Tell Me About Cortex Prime

[Parmandur]

All this has taken me back to Cortex Prime and playing with the various toolkit bits for different games. A nice addition with the DTRPG version of CP is the Cortex Codex, which is basically a list of the common terms and tools (Attributes, Doom Pool, etc.) for reference and also so that your reference document doesn't have to be the 200Mb CP pdf, which is a lot.

And this reminds me inevitably about what I think doesn't work about CP, which is the dice balance issue and feel. You basically try and gather an appropriate handful of dice (say Attribute, Skill, Distinction, Ability) and get a decent result. Differences in levels of those stats don't feel very meaningful - you're rolling d6, d8, d8, d6, for example, which doesn't feel very different from d6, d8, d8, d10 for another combination - and it's hard to tell that you're actually better at one thing than another. And the number of dice matters - if you're only rolling Attribute + Distinction that is very different from rolling 4 or 5 stats, it's much more swingy. But if you have a lot of dice, they can all feel pretty samey. Does that make sense to anyone else?

The good bit about the system is what the dice are and how you choose them - that's what feels like agency. So in Smallville, you've got Drives and Relationships as your main stats. While it's tempting to choose your best stats (Glory d10, Lois Hates Me d10) you usually don't because they're not appropriate and they don't feel right. So you decide you're actually really motivated by Justice d8 and Clark is A Whiny @$$Hole d8 on this roll, which feels like a meaningful choice (even if it is less so on the dice expectation, as it were).

It's an interesting balance, but what it says to me is that you have to be pretty careful in choosing which stats to bring into your game. It's better if each stat choice feels meaningful, important to the character, important to the situation. That's what gives the feeling of choice and agency, and engages the players. So actually, Attributes and Skills are pretty boring - you are clearly directed to choose what's appropriate (Dexterity + Fix) rather than decide what matters to you in this conflict (Drive + Relationship). Similarly, Affiliation is as boring as hell - the situation decides whether you're alone or whether you've got your team with you, not you.

I have no real play experience, but just having read a bit and talked to other people, I have always felt that the pooling elmechabic, while cool, is less intuitive than a more flat core mechanic system like d100 roll under, 2d12 roll high, or d20 roll over for quick estimation of what a character can do.

 

[jian]

I have no real play experience, but just having read a bit and talked to other people, I have always felt that the pooling elmechabic, while cool, is less intuitive than a more flat core mechanic system like d100 roll under, 2d12 roll high, or d20 roll over for quick estimation of what a character can do.

Yes, it does feel that way. We all know that d20 is swingy but it’s clear that better bonuses and Advantage really help you out (and that Disadvantage is a kick in the teeth). MSH is technically swingy (flat d100) but the way the zones work (White, Green, Yellow, Red) really shapes the way your skills and powers feel in play.

In Cortex, it’s the narrative that matters. It doesn’t matter so much whether your Telekinesis is d6 or d10, it matters that you can move stuff with your mind and that’s awesome. It doesn’t matter how strong or fast you are, it feels more meaningful that you’re doing it for something or someone you care about.

 

[Tigris]

All this has taken me back to Cortex Prime and playing with the various toolkit bits for different games. A nice addition with the DTRPG version of CP is the Cortex Codex, which is basically a list of the common terms and tools (Attributes, Doom Pool, etc.) for reference and also so that your reference document doesn't have to be the 200Mb CP pdf, which is a lot.

And this reminds me inevitably about what I think doesn't work about CP, which is the dice balance issue and feel. You basically try and gather an appropriate handful of dice (say Attribute, Skill, Distinction, Ability) and get a decent result. Differences in levels of those stats don't feel very meaningful - you're rolling d6, d8, d8, d6, for example, which doesn't feel very different from d6, d8, d8, d10 for another combination - and it's hard to tell that you're actually better at one thing than another. And the number of dice matters - if you're only rolling Attribute + Distinction that is very different from rolling 4 or 5 stats, it's much more swingy. But if you have a lot of dice, they can all feel pretty samey. Does that make sense to anyone else?

The good bit about the system is what the dice are and how you choose them - that's what feels like agency. So in Smallville, you've got Drives and Relationships as your main stats. While it's tempting to choose your best stats (Glory d10, Lois Hates Me d10) you usually don't because they're not appropriate and they don't feel right. So you decide you're actually really motivated by Justice d8 and Clark is A Whiny @$$Hole d8 on this roll, which feels like a meaningful choice (even if it is less so on the dice expectation, as it were).

