So the Embers of the Imperium RPG was recently released. An RPG set in the Twilight Imperium (Board game) universe.
I loves me some TI, but the Genesys system doesn't sound like something I'd like to play. The idea of drama dice, or whatever they're called.
Anyone got opinions on the system? Is it great and I'm being a moron? Is it awful and I should stay far away? Somewhere in-between?

I think the problem with Genesys is that it's a niche system which is more about prompting a group of improv roleplayers than generating simple yes-no answers. Most of the symbols are in pairs which cancel out, so it is less cumbersome than it seems upon reading, but it still is a cumbersome system. Usually the dice work well enough, but not all of the symbols in the core mechanic match to all situations equally well, so you occasionally have to spend a moment staring into the void when you are trying to figure out what rolling a bunch of Despair means because it isn't obvious for this specific circumstance.



All in all, I think Genesys is perhaps a touch more clunky than percentile. The difference is that the clunkiness of percentile is more front-loaded with arithmetic, and the results come out in a binary yes-no. Genesys is more back-loaded, with assembling the pool being an almost thoughtless process and all your effort getting spent on interpretation. It isn't that the system itself is excessively clunky, but that the clunk comes in at a weird spot in time which doesn't jive well with someone who is used to classic RPG or OSR gameplay.

TL;DR: It's a weird system which not everyone will enjoy. I don't. But I also don't quite revile it. I can't possibly GM it well. But I might play it with a GM who likes it, and I might buy a splatbook using it...with the understanding that I'm going to tear the system out of it because I don't like Genesys.

Let me speak as someone who generally thinks that funky and overbuilt dice pools are probably the future of the RPG hobby; Genesys is a "don't let this happen to you," RPG. The problem with Genesys is that it forces you to use its overbuilt features. You must use custom dice, you must roll all the symbols, you must interpret all the symbols. You have to do this. Every. Single. Time. What's worse, 90% of the time these features are not particularly relevant and just getting in the way of the game. That makes it sound like I think Genesys is a terrible game when that's not quite true; a lot of RPGs have this fault, sometimes even to the same extreme degree once you know what you're looking at. But Genesys is such an oddball system that the fault is glaringly obvious.

If you are going to make a massively overbuilt system, players need options to be able to turn the overbuilt features OFF when they don't want to mess with them.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 08, 2023, 05:47:32 AM
So the Embers of the Imperium RPG was recently released. An RPG set in the Twilight Imperium (Board game) universe.
I loves me some TI, but the Genesys system doesn't sound like something I'd like to play. The idea of drama dice, or whatever they're called.

While I'm not familiar with Genesys, my group did jump into FFG's previous Edge of the Empire pretty heavily back in the day. I definitely have an opinion on the dice system (and I will by using the Star Wars nomenclature in case this has changed for Genesys).

As you know, there are two axis of results: Success/Fail and Advantage/Threat which means there are four possible outcomes of any roll (Success+Advantage, Success+Threat, Fail+Advantage, & Fail+Threat). However, the issue is that all the dice have both sets of symbols on them so the four possible results are only equally likely if the number Positive and Negative dice are roughly equal. This situation of fairly common at low levels of play. But the advancement system in the game tends to specialize the particular characters over time, meaning they will be rolling much more and much better dice for any action that they are good at. The end result of this is that characters performing actions that they were built to excel at will almost always get Success+Advantage but performing all other actions they will almost always get Fail+Threat.

While uber-specialized characters succeeding all the time is bad, the other outcome is much worse. In a game like D&D, if a magic-user makes a melee attack the worst that can happen is he fails and does nothing. But with these dice the way they are, in the FFG SW game, a character performing a low odds attack will almost always generate an excessive amount of Threat points which will hurt the entire party. The result of this mechanic is that the players quickly become adverse to any sort of low odds roll. A devastating outcome if you are trying to run a high flying game like Star Wars.

As the problem comes from the dice themselves you can't just house rule this problem away although the designers have stated that when they run the game they will often ignore the Advantage/Threat result. The main way that GMs handle this problem is to adjust the difficulty of the roll according to the skill of the PC. Neither of these techniques are particularly satisfying.

I think you can greatly help the game if you change the small square dice to only having Success/Fail results on them. Thus allowing you to adjust the difficulty without also affecting the Advantage/Threat axis.

