# Interest Check, Wild Skies: ET (using Genesys system)



## Blue_Jay (Jan 11, 2018)

So someone else had brought up this game a while ago in this thread. And it's actually a very neat concept! You can learn more about it on the kickstarter that spawned it. But the short of it is that it's a story-driven table-top game where players take on the roles of mercenaries or soldiers in a war-torn Europe during the aftermath of the Great War. So it's "diesel-punk" setting with animal people and historical fiction. After seeing the artwork and reading a review of the material I found it enticing enough to give it a look!

So after buying the book and reading a good chunk of it, I was thoroughly disappointed. Without going into too much detail, the mechanics of this system are lackluster (to put it kindly). And I've spent years playing tabletop games such as DnD (_mostly_ DnD, actually), so trust me when I say that this book wasn't worth the expense.

_But_ I still love the concepts presented in this material. It is surprisingly well thought out and I would love to run a game and explore these concepts even more. So, as it happens, a new RPG system called Genesys was released recently which serves as toolkit for just about any kind of setting a game master would want to run. For those of you who have played or are familiar with the Star Wars RPG (the tabletop game) the mechanics are identical (and the custom dice are essentially the same). I read through it and found that I can effortlessly adopt Wild Skies to this new system.

So, my question is: If I decide to start up a campaign, or even a one-shot game, how many of you would be interested in participating? The reason I ask is obviously because I am honestly considering doing this, but I won't go through the effort of preparing this if no one is willing to participate. I also want to give this new Genesys system a try and see if I can pull off something more long-term or adopt it into my other game. I don't have anything planned in regards to how or when I'll end up doing this. A tentative plan would look something like either a play-by-post game on Discord, or bi-weekly sessions on the weekends (still on Discord). Probably up to six players, two at minimum.

As a bit of background: 

I am an experienced dungeon master. I am currently running a DnD game on discord.
I don't require my players to purchase reading materials or invest a whole lot of time researching game systems. I think that Genesys is accessible enough that players would only need help creating characters, and I as the GM can roll and interpret dice own my own if I need to.
Regarding the previous point, my hope is that the game mechanics would fade into the background over time, allowing players to focus on the story telling and narrative.
As my current players will attest, I _love_ world building. It is literally my passion, so players would need to put up with me posting walls of text and lore all the time. If you don't like to read, then you don't want to join one of my games.
I've never run a historical fiction setting before, and I don't know much about European history. So I would need to do a bit of research (but mostly watch a bunch of war films) to get caught up.
Please let me know what you think. Questions are especially welcome. As are ideas, suggestions, and grievances. I want peoples' honest opinion, please, so don't hold back.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 15, 2018)

Empress Perjury said:


> Sounds fun to me! I love reading lore, and worldbuilding is always such a fun thing to do. I’m all about story telling and narrative as well more than the combat, though that’s good too.



That's awesome!
The setting presented in WS:ET features a lot of mechanics and narrative involving combat, but I'd say the majority of it resolves around character development and story telling. Hell, even its progression system doesn't require a character to harm a single person (although I'm going to stick with experience points for simplicity). Most of the career options presented in the book aren't even combat related (Cooks, Academics, Artists, Mechanics, etc.) although they _could_ engage in combat as the story progresses, depending on the scenario the GM runs or how you want to play said characters. The game largely assumes that the story will resolve around a band of mercenaries by default, moving between battlefields, waging proxy wars, and selling their services to the highest bidder. That's more than likely the scenario I would go with for my game because it's less restrictive on players (as opposed to characters being part of a nation's military or being a bunch of pirates), although when presenting my players with options for building their characters, I would think the characters are as likely to be civilians caught up in the struggle as they are to be hardened soldiers.


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## Jarren (Jan 15, 2018)

I'm concerned about that boar one handing what appears to be a Vickers water cooled machine gun....

