RPG Spotlight: FFG’s Genesys
Genesys is Fantasy Flight Games’ take on the generic and open-ended roleplaying system, combining a universal system with a user-friendly play style.
Genesys bills itself as a game “designed for flexibility and adaptability,” and crated to “work with any setting imaginable.” In short. Genesys is Fantasy Flight’s answer to the generic tabletop roleplaying game with loose settings and open rules that would work in any game. Genesys combines the generic open-endedness of GURPS with a fraction of the crunch… and proprietary dice. But don’t worry if you don’t have a set of Genesys dice handy, there are online dice rollers for that.
Genesys and Fantasy Flight RPGs in general walk a line between making character creation easy and giving players a ton of options. Based on your pick for your character’s archetype and career – basically the equivalent of their race and class – the system will start you out with your basic characteristics and skills. From there you take an allotted number of experience points and buy more characteristics and skills for your character as well as picking out their special abilities or “talents”.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you’re at least passingly familiar with other Fantasy Flight roleplaying systems. Genesys is strikingly similar to one of my personal favorites, the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. If you’ve played their take on the Star Wars universe you will be familiar with the characteristics and skills, though you’ll recognize talents as parts of your career tree. Genesys just removes a career tree and replaces it with the Talent Pyramid, giving players the same setup visually but leaving a more open-ended tree of talents for you to choose from, regardless of career.
There is a certain amount of crunch that any generic-style RPG system will have to give the players the opportunity to build the bespoke character of their dreams, but it really is much less time-consuming and overwhelming than some other systems. Of course, this means that there are fewer options than other systems. While a GURPS has a seemingly endless number of special skills to give your character, the Genesys core book only has about ten pages worth of talents to chose from and a set collection of skills that are the same on every character sheet. You may need to get creative with your character building and playstyle, but what are tabletop RPGs for if not getting creative?
The dice and system is one of the places where the Fantasy Flight RPGs shine in my opinion, though it can take a few minutes to get used to. Instead of rolling your standard d20, an entirely unique system of different colored and sized dice will correlate to your skills and the difficulty of whatever you’re attempting. Instead of numbers, symbols on each dice tell you how many successes, failures, advantages or disadvantages you have. For example, a character with decent Athletics may have two greens and a yellow marked on their character sheet, so they would roll those three dice. However, if they are trying to jump between buildings the DM may say that this is a very difficult move to attempt and a difficulty of four purple dice.
The player rolls that hearty handful of dice, subtracts their failures from their successes, and if they have more success they accomplish their task while with a draw or abundance of failures they do not. This makes for a system where you can succeed but have disadvantages or threats, or fail at your specific task but have something advantageous happen anyway. Genesys lets you fail up or succeed while putting yourself in danger, creating a world that can be very fun, cinematic, and maybe even a little bit realistic. In my opinion, this is one of the best games for cooperative storytelling and dynamic scene building that isn’t light on rules.
If you’d like to learn more about Genesys, you can find more information on the Fantasy Flight Games official website, here.
Have you played Genesys? What’s your favorite open-ended or generic-style RPG system? What kind of game would you play using the Genesys system? Let us know in the comments!
Happy Adventuring!
