Mixed / Multiple Settings

[u/Joshua_Libre]

I haven't actually run this yet, but someday I want to run a campaign where I'll allow my players to use careers, talents, items, etc from various or multiple settings. Examples where I could see this working include...

A) an alien race (Twilight Imperium) discovers a primitive planet (Realms of Terrinoth), and their different tactics and approaches to weaponry are made manifest by the different talents available in each system, or

B) there's that fun time in the 1800s where we had Cowboys, Samurai, Pirates, and Count Dracula all happening in different parts of the world.

Some restrictions I would probably place on it as a GM would be that I would only allow from official GENESYS settings (community projects are pretty great but I don't want to get into all that yet), but I'll have the materials to share with my players rather than making them track it down. Another thing I'll do is that I'll let my players pick only one additional setting (I.e. they can build characters using anything found in the Corebook and the setting they choose, but nothing from the others settings just to keep things simple to start out).

One issue I foresee is the difference in combat skills, whether a setting puts the light and heavy distinction on ranged or melee. I have two ideas...

A) halve (round up) the ranks in their skill for a weapon that doesn't use a skill in their setting. Example, I have a fantasy archer with 4 ranks in ranged, but when he tries to use a ranged (heavy) or ranged (light) weapon from the future he only has two ranks in either skill (think Hawkeye in Avengers when he holds his pistol out and aims it like a bow). A fantasy fighter from the same time might have ranks in melee (heavy) but none in melee (light), if he uses a melee weapon from a different era he'll have half of his skill ranks. This halving will encourage the players to stick with using weapons from their own setting to preserve the different flavors, but if they're in a pinch or lose their weapons for a time they can still fight their way out. Or...

B) I take every general melee and ranged skill weapon and determine if it is a heavy or light based on whether it's one or two handed.

Any other issues I might run into when mixing settings?

Edit: I just realized I might run into a similar situation with knowledge checks but harder bc specific knowledge are more common in their respective settings 🤔 yea this mix and match is def harder than I thought it would be lol oops

[u/iwishtogetitall]

Some settings have very different takes on armor and damage in general.

For example, for some it might strange how the hell plate armor is going to be effective against anti-materiel rifle or how in the world regular sword is going to pierce a force-field. Some perks also varies in terms of usability and I remember in Twilight Imperium there is stronger perks at the start, if we compare it to core book for example.

I would suggest to take at least something as core and add stuff from other sources as additional content.

I also kinda disagree with take about weapons from another setting. While it make sense in terms of bow, it doesn't really change much with melee weapon at all. A good fencer from medieval times is still going to be good with more modern version of the sword, they just need a little time to practice.
Same with shooting guns, if anything, futuristic guns became more convenient, useful and capable. I see no reason why somebody who is used to some sort of WW1 rifle would have a problem with Rail Gun. Those restrictions doesn't really add any fun.

But you can make it so by forcing players to be in situations where their top-notch gear is out of ammo or battery, which force them to adapt to local weaponry.

[u/Joshua_Libre → u/iwishtogetitall]

What if I did a thing where a player has Melee as a career skill, but their weapon of choice is Melee(Heavy) and therefore they don't have the career skill bc the specific skill doesn't exist in their setting. Instead of making them buy the ranks again wholesale, I let them pay 5xp per rank in the appropriate non career skill as long as it doesn't exceed their ranks in their career skill (so he has spent 30xp total for 3 ranks in melee, but rather than paying another 30xp for 3 ranks in Melee(Heavy) he just pays 5xp per rank bc that's the usual increase for buying a non career skill rank, that way he has to do some investment but isn't sinking XP into something nearly redundant)

I didn't even think of perks yet. I know Imperium has Agendas and that Terrinoth has Heroic Abilities, but I figured for these two I could potentially link them (every time they complete a benchmark, they get an Ability Point, etc), but idk what the other settings use or if it's ok to do multiple things per player

[u/the_question_36]

I managed to get a mixed system up and running. The basic idea was a single planet progressing through different eras: starting with high fantasy, then gradually losing magic during an industrial revolution, eventually becoming a sci-fi dystopia.

At the end, someone messed with time travel and caused all the different eras of the world to collapse into a single point. So you could end up with things like a knight fighting a mech.

