Improved Genesys Combat

The Original System

If you're already familiar with how combat works in the Genesys core rules, feel free to skip this section. This is an explanation for those who aren't familiar with it.

The Dice

Genesys uses six dice (Boost, Ability, Proficiency, Setback, Difficulty and Challenge) marked with special symbols (Success, Advantage, Triumph, Failure, Threat and Despair). Both dice and symbols are divided into positive and negative and negative symbols (generally) cancel out positive ones. Whatever you're left with uncancelled at the end is your result. So you might roll, for example, 2 Ability, 1 Proficiency, 3 Difficulty and 1 Setback and end up with 2 Successes and a Threat.

This system allows for a great deal of nuance as you can have successful outcomes that also have negative side effects, failures that result in some accidental triumph, etc. but there are issues that come along with that. The first is that it can sometimes be difficult to work out narratively satisfying outcomes that match the dice rolled. For example, if a player is picking a lock and they roll a Triumph, what does that mean? They picked the lock exceptionally well? What's the benefit to that?

The second relates more specifically to combat, and it's the issue of complexity. In combat, Advantages and Threats can be spent on specific mechanical advantages and penalties, some of which are generic, some of which are tied to Talents (special abilities players can spend XP on and NPCs can be given), and some of which are qualities of various weapons.

Further complicating this, different abilities require different numbers of Advantages or Threats to activate and some also require additional dice to be rolled and must therefore be announced ahead of time.

Initiative

Each combat encounter starts with rolling initiative. This too is a little more complicated than in other systems. Rather than a single initiative modifier each character has a Vigilance and a Cool dice pool. I'm not even going to get into dice pools here but suffice to say that it is, once again, slightly more complicated than D&D's "add the two numbers" system. Which ability you use depends on whether you're taken by surprise (vigilance) or know you're getting into a fight (cool).

Then once each character has rolled their initiative they're put in order and marked as either a player or NPC slot. Each turn, any player who has not yet acted may take any player slot, and any NPC may take any NPC slot. This means that while the initiative order remains the same, the turn order changes.

For small groups of players going up against small groups of NPCs this isn't hugely difficult, but each additional combatant does mean more things to remember.

Distance and Maneuvering

Unlike in D&D and similar systems, the difficulty of an attack is largely independent of the target's skills, stats or armour. Some armour does provide a Defence score (which adds Setback dice to the pool) but the Difficulty dice are set by the distance between the two combatants.

Distance in Genesys is calculated in bands that map to approximate ranges and are themselves somewhat confusing. Most combat will either take place in Melee (which is always 2 Difficulty dice) or Close range (1 Difficulty die).

Armour

Armour comes into play in the form of damage reduction. Each character has a Soak value that reduces incoming damage, and this is usually determined largely by their armour. Damage is slightly affected by the dice but is mostly dependent on the weapon. This means that it's relatively easy to roll a hit but if you're not using a powerful enough weapon then you may find yourself unable to actually hurt your opponent - or at least unable to hurt them much.

Additional Factors

And remember those weapon qualities I mentioned when I was talking about the dice? Those range from relatively simple (but important to remember) like Accurate (adds Boost dice) or Pierce (negates Soak) to the more complex and requiring not just memory but planning. Auto-fire, for example, adds a Difficulty die to the roll but, if the attack hits, the player (or GM) can spend two Advantages to hit the same target again or a different target of the same or lesser difficulty.

All of this adds a lot of opportunities for players to customise their method of attack to their playstyle, their character's skillset, and to the specific challenge they're up against. And if I were running a game for, say, three players, I might find that worthwhile. But in a larger group it's not merely difficult but (at least for me) impossible. There is too much for me to think about and remember here and I don't think I've run even a single combat encounter where I actually remembered everything that was supposed to happen. I'm not even sure I haven't forgotten something vital in this explanation.

My Modifications

In many ways, my system is still too complicated and I am thinking of simplifying it further, or perhaps just building my own system from the ground up. But here's a rundown of how I'm currently running my game and why I've made the changes I have.

Initiative is Scrapped

Just gone. I like the fact that player turn order is not set as it is in D&D, because it's quite often useful to be able to have one character act only after another has done their thing first and that's not always going to be the same order from one turn to the next. But keeping track of which characters had acted and which initiative slot we were up to was just too much. Even with visual reminders (tokens, a stack of cards, an app, etc.) it was too easy to forget to update the turn marker and lose track.

The Numbers Game

I also found that, because I have a large group of players, it was too easy for them if I put them up against small numbers of powerful opponents because they could just gang up and beat them down by pure weight of numbers. Realistic, perhaps, but not much fun. So that meant I was always sending them into fights against equal or greater numbers, which meant a lot of NPC turns; ie. it was my turn way more than it was any player's turn, and my turns weren't even much fun because all the bad guys had to be pretty simple (or at least uniform) for me to keep track of them.

