#narrative dice

You just rolled a skill check. The dice are on the table. Now what?

If you’ve ever done improv, you already know how to play Genesys. If you haven’t, the system will show you the way.

Most rolls land in one of four familiar storytelling beats:

Yes, and… (Success with Advantage). You get what you wanted, and the situation tilts in your favor.

Yes, but… (Success with Threat). You accomplish the goal, but the situation pushes back.

No, but… (Failure with Advantage). You miss the immediate objective, but gain an opportunity.

No, and… (Failure with Threat). You fall short, and the situation gets worse.

The narrative dice answer two questions at the same time: Did your character accomplish what they were trying to do? And what else happened because they tried? Success and Failure answer the first. Advantage and Threat answer the second. That split means you’re never staring at a binary outcome wondering how to make it interesting.

Suppose your hacker tries to bypass a security door while guards patrol nearby. They roll Success with Threat. The door opens. Success told us they bypassed it. But the panel sparks and the security system logs the intrusion. Threat pulled from context you already established: there are guards, there is a security system, and now those things matter.

Same scenario, but Failure with Advantage. The door stays locked (Failure). But while working the panel, the hacker spots a maintenance tunnel the blueprints never mentioned. Advantage pulled from the environment: you’re in a building, buildings have infrastructure, and now that infrastructure becomes an opportunity.

While Advantage and Threat pull from context you already established, Triumph and Despair create context by introducing new facts, details, or complications into the scene.

Your diplomat rolls a social check; Success with a Triumph. The result doesn’t mean they negotiated really well. The Triumph means something unexpected just entered the scene. Maybe they learned the noble’s dark secret. Maybe an ally they didn’t know they had just stepped forward. Maybe the entire political situation shifted in a way nobody saw coming, not even you, the GM.

Despair works the same way in reverse. This time, the diplomat rolls Success with a Despair. Maybe the noble’s liege just walked in and heard everything. Maybe their confidant turns out to be feeding information to your enemies. Or the PC just accidentally revealed who sent them, and that faction has history here. Despair doesn’t automatically mean a failed negotiation—it introduces complications that weren’t on the table before the dice hit.

Look to the fiction for your answers. If you’re staring at Advantage and thinking “I have no idea what that does,” you either rolled for something that didn’t matter—which means you shouldn’t have rolled in the first place—or you didn’t frame the scene clearly before asking for dice.

You’re riding to join a cavalry charge. Your horse bolted without you. You vault onto the saddle mid-sprint—a Hard Coordination check. You roll Success with Advantage and a Despair.

Most players shout the result and wait for the GM to adjudicate. But you already know what Success means: you made it onto the horse. The Advantage? You already established the goal: join the charge. So finish the story! “I grab the saddle strap, swing up, and take aim at one of the riders.” Then the Despair hits and the GM says, “As you crest the ridge, you see the full enemy force: not the dozen riders you expected, but forty.” The GM didn’t plan this. The dice just told everyone at the table that this fight is bigger than anyone thought.

The active player already described what their character wants to do. Let them finish the story they started. You know where the character is, what the environment looks like, and what’s working against them. The dice just show you which version happens.

GENESYS  The roleplaying game for all settings *. 

My first Genesys campaign was in the Avatar setting (benders, not blue people). I prepped three factions on a small island: the Order of the White Lotus, their initiate members (including the PCs), and a turncoat saboteur whose identity I didn’t know yet. I had no plot and no answers. Just a situation: someone is undermining the White Lotus from within.

Six sessions later, the island had ancient relics, dangerous spirits, and one of the White Lotus masters murdered another in an act of betrayal. None of that was in my notes. The dice told me to add it.

I’ve written about the dockmaster cracking under Triumph, and rivals who materialize into scenes because of Despair. Remember that blacksmith whose traps the PCs recognized through Advantage? That’s content I didn’t have to prep. The system handed me NPCs, connections, and complications. My job was to catch them and run with them.

This is the narrative feedback loop in practice. Each roll generated story elements that shaped future scenes, and I never had to plan any of it. The players understood the island better than I did because they built it through play.

