abilities and class skills and the like but then you advance in a much more free form manner and those are generally much more palatable. SW sort of occupied a grey are between those two, and we don’t yet know how genesys will approach it because their "news" articles are so damnably lacking in actual information.

1 hour ago, DarthDude said:

Exactly, classes limit the developement of characters and make special rules for multiclassing a necessity. The chars shouldn't be defined by strict class limitations, rather by the choice of talents and ranks in skill (and stats maybe).

If talents are rather tied to skills instead to classes, similar like Conan 2D20 , this would make Genesys the most perfect generic system of all

I looked over the free Conan 2d20 stuff and really like the concept of tying talents to skills as you say. It makes sense. You're either doing generalist work to improve the skill itself, or you're focusing your efforts into applying that skill, so you gain a talent instead.

That said, some talents reflect knowledge acquired from "the life" not the school. Take a blaster pistol as an example. If my career is as a bureaucrat, I can still commit the time to learn up to five levels in Ranged-Light (or whatever the skill is) but I haven't learned how to shoot in difficult conditions or highly stressful situations like I would if my career path put me in harm's way as a focus of my job.

On the other hand, shooting in difficult conditions isn't really based on a weapon type, it's based on how well you can filter out the distractions, so such talents (reducing black dice) could be part of Cool or Perception trees.

Hmm...yeah, gonna give this some thought.

17 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

we already know that genesys is using classes. Specializations or whatever weird, generic label they put on it.

I think the term classes they use is a bit misleading as they describe, classes could be races (elf, dwarf, etc) or social standing (worker, academic, etc) with sone "class-specific" power/talent/ability. I would rather call them archetype or in case of races simply races

19 minutes ago, Dragonshadow said:

I looked over the free Conan 2d20 stuff and really like the concept of tying talents to skills as you say. It makes sense. You're either doing generalist work to improve the skill itself, or you're focusing your efforts into applying that skill, so you gain a talent instead.

That said, some talents reflect knowledge acquired from "the life" not the school. Take a blaster pistol as an example. If my career is as a bureaucrat, I can still commit the time to learn up to five levels in Ranged-Light (or whatever the skill is) but I haven't learned how to shoot in difficult conditions or highly stressful situations like I would if my career path put me in harm's way as a focus of my job.

On the other hand, shooting in difficult conditions isn't really based on a weapon type, it's based on how well you can filter out the distractions, so such talents (reducing black dice) could be part of Cool or Perception trees.

Hmm...yeah, gonna give this some thought.

Exactly. Narrative Dice and 2D20 already have similar mechanics. In Conan you can accumulate residual successes as advantages like advantage symbols in ND. A rolled 20 is a complication on the other hand very like disadvantages. If they don't mess up with talents, Genesys could be a major win. But should they keep the specialization concept I would find it very complicated to easily generate character advancements. And what will decide how you order talents in a specific way and which talents to mix up and order in specific specialization trees. It would kill any possibility of flexible and versatile character developement.

21 minutes ago, DarthDude said:

I think the term classes they use is a bit misleading as they describe, classes could be races (elf, dwarf, etc) or social standing (worker, academic, etc) with sone "class-specific" power/talent/ability. I would rather call them archetype or in case of races simply races

Exactly. Narrative Dice and 2D20 already have similar mechanics. In Conan you can accumulate residual successes as advantages like advantage symbols in ND. A rolled 20 is a complication on the other hand very like disadvantages. If they don't mess up with talents, Genesys could be a major win. But should they keep the specialization concept I would find it very complicated to easily generate character advancements. And what will decide how you order talents in a specific way and which talents to mix up and order in specific specialization trees. It would kill any possibility of flexible and versatile character developement.

Not sure it really messes up too much though. Drop all surcharges for adding new trees. Drop the concept of career and non-career skills (which most pure point buy systems likewise do). Account for the fact that characters will progress their focuses a little faster that way and will pick up a more diverse skill set more easily, so account for niche protection among PC’s.

10 minutes ago, Dragonshadow said:

Account for the fact that characters will progress their focuses a little faster that way and will pick up a more diverse skill set more easily, so account for niche protection among PC’s.

You could do that just by reducing XP awards on a case by case basis. Or better yet, reduce XP overall but then give out boons whenever someone accomplishes something in a way befitting a certain path, but then place a light restriction on where that XP bonus can be spent.

Actually, picking up on a Savage Worlds cue: just apply a +X surcharge to a skill cost when it exceeds your underlying characteristic. I've always liked that concept because it reflects natural talent getting you quite far toward formal training. Unlike Savage Worlds, even if you've progressed a skill higher than your characteristic, you still gain a tangible benefit from eventually increasing the characteristic itself (i.e. upgraded die or additional green die for all skills using that characteristic).