Anywho, it seems like a cool idea. I'd be interested to hear what you think is lacking about the system in more particulars. That said, I'm in far too many games at the moment, so I'd have to pass on anything you run in this setting. For now at least.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 15, 2018)

Jarren said:


> I'm concerned about that boar one handing what appears to be a Vickers water cooled machine gun....
> 
> Anywho, it seems like a cool idea. I'd be interested to hear what you think is lacking about the system in more particulars. That said, I'm in far too many games at the moment, so I'd have to pass on anything you run in this setting. For now at least.



I don't know anything about machine guns. I guess that's another thing I'll have to research.
Regarding how Wild Skies is lacking: when I initially started reading Wild Skies I jot down some notes as to what the derived attributes were (there are a lot) and also how the skills are handled. I tend to do this with a lot of table top games so I know right away how to adapt the rules for certain settings, and also which ones are too disregard or adjust so that they make more sense.

Eventually, I wound up creating a list of the ways the system is broken. Here's a brief rundown:

Some of the careers have abilities that are counter-intuitive. They are written in such a way that the more you improve the attribute that ability is linked to, the longer the ability will take to complete or the harder it is to use. It should be the opposite, however. I first I chalked this up to a typo, but I found this sort of thing all over the place. So it's clear to be that this oversight is due to negligence on the developer's part. (For example, the Artist career ability allows them to create a work of art after a number of days equal to their Fleetness plus their Valor attributes, thus the faster they are or the more courageous they are, the longer it'll take to produce the final product.)
Perks are like feats, or extra abilities that are beneficial to the character. But a lot of them are linked to attributes that have NOTHING whatsoever to do with said attributes. Also, quirks are disadvantages you take to round out your character concept. The concept itself is novel, but the application is silly in some cases. For instance, quite a few of them are written in such a way that they become more detrimental to the character the more you improve the linked attribute. For example, the Temper quirk makes the character make a check every time they crit fail on a roll. It's based on their Strength attribute, as in the character must add their Strength score to the roll to control their temper.  So apparently brawnier characters are more proficient at controlling their temper, whereas super weak characters are more likely to fly off the handle and break things (literally, it's written that the character would need to try to break something).

 Attributes are separated into primary (Brawn, Smarts, Guts) and secondary (Strength, Fleetness, Know-How, Moxie, Valor, Grit). Obviously they are all either linked to physicality, mentality, or spirituality, and the implication is that the primary attributes augment the secondary attributes. In fact, I believe the text even says that. But this is only true in regards to one specific mechanic that the book briefly touches upon: Power Points. These are like story points in narrative-driven games, except that their only function would be to give players the ability to add the score of a primary attribute (which is typically very small) to the roll of a related skill that uses the relevant secondary attributes (which are typically enormous). The problem with this is that 1) there is hardly ever any reason to do this at all and 2) players are given VERY few resources to enable them to use this mechanic. In fact, the number of times they can use Power Points per session is a derived attribute based on Moxie (I forget what the math is but it's pretty arbitrary). This makes primary attributes functionally useless for 95 percent of the time you are playing this game. And when you DO use them, they only provide a minimum advantage (they increase the chance of success by maybe up to 8 percent, if you are min-maxing).
In most table top games, character attributes and skills are linked together in such a way that you can _intuitively_ determine how to apply those skills and what attributes are the most applicable to them. For instance, athletic tasks are typically tests of strength, and shooting a gun is typically a test of hand-eye coordination. This is not the case for this system. For instance, the Wrestling skill is linked to either the Grit or Valor attributes. And the Rifle skill is linked to the Valor attribute. And the Machine Gun skill is linked to the Strength attribute. Not the mention that I think there are over fifty skills and keeping track of them all is a chore.
The attributes themselves are... just dumb. The nomenclature, I mean. I honestly didn't know what "Moxie" was until I looked it up. Not even lying, the first two definitions I came across had the words Valor, Grit, and Guts in each description. All four of those are separate attributes, and just glancing over them all I cannot distinguish between them at all. Well, actually, now I can after looking through much the rest of the content. Strength is self explanatory, Fleetness is either speed or dexterity I guess, know-how is not even a real term but apparently it represents intelligence, moxie is cunning (?), and depending on what rule your looking at valor and grit can be either charisma or force of will respectively, or they can be swapped. There's a lack of consistency in how those attributes are applied (I addressed that briefly in a few of my previous points), but besides that well I understand that they were trying to use their own style, or at the very least they weren't trying to rip off dungeons and dragons here. But they should have. I can't give this to my players and expect them to know what this means. I glanced at a few of the pre-gen character sheets and I could not interpret this portion of them because the words were meaningless gibberish.
I won't touch on the combat or character creation sections because I don't want to start a rant. But that's basically the idea. If you want, hit me up in PM and I can lend you a copy of the material.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 15, 2018)

