I recently got the Genesys core book and I was surprised at how much it drew me in. I successfully ran a generic setting ruleset in the past, but I really felt like I had to make it my own, whereas Genesys feels so easily applicable, while still being evocative, that I can't decide on what to run (and one potential player said they'd play anything). This thread isn't really about that, though, it's about my first attempt at creating my own content.

Since we won't have a lot of players, I will probably end up having a character in the party myself. However, last time I did that to fill out a party, I ended up so distracted running the game that I still barely ended up really playing the character. So, I came up with the idea of playing something like a fairy, so I could technically be in the party, but be more understandably hands-off in heavy moments.

Using the rules for creating an archetype in the core book, I came up with this:

Fairy

Species Abilities
0 2 2 3 2 2
Br Ag In Cu Wi Pr

Wound Threshold: 8+Brawn

Strain Threshold: 10+Willpower

Starting Experience: 100 XP

Silhouette: 0

Mesmerizing: Fairies begin with one rank in Charm. You still cannot train their Charm above rank 2 during character creation.

On Fluttering Wings: Fairy characters can ignore difficult or impassable terrain as long as they can reasonably stay above it, and they ignore penalties for moving through water. They have to stay within medium range of the ground.
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I'm just wondering if this sounds reasonable. Obviously it only matters so much in the exact context I'm using it in, but I wanted to practice making a real archetype at the same time. I don't even know if characteristics can go to 0, but I felt like it made sense here. Not only is a fairy too small to have any sort of advantage doing anything physical, but they'd be extremely fragile and wouldn't soak any damage.

At the same time, not that you shouldn't be able to alter it, but it feels like it might be too easy to just raise this back up during character creation, and then you'd have this tiny thing carrying boulders over its head for relatively little experience (I tried doing experience calculations based on the recommendations in the book, but I'm not exactly sure how to weigh how these things all work together).

0 Brawn ? I don't think it's possible for a playable species to have an attribute starting at 0.

As mentioned, Brawn of 0 is bad design. This means that, unless they have ranks in Brawn-related skills they literally can't do it . This means that they automatically fail at checks to climb. This means they automatically get poisoned, since they have no dice in Resilience.

Minimum characteristic is 1.

Also, why the super-verbose "On Fluttering Wings"? Just say, "This species can hover, see page 100 of the Genesys Core Rulebook". That's what is done for flying/hovering characters.

19 hours ago, Jokubas said:

Since we won't have a lot of players, I will probably end up having a character in the party myself.

But why? I'm not sure what other RPGs you're used to playing, but Genesys doesn't have an expectation of a specific party composition. As the GM, it is your job to tailor the challenges to your PCs, not some mythical "ideal party". You even mentioned that you just got Genesys, so I would suggest not running your own GMC and instead focus on GMing for your party. Learn the rules, have fun, and let your players figure out how to overcome the obstacles you put in their path.

But if you do insist on a GMC, do please note that adversaries (the Genesys term for non-player characters) don't play by the same rules as PCs. And this is for a reason. Adversaries (even if they're friendly, they're still 'adversaries' 🤷‍♂️ ) are by design simpler than PCs due to the massive number of them the GM needs to keep track of, so making an adversary using the PC generation rules will give you a headache as you try to juggle too much.

Oops, yeah. I know how to make a dice pool out of Skills and Characteristics and it's one of the things I really like about the system, but for some reason my brain was thinking that you'd have guaranteed dice from the Skills if you didn't have a Characteristic (probably because you usually would have it the other way around, because 0 isn't normal).

I still like the idea . My intent was that the character really was that fragile and didn't have any built-in Soak for entirely narrative purposes (the narrative focus being another thing I like), but this went too far (I just didn't catch the obvious problem, but that's one of the reasons I came here to ask ;P).

As for the Hover ability, it's that wordy because I was trying to match the relevant wording from the entry in the rulebook. I like to be thorough first and then cut it down later if I need to (in other words, more feedback that I appreciate). As it is, after posting this I stopped by the sticky resources thread for things like a cheat sheet, because I'm already driving myself nuts flipping back and forth between relevant sections, let alone when I have to start sharing information with my players.