It's an interesting balance, but what it says to me is that you have to be pretty careful in choosing which stats to bring into your game. It's better if each stat choice feels meaningful, important to the character, important to the situation. That's what gives the feeling of choice and agency, and engages the players. So actually, Attributes and Skills are pretty boring - you are clearly directed to choose what's appropriate (Dexterity + Fix) rather than decide what matters to you in this conflict (Drive + Relationship). Similarly, Affiliation is as boring as hell - the situation decides whether you're alone or whether you've got your team with you, not you.

I fully understand what you mean and this goes into the direction I meant with that I rather would have them make a good game (like Tales of Xadia) as the product than a "System".


The Cortex Prime book may be cool, but its way too hard to use for someone new to Cortex and too complex. Its a lot easier to start with a good Game like Tales of Xadia and then start homebrewing from there like starting from this primer: https://www.talesofxadia.com/compendium/rules-primer


You have the values, like in your small ville example, which make sense and can be interesting. The attributes which are a bit boring, but also are the easiest to use when coming from D&D and are easy to guess which attributes help with which situation.


The distinctions are really cool because of the special abilities etc. so they are needed for the special abilities, but as you say when adding too many dice it just becomes less important what attributes etc. you choose.


Still the reason why I like cortex prime over other narrative games are the distinctions because they give you mechanically different special effects. If you are a water mage, you have different mechanic from a soldier, which in other games (like PbtA avatar game) only plays a role narratively.


One thing where number of dice (and also size) does matter a bit is getting 1s. The more dice and the smaller the dice, the higher the chance you gift the GM 1s which they can use as currency.


Also I think Tales of Xadia makes for me a lot of sense, because the way you progress (overcome stress, and have change of hearts (change your values)) just fits coming of age stories, and makes you really want to use specific stats, even if they are not the highest.

I understand. Cortex Prime is a toolbox, not a game you are expected to play out of the box.

Yes and I think this is the problem/error with it. It should be game first and toolbox second. Games are easier to sell than DIY kits.

What? I don't know who "the developer" is in this context.

Cam Banks, the design mind behind Cortex Prime, by no means underestimates the importance of a working implementation - he was also on the teams that did Leverage, Marvel Heroic, and Tales of Xadia. The game you like was his work. He also distilled the engine behind all these games into Cortex Plus.

But as developers often do, they underestimate how much more complex something is for others. He still thinks "toolkit first". He overestimates how important a toolkit is / how easy it is to use. I bought Cortex Prime to support the system, but honestly I find the book pretty useless. I get soo much more value from Tales of Xadia. Even if I would make my own game, I would choose Tales of Xadia as a starting point, and not the toolbox.

Thats what people make with 5E homebrews etc. Its a lot easier to start with a working game and tweak it than make a game by yourself.

And, I haven't asked him, but I think the decision to go with licensed worlds for the individual games was done on the leadership level of Margaret Weis Productions, not by Banks - so not actually the developer's fault.

Yeah, the problem is that it might not sell with the Dragon Prince filed off.

Well Cortex Prime did also sell to some degree. What I say is that "Cortex Prime" should have just been Tales of Xadia without the Dragon Prince + some additional material about "how to homebrew it for different worlds" etc.


Dont waste effort to make a toolkit. Make 1 working game, call it Cortex Prime, and add material in how to homebrew it. This is how PbtA got popular, this is how 5E and all its homebrews work.

 

[timbannock]

All this has taken me back to Cortex Prime and playing with the various toolkit bits for different games. A nice addition with the DTRPG version of CP is the Cortex Codex, which is basically a list of the common terms and tools (Attributes, Doom Pool, etc.) for reference and also so that your reference document doesn't have to be the 200Mb CP pdf, which is a lot.

And this reminds me inevitably about what I think doesn't work about CP, which is the dice balance issue and feel. You basically try and gather an appropriate handful of dice (say Attribute, Skill, Distinction, Ability) and get a decent result. Differences in levels of those stats don't feel very meaningful - you're rolling d6, d8, d8, d6, for example, which doesn't feel very different from d6, d8, d8, d10 for another combination - and it's hard to tell that you're actually better at one thing than another. And the number of dice matters - if you're only rolling Attribute + Distinction that is very different from rolling 4 or 5 stats, it's much more swingy. But if you have a lot of dice, they can all feel pretty samey. Does that make sense to anyone else?

The good bit about the system is what the dice are and how you choose them - that's what feels like agency. So in Smallville, you've got Drives and Relationships as your main stats. While it's tempting to choose your best stats (Glory d10, Lois Hates Me d10) you usually don't because they're not appropriate and they don't feel right. So you decide you're actually really motivated by Justice d8 and Clark is A Whiny @$$Hole d8 on this roll, which feels like a meaningful choice (even if it is less so on the dice expectation, as it were).

