Take A Peek At Social Interactions In FFG’s Genesys

October 2, 2017 by brennon

We stop back in with Fantasy Flight Games as they showed off another preview of their upcoming role-playing game, Genesys. This time the focus is on how social interactions work.

One of the aspects of the game that should make up most of your time in a role-playing session is the narrative description of what your characters are doing, who they are talking to and more.

Fantasy Flight are attempting to make the social interactions between characters as interesting and 'conflicting' as any normal combat. Green Ronin did something similar with their A Song Of Ice & Fire role-playing game and it will be fun to see how this plays out in Genesys.

Much like with their Star Wars role-playing games the focus appears to be on making sure that dice pools change and flow depending on the advantages and disadvantages of your group and the activity they are undertaking.

For example, playing to a characters motivation might yield better results than going against your beliefs for a common goal.

There is also an emphasis on the fact that, even in failure, you'll learn something about the people you are talking to rather than things just doing badly.

While of course most conversations are going to be organic experiences where you just flow around the table sometimes it might pay to be more structured in your approach, basing it on the combat model, in order to allow everyone to have their say.

It makes things much more like a video game conversation wheel where you might be able to ask certain questions based on your information at hand and what you've learned.

As a way to get you into role-playing this seems like a great route and should work nicely, especially in the sense that even in failure there is a positive.

Remember one of the golden rules, if one of your characters fails a check make sure something else happens because of their actions.

Drop your thoughts below.