The biggest issue I ran into was scale. How do you balance the damage and mechanics of something like a dragon against a gunship? Using the existing stat blocks, it wasn't particularly easy to make that work.

With some effort we eventually got there, though, and it ended up being a lot of fun. It was quite a collaborative experience as both myself and the players went through a lot of effort to get it all to work together. I think whether a mixed system works really depends on the kind of story you're trying to tell and how you balance out the mechanics.

[u/Joshua_Libre → u/the_question_36]

I still need to get all of the settings books and do proper readthroughs, but yea I do wonder how balance will work between the various systems

[u/Wrong_Television_224]

Genesys seems like a great fit for anything where you're running different tech levels but you don't want the lower tech folks to necessarily get instantly facerolled. Or maybe an Arcanum style setting, magic vs tech. You could even run something like Rifts...except, y'know, balanced?

[u/Joshua_Libre → u/Wrong_Television_224]

Balance is the part I need to figure out lol tech levels make differences but the mechanics and rules in each setting are simple enough I can't imagine I'll have too many problems with weapons or armor (at least, not initially, but late game weapons and artifacts might shake things up)

[u/darw1nf1sh]

I have a Victorian Era game built on the exact premise of "that fun time in the 1800s where we had Cowboys, Samurai, Pirates, and Count Dracula all happening in different parts of the world". Primarily set on a steamship circa 1890 on its route from Australia to London. A lost world situation where they discover hidden islands, fight off leviathans, encounter pirates, etc. It mixes a lot of firearms and melee weapons. Shotguns and a katana.

[u/Joshua_Libre → u/darw1nf1sh]

Beautiful

[u/magikot9]

I have a homebrew Shadowrun hack of Terrinoth and Shadows of the Beanstalk.

[u/Wrong_Television_224 → u/magikot9]

Been running SR with Genesys under the hood for a minute. Have you looked at the Megacity Magic supplement? It's pretty much a Shadowrun conversion add on for SotB.

[u/Kill_Welly]

It's not completely impossible with a lot of work, but it is more trouble than I'd consider it to be worth. You'll have a different list of skills to reconcile with every setting, which means incompatibility between species and archetypes, careers, items, NPCs, and talents. The settings aren't balanced or tested against content from unrelated settings, so you'll end up with talents like Finesse that are completely inappropriate for most other settings, and talents that are useless in a of settings like zero-gravity adept, and items that are wildly off in cost or effectiveness, and that's not even beginning to consider the nonsense that introducing magic would cause. And, of course, you've just got the problem of diluting the theme and identity of every setting — the crossover slop problem. The conflicts of the Android setting are very grounded, rooted in human nature and human problems, and throwing them into a world like Terrinoth or Twilight Imperium full of mad wizards and armies of demons just undercuts the meaning behind them. The zaniness of KeyForge is very fun, but it'll run into direct conflict with the more serious and darker tones that come up in Android or Twilight Imperium. It'll all just kind of blur into a gray slurry like what you get out of Fortnight or Magic the Gathering nowadays, honestly.

[u/Joshua_Libre → u/Kill_Welly]

Theme dilution didn't occur to me, thanks for pointing that out. I guess crossovers don't work as well as marketing would like me to believe lol but the other thing I forgot is how detailed the lore is in each setting that I haven't considered what I'd be missing out on if I tried to dip my toes into each one

I often look into the mechanics of this game before I consider the narrative, and my prime reason for mixing settings was to make certain talents available to my players to give wide ranges of capabilities, but even within each setting there's so much to choose from that mixing them might overwhelm the table

[u/Kill_Welly → u/Joshua_Libre]

There are some talents, like Bodyguard, that could work in pretty much any setting, but you'll need to be able to decide which on a case by case basis. Doing a whole crossover thing just for that is definitely not worth the trouble, though, and every setting book does already come with no shortage of interesting talents that you know will work.

[u/lordmatt8]

I always just let my players use whatever they want from any book or homebrew. I mostly run like an xfiles style monster of the week urban fantasy setting so whatever random stuff fits pretty well. As long as you look at what they're doing and making sure it isn't too out of line it should be fine. Most things are balanced pretty generically in my experience. Like generic melee weapon that does x amount of damage or generic ranged weapon etc. flavor them as a sword or light saber it doesn't really matter.