RPGPundit Reviews: The Genre Diversion Manual

This is a review of the Genre Diversion Manual, by Precis Intermedia, written by Brett Bernstein. It is the softcover print edition.

There's a lot about this game that reminds me of GURPS. It is a Generic system, after all.  But my overall reading of the game makes me think its more of a "Thinking Man's GURPS". Not in the sense that its more complex than GURPS (god forbid!), but in the sense that the way the system is set up, it tends to emphasize a different kind of play. More on that later.

The structure of the book itself is as a 123 page softcover manual. Brett informed me that price was a serious concern for him, in the sense of wanting this manual to be affordable.  In general there is little effort lost in the area of layout or printing as far as I can see, but the art is a little sparse, and not always wonderful. There are a few pieces of nice interior art, but the cover, to me, leaves a lot to be desired. A cartoony image of two figures: a "SWAT" guy, and a conan-esque barbarian. They're both just kind of standing there, and the whole thing reminds me a bit of GURPS too, as in the earlier editions of GURPS.  I guess you could say its a bit "old-school", but really its just not all that eye-catching.

I'll note that the rules are not always presented in a straight-forward way. Sometimes there's a few areas where a rule is presented in part before its explained in more complete form. You learn about "damage" before you learn about combat, for example. On the other hand, as a positive note, each chapter is closed with quick reference charts providing details on the rules covered in that chapter. This is invaluable and goes a long way to making up for any complexity.

What about the system itself, though?

Genre Division 3e is the evolution of the old "Genre Division i" system, used in a number of Precis games, most notably the Coyote Trail western RPG. In the preface to the book, Bernstein states that "the new system shares the basic foundation of the GDi system, only with more focus on the character over skill".  This sounds about right.
On the whole, GD3 is pretty well compatible with GDi, with only some changes and additions.

The basic construction of characters begins with the abilities (attributes). There are five of these: fitness, awareness, creativity, reasoning, and influence. You will note that only ONE of these is a physical attribute as such. The others are all intellectual/social attributes.  This is a big part of why I say that GD3 is the "thinking man's GURPS"; the system by default places emphasis from the start on a diversity of activity, not just physical prowess. But does this mean that Fitness can be overpowered, or TOO generic? We shall see.

You are presented with a variety of methods for generating attributes: random rolls, point-buy, or linear.  This is in keeping with the style of trying to provide a "toolkit" concept, which my frequent readers will know I approve of.

Skills in the game are called "pursuits", and are reflected as bonuses or penalties to the basic abilities. You can have "firearms +2", "brawling +3", "investigation +1", etc. You can also have "incompetencies", which give you a -1.  Pursuits that aren't academic all default to 0.
Pursuits are purchased in either a linear fashion or with an allocated point-buy system.

Characters can also have "gimmicks", these are special properties that further modify a character's ability levels. Gimmicks generally modify an ability in particular circumstances.  This is something that can help to overcome the monolithic quality of the Fitness ability, for example, since you can choose gimmicks that make a character with otherwise low fitness be more strong, or more agile. You can also take purely detrimental gimmicks, which are basically drawbacks. There are gimmicks which do not connect to a specific ability but to social qualities (like "military rank" or "noble title"), as well as social gimmicks like "enemies" or "fugitive".

Health is the "hit points" of the game, and comes in two varieties: Fatigue and Injury.  Fatigue represents damage from exhaustion, trauma, and physical strain; while Injury represents damage from serious injury, lacerations, burns, etc. Health is marked in boxes, and damage can be done in lines.

Some rules are also given for vocations (careers, which specify certain pursuits and gimmicks) and species (which do likewise).

There's a decent list of pursuits, with icons denoting if a pursuit is academic or not, and what time periods/genres it would be appropriate for.  There's also a lengthy list of gimmicks, and some random tables are included for generating random gimmicks.

Finally, there is an optional rule for "Drives"; these are basic motivations for a character like "challenge", "anarchy", "subterfuge", things that determine a character's personality. The PC gains experience when he acts within his drive, and must spend an experience point if he wishes to act against his drive. This is a good rule to have in the book, and its also good the rule is optional.

The basic and pretty well universal mechanic of the game is based on rolling 2d6, adding the applicable bonuses, and adding your basic ability. Bonuses can come from your pursuits, gimmicks, or situational modifiers. The result is compared to a difficulty rating, and the ratio of success or failure (called "Overkill" in the game) generally measures the degree of consequences, positive or negative, from the action taken. Rules are provided for a variety of things that can influence basic checks.
An optional rule is given for "Exploits", which are special actions you can take if you succeed with 5 or more points of "overkill". In other words, when you kick ass. These basically mean that you complete your task faster, or more forcefully, or with more impact, or gaining some additional benefit.

