Tell Me About Cortex Prime

[Haplo781]

It's not.
Powersets don't even have direct comparisons in Leverage... Nor firefly.
Leverage is core roll of Attribute + Role + distinction. Optional gear and conditions.

Firefly has default assumption of Attribute + Skill + Distinction, with specialization adding a d6. Distinctions also carry the FX.

Marvel has distinctions, Affiliation, one to 3 powersets (with one or more powers each and often several FX), Specializations (aka skills), and often assets; up to 3 damage track complications, and no limit on other created complications/assets. But when rolling: 1 distinction, 1 affiliation, one power per powerset, one specialization, one asset, one target complication; each plot point spent allows adding another from any of those groups except affiliation. So, you don't normally get more than 4-6 dice; one can, however, wind up with pools into the 8-10 range, not counting the mob rules nor the giant critter rules.

FX refers to mechanical special rules...
In Firefly, they're attached to Distinctions. (And so are starting skills.)
In MHRP, they're attached to Power Sets.
Various effects do interesting things, such as "step down then double" a particular die - so that d10 Flight becomes 2d8, for example - or "spend a Plot Point to pick a second damage die for another target." Or even "Step up your ___ power for this action, then shut it down for the rest of the session."

It's also worth noting that Firefly lacks a doom pool. NPCs have stats and skills, and difficulties default to either opposed by NPC or opposed by 2dX (X varies by difficulty). ISTR that the doom pool is (in published Plus designs) unique to MHRP.

Smallville has a Trouble pool, which functions similarly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's not.

I thought probably not, but I was a little hesitant to say with, say, Smallville.

Looking back at my Cortex LoGaS port, it appears pools were usually Attributes, Distinctions, Specialties and often Signature Assets. Sometimes created Assets with LoGaS Powers (which don't look anything like normal Cortex constructs because I was trying to be quick and dirty with porting them over, which in retrospect wasn't my best idea).

 

[Aldarc]

Going back to the original point:

This game gets brought up a lot and I have always sort of just glided past it. But I want to know more, and was hoping some folks could give me the rundown.

What kind of rpg is it (narrative, trad, other, mix)? How does it play? What is the general system like? What sorts of genres or settings or themes is it good for? How complex is it? How hard is it to learn? What have you used it for? That sort of thing.

IMHO, where Cortex shines as a system lies in how the character's action in the fiction is reinforced by the player assembling the dice pool through their traits and how different hacks of Cortex assemble these traits.

I ran a game of Fate Core set in a fantasy quasi-Italian Renaissance Venice. The players made great Aspects. The characters were in the service a noble house, with one of the characters being a non-inheriting son. Their noble family had acquired a small island that once belonged to monks before they were killed in a siege by a rival city-state decades prior. The family wanted to use the island for their spice smuggling operations, but it was haunted by wrath spirits attracted to the traumatic deaths of the monks. Thankfully one of the noble family's daughters was an exorcist with the church so she would perform a ritual for her family to seal the tear to the Spirit World, but she needed exotic items for the ritual. So the players went on a scavenger hunt through the city. It was a load of fun.

I wanted to try "grokking" Cortex. When I began converting this campaign setting to Cortex, I actually found myself more engaged with the game's themes. For example, the Seven Virtues that I had imagined for the setting's Church were turned into a Trait set, with players ranking how they relate to or value the Virtues. Players can go against one of their Virtues and embrace the corresponding Vice to get their die boosted for a roll but they have to step the die down afterwards. This is something I can do with Cortex that is not really a mod in Fate but it leans heavily into the themes of the setting.

So when players assemble a dice pool, they will be doing so in relation to three primary trait sets and a couple of secondary ones:

• Distinctions: Identity, Background, Ambition
• Means: Cunning, Force, Grace, Panache, Reason
• Virtues: Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice, Mercy, Hope, Love
• Relationships
• Resources/Assets

I have not finished the conversion. It has been an off and on project for several years: Virtues of Valizia.

I still have the magic system to deal with, among other things, though I think that Magic will be a Resource. Resources will require making deals to replenish them, which can create further complications: i.e., "I Owe You for X, You Owe Me for Y." In the case of Magic, as magic is done via Spirits/Demons/Angels, that will mean making Faustian pacts and bargains with supernatural agents.