Genesys wants you to prep situations, not plot. A situation is people who want incompatible things in the same space. The turncoat wants to sabotage the Order. The masters want to complete their mission. The PCs are caught between them. That’s enough! When the dice deliver complications or opportunities, look to the fiction—not your notes—for what they mean.

A player tries to sneak past a patrol. They roll Failure with Advantage. The guards spot them and tell them to get lost, but the Advantage means they overheard the guards discussing something useful. Maybe patrol routes, or a weak point in the perimeter, or even tensions between the masters. You didn’t have to plan that conversation, and now you know something new about your own setting.

Another PC investigates the temple ruins. Success with Threat. They find what they’re looking for, but the Threat means the search took longer than expected and now someone knows they were here. Or the relic they found is damaged. Or they trigger an alarm they didn’t notice. You pick the complication that makes the next scene more interesting, and now your prep extends forward without you ever writing a single note.

When you don’t know if the island has ancient relics, you don’t have to decide in advance. You wait for a roll during investigation. Success means “yes, there are ancient statutes,” Advantage means “and you notice something useful about them,” Threat means “but they’re more dangerous than expected.” The dice generate story at the table instead of you writing it all alone in your notebook.

All of this works because Genesys gives you the tools that create content:

Advantage and Threat modify scenes without changing success. They reward you for framing scenes clearly. If you establish guards and security systems before the roll, Threat has something to activate. If you described the crumbling architecture, Advantage can reveal a hidden passage. Most of your prep content comes from these results because they show up on almost every roll.

Triumph and Despair shift the dynamic. They create story elements that weren’t on the table before, and should shift the situation in unexpected directions. When players spend Triumph to assert facts about the world, that’s one less thing you had to decide in your notes.

Story Points let players declare facts. “There’s a service tunnel here” or “I know someone in this city” are answers you don’t need to prep. The system assumes the table will fill gaps, not the GM alone.

Genesys being general-purpose means you’re doing less work per genre or setting. Social encounters work the same whether you’re negotiating with a crime boss or a duchess. Range bands work the same whether you’re running a speeder chase or a dragon flight. You’re not relearning the system every time you change settings, and you’re not building out new encyclopedias each time. Same dice, same prep approach, different coat of paint.

When I start a new campaign now, I prep like this:

Three factions with incompatible goals. I’m not worried about their detailed history or org charts. I just need to know who they are and what they want that conflicts with everyone else.

One location where those factions intersect. A settlement, a station, an island. Somewhere for the PCs to navigate between interacting with the factions.

A pressure or deadline. Something that forces action before the situation stabilizes.

That’s it. The rest emerges through play. When a player rolls a Triumph hunting for clues, I don’t check my notes to see if the clue exists. I say “yes, you find it” and figure out what it means with them. When Threat or Despair show up, I introduce complications that weren’t in my prep but that make sense in the fiction we’ve established together.

At a lot of tables, talking to an NPC means improvising until the GM decides whether they like what you said. If you’re charismatic in real life, great. If you’re not, you either avoid social scenes or roll Persuasion and pray.

Negotiation should feel as satisfying as a sword fight. That means clear stakes, meaningful choices, and mechanical weight. Genesys gives you the tools to make that happen.

Consider this:

You enter the magistrate’s office to convince them to “misplace” a warrant for your arrest. You know from your research he’s afraid of losing his position—his Fear motivation. The GM recognizes the difficulty inherent to the fiction and says, “Convincing him to look the other way will be Hard” and puts three purple dice on the table. Your friend says, “I mention the evidence we have could make him look good to his superiors.” The GM offers you two Boost dice—you’re playing to the magistrate’s Fear. Another player leans in with, “I offer him a hefty pouch of gold.” This time, the GM adds a Setback die and says, “You haven’t done your homework, and I’m adding this for factors unknown to you. He appears uncomfortable and the bribe makes him defensive.” Then the GM spends a Story Point to upgrade the difficulty: “The magistrate decries your blackmail, insisting he could have security in his office at a moment’s notice.”

