FFG SW/Genesys: How well does it play?

[The Glyphstone]

I've been looking at Genesys, the setting-agnostic iteration of Fantasy Flight's Star Wars system - the emergent story aspect of the Narrative Dice intrigues me, but I'm finding it hard to track down examples of how it actually plays out. Has anyone here played EotE/AoR/FaD enough to get a sense of if the game works?

[Telwar]

I enjoyed it when we ran an EotE game.

The biggest challenge was having to figure out what to do with advantage/threat and triumph/despair. Our GM had a problem with that for a while. Having a list of what to do is handy until you get used to it.

[The Glyphstone]

That was my biggest question, since it's also the biggest change versus a typical dice system. Was the issue mechanical (1 advantage = X, 2 advantages = Y), narrative (fluff X advantage benefit as Z event happening), or a mixture of both?

[Bunny Commando]

I've played a few games of EotE, here my thoughts:

- Using an app to roll the dice is quite useful and saves a lot of time; helps especially during a combat, to keep it fast and cinematic as it should be. At the table I played at the players that wouldn't use an app where also the ones that would bring fights to a halt trying to understand what result they had with the dice.

- The Advantage\Threat system needs cooperative players; a GM would like to have players willing to give suggestion on how to translate the Advantage (or Threat) they had in a compelling scene (there are of course standard ways to spend Advantages\Threats, but the game is much more fun when you use the system to recreate cinematic scene instead of reading a table).

[Rakaydos]

Behind the screen, if you have a direction you want to funnel players in, Success with threat is "you get what you want, and it points to X, but Y." and fail with advantage is "You only manage to pick up information pointing to X"

When I ran convention games, I made sure to plot three tracks to the plot that eventially lead to the climax, so when players go off one set of rails, I can divert them to a different track rather than the same one they're trying to escape. (My home game was better about following the script)

Tropes are a great tool.

Remember that threat and advantage can affect other players. My favorite scene is a fight on top of a ship that another player is flying, while the pilot needs to X. The pilots checks turn into enviromental changes for the fight.

[False God]

Reposting my thoughts from another thread on what I didn't like about FFG's Star Wars:

I primarily play 3.5/Pathfinder and WoD. If I had to TDLR it, I feel like FFG Star Wars tried to run away from the crunchy d20 system while also trying to dodge the WoD Storyteller system and wound up somewhere awkwardly in the middle.

Quoting myself....

A lot of it came down to the skills. A lot of them are highly situational while, oh, about a half dozen of them come up on the regular and even then they were often an odd fit. Some of them seemed redundant especially when the game seemed to offer using them interchangeably (Cool and Discipline and Vigilance often overlapped). IMO the skills suffer in the same way D&D skills suffer by being attached to a specific stat. Opening them up to be Skill+Stat as determined by the GM based on player approach helped but then folks had trouble doing the "upgrading" on the fly when mixing and matching Skills and Stats.

The XP was also a problem. The expected "per session" amounts are very close to WoD and seemed very low for the costs, especially later in the trees. 5+ sessions to pick up a single talent? And what, 20+ sessions just to get there? But then the game scaled very poorly, there's almost nothing in the books short of Darth Vader that can challenge a player with a couple sheets behind them and a couple of the "good powers". Speaking of which...

*Note: Genesys fixed this to an extent by allowing you to purchase special abilities at a fixed starting price, and then an increase of 5 points (I believe) for each subsequent purchase, capping at 5 copies of the same thing and eliminating "trees" that need to be bought-through. They also reduced the ability score cap to a hard 5, whereas in the Star Wars system it was a soft 6 naturally, 7 with cybernetics, and max 8(I think, it's been a while) with special powers. As far as I recall the XP values are the same in Genesys though.

I ended up having to custom-build almost every enemy when the party got to high level (around 500xp), this isn't unusual in my experience across many games, but there was a *dramatic* difference in a "high level PC" and a "high level NPC". A great deal of the high-level NPCs seemed to be closer to what the game considered "Knight Level Play"(about 250xp) and a lot of them seemed to function on GM fiat. Yes, Palpatine has stats, no they're not very impressive, but there's notes that the GM needs to fudge what he does because ya know, he's Palpatine.

I found some of the powers to be wildly unbalanced, a Force Rating 3 and the Move power can literally rip starships from orbit. But other powers like Enhance where pretty average and generally useful while never getting too crazy. I ended up adding checks to almost all of them (typically Willpower) to manage them a bit more.

There was also a bit of an implied demand to come up with "some interesting good effect" or "some interesting bad effect" for threats and advantages for every single demand, which was frankly overwhelming. Even with players using the advantages (BTW: bring a list of what they can do) and me using the threats to aid the enemies, the "little special successes" or "little special failures" that can be narratively tacked on got repetitive, particularly in combat.

I completely dumped space combat because it was so non-interactive for the players. It very much is one of those "everyone is reduced to a single station and a single check per turn" -type of space combat systems, unless you put everyone in individual fighters. I don't recall if Genesys has a ship-combat system so this might not even be an issue if you run Genesys instead of Star Wars.

I personally also had an issue with players who weren't willing to buy into some of the inherent camp of Star Wars. This might not be a Genesys problem of course, but given the divisiveness among Star Wars fans, I found it difficult to play with people of varying opinions on how Star Wars should look. If you're all on the same track on what Star Wars should be, great! If you're not, if folks are in love with their own head-canons, if folks have strong opinions on the new or old material, it can get rough.

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TLDR: I didn't really enjoy FFG Star Wars. It felt like a lot of work on both sides of the table for very little reward. An entirely new system for something that either if you enjoy crunch the d20 Star Wars does better and is more approachable for people familiar with d20-based games, or if you enjoy a more story-based experience the WoD Storyteller system does better.

I don't have much to say on Genesys, other than I read the core book but couldn't get a group for it, there are some clear fixes, but it's also very "build your own pizza" sort of approach to a game with only general guidance on how some common (and uncommon) RPG classes or characters or approaches to the game may look. It did not appear to be a game you can just open up and start rolling (anyone feel free to correct me if it is). FFG Star Wars, by-and-large, was.