One thing that hasn’t felt quite “right” with our Genesis System to us as of late has been how skills progress. They currently have been progressing upon successful utilization of said skill up through the ranks of three tiers, adept, veteran, and master, with each tier requiring more success “points” than the previous tier to advance more. This had been functional during our previous playtests, however as it stood before it seemed that playtesters were leveling their most-used skills very quickly and plateauing rather early on; which was a critique from a few different folks.

Last Friday we had a playtest where we tried a different way of progressing skills wherein you progressed your skills for trying to use them, not necessarily successfully using or landing a skill shot but just attempting to use said skill, but each tier required more “points” to level up to the next tier. The problem we ran into with this concept, however, was almost a complete 180 from what we were facing previously: where previously it felt like skills leveled too quickly and plateaued, now it felt like skills were barely progressing because so many “points” were needed to advance.

While we’re going back to the drawing board on the skill ranking progressions, on thing that we also tried out during last week’s playtest was re-consolidating the Character Core skills back down to 5 (down from the 10 we had expanded to previously), but now we have 10 possible points to put into said Cores (up from the 5 you could put into them previously). So far this has made the Cores less specialized and more capable of being used in varied situations, but we will have to see how it plays out as the characters advance!

In closing, we wish you all a happy Friday and, as always, game on!