NPCs Do Not Play Dice

I was able to come up with one solution to both these problems. What if I combined the PC and NPC attacks into a single dice roll? Let's say a player would roll a melee attack of 2 Ability, 1 Proficiency and 1 Boost but instead of rolling against the standard 2 Difficulty I have them roll against the NPC's Melee skill? So let's say the NPC's stats say they should have an attack roll of 2 Proficiency, we can just convert that to 2 Challenge. Now if the player rolls any uncancelled Successes they'll hit the NPC; but if they roll any uncancelled Failures then the NPC hits them.

Not only does this eliminate the need for Initiative (because NPCs don't take turns at all any more), it also solves the issue of numbers. If five players want to attack one NPC then that NPC will have a chance to fight back against all of them rather than having to just single out one player for retaliation. And if a single player gets into a fight with five NPCs, they can fight them sequentially rather than being dogpiled.

Uneven Odds

But what if we want the players to be outnumbered? What if a couple of goons corner a player alone in an alley and attempt to beat them up? This is where GM's discretion comes in and I let the NPCs get in extra attacks. At the end of each combat round, any NPC who hasn't been attacked can, at the GM's discretion, make an attack. But not in the standard way, or in the same way players do. I'm still going to let the player make a choice and roll some dice.

Dodge or Parry?

Let's take our alley beatdown example. The player attacks one of the goons and since there are no other players present the round is over. But I want the player to be outnumbered and in some danger here, so I'm going to give the second goon an attack. I ask the player if they want to roll Coordination or Resilience. One represents dodging, the other represents either blocking or taking the hits to better-armoured or less sensitive areas. So rather than rolling an attack against their opponents Brawl, they'll roll their chosen skill. If they roll any uncancelled Failures then they're hit, but because this is a purely defensive action they won't score any hits themself for rolling uncancelled Successes.

This can, of course, be applied in reverse as well. If the players outnumber their enemies and you want them to have the benefit of that then you can choose, for each attack, whether their opponent is fighting back or just reacting defensively.

Other Actions

My favourite thing about this system though is how adaptable it is. Does a player want to sneak behind an enemy? Then they can use their action to roll Stealth against the bad guy's Vigilance - and if you want to you can count uncancelled Failures as hits against them just as though they'd been rolling against a combat skill. Does a player want to yell at the enemy to drop their weapons and surrender? Have them roll Coercion against the enemy's Discipline to inflict Strain instead of Wounds - and have them receive Strain in return if their roll is unsuccessful, representing the shame and disappointment of being so thoroughly disregarded.

Social Encounters

As social encounters can be run using a very slightly modified version of the combat rules in the standard ruleset, so can they be under my rules. In fact, the only real change I make is that the players have to nominate a spokesperson. Any player can make an "attack" using whatever social skill they prefer, but any Strain inflicted by the enemy will target that one player.

More even than combat encounters, I found social encounters were extremely susceptible to the numbers game. If there was any way to justify it, players would essentially have their characters stand around some poor sap and bully him into submission. Concentrating the enemy's damage output onto a single character makes it possible for these poor NPCs to stand up for themselves. Players will likely still have an advantage as they'll be able to use tactics like having a player with high Charm and a player with high Coercion team up to play good cop/bad cop while the NPC will have only one set of skills to rely on, but it's not such a foregone conclusion.

Unaddressed Issues

Threats and Advantages

The big thing that's still an issue for me is the many, many ways that Threats and Advantages can be used - particularly to activate weapon qualities. There's still a lot of stuff to potentially have to remember there and I'd really like a way to simplify that.

My group has already long since taken up the standard operating procedure of just passing on Boosts for Advantages because it's simple and generally not too difficult to remember, but it would be nice to make more use of some of the more interesting options. They're just a little too complicated to really get into without slowing everything down.

Pierce and Soak

I feel like this one shouldn't be as big an issue for me as it is, but I just forget about it all the time. I'm getting better at remembering Soak, but Pierce still catches me off guard - I think probably because it doesn't alter the dice pool and there are just too many weapons and weapon mods for me to have memorised what each one does, so if a player doesn't mention it I just don't think to ask. Obviously that's also on them, but I'd like to come up with some way to just eliminate it as an issue. The less we all have to remember, the better.

One thing that's really great about D&D's Armour Class system is that it just alters the difficulty rather than negating damage. If the enemy's AC is 14 and you roll a 12 and add the +3 you've got written beside your weapon to get 15 then you've hit. Roll your damage dice and that's how much damage you do. OK, so there's damage resistance sometimes, but honestly I never liked it either.

Armour as damage reduction does make sense, and altering the difficulty in Genesys is a lot more significant than it is in D&D, but it does add an extra step to resolving an attack and that's just one more thing to forget. I don't know what to do about that though.

Conclusion

There's a lot of cool ideas in the Genesys system. I like a lot of things about it. But it is way more complex than it needs to be and that doesn't always translate to more interesting or nuanced gameplay - especially when it's so complex that everyone forgets how it;s supposed to work.

There's a lot more I'd change if I were setting out to redesign the whole thing, but I've run a few sessions with these altered combat rules now and I think it still feels like basically the same game but just a bit easier to manage.