Just to add to my previous post (because I don't know if I was approaching the character limit), the Genesys system is *a lot* more intuitive than the system in Wild Skies. The attributes are more descriptive (Brawn, Agility, Cunning, Intellect, Willpower, Presence), there are only a couple derived attributes (Brawn determines carrying capacity and how much damage you soak), there are fewer skills which themselves are a lot more intuitive, the system uses Story Points in a reasonable way, and _most of_ the mechanics are just as simple (if not more simple) than DnD 5e (in my opinion). If I really needed to I can pretty much run this game without players ever rolling any dice, and it wouldn't slow down the narrative (unless there are large scale battles involving ships, in which case I may have to make shit up as I go).

I tried to see if I can _fix_ the rules in Wild Skies but that would take a crap ton of work. I won't adapt those rules to fit Genesys because, frankly, I don't need to (and also that's a lot of work, too). Genesis provides its own rules for the same kinds of scenarios you'd find in Wild Skies, to include social interactions, ground combat, ship battles, zoid battles (because apparently there are zoids in this setting), environmental hazards, espionage, and whatever else you can expect in an action movie with animal people. Also, it has rules for building custom races as well. Wild Skies had forty of those, I think. I've already made costume races to accommodate most of them, and I can make more upon request. I'll be using the standard rules for modern-day weapons or I will customize those on case-by-case basis (I'm fine with letting players play mad scientists). I still need to read through the stats for their ships and walker tanks (zoids) and see what my custom vehicles will look like, but it shouldn't be too difficult.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 15, 2018)

Empress Perjury said:


> How do the races work? Do you have to choose a character of a specific species to fit that race? My fursona is so far off the map of expected races that I’m afraid of not being able to use her give that restraint is present.
> 
> Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’ve never played a D&D esque tabletop before.



That's a perfectly legitimate question, Empress. And I'll be frank with you, in most tabletop games the expectation is for you to _create_ a character or concept that will fit the setting. This typically involves you going through some sort of character creation process--in which you will be presented various options such as race, class, background, and starting attributes. In many cases those options will be limited, such that you would have to choose from a list of races or a list of classes. In other cases the options can be limitless, like how you can craft you character's history or background, or assign a set of abilities or talents. It sounds like you are concerned that your character won't fit in this setting because her appearance or her species is perhaps too exotic to resemble anything that is feasible in this world setting (correct me if I'm wrong), in which as you would be correct to be concerned.

Some GMs are willing to make allowances or compromises for their players, and let them carry over characters from completely different settings or even genres, even if that character features concepts or abilities that don't fit within the game world. Other GMs are willing to rewrite the rules or the setting to accommodate those players. I can do either of those things for this game. In fact, it would be easy for me. You want this to be a Weird War setting, where there is magic and dragons and nazi-zombies? Done! Most of those things are already written in my materials so the amount of work I'd need to do is minimal. You want to create an entirely separate race of chimera creatures? Sure!

The real question here, however, is _will this make for a compelling story_. All tabletop games are cooperative in the sense that everyone involved (GM included) is engaged in collaborative storytelling. In my games I try to work with my players as much as possible to invent settings that are conducive to telling everyone's story. In many cases it'd be the players who would have a say in that. In the DnD game I'm running, one of my players had a concept that they wanted to use and both of us developed an entirely new society within the world setting that didn't exist previously. Another player wanted to play a unique race, and I ended up writing a whole story line related to that character's past that explains their existence (and might have world-shattering significance later on down the line).