Nobody has rolled yet, but the entire conversation already lives in the pool. The magistrate won’t bend without pressure, and the PCs need him to bend. That’s social conflict.

The pool building was the roleplay. As with most scenes in Genesys, the dice are the primary tool through which social encounters come to life, but the toolbox also includes Motivations and Strain Threshold.

Motivations are mechanical levers, not just flavor text. Strength, Flaw, Desire, and Fear function the same way environmental factors do. If you establish that it’s raining before a chase scene, Threat during that chase might mean someone slips. Work with an NPC’s Fear to earn their cooperation? Boost dice. Push too hard and make them panic? Setback.

The system gives you tools to discover Motivations during play. A PC can spend Advantage to learn any one of these four Motivations. And if they roll Threat? The PC accidentally reveals one of their own, and now the magistrate knows what drives you—that’s leverage. You don’t have to guess what will work based on your real-life charisma. You’re identifying levers, pulling them strategically, and watching the pool reflect your choices.

Genesys makes NPC psychology tangible. You don’t need to deliver a perfect speech. The system makes the social encounter space accessible to players who struggle with improv or performance, and rewards strategic thinking. The quietest player at your table can recognize that the NPC’s Flaw is pride, angle their approach to avoid triggering it, and even earn Boost if they play their cards right.

The magistrate scene is an example of a narrative social encounter. The players build the pool as the conversation unfolds, and when the pool accurately reflects the situation, you roll. It’s fast, flexible, and cinematic. Perfect for moments where the outcome matters but timing doesn’t.

When stakes are high, when timing matters, or when multiple parties are involved, use the rules for structured encounters: initiative and action economy. Characters use social actions to inflict strain, or talents to shift the scene’s dynamic. Strain functions as attrition. Every argument, every appeal, every threat chips away at their resolve until one side breaks.

When an NPC reaches half their strain threshold, they become “willing to compromise with regard to your character’s goals” (GCRB, page 122). What that looks like is a matter of context and collaboration between players. When an NPC exceeds their strain threshold, they capitulate. If a PC hits their strain threshold first, they’re incapacitated. In a social context, this might mean they stormed out of the room, or they can’t focus. But if the PCs fail or push the wrong buttons, the NPC might snap and escalate the situation.

Losing has consequences, true of any encounter. You don’t just “fail to convince them” and find another way past. You lose something real: leverage, reputation, access, time. Doors close. Clocks advance. Other people notice. The magistrate refuses, and now every other official in the city knows you tried to bribe him.

If the roll will push the story in a way that narrating the outcome won’t, and the process matters as much as the outcome, you probably need a structured encounter—the conversation is the fight. A tense interrogation where every question matters. A debate in front of a council where timing and positioning determine who sways the crowd. A negotiation between multiple factions where alliances shift every round. If you just need to convince the guard to let you pass, one roll should suffice.

Frame social conflicts the same way you frame physical ones. Establish what everyone wants. Identify the pressures. Build the pool so everyone can see the situation. Then roll, or structure the encounter if the process demands it. Magic, hacking, vehicle chases, negotiations—everything uses the same mechanical spine because the purpose is to create tension and generate consequence.

Next time a PC wants to convince an NPC of something, ask yourself: “what does the NPC want that conflicts with what the PCs want?” If there’s no conflict, don’t roll. Just narrate the conversation and move on. If there is conflict, look to the fiction for your levers. Who wants what? What’s in the way? What are the stakes if this goes wrong?

Your rogue just described the sneaking up on some hapless guard with the nastiest angle, so the GM calls for a roll. The dice hit the table, and… “you fail. Next turn.” You know that moment. Everyone’s leaning in, but the tension dies.

I hate that moment. I’ve hated it for years. When your goal is to tell a story, that moment is a failure of design, not a gameplay feature.

A lot of games reduce uncertainty to a single axis. You succeed or you fail, and everything else is window dressing. The dice answer one question, then politely exit the scene. If you want complications or momentum, you have to invent them after the fact.