I agree with Big Head Zach that reducing the XP could offset the lower cost openness of a surcharge free system. Not a big fan of XP "boons" though. I much prefer good roleplaying or problem-solving to be reflected in other economies, such as whatever they're calling Destiny Points in Genesys flipping in the party's favor (or gaining bennies/Fate Points in Savage Worlds or Fate). I like keeping XP progression on an even footing across PC's, including new PC's joining as others leave the story.

2 hours ago, DarthDude said:

I think the term classes they use is a bit misleading as they describe, classes could be races (elf, dwarf, etc) or social standing (worker, academic, etc) with sone "class-specific" power/talent/ability. I would rather call them archetype or in case of races simply races

Quote

Genesys: Craft Your Character

Step 2: Select an Archetype or Species

This step is where you decide whether your character is a plucky human, a sneaky elf, or a raging cat-monster from the Sigma Stellar Cluster. This choice is important both because it defines a lot about your character’s personality and life, and also establishes a base for the characteristics and other attributes that define your character mechanically.

Step 3: Choose a Career

Careers are what your character does in the game world. They may be literal jobs (such as a character whose career is Soldier and is a member of a military organization) or they may define your character’s role in society (such as a Socialite character who is a member of a noble house).

Careers provide your character with career skills. In Genesys , a character can buy ranks in any skill you like. However, career skills are skills that are cheaper for your character to advance than other, non-career skills. This means that careers tend to guide your character’s development, but they don’t lock it into a pre-set mold.

We provide two types of careers in Genesys . The first are general, role-based careers that are suitable for any setting. The second type are some examples of setting-based careers that only fit into a few different settings. After all, you’d seldom see a Starship Captain in a steampunk setting, any more than you’d see a Wizard in a modern or futuristic setting (unless you’re running an urban fantasy game, of course).

Genesys is not using "classes". They are using Archetypes and Careers. Archetypes are where you get your race, Careers are where you get your Career skills and role in society.

I wouldn't use the term Class in this discussion at all, simply to avoid confusion and misinterpretation.

The thing is, even if there are talent trees, you don't have to use them. Talent trees is the one thing I really dislike about EotE.

I prefer setting specific talents anyway, so I think the way to go is to create your own for the setting you play in. The talents you want for a historical musketeers game is very different from the ones you want for a High magic fantasy game. Wild West talents will be different than modern day Agent talents. Talents go a long way to mechanically describe the setting and having general Talents is poor. Some talents like dodge, parry and similar are universal enough, but most talents should help frame the setting.

i hope they present a broad spectrum of talents, to be used as inspiration and then some tables and guidelines, so we have the tools to create all talents we need for different settings.

17 minutes ago, DarthGM said:

Careers are where you get your Career skills and role in society.

Also known as your character class in many games. They just didn’t want to use the word.

54 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

Also known as your character class in many games. They just didn’t want to use the word.

Weeks ago when I started chatting about Genesys on this board, I mistakenly stated that Edge of the Empire is classless point buy. I've since been educated here and reversed that statement completely. Call an umbrella a bumbershoot if you must, but it's still an umbrella. That said, we don't honestly know what to call things yet. EotE uses careers and specializations. A career is a grouping mechanism for specializations and a core skill list that overlaps somewhat with a specialization, though the latter actually adds a few more skills. We don't know what Genesys will do because we've only heard about careers.

EotE Specializations are pretty analogous to classes in Pathfinder if you throw in the skill list from the parent career. But effectively an EotE career is virtually identical to the 5E D&D class, and a specialization is like one of the subclasses you have to take within that class. No one is just a class in 5E, just like no one is just a career in EotE.

At any rate, this is all academic, and I get DarthGM's point about using the right terminology, assuming we soon learn for sure what all that terminology is. But what I don't want to read about is that somehow EotE (and probably Genesys) is seen as more inherently open than d20 based games. It's very definitely NOT. As I already mentioned, not only does branching into more specializations limit your advancement in a given spec, but the escalating surcharge just to multi-spec your PC makes choosing to do so much less appealing than it should be.

51 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

Also known as your character class in many games. They just didn’t want to use the word.

If Talents are divorced from Careers in Genesys, then Careers look nothing like Character Classes in many games. They didn't want to use the word because it's inaccurate.

If talents are divorced from Careers in Genesys, then there is virtually nothing left that they define. Which talents you have access to is the base defining feature of the careers in EotE. Take that away completely and you may as well not define a "career".

Now, I suggested before that they may be pruning the talent trees down into more focused talent shrubs and that each career then will be composed of several different such shrubs. That would make it a lot easier to create custom classes and races for home brew settings and such, but given the way genesys is clearly based on EotE, and the fact that they are still using a class structure, available talents pretty much have to be based off of career in some fashion, there is no reason to define careers otherwise.

You can't just have 52 pick up with the Talents, at least not specifically with many of the ones in SW. They are simply too powerful and to be able to just pile them up without some kind of limiting purchase/number/class restriction would be OP as ****. PCs would move from session 0 to retirement in no time at all.