The experience system allows one to roll bonus dice, which can obviously increase one's chances for success. Likewise they can be used to increase your level of protection against damage.

One particular type of check which is quite important, and an improvement (in my opinion) from its original version in the Coyote Trail system, are Composure checks. These are basically "willpower" checks, rolled to keep your cool under difficult situations, when faced with particular stress.  You can make a composure check based on any of the abilities; for example an awareness composure check might be required to avoid revealing physical reactions, creativity based composure checks might be required when facing things that challenge the PC's understanding of reality (Cthulhu, anyone?), influence-based composure might be for resisting losing your cool in humiliating or confrontational social situations, etc.

Difficulties for checks can be based on assumed difficulty levels, or based on the ability/pursuit levels of someone you are trying to affect. For example, to try to stop a computer hacker, you would have to make a computer check with a difficulty equal to 8+ the hacker's Reasoning ability + the hacker's Computers bonus.

Damage in the game can be resisted with "abatement" rolls, which are basically a kind of old-style "saving roll", where for each point of damage you roll a die, and must roll under your armor value to ignore that point of damage. Rules are given for a variety of damage types.

Rules are provided for combat, after the basic rules. Movement rules are based on semi-abstract "spaces", and rules are given for all kinds of movement, and the effects of encumbrance and injury on movement.
Ranged combat is resolved against difficulty based on range. Close combat is based on a check against a difficulty affected by the opponent's fitness attributes and skills.
Weapons can do a base damage in some cases, or a bonus to the basic damage (based on Fitness) that a character can do unarmed.

Overkill essentially covers the concept of "criticals", while botching is handled with the rule for "Calamities". If you roll double-1s, the result is either automatic failure (if your pursuit score for the roll was 0 or negative), or determined by the dice (if you had a positive pursuit value), or, in either case if the difficulty was "challenging" or above (challenging being a Diff of 14 or more) a second roll must be made to determine if a calamity occurred. Some basic but good random tables are provided to determine the nature of the calamity caused: depending if your attack was ranged, unarmed, close combat, etc.
Optional rules are provided for weapons having their own gimmicks, and for combat-specific Exploits.

The "directing the stories" chapter provides advice to the GM and players in running the game. Emphasis here is placed on players collaborating with the GM (rather than fighting with him for authority), and on the importance of Immersion. A sidebar here provides a lengthy list of common difficulty values for a variety of typical tasks. There's a lot of material provided also in how to frame adventures, providing plot and subplot creation advice.
This is also the section where the advancement rules are applied; curiously they don't really have anything to do with experience points, which are basically just points used for bonus rolls. Instead, at the end of the Game session, the GM and player look over the character, and the GM can decide to modify one pursuit and/or one gimmick favorably. The GM might also choose to assign new gimmicks (positive or detrimental) based on events in play. Health can likewise be improved, or reduced due to long-term injuries (or a PC who has taken very grave injuries but survived might have to gain detrimental physical gimmicks). "Dementia" is also introduced here as an optional form of health/injury, reflecting a psychological-mental strain. Basically, its Sanity points.

Rules are also provided in this chapter for working with different scales of magnitude, something that could be very important for certain kinds of games. Sample scaling for a variety of scales is provided; for example, you can choose to scale "damage" so that larger objects do notably more damage and smaller objects do less damage to larger or tougher objects. A human fighting a mammoth, for example, would only do half damage, while a mammoth would do double damage against a human.

In following with the "kitchen sink" feel of this chapter, what follows this are random hit locations, with rules for effects on particular areas of injury. These are pretty good tables, though they'd add a bit of complexity to the game.
Finally, rules are provided for creating "extras" (henchmen characters) or for generating new gimmicks.

You might be wondering at this point just how "Universal" this game really is as a system. I guess there are two elements to this question: how many diverse genre elements does it cover, and how good is it at functioning at different genres and power levels?

Well, let's start with a magic system. Spelled in the pretentious "magick with a k" style, the GD3 answer to the magic question is to present magic power as new pursuits. Optional "etheria" health-meter rules are usable if you want to limit how many "spells per day" can be cast. A good sized list of magical pursuits are offered. Pursuits of magic are all academic pursuits (ie. you can't do them "untrained"), and are listed as "schools", where you must get at least a proficiency in the more basic pursuits before being able to acquire the more advanced pursuits. Each "school" has four progressive pursuits. The school of "battle magic", for example, has the pursuits of Blasting, Etherial Blasting, Shrouding, and Rallying.
Schools include battle magic, aegis magic (protection magic), bestial magic, death magic, divine magic, mind magic, and sensory magic.
In casting a spell, you must apply a particular method, be it chanting, focusing with a crafted artifact, creating a magic circle, or a potion. Difficulties are modified by things like range, size, and casting speed. Calamities can occur when casting, and different schools of magic each have their own calamity table for harmful effects.