Genesys is for all intents and purposes a mechanically heavier PbtA game: a storygame designed not to accurately model a fictional reality but to consistently produce implausible results for the sake of "the narrative". It's pure shit just like PbtA, every Star Wars need is better served by WEG Star Wars.

Quote from: Vestragor on May 08, 2023, 10:17:40 AM
Genesys is for all intents and purposes a mechanically heavier PbtA game: a storygame designed not to accurately model a fictional reality but to consistently produce implausible results for the sake of "the narrative". It's pure shit just like PbtA, every Star Wars need is better served by WEG Star Wars.

Because as we all know, the Star Wars source material is completely devoid of implausible results for the sake of "the narrative".

The only relationship Genesys bears with PbtA is that the possibility exists for a "you succeed but" or a "you fail but" result.  In PbtA, the half-failed result is the most likely outcome of any roll regardless of whether it's done at 0, +1, or +2.  In Genesys, it happens for a reason.  Do you have a bunch of black dice?  Well it's because you were tapdancing on an oil slick at midnight.  Have a bunch of blue dice?  Your party was assisting you, you have good tools.  It's not arbitrary.  Of course there's always rolls where the dice screw you, but the presence or absence of the good or bad dice is entirely due to the situation and is controllable by the players' choices.

hedgehobbit's experiences are more in alignment with my own from doing Star Wars, though I'll note that the game doesn't scale as it's not level-based.  So unlike say Pathfinder, the beginner party isn't going up against DC 15 stuff and the advanced party isn't going up against DC 30 stuff.  If a character is an okay lockpicker, they don't become a shitty lockpicker later in the campaign because the world magically became more difficult.  The scaling of the game comes through different tiers of enemies, minions, rivals, and nemeses.  If your wizard is running up to try to punch Darth Vader or the barbarian is trying to out-smooth Lando Calrissian, yes, that is a bad idea and tears will flow, but I feel that's sort of how it should be.  If you're up against a master in their field, you shouldn't expect to come out well if the extent of your expertise is having watched a YouTube video on the topic.  If someone doesn't have something they can directly do against a powerful opponent in an encounter, at the very least they can act to assist party members who are more in their element and give them extra boost dice.

GM paralysis over coming up with how to deal with complications or bonuses is a learning curve for the system, though for many skills there are cheat sheets of suggested ways to handle threat or advantage results, and in any case there's a default "threats cause strain, advantages heal strain" if you're at a total loss to come up with a narrative result.

Also, just a side-tip, if you have players who can't handle counting numbers of things on dice, they do have a dice app on phones that will roll and auto-interpret the results for you.  VTTs of course also automatically interpret the whole success/failure advantage/threat canceling.

Quote from: rgalex on May 08, 2023, 11:26:38 AM

Quote from: Vestragor on May 08, 2023, 10:17:40 AM
Genesys is for all intents and purposes a mechanically heavier PbtA game: a storygame designed not to accurately model a fictional reality but to consistently produce implausible results for the sake of "the narrative". It's pure shit just like PbtA, every Star Wars need is better served by WEG Star Wars.

Because as we all know, the Star Wars source material is completely devoid of implausible results for the sake of "the narrative".

Adding random events, results and mishaps which have no plausible exaplanation in the simulated world is not the same thing as having a green goblin as tall as a piss bucket that can mow down soldiers by the dozens simply because is a Jedi master.
The problem with Genesys is the same one that plagues PbtA: every roll acts as a random events tables of some sort, even when there's zero in-game justification for it to be so.

Quote from: Vestragor on May 08, 2023, 11:45:57 AM

Quote from: rgalex on May 08, 2023, 11:26:38 AM

Quote from: Vestragor on May 08, 2023, 10:17:40 AM
Genesys is for all intents and purposes a mechanically heavier PbtA game: a storygame designed not to accurately model a fictional reality but to consistently produce implausible results for the sake of "the narrative". It's pure shit just like PbtA, every Star Wars need is better served by WEG Star Wars.

Because as we all know, the Star Wars source material is completely devoid of implausible results for the sake of "the narrative".

Adding random events, results and mishaps which have no plausible exaplanation in the simulated world is not the same thing as having a green goblin as tall as a piss bucket that can mow down soldiers by the dozens simply because is a Jedi master.
The problem with Genesys is the same one that plagues PbtA: every roll acts as a random events tables of some sort, even when there's zero in-game justification for it to be so.