For the party thing, I'm not aiming for a mechanically balanced party or anything, just that I might only have one or two other players. We'd prefer to have a couple more players but we just can't manage it, so the game master doing double-duty is something we've done before in order to have a fuller cast of heroes.

1 hour ago, Jokubas said:

Oops, yeah. I know how to make a dice pool out of Skills and Characteristics and it's one of the things I really like about the system, but for some reason my brain was thinking that you'd have guaranteed dice from the Skills if you didn't have a Characteristic (probably because you usually would have it the other way around, because 0 isn't normal).

If you did have a skill rank you would have ability dice to roll, yes. But all characters are assumed to be able to make an "unskilled" check with their characteristic as the base ability dice in the pool. A characteristic of 0 means no unskilled attempts.

1 hour ago, Jokubas said:

My intent was that the character really was that fragile and didn't have any built-in Soak

This is a very problematic way of thinking. The game maths is balanced around characters having a soak between 2 and 5. Taking that away can cause issues later on.

If you want you can give them an ability that reduces their soak by 1, so a Br 1 pixie has no soak, that would give them +20 starting XP (it's the opposite of the tier 4 Enduring talent (which is 20 XP and grants +1 soak). You'll find that many species abilities are re-worded talents, or at least based around existing talents.

If you haven't yet, I would suggest taking a look at my 11-page document designed to help make new archetypes/species, cleverly entitled Archetypal Species 😛

It'll help explain the ins and outs of making new species in more detail than the CRB, since page count isn't an issue 😉

Frankly, I feel a bit silly about all this. I knew it was a bit risky, and I used the excuse that it's more of a hands-off game master character than a true player Species choice, but I'm legitimately not sure if I really understood how broken it was, or if I was just hoping it could pass muster anyway.

Regardless, thanks for the feedback. Your document looks really interesting and could be a lot of help if I need to tackle this sort of thing in the future.

9 hours ago, Jokubas said:

Frankly, I feel a bit silly about all this

No need to feel silly. My doc is the result of me making all the "silly" mistakes you can imagine…and learning from them!

Nothing is perfect, especially the first time around. You thought about a thing, you did a thing, you got feedback on your thing and you learned something. Sounds like a win to me!

Best of luck to you and your group as you embark on your new campaign!

Pixie and Fairy player species have always had a disconnect with me. I love the idea of playing as one, but every system that has implemented it has gone one of two ways. Either they design it "realistically" and the species becomes unplayable because of hitpoints and limited resources in strength, or the handwave it, and you have pixies/fairies/sprites that can lift objects and perform physical attacks as easily as a human.

It's a real challenge to design a species like this that people will get excited to play. The only real solution I can think of is to add features that make them natural or superb spell-casters in lieu of physical skills and abilities.

Yeah. I mean, I can imagine fairies being able to do physical feats you wouldn't expect them to be able to because they're magical creatures, but trying to keep that within the realm of what people expect is probably one of the reasons they're rarely playable to begin with. Now, depending on your group/campaign, you could make the inability to use certain skills a meaningful part of the story and gameplay, but official rulebooks aren't likely to present something so unbalanced.

I was originally going to try to make a new version of my attempt after taking all this advice, but I feel like brainstorming more instead.

What about something like (assuming the species has at least a 1 in Brawn now):

Fragile
Add one setback die to any check involving the Brawn characteristic. Reduce your soak by 1.

I feel like maybe that's still a bit much, though. Having that always come up could get annoying. What would this give back in XP though? 25? 30?

I also thought that throwing in something like this might help:

Magical Creature
Choose one Magic skill. That skill becomes a career skill.

Though that obviously matters more in a setting that restricts magic like Terrinoth, because otherwise it isn't much without free ranks or Knowledge. I'm not sure how much experience this would be worth. Maybe 5 in an open setting, but 10 in Terrinoth?

Realistically, such fairies would be pretty strong for their size. Due to a mathematical principle called the square-cube law, increasing the dimensions of the object increases its volume faster than it increases its area, which means small creatures have a better muscle thickness to body mass ratio than bigger creatures. This is why insects and spiders can often boast being able to lift several times their own weight.

So, while the fairies wouldn't exactly be super-strong, they'd nevertheless be able to lift more in proportion to their body weight than you'd assume intuitively based on human strength.

This was actually a very useful discussion. Cheers guys.