All in One, Part 3
(Read part 1 here. Read part 2 here.)
So the Hero System was a bust. What about some of the other genreless roleplaying game systems that social media readers suggested to me?
Genesys is a universalization of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2012 (not to be confused with West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, published in the 1980s and ’90s, or Wizards of the Coast’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game, published in the early 2000s). Interestingly, Edge Studio took over the Star Wars RPG in 2020, but Fantasy Flight still publishes Genesys.
Genesys uses dice with special, proprietary symbols, which already has me raising an eyebrow. There are good dice (the six-sided boost die, the eight-sided ability die and the 12-sided proficiency die) and bad dice (the six-sided setback die, the eight-sided difficulty die and the 12-sided challenge die). If you want to use regular dice instead, the rulebook does, at least, provide a helpful table laying out the distribution of all the symbols on the dice, but looking results up on tables is so 20th-century. (Fate has specialized dice, too, but you can easily substitute ordinary six-sided dice for them; it takes hardly any cognitive labor to count a 1 or 2 as a minus and a 5 or 6 as a plus.) In addition to these, Genesys also sometimes requires the roll of a standard d10 or percentile dice. My first reaction is that character creation had better be amazing, because this is a lot to expect me to put up with. On closer examination, I’ll admit that the dice pool system is interesting and fairly elegant, but I’d still rather be able to use the dice I have already without having to apply stickers or look things up on tables.
There are six ability scores, two physical (Agility and Brawn) and four mental (Cunning, Intellect, Presence and Willpower). Scores run from 1 to 5, 1 being below average, 2 being average, and 3 to 5 representing varying levels of excellence. (This choice I actually like very much, because it’s the same schema I used when I was writing movie reviews back in the ’90s; I’m more interested in degrees of success than I am in degrees of failure, and the average anything is usually mediocre.) Tasks difficulty is rated similarly, with 1 being an easy (but nontrivial) task, 2 being an average task, and 3 to 5 representing hard, harder and hardest. Abilities, skills and favorable circumstances add good dice to a player character’s pool, while difficulty and adverse circumstances add bad dice; they all get rolled together, with good dice contributing Successes and Advantages (positive consequences) and bad dice contributing Failures and Threats (negative consequences). A roll of 12 on a d12 is either a critical success (“Triumph”) or a critical failure (“Despair”), depending on whether it’s on a good die or a bad die. One Success and one Failure cancel each other out, and one Advantage and one Threat cancel each other out, the same way pluses and minuses do in Fate.
The first step in creating a character is determining their background, which is a purely narrative exercise. The next step is to select an archetype or species, which provides a starting set of ability scores along with some secondary attributes. The core system includes just four archetypes: Average Human (straight 2s, with 10 extra experience points and an extra skill), Laborer (a point of Willpower traded away for a point of Brawn), Intellectual (a point of Agility traded away for a point of Intellect) and Aristocrat (a point of Brawn traded away for a point of Presence). However, the rulebook also includes additional archetypes for fantasy, steampunk, “weird war,” modern, hard science fiction and space opera settings. The fantasy section includes species archetypes with different baseline abilities, which some players may object to as biological essentialism, but there’s really nothing stopping you from moving some numbers around and saying, “My archetype is Elf Emissary, so instead of putting a 3 in Agility, I’ll put it in Presence instead.” There’s a whole chapter on creating species and archetypes that includes rules for modifying species profiles.
Next comes choosing a career, which is essentially a package of skills, then investing XP to improve characteristics, boost skills or buy “talents”—special abilities, including ways for the characters to break the rules. Finally, there’s some math to calculate secondary attributes (wound and strain thresholds, ranged and melee defense, and “soak value,” a PC’s ability to absorb damage), followed by determining motivations, which is another narrative exercise, and other window dressing.
Anatoly Nikolayevich is easy to create in Genesys. His skills fit neatly into the game’s skill system, his talents are covered, and peripheral aspects of his character can be described under his motivations. There’s nothing in the game rules about his alcoholism that forces him to drink, but when he does, the rules can account for that by such means as adding a setback die to his pool when he’s intoxicated or hung over.