Bottom line is that more likely than not I'll end up enforcing the conventions of whatever setting I come up with (alternate history in European nations so far, although I may end up inventing a new world instead). If you want to use a concept or race that initially doesn't fit then that can be up for discussion; but if it ultimately doesn't add to the narrative (if you want to play a unique race simply to play a unique race and not consider the implications to the story) then I don't think that it would be possible in my game.

I'm sorry for the wordiness, and I hope that answers your question. Please let me know if I didn't and I'll provide more clarification.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 16, 2018)

Empress Perjury said:


> Thank you, that does answer my question. Optimally is like to use my fursona, the unconventional looking girl in my avatar picture. She carries over to any setting just fine, except for the fact that she’s of a strange race. Her weapons, stats, and all that could be completely reset.
> 
> Her race, the Lemuria, are a tribal people that make their homes in caves and harness small amounts of advanced technology. Their culture could be described as a mix of Native American and Asian (India, China, Japan, Korea) culture. Maybe that society could put tension of where are characters are set, and my character could act as a mediator between the two parties.
> 
> Honestly, I really dislike using conventional species like canines, so I’d rather not use one of those.



Do you mean something like having the Lemurians' country/territory be set in the middle of two expansionist super powers, and there'd be tensions between said powers regarding disputes as to who will protect/claim the country and the Lemurian's precious resources? Or maybe there'd be political misgivings about their society slowly developing into a superpower in their own right and the other nations trying to decide whether to oppress or defend them? I like both of those ideas!

Also, is there a particular reason why you don't like using conventional species? It's okay if you don't, I'm just curious.

Also again, regarding the subject of cultures, the Wild Skies setting is based on real events, people, and places (as expected because it's historical fiction). And having read through the material, they do a _fantastic_ job of portraying the political climate and the tensions between the nations. That said, I'm not an expert on history or anthropology (the study of other cultures), and I definitely want to avoid being culturally insensitive. So if I do this thing I'm going to invent an entirely new setting that is not based on real world historical events or races. Which means I have to probably draw a new map and create new races (of animal people) and an alternate timeline and everything. So basically I'll do the same thing I do in my other games, except without creation myths or magic or alternate realities. And although this setting does have lots of sci-fi elements, there's also a lot more realism than I'm used to.

Might be fun. I'd definitely have my players help me with that.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 17, 2018)

Gotcha, I think I understand. It's kinda like how I prefer to draw animal people instead of humans because I think the latter isn't interesting enough.

I will say, though, avionics is really important in this setting. While there will be bird-people, they won't have the natural ability to fly, even with wings. I don't think creatures that weigh more than a hundred pounds will be able to accomplish that, much less glide or hover.


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## Blue_Jay (Jan 17, 2018)

Empress Perjury said:


> Not even with four wings, adequate wingspan and nearly enough of the muscle mass to use those wings? Lemuria are shorter and lighter than most races as well. I’ve tried to account for this as well as a I can.
> 
> Anyways, if wings aren’t possible, I can just remove the race’s large pair of wings, the one on their back. The smaller wings on their hips can stay as vestigial limbs for aesthetic purposes.



I don't think the number of wings would make a difference in this case. And even if the necessary proportions of wing-span scales with mass (I don't think it does) her wings would need to be huge--as in she'd probably need to constantly wear them as a cloak just to maintain a comfortable posture. Mind you, I'm no expert on man-bird hybrid anatomy, but I'm curious enough about the logistics of this sort of thing that I'll take a crack at researching it. I'll let you know if i find something that says I'm wrong.

Aesthetic wings sound interesting. I suppose her people would resemble angles or some such, and inspire awe or fear among the other races. Mind you, I think celestial entities will be the stuff of myths in this setting. I dunno yet.


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