That is not at all my experience.  I've ran 2 campaigns of Star Wars and played Genesys and own most of the material.  I actually really enjoy the system.

Quote from: Vestragor on May 08, 2023, 11:45:57 AM
Adding random events, results and mishaps which have no plausible exaplanation in the simulated world is not the same thing as having a green goblin as tall as a piss bucket that can mow down soldiers by the dozens simply because is a Jedi master.
The problem with Genesys is the same one that plagues PbtA: every roll acts as a random events tables of some sort, even when there's zero in-game justification for it to be so.

That seems more like GM error to me.  It should be obvious that not every action invokes weird random stuff to just start happening.  If someone's doing something straightforward and simple, they shouldn't be rolling in the first place, and if someone's doing something straightforward but challenging enough to call for a roll, there are dead-simple, not-weird results that a GM can call, "It's taking longer than you thought."  "It's taxing you, take strain."  "You aced it, recover strain." 

Now if you the GM know that there's a bunch of security goons around a corner and somebody gets a pile of threat while trying to open a lock, it's an obvious call at that point, "You raised a ruckus, you hear boots stomping down the hallway and see the beam of a flashlight around the corner."  But you don't have to fabricate the goons just because threat was rolled.  You don't have to do anything.  A party rolled some threat while trying to finagle a console in a Star Wars game I was running, so I had a red light start blinking on it.  That was it.  But they were paranoid as fuck about it from that point onward.  If I am running a game, and I have an interesting idea rattling around in my head, I'll keep an eye out for threats or advantages to provide an opportunity to bring it in.  Otherwise I don't let it bog me down.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 08, 2023, 05:47:32 AM
So the Embers of the Imperium RPG was recently released. An RPG set in the Twilight Imperium (Board game) universe.
I loves me some TI, but the Genesys system doesn't sound like something I'd like to play. The idea of drama dice, or whatever they're called.
Anyone got opinions on the system? Is it great and I'm being a moron? Is it awful and I should stay far away? Somewhere in-between?

  I have the system book and the Fantasy setting book....I want to like it a lot.  But it seems to just not be my flavor, I think I would have to try it as a player with a good gm first to see if it is for me.  I know I judged Savage worlds without playing it for years and it was a lot better on the table than on the page.  Could be the same with genesys....but for the past couple years it has rested on the book shelf.

Ah, another 'you must buy multiple sets of our proprietary dice just to be able to play' system. Apart from the added expense, I always wonder how good a system is, that was primarily built to sell dice.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the concept of the custom dice, if nothing else because you're up the creek for finding any in 10-15 years down the road.  In this instance at least their dice app is free, so there is a non-paying route for play, but I prefer physical dice when not on a VTT.

Quote from: Valatar on May 09, 2023, 02:02:25 AMIn this instance at least their dice app is free, so there is a non-paying route for play, but I prefer physical dice when not on a VTT.

The App won't last more than a few years either.

Not a fan of the system used in Edge of the Empire (to be as kind as possible) specifically because of all those damn dice. It feels way too meta and breaks immersion quite a bit. There's a big difference between rolling a d20 (or 5d6 if you're playing WEG SW for instance) and seeing if you hit a target number and trying to figure out what multiple symbols mean on multiple dice. Like two steps too many.

I think it'd make a decent mechanic for a board game or something which makes sense considering the publisher. As an RPG system, no thanks. There is an app to speed up play, but if you NEED an app to play an RPG, you're already moved past an RPG into something else.

Quote from: Brad on May 09, 2023, 09:27:31 AM
I think it'd make a decent mechanic for a board game or something which makes sense considering the publisher. As an RPG system, no thanks. There is an app to speed up play, but if you NEED an app to play an RPG, you're already moved past an RPG into something else.

Something very similar already does:  "Roll for the Galaxy".  Not to be confused with the more deterministic parent game, "Race for the Galaxy".  Not that Roll for the Galaxy is perfect.  It's a bit clunky in places.  But the dice are generally a big plus, not part of the problem. 

Roll for the Galaxy is helped by the fact that once you get enough dice, most rolls have a few dice that simply aren't useful for anything, get stuck into their default spots just in case, and thus don't require a lot of thought until/unless they are invoked by the actions of someone else.