I have a tough time with Human strength going up to a 6.

Where a Hutt has something like a 5 or 6 and a Rancor or Kratt Dragon only a 8 or 9 (if I remember correctly.

This seems very skewed to me.

Aside from rolling alot more dice is there a problem with giving a much higher STRENGTH Characteristic that matches more appropriately?

Anyone else feel this way?

I would rather use talents to model things like that than mess with dice mechanics. If you have uber powerful creatures like a colossal dragon or some such maybe use the Massive rules from Star Wars.

For strength maybe a talent that doubles their encumbrance.

Just spitballing

Are you thinking of Star Wars rules? Because in Genesys, characteristics are capped at 5 regardless of species (and there's no characteristic called "Strength"; it's "Brawn" you're thinking of).

Also, bear in mind that many facets of physical characteristics are going to be relative based on Silhouette. A Brawn 3 warhorse can carry an armored knight into battle, while a Brawn 5 human can barely carry him across the room.

Yes I meant Brawn of course.

4 minutes ago, rsdockery said:

Because in Genesys, characteristics are capped at 5 regardless of species

Yes, but: "[Characteristics] generally range from 1 to 5. Some exceptions can exist especially in powerful or unique cases." (p. 14)

Characteristics cap at 5 and skills cap at 5, but a given dice pack has only 2 yellow dice. So if you actually want to roll a maxed skill on a maxed characteristic, you need 3 dice packs. That's a little irritating, especially since you can't easily reroll with a mechanic that is about symbol cancellation. I bought 2 dice packs and will switch to the app before I buy a third.

All that said, I like the idea of leveraging silhouette to represent higher relative strengths. One of the stated design goals in the book was to keep dice pools reasonably small. Massive numbers of dice just mean crazier and crazier results that take time to calculate and longer to adjudicate.

I wouldn't worry about messing with Brawn and making overly large dice pools. Higher levels of damage and feats of strength are better handled via Talents, or applying damage as if vehicle level in scope I think.

I'd like to see some official examples of basic beasts and monsters (horse, bear, alligator, elephant, griffon, dragon, etc) to help us out with creature creation. Including a section on creature crafting would have been very helpful, I hope something along those lines is added in a future book.

I think we are going to house rule Brawn.

What we will do is use Agility in place of Brawn for melee.

Which in fact is more sensible anyhow, (a giant trying to hit you shouldnt be able to easily just because he is strong).

That way you can go really high for Supers and large monsters without breaking the system or having massive dice pools.

Or better yet rename Brawn to Prowess and incorporate Strength and Constitution levels as separate Abilities that go towards Damage and Threshold.

Or just play another game that makes more sense

I do have to admit that the stats (for a human) only going up to 5 is a bit annoying to me, that just doesn’t have the resolution that I feel is needed to model things. I like quite a bit more crunch in my game systems, however.

All that is, however, a remnant from 30 years of simulationist games, where the idea is to represent a more or less realistically believable environment. Genesys (like many games these days) is not trying to do that, but instead is trying to recreate the tropes from movies/TV/and novels (whether it succeeds or not is a question for another thread) In that context, it is much better for a lot of things to be a contest with differences in stats only coming into play for really extreme differences. So I can see where they are coming from, I just have to unlearn a few decades of expectations.

23 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

I do have to admit that the stats (for a human) only going up to 5 is a bit annoying to me, that just doesn’t have the resolution that I feel is needed to model things. I like quite a bit more crunch in my game systems, however.

All that is, however, a remnant from 30 years of simulationist games, where the idea is to represent a more or less realistically believable environment. Genesys (like many games these days) is not trying to do that, but instead is trying to recreate the tropes from movies/TV/and novels (whether it succeeds or not is a question for another thread) In that context, it is much better for a lot of things to be a contest with differences in stats only coming into play for really extreme differences. So I can see where they are coming from, I just have to unlearn a few decades of expectations.

Exactly, Its so hard for me to let go.

2 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:

I do have to admit that the stats (for a human) only going up to 5 is a bit annoying to me, that just doesn’t have the resolution that I feel is needed to model things. I like quite a bit more crunch in my game systems, however.

take the storyteller games (ie. World of Darkness, Aeon Trinity, Exalted, ...) for example, they all have a basic 1-5 attribute/skill structure, but as things got more supernatural/techie they added the 6-10 range.

as stated above some things can be handled by siluette difference, yet that makes derived attributes harder to properly calculate (damage, wound threshold, ...).

in the bestiary thread there is already such a discussion going on.

fact is: if strength levels can be easily handled by higher ratings instead of throwing talents around, why not do it and ignore the 5 dice limit.

if you have problems that Brawn derived attributes go thru the roof, house-rule it into two attributes: Strength/Physique, Stamina/Toughness/Constitution -- with only the first subject to siluette difference.

i use the following table to modify attributes (based on old d20 ogl chart)

ignore SIZ and Class, Wgt is Weight in lbs, H/L is Height/Length in ft, Sil. is Siluette, WT is Wound Threshold, Reach is average Melee Reachability (no range bands)

so to calculate final Brawn from medium/human-relative Brawn, i would add (Mod1) with a minimum of (Min).

as for actual Agility (Dexterity), i would subtract (Mod2) with a maximum of (Max); and yes i mean a Fine-sized Creature has +2 AGL.

