Tones

to your game. Changing the character of the game you’re running, tones include pulp, horror, mys-tery, intrigue, romance and drama, and superhe-roes. All of these sections include advice on how to incorporate that tone into your game. Some of the sections also include special rules, such as fear and sanity rules in the horror section.

CHAPTER 1: CUSTOMIZING RULES

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ow that you know the core and setting-specific rules, you might want to customize the game with your own unique skills, species, archetypes, talents, items, or adversaries.

As you create your own rules, keep in mind that the guidelines we provide here are intended to be just that:

guidelines. There’s a lot that goes into making a role-playing game, and we cannot cover all the aspects of game development in these pages. What we can do is give you a good starting point. We hope you take what

we tell you here and run with it. As you spend more time tweaking, modifying, and creating your rules, you’re going to learn more about the entire process.

Just keep two things in mind as you go forward.

1. Don’t assume the initial reaction to something you’ve created is the “right” reaction. Always test a rule in play before you make a final judgement about whether it works or not.

2. Don’t be afraid to scrap something that isn’t working.

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e already defined and explained skills (if you missed this, check out page 52 in Part I).

However, even though our list is fairly extensive, we expect you may want to create some additional skills for your own game.

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The first thing to keep in mind is that skills are pretty simple. Since a skill is a measure of a character’s ability to complete a certain type of task, creating a new skill just requires you to define a task you want characters to accomplish. For example, let’s say you want to measure how well characters in your game swim. You create a new skill, Swim.

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Once you create a skill, you need to decide what char-acteristic the skill links to. This charchar-acteristic helps determine the dice pool when a character makes a check using your new skill. Thus, you need to pick the characteristic that makes the most thematic sense for the skill at hand.

Going back to our example, let’s look at our new Swim skill. Consider the six characteristics in the game: Brawn, Agility, Intellect, Cunning, Willpower, and Presence. Being a good swimmer relies on physi-cal fitness and conditioning, so we can immediately narrow it down to two characteristics, Brawn and Agil-ity. Between the two of them, Agility depicts more a measure of manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination,

reflexes, and precision. Brawn measures physical strength, stamina, and conditioning. Swimming fits better with the latter, so we’ll link it to Brawn.

Sometimes, you may think of multiple characteris-tics that make sense with your new skill. Often, this is because there may be multiple approaches to accom-plishing the task your skill lets characters execute. For example, maybe your Fly Drones skill should be linked to Agility because piloting things remotely requires hand-eye coordination and reflexes, or maybe it should be linked to Intellect because it requires using a com-puter. In cases like this, pick the one you feel fits better.

If both seem to work equally well, consider the number of other skills linked to each characteristic, and pick the characteristic that has fewer skills linked to it.

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Once you’ve created the skill, write up a brief descrip-tion of when characters will use this skill. You want to define this so that your players know what they’re get-ting if they buy this skill for their characters!

One of the best ways to communicate a skill’s uses is to create Should and Should Not lists. These provide examples of when a character should use this skill and when they should not use it (and what they should be doing instead). Generally, your lists should have at least three entries. If they don’t, then the one or two entries you have better be situations that come up quite often in your game! Otherwise, people aren’t going to feel the skill is worth investing XP in.

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Think of these as guidelines to help make sure your skill is useful in your game.

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When you create a skill, think about the skills that already exist in your game. Ask yourself if any other skills already do what your skill does.

Going back to our previous example of the Swim skill, consider that the Athletics skill already exists. Normally, this skill covers swimming. If you add the Swim skill to your game, you create a situation where your players can buy a very specific skill for their characters—or they can buy a skill that lets their characters accomplish a wider variety of tasks, including the task your new skill focuses on. So why would anyone take ranks in Swim?

There are a few ways to address this situation.

• Don’t Use the New Skill: This is the simplest and most obvious solution. Generally, if there’s not a good reason to create a new skill, it’s better not to.

• Eliminate the Old Skill: This happens in most set-tings that have two separate Ranged or Melee skills for different types of weapons. We get rid of the old skill, and replace it with two or more new skills.

Just keep in mind that if you do this, you need to make sure the new skills cover everything the old skill did. Also, remember this increases the total number of skills, so watch out for skill bloat.

• Eliminate the Particular Use in the Old Skill: This is pretty similar to the previous solution, actually.

Rewrite the old skill so that it doesn’t cover the task that you want your new skill to perform (you still need to consider the previous issues).

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When developing a new skill, think about how your group’s characters are going to use it in the game. Try to imagine when and where they’ll use it. Speak to your players, and ask them what kind of adventures they want to participate in. What they want to do in the game can be a good guide as to what skills they’ll want to invest in. Finally, consider the setting. Is the skill appropriate for the setting? A science fiction set-ting doesn’t need a Woodcarving skill any more than a fantasy setting needs the Computers skill.