It's an interesting balance, but what it says to me is that you have to be pretty careful in choosing which stats to bring into your game. It's better if each stat choice feels meaningful, important to the character, important to the situation. That's what gives the feeling of choice and agency, and engages the players. So actually, Attributes and Skills are pretty boring - you are clearly directed to choose what's appropriate (Dexterity + Fix) rather than decide what matters to you in this conflict (Drive + Relationship). Similarly, Affiliation is as boring as hell - the situation decides whether you're alone or whether you've got your team with you, not you.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but not the last two sentences.

Different strokes and all that, but Attributes + Skills works really well in some builds, especially action-heavy action/reaction resolution builds. Think any time you want to do a Mission Impossible, Metal Gear, or Firefly-esque thing, it's a great default. And dungeon-crawlers for sure are best with either that setup or Attributes + Roles, at the very least. But sometimes, Roles make characters too broadly skilled, and therefore they end up feeling samey after a couple sessions. (Specialties can mitigate this.)

And my groups have absolutely loved Affiliations in Marvel:

• The d10 doom pool spend to split/rejoin the party makes "the situation decid[ing]" your Affiliation for you an interesting tactical and strategic consideration (e.g. you might want to take actions that target scene traits or use SFX that can manipulate the Doom Pool).
• Milestones often focus on nudging PCs towards using specific Affiliations, but also often create choices that will mean they eventually have to act against their best ones, and since there are only 3, it's a simple but pretty mechanically "powerful" statement to make.

I have no real play experience, but just having read a bit and talked to other people, I have always felt that the pooling elmechabic, while cool, is less intuitive than a more flat core mechanic system like d100 roll under, 2d12 roll high, or d20 roll over for quick estimation of what a character can do.

That's by design. The exact odds of any given roll are a little hard to suss out, and for the type of genres Cortex is trying to emulate, that tends to be for the best. There's several axes to consider, and you're often pushed to make choices that are suboptimal for any given roll because they net you other things (either Plot Points or different narrative outcomes), so it works really well for that.

Yes, it does feel that way. We all know that d20 is swingy but it’s clear that better bonuses and Advantage really help you out (and that Disadvantage is a kick in the teeth). MSH is technically swingy (flat d100) but the way the zones work (White, Green, Yellow, Red) really shapes the way your skills and powers feel in play.

In Cortex, it’s the narrative that matters. It doesn’t matter so much whether your Telekinesis is d6 or d10, it matters that you can move stuff with your mind and that’s awesome. It doesn’t matter how strong or fast you are, it feels more meaningful that you’re doing it for something or someone you care about.

This is also a reason why SFX for Powers versus Abilities are so dramatically different, even though they are technically built around the same formula: spend something to do the thing. They have significantly different weight because Abilities are much more geared to automatically doing something that is an outcome in the narrative, where as Power SFX are more about manipulating the dice rolls that may or may not lead to those outcomes, based on the roll.

 

[jian]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but not the last two sentences.

Different strokes and all that, but Attributes + Skills works really well in some builds, especially action-heavy action/reaction resolution builds. Think any time you want to do a Mission Impossible, Metal Gear, or Firefly-esque thing, it's a great default. And dungeon-crawlers for sure are best with either that setup or Attributes + Roles, at the very least. But sometimes, Roles make characters too broadly skilled, and therefore they end up feeling samey after a couple sessions. (Specialties can mitigate this.)

And my groups have absolutely loved Affiliations in Marvel:

• The d10 doom pool spend to split/rejoin the party makes "the situation decid[ing]" your Affiliation for you an interesting tactical and strategic consideration (e.g. you might want to take actions that target scene traits or use SFX that can manipulate the Doom Pool).
• Milestones often focus on nudging PCs towards using specific Affiliations, but also often create choices that will mean they eventually have to act against their best ones, and since there are only 3, it's a simple but pretty mechanically "powerful" statement to make.

That's by design. The exact odds of any given roll are a little hard to suss out, and for the type of genres Cortex is trying to emulate, that tends to be for the best. There's several axes to consider, and you're often pushed to make choices that are suboptimal for any given roll because they net you other things (either Plot Points or different narrative outcomes), so it works really well for that.

This is also a reason why SFX for Powers versus Abilities are so dramatically different, even though they are technically built around the same formula: spend something to do the thing. They have significantly different weight because Abilities are much more geared to automatically doing something that is an outcome in the narrative, where as Power SFX are more about manipulating the dice rolls that may or may not lead to those outcomes, based on the roll.

Sorry, I think I should have been clearer. I don't think Attribute + Skill is a bad combination generally - it's obviously sensible and useful for a lot of settings and games. But the thing is that in Cortex, it's very hard to tell that you're good at those things, which is part of the feedback loop in most RPGs (I think) and part of the enjoyment and genre emulation.

