What's in a Genre?

One of the hallmarks of the Cypher System is the fact that we’ve tried to make it usable with almost any genre. As you might imagine, this is its own unique design challenge. Not only do the different genres have different needs, but with a multi-genre system like this, you ideally want the freedom to mix them up. Your wizard can stand side-by-side with a power-armored warrior, and it just works. (One of the underrated aspects of the system is how easily it works with superheroes—wizards and guys in powered armor work together all the time, and it’s no big deal.)

From a design point of view, this means you have to ask questions you don’t have to in other games. Is a magic fireball just a grenade with different set dressing? Is it different when two knights hit each other with swords than when two robots slice at each other with laser axes? Is piloting a hovercraft mechanically different than driving a car?

These are fun questions, but that doesn’t make them superficial—they’re important.

While the main rulebook covers a lot of different genres, we’ve also done a lot of work on genre-focused Cypher System books, like Stay Alive! for horror, Godforsaken for fantasy, and Neon Rain for cyberpunk. As we move forward into Cypher’s future, we don’t want to undo any of that work. We’re lazy that way. Still, all this additional work has taught us a lot about dealing with different genres and settings, and we don’t want to pretend that it hasn’t.

First and foremost, we’ve learned that the game as it stands is slower than we’d like to jump into a fresh one-shot adventure or campaign. As I mentioned last week Cypher was designed to be more of a game-creating toolbox than a game, and that can be less than ideal at times. Genre, I believe, is the answer to that problem. Rather than just having core character types that can be molded and modified to fit any genre, we’ve determined that it’s a much easier and more fun experience (not to mention faster) if those types are just designed for a specific genre. This means that rather than taking an adept and making a lot of choices to make it into the wizard you want to play, you can just play the wizard type we’ve designed for you. This new approach doesn’t require a player (or GM) to choose abilities and whatnot to reflect the desired spellcaster—it instead asks you to choose from a wide variety of pre-made options like the wizard, the sorcerer, the witch, the mage, and more. You still have a lot of choice, with many customization opportunities if you want them.

We’ve also embraced the idea of sub-genres in a big way. So while the mage or a necromancer might be better suited to your dungeon-fantasy game, the wizard might be more appropriate for an epic fantasy (à la Tolkien or King Arthur). A Conan-style sword and sorcery game might work best with a witch or a sorcerer. Of course, because all the types are compatible with each other, you can choose whichever you want.

Likewise, this means that we don’t just have science fiction options, but hard sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, and post-apocalyptic choices for you. And of course, there’s modern “real world” options, superhero options, and more.

One of the reasons that this new way of looking at types works so well is that these choices are simplified and streamlined, meaning each option takes up a lot less space in a book than types that cover every conceivable campaign imaginable. This, in turn, makes them less complicated and intimidating to jump into.

By digging deeper into the different genres, it’s a lot easier to have the game you most want to play. Flavor is so important to really enjoy a game. While some people are fine with a general fantasy game, others want to embrace the difference between Conan and Aragorn, for example. Sure, superficially they’re both guys with swords, but the things they can do, the companions they travel with, and the challenges they face are actually quite different.

Ultimately, having defined types specific to genres means that no matter what campaign the group wants to play, it will be much easier to play straight out of the book, and get things up and running fast. Of course, if the GM has some really weird ideas for their setting—things that don’t fit into a standard genre or subgenre—there’s plenty of options to customize everything, but that info will be presented in a user-friendly way for the GM’s eyes only, just to cut down on the rules clutter.

Ultimately, we gave ourselves the task of making character creation faster and easier without decreasing the options and ability to customize. (I’ll talk about that more in a future post, including greater access to skills, and abilities having more interesting and varied effects for PCs.) It was difficult, but I think we did it.

Want to keep informed about the upcoming crowdfunding campaign? Click here.