I've been working on several projects for Genesys lately (in between the usual insanity of the holiday season). Most of them are for Fallout, but some are for my City of Heroes theme, as well as the Wizarding World module I'll be running at GamernationCon 5 in April. For Fallout, I've done some work on Chems, finally wrote up the rules to heal radiation damage with the Medicine skill, and started to outline some new talents tht are taken from Fallout 4's Perks list.
The Chems document is done, sort of. I'm basically considering them a Beta test, as I'm not really certain how some of them are going to play out. The most well-known chems are in the document; Buffout, Jet, Med-X, Mentats, Psycho, and Rad-X. I haven't gone into the extensive list of chems in Fallout 4 quite yet, because I need to see how these basic ones play out in the game. I'm most curious/concerned with Jet...
Using Jet will grant the character an extra turn at the end of the round. This additional turn does not count as the character's next turn for the purposes of talents and effects.
I'm worried this could be game breaking, but it might not be depending on how easy Jet is to obtain. Also there are some pretty heavy side effects to being addicted to chems. Jet in particular has some nasty ones when not affected by Jet
Characters addicted to Jet increase the strain cost of any non-free maneuver by +1 and suffer a setback die to all Agility checks when not under the effects of Jet.
I'm hoping that the downside and one-shot nature makes chems useful in certain situations, but not game breaking. Feedback will be necessary and updates may occur.
The Chems document and the Healing Radiation rules are published and ready to go, and should be up on D20Radio.com shortly. In the meantime, I'm looking at making some new talents with names and effects inspired by the Perks list from Fallout 4. Thus far, here's what I'm looking at:
- Iron Fist - Bonus Brawl Damage (Ranked)
- Big Leagues - Bonus Melee Damage (Ranked)
- Heavy Gunner - Add Stagger to Gunnery checks
- Strong Back - Increase Encumbrance Threshold (Ranked)
- Pain Train - Bonus brawling damage while in Power Armor when moving
- Demolition Expert - Bonus damage with Blast weapons
- Sniper - “Sniper Shot” from Star Wars RPG
- Penetrator - Maneuver to add Pierce to an attack. (Ranked)
- Chem Resistant - Upgrade Resilience checks to avoid Addiction once
- Rad Resistant - Reduce Radiation damage from all sources by 1 (Ranked)
- Medic - Improved use from Stimpacks and RadAway
- Gunslinger - Bonus Ranged (Light) damage (Ranked)
- Rifleman - Bonus Ranged (Heavy) damage (Ranked)
- Commando - Maneuver to remove the increase difficulty from Autofire attacks
- Blitz - Make melee attacks against targets at Short range
- Bloody Mess - ????
- Better Criticals - Bonus to Crit Rolls (Ranked)
I love the idea of Bloody Mess, but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what it could do in Genesys, other than just "MOAR DAMAGE". It's going to require some additional thought. As far as what else is coming for the Fallout Theme, I have more weapons and equipment coming, along with more adversaries, attachments, rules for establishing settlements, and scrapping/crafting rules. Some of these will be pretty direct adaptations from similar rules in the Star Wars RPG, but there will be some differences. They can't port over directly, and do need some tweaking to fit into the Fallout world.
I figure these tasks should keep me pretty occupied over the winter months. It should hopefully distract me from starting some more Theme adaptations. A Rifts theme is really itching to get some attention, but so is a Battletech theme. A poster on the FFG forums is working on one but it feels too much like he's trying to make the Battletech rules fit into Genesys; which is not a direction I would take with it. If I work on one, my direction will be "how to play Genesys in the Battletech universe"; trying to capture the essence of the setting without it getting too bogged down in complex rule adaptations.
...and now my brain is working over how I'd do it; I'm hopeless.
Ah well. Something to toss on the growing pile of stuff to work on later.
May the dice be with you.