Inspector Anatoly Nikolayevich Golovko
Species/Archetype: Average Human
Career: Police Inspector (career skills: Brawl, Coercion, Cool, Leadership, Perception, Ranged/Light, Streetwise, Vigilance)
Soak Value: 4 (Brawn + heavy overcoat)
Wound Threshold: 15
Strain Threshold: 13
Ranged Defense: 0
Melee Defense: 0
Brawn 3 Agility 2 Intellect 2 Cunning 2 Willpower 2 Presence 2
General Skills
Stealth (Ag) 1
Streetwise (Cun) 1
Vigilance (Will) 1
Combat Skills
Brawl (Br) 2
Melee (Br) 2
Ranged/Light (Ag) 2
Social Skills
Coercion (Will) 1
Weapons
Revolver Ranged/Light, Damage 6, Crit 4, Range Medium, Accurate 1
Saber Melee, Damage 5, Critical 3, Range Engaged
Fists Brawl, Damage 3, Critical 5, Range Engaged, Knockdown
Talents and Special Abilities
Ready for Anything: Once per session as an out-of-turn incidental, you may move one Story Point from the GM’s pool to the players’ pool.
Grit 1 Each rank of Grit increases your character’s strain threshold by 1.
Quick Draw Once per round on your character’s turn, they may use this talent to draw or holster an easily accessible weapon or item as an incidental. Quick Draw also reduces a weapon’s Prepare rating by 1, to a minimum of 1.
Rapid Reaction 1 Your character may suffer a number of strain to use this talent to add an equal number of Successes to a Vigilance or Cool check they make to determine Initiative order. The number may not exceed your character’s ranks in Rapid Reaction.
Toughened 1 Each rank of Toughened increases your character’s wound threshold by 2.
Motivations
Strength: Patient Anatoly Nikolayevich is always willing to wait and knows the power of being calm. By waiting for the right opportunity, he avoids all manner of unpleasant and dangerous situations. However, when such an opportunity presents itself, he acts swiftly and decisively.
Flaw: Alcoholism Anatoly Nikolayevich’s drinking impedes his ability to function and be healthy.
Desire: Justice Anatoly Nikolayevich believes in a set of ethics that demands adherence to one’s word and compliance with the law.
Fear: Shame Anatoly Nikolayevich has a deep sense of honor and frets about failing to uphold his own standards in others’ eyes.
Joseph Chapman is limited in how strong his luckbending talent can be because of the talent pyramid rule: A PC can never acquire a talent in any tier without having more talents in the next lower tier. Thus, to start off with a tier 2 talent, he must also buy two tier 1 talents, for a total cost of 20 XP; to start off with a tier 3 talent, he’d have to buy three tier 1 talents and two tier 2 talents, for a total cost of 50 XP.
If I use the Average Human archetype; give him the Perception, Vigilance, and Light and Heavy Ranged skills from his career; raise his Agility to 3 (30 XP) and his firearm skills to 2 each (20 XP); and give him the Brawl, Cool, Knowledge and Riding skills (30 XP), he’s got only 30 XP left to spend, so his luckbending talent can’t exceed tier 2. However, it can be a second level of a ranked tier 1 skill. I have to build it from scratch anyway, so let’s see what’s possible.
Luckbending, as I imagine it, is a manipulation of probability—making a favorable course of events more likely to occur. In Fate, at Mike Olson’s suggestion, I modeled this by allowing Chapman to roll extra dice and choose which ones to use. That could work well in Genesys’s dice pool system, too. Circumstance is represented by Boost and Setback dice; it’s not a function of ability, proficiency or task difficulty. Chapman can’t actually make a task easier, or make himself better at it, but he can give himself lucky breaks. What if his talent allowed him to roll extra Boost dice and choose which die symbols to use, or to upgrade Boost dice and/or downgrade Setback dice?
