Alrightee, here is my pitch to “sell you (and everyone else!) on Cortex.”
As you’re familiar with Fate, many of the advantages and selling points about Fate applies here too, including a narrative/fiction focus, flexibility to define characters through Stunts (called SFX in Cortex Prime), ability to create advantages on the fly (called Assets here), use of a metacurrency, and more. On the whole I find Cortex handles them even better, along with adding a bevy of other advantages that really make things sing:
Adjustable “attribute” sets: While you can go the standard “Attributes” plus “Skills” route, there are a lot of other suggested sets that can really tailor the game to suit the tone, themes, and intentions of the campaign. Using Roles helps emphasize, well, character roles as well as character archetypes and/or aspects of adventuring, and can also be leveraged for something like a Star Trek as departments. Values pulls in moral questions and highlights a character’s state of being. Relationships is a bit self explanatory, great for games like the aforementioned Smallville that’s about people dynamics and drama or soap-opera like situations. And I’ve become especially enamoured with porting in Approaches from Fate Accelerated, coupling them with Roles as the foundation for my Cortex games.
Distinctions apply to every roll made: Unlike Fate, where a character’s Aspects only come into play by spending a FP, in Cortex Prime a Distinction is chosen and included in every test made.
I did a big write up about why this is great here, but the short of it is that by doing so, it continually brings to the fore the important concepts of the character (and that is character in the more literary sense rather than just “collection of abilities for a game” type character). Even more so when a player chooses to hinder themselves with the Distinction, creating fodder for rich RP experiences.
Many dice is not a problem: Because Cortex Prime uses a “roll, choose 2” die system, there’s less worry about having to adjudicate “does that apply here?” to avoid characters overcoming things too easily.
SFX are tied to either Distinctions or Assets: SFX are very much like Stunts under Fate. However, each SFX is written under a Distinction or a Signature Asset (signature as it’s tied to the character and could be an item, specialized training, connection, perk, or etc). That narratively ties them to that Distinction or Asset, which again highlights the specialness of that Distinction or Asset and thus the character every time it’s used.
Everything can be reduced to a dice pool: Similar to the Fate fractal, many things can be represented in Cortex as a dice pool, whether a large challenge or small obstacle, a powerful opponent or a mob of goons, or even a nebulous looming threat. Actions and counter actions reduce the pool in an intuitive and easy way until it is whittled down to zero, at which point the obstacle/opponent/etc is overcome or no longer an issue.
Asymmetric characters are not an issue: One of the important things to get is that Cortex aims to ‘simulate’ fiction (whether novel, TV series, movie, etc) rather than quasi-reality. And main characters in the fiction are all able to contribute towards moving the narrative forward, resolving things happening in the plot, and creating meaningful moments. So too then are all characters in Cortex able to move things forward in most situations. As was just dexcribed by RinleyRenfield above, if the player can create and narrate what their character is doing and it is reasonable to the table, then they can go for it and be as effective as everyone else in forwarding the action and overcoming challenges or antagonists. This allows for both different ‘power levels’ of characters as well as allowing for different methods and character concepts/shticks.
Different modes of resolution for different moments in the game: Beyond the simple Test to overcome something, there’s also several method for longer-run encounters, be they two-person showdowns (arguments, duels, chases, etc), larger-scale obstacles (environmental, research, rounding up wild horses, mobs of small animals, etc), or going all the way to traditional “action rounds”. This allows the narrative and the game to flow smoothly by tailoring the resolution method for what's happening in the fiction at that moment. (It’s also easy to merge in a Clock-type mechanism if desired.)
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Those would be my top-line selling points for Cortex.
It is one of my two go-to rulesets for nearly every non-D&D campaign that I run (with the other being a game system I wrote). And for a "non-combat heavy, alternate-means of success, and when there is combat it is non-tactical" type game you’re looking for I think it really fits the bill.
(And as you’re familiar with Fate, I wrote some optional additions to Cortex Prime that ports in a few ideas and concepts from Fate that I think enhances Cortex even more,
link to them here.)
