We're a few sessions into our Genesys fantasy game, and people are loving it! We have a handle on spending advantages/threats during combat with the handy combat chart, but my players are having a hard time coming up with ideas for outside of combat. What sort of tips/suggestions would you give your players for spending advantages on skill checks, like knowledge, or lockpicking, or stealth, ect? The second question I had for my side, is how do you determine the degree of advantage? For an example, what's the difference between rolling 1 advantage or 3 advantage?

recover strain or a boost to the next allied character check is always good. you can go with more narrative approaches though, depending on the skill used.

knowledge could be that advantages give you additional bits of information that might be more flavor or world building than important info but still good to know. "you know that trandoshans can regenerate limbs from success and from the advantage you recall a particular alcoholic beverage they favor and produce on their homeworld."

skullduggery could be that advantages ensure no alarms were tripped or you put in a quick escape with that door, maybe by putting an item in and blocking the door from fully closing and locking.

stealth, advantages could help you spot good vantage points, other hiding spots, a general sense of the situation at hand.

1 advantage is a small boon. something good but not spectacular. then you work your way up. 3 adv or 4 adv is really good, almost on par with a triumph but for that triumphs are special in and of themselves.

The system is very abstract, so sometimes is hard to determine which something means.

The Advantages could be used to:

• to provide additional and important informations;
• to reduce the costs to do something;
• to remember important old informations (i.e. an NPC, local, item, monter, motivation, etc.);
• to reduce the time of the activity;
• to provide booster dices for an ally;
• to affect more npcs/creatures/objects than the expected;
• to extend what you done for more scenes;

An observation: Genesys recommends that all the players be somekind of narrator also and that is useful, in various ways, to describe what you want to do the better wat you can.

This would make the game cool AND can help to describe the results of the check. Sometimes a cool description could also add some booster dices.

Appreciate both responses! It's definitely an interesting system, and quite different from the standard D20 game which is fun. I can already see more of an interest to be narrative/descriptive from my players, especially during combat. I always encourage them to be descriptive, so I definitely should give them a few boosts to encourage it further.

5 minutes ago, Idar said:

Appreciate both responses! It's definitely an interesting system, and quite different from the standard D20 game which is fun. I can already see more of an interest to be narrative/descriptive from my players, especially during combat. I always encourage them to be descriptive, so I definitely should give them a few boosts to encourage it further.

We've only played 3 sessions so far (the Haunted City playtest) and have already moved beyond the chart both for combat and outside of it. There's very often something much more interesting they can come up with to spend a pile of advantages or a triumph on, although less advantages are more likely just strain recovery. Ditto for threat/despair, and they've already evidenced a willingness to shoot themselves in the foot with a bad roll, typically if they can make something funny or groanworthy happen.