Looking at the talent creation rules, however, it quickly becomes clear that a talent like Chapman’s luckbending has to be tier 3. Tier 2 is characterized as “a good place to add in ranked talents that are useful enough that you want a lot of characters to take them.” Luckbending isn’t that kind of talent. Instead, it belongs alongside “any talent that lets a player reroll a check [or] fundamentally alter an ongoing encounter”—that is, in tier 3. So I can’t give him everything else I wanted to; I have to claw back 20 XP. I don’t want to reduce his Agility back down to 2: He should be above average in that ability. But I do think of him as more of a rifleman than a quick-draw artist, so I can get 10 points back by leaving his Ranged/Light skill at 1, and I’ll recoup the other 10 by dropping the career skills Cool and Riding.
Joseph Chapman
Species/Archetype: Average Human
Career: Gunslinger (career skills: Brawl, Coercion, Cool, Perception, Ranged/Heavy, Ranged/Light, Riding, Vigilance)
Soak Value: 2
Wound Threshold: 12
Strain Threshold: 14
Ranged Defense: 0
Melee Defense: 0
Brawn 2 Agility 3 Intellect 2 Cunning 2 Willpower 2 Presence 2
General Skills
Knowledge 1
Perception 1
Vigilance (Will) 1
Combat Skills
Brawl 1
Ranged/Heavy (Ag) 2
Ranged/Light (Ag) 1
Talents and Special Abilities
Ready for Anything: Once per session as an out-of-turn incidental, you may move one Story Point from the GM’s pool to the players’ pool.
Grit 2 Each rank of Grit increases your character’s strain threshold by 1.
Proper Upbringing 1 When your character makes a social skill check in polite company (as determined by your GM), they may suffer a number of strain to use this talent to add an equal number ofAdvantagesto the check. The number may not exceed your character’s ranks in Proper Upbringing.
Quick Draw Once per round on your character’s turn, they may use this talent to draw or holster an easily accessible weapon or item as an incidental. Quick Draw also reduces a weapon’s Prepare rating by 1, to a minimum of 1.
Basic Military Training Athletics, Ranged/Heavy and Resilience are now career skills for your character.
Bend Luck 3 (Active, Incidental, Out of Turn, Ranked) Once per encounter, when you make a roll or a roll targets your character, your character may suffer a number of strain no greater than their ranks in Bend Luck. Your character may add Bonus or Setback dice equal to the strain suffered to the roll, then remove the same number of dice from the pool after rolling but before determining the result.
Motivations
Strength: Adaptable No matter what life throws at Chapman, he always rises to the challenge. He’s flexible and can handle nearly every situation, no matter how grim or strange the circumstances.
Flaw: Superstition Chapman is acutely aware of how he regularly cheats fate, and he engages in ritual behavior to try to ward off its ire.
Desire: Vengeance Someone or something wronged Chapman in the past, and he has sworn to exact revenge against the aggrieving party.
Fear: Death Chapman’s fear of death is deep and intense, and he’ll do anything to stay one step ahead of it.
So far, so good, but when we come to Coill, the fortune teller, we run into a problem: Genesys’s rules for magic don’t seem to contemplate the use of spells for detection or divination purposes at all. The category that comes nearest is “Utility,” with purely theatrical effects. There’s extensive guidance for using magic to attack, heal, enchant items, throw up wards, conjure spectral allies and even afflict enemies with curses, but there’s none whatsoever for scrying, locating people or objects, or sensing invisible intruders, let alone learning secrets or peering into the future. This gaping omission excludes not just Coill but any magic-using character with the gift of second sight. It sandbags what was starting to look like a serious contender for the “next GURPS” title. I’d have given it a solid B, but the best I can give it is a C-with-an-asterisk.