There are optional rules for magic gimmicks, as well as optional magic Exploits, and some sidebar-rules for making your own pursuits, schools, or methods.
On the whole, I have to say that Bernstein handled magic in GD3 better than I expected, I didn't think this would be an easy task for this kind of system. Its still not a strong point of the game, but you have a basic and workable magic system provided.

Vehicle rules are next, where the tactic applied by the author is to essentially create as though they were a type of character (albeit with different abilities, like Handling, Frame, Tech, etc). Gimmicks are used for creating vehicle "fixings", including weapons. Vehicles have their own kind of health scores, called "integrity" and divided into "mechanical stress" and "structural damage". Some good rules are provided for vehicle repair, special vehicle damage, vehicle tasks, and vehicle combat. Random tables are provided for vehicle calamities, and for vehicle obstructions or anomalies (nice touch!). And following the same format as previously, optional rules are provided for vehicle gimmicks and vehicle exploits.

Next comes the monsters chapter, which starts out reminding us of scaling issues with monsters, and providing some random ability tables and monster gimmicks, for creating one's own creatures or if you want to make a non-average member of its race. Sample monsters are then detailed in small statblocks, with a couple of lines of description and then some basic stats. Four or five monsters are packed in a single column of text (8-10 monsters per 2-column page).  Monsters are presented for a variety of genres: bears, dragons, hill giants, martian stormtroopers, mechatroopers, dinosaurs, etc. But in all, the bestiary is fairly small (only about 30 entries), and the monsters are presented as examples.

The next chapter is the conversion guide. I don't think there's much to say here: it provides conversions for GDi, plus other Precis systems (Iron Gauntlets, Story Engine, and the diceless Active Exploits).

At page 95, this basically finishes the system per se. What is presented in the remainder of the book is a sample setting: "unbidden and forsaken", a modern-day horror setting. Somewhere between WoD and Unknown Armies, the concept of the setting is one of a secret world behind our own, and that certain characters, the "unbidden" can become aware of this secret world and its secret stories ("the Mythos"), but that this comes at a great cost.
The dementia optional rules are used here (obviously) and its meant to be a game of psychological terror and modern magic (with Mythos Lores granting special powers), where the PCs fight in this secret war happening behind the scenes of our own reality. Its not bad, its not super-super original (though it does present this genre in a slightly different light than other games I've seen), and its certainly better than anything WW has done, and more importantly presents a good example of what the GD3 system can be made to do. A more expanded version of this setting, for example, could make a good GD3-based setting book.


So in the end, how good of a game is this, and how good of a "generic" game?
The answer to the first is that its a pretty good game. Its simple, but the GD3 version of it (compared to the earlier GDi) certainly adds a lot of great detail to the game, without losing that simplicity, that allows you to run a much more complete game.
How generic is it? Well, to compare it once more to GURPS, this is not in fact a game system I'd say you could just use for "anything".  It is a game best used in either historical games, or low-fantasy or "Gritty" games. I think it can do horror much better than it could do "superheros". It can certainly do hard sci-fi really well, I think it would be harder to do epic sci-fantasy/space opera.

But I guess that the final analysis is this: I'd certainly rather use this game than GURPS for the same kind of campaigns these games are best suited to run. I'd rather use GD3 than GURPS for an historical game, for example, or for a modern horror game. So I'd call that a "win" for GD3.  I hope that over time this system will find itself supported by a variety of settings.


RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Stanwell Compact + H&H's Namaste

Thanks for the thoroughness. I think you pretty much got what I was trying to accomplish. I basically tried to answer all the requests made by fans of the GDi games.

AFAIK Coyote Trail and GDi games in general already had Composure rolls. Is there a notable difference in how these are used in GD3?

Nice review.

Quote from: 3rik;720790AFAIK Coyote Trail and GDi games in general already had Composure rolls. Is there a notable difference in how these are used in GD3?

No. Composure rolls are pretty much the same.

I thought so too. Which is why I found this remark in the review puzzling:

QuoteOne particular type of check which is quite important, and an  improvement (in my opinion) from its original version in the Coyote  Trail system, are Composure checks. (...)

Its been so long since I've reviewed either of these that I couldn't honestly tell you what the difference was (or what I thought was the difference); but if I said it means that I clearly perceived some kind of a difference in how they were handled in each game.

Quote from: RPGPundit;721508Its been so long since I've reviewed either of these that I couldn't honestly tell you what the difference was (or what I thought was the difference); but if I said it means that I clearly perceived some kind of a difference in how they were handled in each game.

There may be something minor - I don't remember either - but the basic premise is the same.

Is this system open for publication like OGL or OpenD6?

Quote from: Jeffrywith1e;865791Is this system open for publication like OGL or OpenD6?

It is not, because I am very strict on its implementation.