Wound Threshold (WT) would be based on unmodified Brawn (ie. Toughness) and (Mod4)

if you want a hard movement stat (MOV), you can add Brawn+Agility (Physique+Dexterity) times (Mod3) or (Mod4) to get ft/second

Thank you for this Terefang

On 12/15/2017 at 7:44 PM, widomknight said:

I think we are going to house rule Brawn.

What we will do is use Agility in place of Brawn for melee.

Which in fact is more sensible anyhow, (a giant trying to hit you shouldnt be able to easily just because he is strong).

That way you can go really high for Supers and large monsters without breaking the system or having massive dice pools.

But wouldn't a large monster get a difficulty increase against smaller opponents anyway?

1 hour ago, Big Head Zach said:

But wouldn't a large monster get a difficulty increase against smaller opponents anyway?

yes but that means adding difficulty/setback dice to the dicepool (ie. rolling more dice), yet ffg tried to artificially cap the dicepool

@widomknight , what you may have to consider is scale and consistency.

In a Supers game, why not make the Average person have one in all stats, then make heroes with 2s in everything, or have everyone start with 1s, and then give the Archetypes more XP to spend on stats.

Throw in open ended rolls along with the ability to choose 1 stat at character creation that is a Super Attribute (eg when when you roll a skill with that Stat it becomes open-end when you roll a Triumph - like in the book) plus consistency with those rules, then you may have what you are looking for.

I would be looking at that before going about getting rid of the cap of a 5 for an attribute.

36 minutes ago, GM Hooly said:

I would be looking at that before going about getting rid of the cap of a 5 for an attribute.

as has already been stated, the 5 attribute cap applies per default to PCs only

so there can be adversaries (eg. NPCs) going beyond that.

and a setting theme may remove this limitation !

IMO, the attribute cap is the first step towards introducing gear or talent porn, but your milage may vary

yes it basically it is a matter of campaign-style what should be done about it, so we face a fracturization of the system into to following camps:

• the capiists/ruleists -- keep the rules as written and no additional talents for circumvention.
• the talentists/narrativists -- introduce new artificial talents to circumvent the cap.
• the attributists/crunchists -- just ignore the cap-rule if the setting can bear it, on the grounds that no additional rule(s) need to be introduced.

adversaries (eg. NPCs or monsters) do not necessarily have to use the same build rules as PCs

call me a "crunchist".

12 minutes ago, Terefang said:

as has already been stated, the 5 attribute cap applies per default to PCs only

That is true, but as has also already been stated, the designers don’t recommend doing so often, and not above 6.

"Monsters and creatures can have even higher characteristics to represent there inhuman nature. Remember that we try to limit characteristic values to 5; however, you might decide a characteristic of 6 is necessary for an inhumanly potent foe. Do this rarely and your players are sure to be impressed when you assemble the dates."

that paragraph is right after the recommendation that nemesis' have stats "slightly higher than" 3 in characteristics they are proficient in.

OK, no worries @Terefang . I was merely speaking from the perspective of PCs, not NPCs. I apologise for my error.

33 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

That is true, but as has also already been stated, the designers don’t recommend doing so often, and not above 6.

"Monsters and creatures can have even higher characteristics to represent there inhuman nature. Remember that we try to limit characteristic values to 5; however, you might decide a characteristic of 6 is necessary for an inhumanly potent foe. Do this rarely and your players are sure to be impressed when you assemble the dates."

that paragraph is right after the recommendation that nemesis' have stats "slightly higher than" 3 in characteristics they are proficient in.

sorry to crunch on that (because i am currently involved in a d20 monster to Genesys conversion ...)

lets take the following creature

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/dragons/dragon/-primal-cloud/cloud-dragon-great-wyrm

converted just Attribute-wise to Genesys:

BRN 7, AGL 1, INT 5, CUN 5, WPR 5, PRE 5
Silhouette 5 (Colossal)
(yes Brawn and Agility are already Silhouette adjusted)

scaled back to Medium Size it would have:

BRN 2, AGL 3, INT 5, CUN 5, WPR 5, PRE 5

if you just look at the numbers, wouldnt you agree ?

What I think Im going to do is consider brawn more of a physical Prowess (like fighting ability and muscular density/speed).

Then for supernatural and superhuman strengths I will have Talents/Abilities called:

Supernatural Strength, Metahuman Strength and Superhuman Strength which will give higher damage in melee and lifting maximums.

OR

I was thinking of having the human maximum for Brawn set at 3 and use a ladder/chart like this:

BRAWN Level Max weight (Lift/Press) Examples

1 Weak up to 50 lbs children, elderly
2 Average up to 250 lbs average human adult
3 Human Max. up to 250 lbs Olympic athlete, average Orc
4 Supernatural up to 1 Ton Ogre
5 Supernatural up to 5 Tons Troll, Hill Giant
6 Meta-human up to 10 Tons Mountain Giant
7 Meta-human up to 25 Tons Storm Giant
8 Superhuman up to 50 Tons Dragon (average adult)
9 Superhuman up to 100 Tons Dragon (Ancient Wyrm)
10 Superhuman up to 250 Tons Godlike Entities (Cthulhu, Kaiju)

Then increase damages/wound threshold bases on silhouette (maybe multiply x silhouette?)