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When you create a skill, you need to make sure that the skill isn’t so broad that it lets the character accomplish

too wide a range of tasks. You don’t want to create one skill that’s mechanically “better” to invest in than all the others, lest your players all invest their experience into that one skill.

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Unlike a skill that is too broad, one that is too focused on a specific kind of task won’t break your game. How-ever, your players won’t be very interested in using the skill. We consider a skill to be too focused when oppor-tunities for using it come up less than once every other session. In cases like that, your players will quickly stop investing experience points into advancing the skill.

Sometimes it can be hard to notice when a skill is too focused or too broad. You may have to put the skill in the hands of your players and let them try it out.

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When developing skills, you need to keep in mind how many are linked to each characteristic, and how use-ful those skills are. After all, since PCs and NPCs don’t make characteristic checks, linked skills determine how useful characteristics are. Generally, make sure no one characteristic has too many linked skills. However, if a skill is particularly useful and comes up a lot, its characteristic can have fewer skills linked to it overall.

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When creating skills, the primary thing to avoid is so-called “skill bloat.” Skill bloat is a problem games can develop when they have a very long skill list, and each skill lets a character perform a very specific task. If the list is too long and the tasks are too specific, a player may buy a rank in a skill, only to find that their character doesn’t use that skill for several game sessions. This is going to be frustrating for the player who feels like the investment of XP wasn’t worth it.

Skill bloat also means players must keep track of a wider variety of skills. This is problem-atic for players trying to figure out what skill is most appropriate for a check. It also makes things harder for GMs, who now must try to include more chances to use a wider range of skills in their adventures, so that those skills seem relevant.

That’s skill bloat. However, if you consider the points we lay out in this section, you should be able to avoid it.

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epending on the setting you’re using, quite a few species or archetypes could be available to players.

This book barely scratches the surface of the available options, and that’s just when you consider our settings.

If you’re creating your own setting, you’re undoubtedly going to want to create your own species or archetypes to go with it.

Before we get started, a brief note on terminology. Spe-cies is the word we use to describe anything that’s sentient, but not human. In a fantasy setting, your elves, dwarves, orcs, and gnomes would all be different species. In a sci-fi setting, your intelligent aliens are all different species.

Archetypes are what we call different types of humans.

You see this in movies and books: the archetypical jock or nerd, for example. Basically, it’s a specific kind of per-son. We created archetypes so that players have charac-ter choices in settings where everyone’s playing a human.

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One of the first things you should know is that there’s not much of a mechanical difference between a species and an archetype. Thematically, plenty of difference exists, of course, but that doesn’t matter for our pur-poses. Going forward, we’re going to simply say “spe-cies” and know that we’re talking about either.

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All species profiles consist of the following parts:

1. Starting Characteristics: These represent differ-ent species’ general physical and mdiffer-ental attributes.

Most settings with different species exaggerate the differences between those species (some are stron-ger, some are faster, some are smarter, etc.). Differ-ent starting characteristics also give you something concrete to choose between at character creation.

2. Wound Threshold: Basically how much damage the species can take before being incapacitated.

You always add the species’ Brawn (after spending starting experience) to the total wound threshold.

3. Strain Threshold: How much stress a species can take before passing out or capitulating. You always add the species’ Willpower (after spending starting experience) to the total strain threshold.

4. Starting Experience: How much experience you begin with when building a character. We tie start-ing XP into the species choice, because it is our

prime balancing mechanism between different species. We’ll get to that more later.

5. Special Abilities: Almost always something that gives your character a rank in a specific skill. The idea is that individual species are better at some things than they are at others. This section might include additional rules as well, but generally those should be saved for part six.

6. Other Unique Rules: Many (but not all) species have some special rule that can’t be obtained in any other way during the game. This rule might be something like Amphibious (can breathe underwater without penalty and never suffers movement penalties for traveling through water), or perhaps something like the Bioroid’s Inorganic rule, on page 174. Usually this is something intrinsic to the nature of the species.

When building a species, you should start with four of your six characteristics (your choice) with a value of “2,” one with a value of “1,” and one with a value of “3.” Your wound and strain thresholds should be at

“10+Brawn” and “10+Willpower,” respectively. Your starting experience is set to 100 XP. Finally, your spe-cial ability is one rank in one skill.

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When modifying the profile, keep in mind how many experience points each modification would cost (think about Step 4: Invest Experience Points during charac-ter creation). Then adjust the starting XP appropriately.