Risus: The Anything RPG is a four-page mini-RPG that nevertheless boasts of being “a reliable campaign system supporting years of play” … at least for some. Character creation begins with “Clichés,” essentially the same as aspects in Fate. Each Cliché is assigned one to four dice (“Three dice is ‘professional.’ One die is a putz. Six dice is ultimate mastery”), and a starting character gets 10 dice to portion out. PCs who lose access to their Tools of the Trade—standard gear that’s part and parcel of one of their Clichés—only get to roll half the usual number of dice for that Cliché, rounded up. Task resolution involves rolling all the dice, totaling them up and comparing them to a standard target number scale, where 5 is “a challenge for a schmuck [but] routine for a pro,” 10 is challenging even for an experienced PC, and target numbers from 15 to 30 are increasingly bonkers—but target numbers aren’t constant from PC to PC. There isn’t, for instance, a chest with a lock that’s DC 20 to pick. A Master Safecracker’s target number for that task might be merely 5, while for a Gutter Punk it might be 10, and a Talking Dog (opposable thumbs not included) might need to roll a 30.
The system is so rules-light that it’s pretty much impossible not to be able to create a character:
Inspector Anatoly Nikolayevich Golovko
Description: Gruff, tough police inspector from St. Petersburg, Russia. A man of honor with a watchful eye who knows the streets of his city like the bottom of his vodka bottle.
Clichés: Cossack (4), Mostly Good Cop (3), Fast Draw (2), Singer (1)
Joseph Chapman
Description: A gunslinger with an uncanny ability to make his own luck. Educated and refined, but trouble follows him wherever he goes.
Clichés: Shootist (4), Improbably Lucky (3), Card Sharp (2), Civil War Deserter (1)
Coill Amaezhiad
Description: A wandering fortune teller of mixed high elf and drow parentage. His cards don’t lie, and neither does he.
Clichés: Fortune Teller (4), Hedge Wizard (2), High Elf (2), Dark Elf (2)
Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. But there’s not a lot of there there, is there? I can see this kind of loosey-goosey game being fun for an evening, but contrary to the game’s assertion, I can’t imagine wanting to play an entire campaign of it. Tabletop roleplaying games aren’t just cops and robbers; you need some structure to guide your imagination. Bounded creativity produces more interesting results than unbounded creativity. With an amazingly skilled GM, maybe Risus could be a universal RPG system worthy of extended play. But it doesn’t feel to me like the game takes itself seriously, so why should I?
Aside from a handful of also-rans that even the people who suggested them didn’t seem to consider much good, the one remaining contender for the title of “the next GURPS” is EN Publishing’s What’s Old Is New. I purchased the starter box and feel somewhat cheated, because it doesn’t contain instructions for creating characters in any genre. Apparently, to get the full scope of the game, you have to buy the WOIN Core Bundle, which contains three rulebooks: one for heroic fantasy, one for science fiction and one for modern action. Character creation rules, I have to assume, are in these books.
When I started assembling a list of genreless RPGs, I adopted a working definition: “You can buy one or two core rulebooks for the system itself (vs. a game made using the system) and play a variety of different genres from the core rules alone.” WOIN doesn’t seem to have a core system rulebook; instead, it has a package of three genre-specific game books that together are seemingly meant to constitute the game as a whole. Therefore, I’m moving toward the conclusion that WOIN doesn’t qualify—it’s an engine, like Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark, not a single universal RPG. And as far as I can tell, it doesn’t accommodate any genre beyond the three for which there are published core books.
So what have I learned from this exercise? That of all the purportedly genreless RPGs out there, there are really only two that merit the mantle of “the next GURPS”: the Cypher System and Fate Core. For novice players who aren’t looking to test a system’s limits, Fate is the more accommodating choice. If you want clear guidance on how to create new character options that push the envelope, go with Cypher. You may be able to accomplish more with Fate if you’ve played it enough to know it inside and out, but it’s not going to hold your hand and tell you how. Cypher may creak and groan audibly when you press against the limits of what it was designed to do (and sometimes even when you don’t), but it’s always there to reassure you that what you’re doing is OK, and you won’t break anything by trying.