I thought this was a real problem in Leverage, where the baseline is Attribute + Role. It's obvious what you're supposed to roll when Eliot beats people up, but for a game or setting where Eliot is supposed to be and feel amazingly awesome at beating people up, he didn't feel that way at all unless he used his Distinctions (which, of course, weren't like Distinctions in Cortex Prime - they were basically special abilities, a bit like Stunts in Fate) to narratively rule that he beats people up awesomely. The Distinctions were the only way he felt, in the game mechanics, significantly better at Hitting than Hardison did, which absolutely should not be the case.

So I guess what I'm saying is that it may be worth considering another RPG system than Cortex for game settings where greater talent, skill, competence, and power levels matter and are part of the gameplay loop, unless you're slotting something like Leverage Distinctions in there to bypass the system.

(I don't think I've ever seen it in any version of Cortex, but I do wonder, for settings where skill/competence/power levels matter, whether you should be able to get straight bonuses to the result for those things. Convert your d10 Skill or Power to a +3 bonus to the result, or similar. That would make it feel more static and remove the fuzzy feel around Cortex dice outcomes.)

But for a setting where motivations, relationships, and narrative and character choices really matter, then Cortex shines almost uniquely as a perfect jewel.

 

[nyvinter]

Yes and I think this is the problem/error with it. It should be game first and toolbox second. Games are easier to sell than DIY kits.

When it was kickstarted there were Cortex games: Leverage & Firefly. And it was made for people wanting to make their own since the previous version in Hacker's Guide was getting old and out of print. You can't blame the toolbox for the game getting sold months after the Kickstarter had finished and all the licensed games were not withdrawn.

 

[Tigris]

When it was kickstarted there were Cortex games: Leverage & Firefly. And it was made for people wanting to make their own since the previous version in Hacker's Guide was getting old and out of print. You can't blame the toolbox for the game getting sold months after the Kickstarter had finished and all the licensed games were not withdrawn.

Ok this makes more sense. Although I still think cortex prime would have made more sense as a game + toolbox, but having no game licenses around anymore for sure made matters a lot worse and all the constant shift of ownership etc. for sure did not help either.

 

[jian]

Ok this makes more sense. Although I still think cortex prime would have made more sense as a game + toolbox, but having no game licenses around anymore for sure made matters a lot worse and all the constant shift of ownership etc. for sure did not help either.

Yeah, Cortex Prime to me felt like a response or follow up to the Cortex Plus Toolkit, which was basically an earlier version based on the three licensed Cortex RPGs that were out at the time (Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroic). The three games and their core mechanics were referenced heavily in the Toolkit as they are in Cortex Plus (as Dramatic, Action, and Heroic respectively IIRC).

Those were the last three big licenses and different implementations. The ones that had gone before* (Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, and Firefly) were more similar to each other and used IMO more traditional RPG mechanics such as Life Points.

*OK, this is technically inaccurate. Firefly came out in 2014, after Smallville (2010), Leverage (2011), and MHR (2012). I've always grouped it mechanically with BSG (2007) and Supernatural (2009) but I haven't read it, and I realise that it's probably more like Cortex Action (Leverage) than anything else.

 

[chuckdee]

Yeah, looking at how Cortex came to be - it wasn't even a thing when it came out, sort of like Savage Worlds came out of Deadlands and YZE came out of their first game. It wasn't like Modiphius where they set out to make 2d20 and then applied it everywhere. The system came out of the game. Modiphius got bitten like Cortex did... Mutant Chronicles and Conan got pulled out from under them. That's when they decided to go all in on Achtung Cthulu! being 2d20 instead of Fate and BRP like it was before. So even if all their licenses got pulled, they had their own bit to build on.

 

[jian]

Yeah, looking at how Cortex came to be - it wasn't even a thing when it came out, sort of like Savage Worlds came out of Deadlands and YZE came out of their first game. It wasn't like Modiphius where they set out to make 2d20 and then applied it everywhere. The system came out of the game. Modiphius got bitten like Cortex did... Mutant Chronicles and Conan got pulled out from under them. That's when they decided to go all in on Achtung Cthulu! being 2d20 instead of Fate and BRP like it was before. So even if all their licenses got pulled, they had their own bit to build on.

Yes, IIRC it first appeared in Sovereign Stone (a RPG I’ve never read based on some Weis fantasy books I’ve never read either) but then MWP got the BSG license and decided to use those rules there.

The other Weis property associated with Cortex is of course Dragon Brigade, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything other than the QuickStart there.