I just picked up Genesys main rule book. I was wondering if anyone uses the Gen rules for SWRPG setting? Is the player’s handbook worth getting?
I know many speak of using the vehicle rules from Genesys in Star Wars. Pretty much anything can translate over (same system) EXCEPT character creation. Genesys replaces the talent trees of SW with a more free-form talent pyramid which makes the careers only important for career skills granted.
Player’s handbook? You mean the Expanded Player’s Guide I assume? If so, then this could be very helpful if you are completely using Genesys to play SW, not just picking and choosing pieces. Lots of information for creating settings, adversaries, etc in there. It really should be called the Expanded Game Master’s Guide, not sure why they chose to call it the Player’s Guid. It also has information regarding using talent trees (instead) with the Genesys system. Thus, converting it back to the SW way if you wish.
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Thank you I will pick up the Expanded Player’s Guide and look it over. But it sounds like the vehicles rules is the most common cross over.
I haven’t, but I am curious what the motivation would be.
Has anyone tried it? It seems like a lot of work!
I don’t know if anyone has done it either. Depending on how you do it, it may not be much work at all.
You really don’t need to do much (anything?) with gear, vehicles, etc. It’s the same system. The only large change is character creation. If you decided to do it Genesys style, you’re gutting the talent trees and leaving only the career skills. You could probably just use the SW career skills list directly with some name changes. Then, import the SW talent lists to Genesys assigning them tiers. That would be the biggest part of it, but I don’t know the advantage of doing that. Not much work at all to do it though.
If you decided to still use SW character creation with Genesys, then what you are really doing is just using a slightly new version of the other rules regarding combat, social actions, and vehicles. They are slightly updated. Using SW vehicles, gears, character creation and talent list with all the other rules from Genesys, wouldn’t be any work at all. You could call the Narrative system 1.0 for Warhammer, 2.0 for Star Wars, and 3.0 for Genesys (with the character creation changes). If you don’t use the character creation just the other rules changes, you’re playing Star Wars 2.1 I guess.
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Order66 did a whole episode on it and posted the result. It requires reworking every vehicle’s stats and weapons so is no small task.
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I do use the Genesys rules for SWRPG, and it works fine for my group. I like the flavor of SWRPG, like its setting books, but we wanted a more stream-lined experience. For us, that meant doing a way with career specialization talent trees and Force Power trees. You might say, well are you even playing SWRPG anymore? But we did use things like Allies & Adversaries and Gear & Gadgets, plus the settings books for ideas. It’s just that we really liked Genesys for our games in other settings, so we switched to playing Star Wars that way to. (We don’t do much with vehicles, so I can’t comment on that area.)
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Out of curiosity, did you personally start with STAR WARS or GENESYS?
I find the build-your-own-talent trees to be as broken and complicated as a Pathfinder Wizard’s spellbook, but I come from the long-ago times when EotE was the only FFG game out.
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We started with SWRPG, but only because Genesys didn’t exist yet at the time, and we really liked the narrative dice. We played SWRPG as-written for a full campaign, and after it, we moved to Genesys for any future Star Wars games. If I was looking at every single Talent in Genesys and Star Wars combined, I might be a little overwhelmed, but we are very character-focused in how we grow our PCs… and that was one of the things that chafed so much about the trees. There was just so much in there that wasn’t of interest, or we’d have to go to great lengths to reach the talents we wanted. So we mainly played with the Genesys talents, and added a few talents from the Star Wars line if there was something specific of interest to us.
I’ve played plenty of d20 stuff, including Pathfinder, and those games all tie characters closely to a career path with their classes, even with the options that exist in feats. SWRPG was kind of a middle ground, since the trees tie you to the authors’ visions of those career specializations. I feel much freer with Genesys to build the character I want and to shape them as the narrative grows the character. That’s what I’m looking for in a skill-buy RPG. I’m still happy to use SWRPG sector books and adventure modules, I just don’t want it for my PC creation.
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I have been using SWRPG and haven’t used Genesys rules for anything yet. I do enjoy the SWRPG rules, just feel Genesys rules seem like SWRPG 2.0
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