I could definitely do some of this with Fate, but I think that the results have been more thematically satisfying with Cortex.

 

[jian]

Thanks for the detailed response. it is too bad there isn't a "Fate Worlds" style book for it to help newcomers grok the system.

I think this would be a fantastic idea. There are three rough implementations in the core book (Eidolon Alpha, Hammerheads, and Phase 2.0) which are all fine but in a way not… generic enough, I guess?… to guide people in designing their own games.

(To be fair, Fate Worlds can also be pretty out there but there are enough with enough ideas and suggestions to guide GMs to design their own implementations, generally.)

 

[dbm]

There are 16 ‘Spotlight’ campaign implementations that were done as part of the original Kickstarter for Prime, but these have only been released to backers and the current owner seems to have no interest in releasing them more widely.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There are 16 ‘Spotlight’ campaign implementations that were done as part of the original Kickstarter for Prime, but these have only been released to backers and the current owner seems to have no interest in releasing them more widely.

Yeah, if I recall correctly they were supposed to be released in three collections originally, before the post Kickstarter stuff more or less fell apart. They'd have at least given people a broader set of examples to work from.

 

[JConstantine]

I think this would be a fantastic idea. There are three rough implementations in the core book (Eidolon Alpha, Hammerheads, and Phase 2.0) which are all fine but in a way not… generic enough, I guess?… to guide people in designing their own games.

This was exactly my problem with Cortex Prime. I got into RPGs properly after MHR and Firefly had been pulled so I only had the Prime handbook to go off, and none of those examples were particularly helpful or inspiring. As a newcomer, I would have been better served if the 3 examples were, say, generic fantasy, generic sci-fi (space opera), and generic supers.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There are 16 ‘Spotlight’ campaign implementations that were done as part of the original Kickstarter for Prime, but these have only been released to backers and the current owner seems to have no interest in releasing them more widely.

Wow, that would have been really helpful.

As was I was able to put together a decent Mass Effect setup, but god it required a lot of effort that I think could have been made a lot easier with more examples! It's a really pity that this just all seemed to slam to a halt.

 

[dbm]

The badly mangled Kickstarter killed my interest in the game, unfortunately. It has some interesting qualities but I doubt I would want to run it for anything but the most relationship driven campaign since this seems to be it’s USP versus systems like Fate (IMHO at least).

 

[Kannik]

That Cortex Prime is a toolbox does, unfortunately, mean it has a high bar to entry. Having to build your RPG system from the kit of parts before you can start playing is not only a bunch of work, but a chicken and egg kind of situation: if you've never played how are you supposed to know what would work best for your campaign?

What's happened with the spotlight settings from the Kickstarter is really regrettable, as is the fact that only one full RPG using the rules has been released (Tales of Xadia). Having the gaggle of spotlight settings from the KS would at least allow getting a sense of the game and able to start with something close and then reverse engineer what you want for your campaign. At least there is the Cortex Prime Hack Database, though as it's all fan material there's a wide variance in both quality and completeness. (Plus the term "hack" to some might imply tweaking or breaking or alternate rather than putting something together.) And, in addition, there aren't any a "behind the scenes" explanation for why the various elements in a hack/campaign were chosen and what kind of tone/themes/gameplay loop/etc they enable and support.

That I think is the big missing link (well, that and a company willing to advertise it). Wouldn't need to be a book per se (though that would be great!), but a series of articles or podcasts that both went through each element and described what they bring to the table (ie, Values: how are they used? what do they highlight? what kind of campaigns do they work well for?), followed by a series of examples creating campaigns for many different genres beginning from the theme/tone/worldbuilding and then choosing the game elements to match those theme/tone/world. And if a podcast or video series, it could finish off with 30+ minutes of gameplay to show it all off in action!

Cortex is one of my three go-to systems when thinking up a new campaign (one of which my own system, that's how highly I think of Cortex). I love it's narrative emphasis, focus on character, and what it creates at the table. That it's languishing in obscurity due to things behind the scenes is, again, hyper unfortunate.