Let’s say you wanted to make the average human archetype on page 36. All of that archetype’s charac-teristics start with a value of 2. If you lowered the 3 in our framework to a 2, the species would now be miss-ing 30 XP (the cost to raise a 2 to a 3 when purchasmiss-ing ranks in characteristics). On the other hand, you are raising the 1 in the framework to a 2, but that’s only the equivalent of giving our new species 20 XP (again, the cost to raise a 1 to a 2). The species loses 30 XP and gains 20, for a net loss of 10 XP. To compensate, you increase the species’ starting XP from 100 to 110.

Likewise, increasing or decreasing a wound thresh-old by two or a strain threshthresh-old by one is worth about 5 XP. If you increase a wound threshold by four or more, or a strain threshold by two or more, it’s worth about 15 XP instead. We say “about” because these modifica-tions don’t have to be an exact science. Sometimes, you can make some minor adjustments (such as changing

the wound threshold by only one) without changing the starting XP total at all.

Special abilities (as long as they’re ranks in skills) are easy to price. A single rank in a skill is worth 5 XP, unless that skill synergizes well with the species’ start-ing characteristics. If the skill is linked to a characteris-tic that starts as a 3 or higher, it’s worth 10 XP.

Other unique rules are the hardest to price out. Gen-erally, they should be about the power level of a Tier 1 talent (see page 196). If they feel more powerful than that, decrease starting XP by 5 or 10 XP to compensate.

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Here are a few other things you should keep in mind as you’re designing your species. These aren’t rules, but rather guidelines that will help you create a species that people are going to want to use, but won’t break your game.

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Keep this question in mind as you’re designing your species. Do you see this species being better in melee or ranged combat? Social encounters? Exploration? Cer-tain skills, characteristics, and abilities are going to be better for different focuses. That doesn’t mean you must make everything about your species optimized, however.

Generally, we recommend you make most of the options mesh up with the species’ focus, but include one or two elements that go against type. This makes a species a lot more interesting than if it’s ruthlessly optimized.

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When determining wound and strain thresholds, don’t forget that you add Brawn and Willpower to those values! If your species has a starting Brawn of 3, their wound threshold is going to be a minimum of three higher than the listed value.

When you’re making a species, you want to keep wound and strain thresholds (with Brawn and Will-power) somewhere between 10 and 15 for most species.

If you go slightly lower or higher for some species, you may want to lower or raise their starting XP accordingly.

Also, we recommend only having one of the two thresholds be high while the other is lower, or have both of them at an average final value of 12 or 13. Hav-ing both thresholds high would make the species seem overpowered, while having both thresholds low would make it seem weak.

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The best unique abilities are those that define a physi-ological element of a species that can’t be defined

through skills or talents. This includes things like the ability to fly, breathe underwater, or not breathe the same atmosphere as the rest of us. Most of these are benefits, but not all, and while benefits decrease start-ing XP, drawbacks can increase startstart-ing XP.

Here are a few example unique abilities to help you create your own, as well as how much you should increase or decrease starting XP by.

• Amphibious: This species can breathe underwater without penalty and never suffers movement pen-alties for traveling through water (–10 XP).

• Exotic-Atmosphere Breather: This species does not breathe oxygen, but some other gas instead.

This means its members must always wear some sort of respirator when not on their home planet.

Characters of this species start with a respirator, and treat oxygen as a corrosive atmosphere with rating 8 (as per page 111) (+10 XP).

• Regeneration: Whenever this species heals wounds due to natural rest, they heal 1 additional wound.

They do not recover 1 additional wound when receiving first aid or medical treatment. This spe-cies can also regrow lost limbs, which takes roughly a month before the limb is usable (–15 XP).

• Environmentally Adapted: This species has adapted to living in a particular climate. When making skill checks, they may remove 󲊸 imposed by conditions matching their native climate (–5 XP).

• Artificial: This species is an artificial construct. It does not need to eat, sleep, or breathe, and is unaf-fected by toxins and poisons. If you are using the Cybernetics rules from the science fiction setting (see page 177), the first six cybernetics this spe-cies receives do not reduce its strain threshold (the cybernetics can represent upgraded mechanical components instead of true cybernetics) (–10 XP).

• Dark Vision: This species has excellent night vision. When making skill checks, it removes up to

󲊸 󲊸 imposed due to darkness (–5 XP).

• Fearsome: This species is feared in societies other than its own. Its members add 󲊸 to Charm, Deception, Leadership, and Negotiation checks they make, but they add 󲊸 to Coercion checks they make. This does not apply when interacting with others of their own species (+5 XP).

• Claws: This species has claws. When making an unarmed combat check, its members add +1 to their base damage and have a Critical rating of 3.

(–5 XP).

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t this point, you’ve undoubtedly reviewed the tal-ents provided throughout the book. However, the listed talents barely scratch the surface of the number of talents that could exist. There are plenty of options for creating new talents, and the fact that you’re reading this

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In document Genesys - Core Rules (Page 190-200)