What is flawed about Genius?

[Don Strudel]

I'd like to hear all your honest criticisms of Genius: The Transgression.

EDIT: Removed rudeness.

[Prak]

Which comic books? What disgusting excesses? You make it sound like it's full of floss-clad lab assistants and gorn...

[Josh_Kablack]

sabotages TVtropes pages

That's not even possible, you are spouting nonsense and I refuse to care about anything else you have to say.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sabotaging a TVTrope page is telling the unpopular but necessary truth about something. For example, saying that Naruto promotes misogynist values or that The Spoony One has an ego that's out of control or that Deceased Crab regularly power trips in his comments section or that Voyager fits the classic definition of So Bad It's Good is Not Cool And Won't Be Tolerated.

Mindless fanboy boosterism is par for the course.

[Don Strudel]

Yes, yes, TVtropes is a pile of bullshit. Har, har.

Can we get back to the subject now?

[Username17]

A lot of world of darkness games aren't horror. There is absolutely no reason to be horrified in Mage. In nWoD Mage there isn't even a reason for you to not collect the Randi prize and have a TV show where you use magic and rant about Atlantean mysteries to collect millions of dollars.

Not all of the games do a particularly good job of emulating source material. Werewolf the Forsaken has pretty much none of the tropes of fucking Werewolves that people want. Instead of being cursed so that when you see the full moon you turn into a killing machine until dawn arises - you have a family business where you move around a lot and fight ghosts and can only maintain your killing machine form for a few seconds and it's not even as good as "having a gun". Seriously, that game is WtF for a reason.

The games need to be judged on what they do, not on what we wish they did. Werewolf the Forsaken is a bad game because it's supposed to be mostly about combat, but nWoD combat is fairly terrible and there are no presented reasons in the game why the players would even care about any combats. They don't get anything for winning fights and the presented enemies aren't really doing anything wrong when they aren't fighting you. You could probably accomplish more good by ignoring the plotline entirely and engaging in street fights with Mubarak supporters.

Genius is like someone having turned the Sons of Aether from oWoD and made a whole game out of it. That's weird, and incredibly specific, but there's nothing inherently wrong about that. The problems are mostly one of a lack of perspective. Where the designer has incredibly random ideas about what is "powergaming". So if you shoot a death ray at a city and wipe it off the map, that is good clean fun; but if you make a smaller death ray and shoot it at a person, and just that one person dies, that is powergaming cheating that needs to be stopped at all costs.

Fundamentally, Genius can't quite come to a decision about what people can and cannot do. So it suffers from "infinite possibility syndrome". First of all, power discrepancies between players are very large, secondly power discrepancies between Genius players and characters of any other splat are very large, and thirdly no one can agree on what benchmarks - if any - the game should have.

-Username17

[FatR]

Not all of the games do a particularly good job of emulating source material. Werewolf the Forsaken has pretty much none of the tropes of fucking Werewolves that people want. Instead of being cursed so that when you see the full moon you turn into a killing machine until dawn arises

No one actually wants Hollywood werewolves. Well, no one who actually intends to buy and play the game, because lunar-madness werewolves are not playable, for completely obvious reasons. In fact, most people who I've heard wishing for something like them were either inconistent enough to belive that nWoD satisfied this need, or Vampire fanboys that still harbored lingering butthurt from oWoD times.

- you have a family business where you move around a lot

And this is just factually not true. WtF actually wanks on how it ties the characters to their territory.

You are right that there is not much reason to be involved in the default WtF gameplay. Bad guys can "control" whole cities for years, and consequences for mortals are so miniscule, as to be hardly noticeable. Certainly way less than from normal crime. And bad guys don't really have ways of finding you, unless you sit on the stuff they need. Most don't even have desire to do so. So, unless you are a selfless hero and protector of innocents (which, I recon, is not the default morality in nWoD), there is no reason to sit on the stuff bad guys need and fight monsters that are massively better than you in your sole schtick for said stuff.

[Don Strudel]

What would be a better ruleset for Genius?

[Username17]

What would be a better ruleset for Genius?

Such as nWoD works at all, it isn't super bad for Genius. It's basically Shadowrun4 with a slightly worse action resolution system appended to a slightly more elegant skill list with a practically unplayable combat system. But you're supposed to be making robot armies or something, a combat system where "bigger pile of dice wins at life but a bunch of people fall over" is actually fine.

Mostly the authors just need to decide what things can do and how people can do them. Right now it basically reads like a brainstorming session.

-Username17

[FatR]

Sabotaging a TVTrope page is telling the unpopular but necessary truth about something.

Almost forgot to say this - depending on which side of a mod's tastes you end up, it also can be removing idiotic whining about things the whiners in question don't get.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Almost forgot to say this - depending on which side of a mod's tastes you end up, it also can be removing idiotic whining about things the whiners in question don't get.

Of course comments like those tend to have an 'Um' 'Actually' 'This is wrong' 'This tropes wonder if' followed by a justification rather than an outright deletion.