Some people are naturals at this, and others learn to improvise; but many find it nerve-wracking to come up with consequences on the fly. You have to narrate complications that the system covers through obscure subsystems or hard-to-find tables, while simultaneously trying to keep scenes alive when the player just shrugged and said “I missed.”

Genesys bridges the gap between improv and structure with its weird dice and their arcane symbols.

Every roll in Genesys is a skill check. When you make a check, you’re not just learning whether your character did the thing they set out to do. You learn what it cost, what it revealed, or what else it set in motion. The dice answer two questions at once, and both answers matter.

You don’t roll to attack, then roll for damage, then ask your target to roll a save. You roll once and the dice tell you everything: success, failure, complications, opportunities. One roll. One resolution. The character acted, and now the table knows what happened.

The system will not let you waste a roll. Every die result is intended to push the story somewhere new.

The dice track success and failure separately from Advantage and Threat. That simple separation changes everything. You can succeed and complicate your life. You can fail and discover something useful. The roll opens the scene to new possibilities.

The narrative dice change the table’s dynamic. The GM doesn’t need to invent complications on the fly—the dice generate them! Players don’t sit back waiting to hear if they succeed, they’re already looking at the pool and thinking about what could go wrong or what advantage they might seize. The game expressly invests narrative power in all players, not just the GM. The uncertainty isn’t just “did I succeed?” It’s “what kind of success or failure is this?” That question keeps everyone engaged, even when the roll doesn’t go the way they hoped.

Imagine a classic heist moment. A character tries to bypass a security door under pressure.

Success with Threat? The lock opens, but the panel sparks and the security system clocks the intrusion. Failure with Advantage? The door stays shut, but while working the panel, the character spots a maintenance tunnel the blueprints never mentioned.

I ran a chase scene where corporate security hunted the PCs through an open market. One player asked “how far away are they?” In other games, I’d consult the grid, count squares, factor movement speed, check line of sight. Genesys just asks you to examine the fiction instead.

“You can just hear them shouting after you. They’re at long range.”

Everyone understood immediately. The security team was still on their tail, but not close enough to be a threat yet. One player burned their maneuver and action to push the gap to extreme range. Another spent Advantage to declare the existence of a narrow alley at short range that only their bike could fit through.

Range bands work the same way semantic difficulty does. I previously wrote about how you recognize difficulty instead of computing it. You look at the fiction, make a qualitative call, and move forward. Range bands do this for positioning. You’re either close enough to punch someone (Engaged), close enough to talk (Short), across the street (Medium), across the plaza (Long), or waaaay over there (Extreme).

The exact distance doesn’t matter. What matters is can you do the thing you want to do?

Range bands eliminate the need to count squares, measure movement rates, calculate precise firing arcs, and track exact distances. These are all details that don’t contribute to the story. They’re bookkeeping disguised as tactics.

When you remove these decision points, every choice the table makes matters to the narrative. Do I close to engaged range and risk getting hit? Do I spend my maneuver to increase the gap? Should I spend a Story Point to manifest an obstacle between us? Those questions push the scene forward.

A player says “my character fires down the corridor from behind cover, desperate to escape.” You build a dice pool that reflects what’s going on right now—who’s acting, what skill they’re using, what’s pushing back, and what pressures are in play. You build the pool, roll once, interpret the results, and the chase scene continues! Genesys creates clarity through a shared language of abstraction. When you tell players “the sniper is at extreme range on the rooftop,” they immediately know that closing this distance will take multiple turns, and they’re outside effective range for most interactions.

This abstraction gives players space to use the tools to modify positioning and the environment. A player rolls Advantage while fleeing? They can spot a service corridor that puts an obstacle between them and pursuit. Threat during a firefight? The enemy closed faster than expected—they’re at short range now instead of medium. The dice generate consequences from whatever fiction you’ve established.

This works beyond combat. Picture a heated negotiation where you’re trying to convince a magistrate to look the other way. You know their Fear motivation: losing their position. Leveraging this knowledge earns two Boosts. The dice pool shows the conversation before anyone ever rolls. This abstraction clarifies what matters: you’re not tracking every word or relying on the most charismatic player to lead every social scene. Anyone can recognize the pressures in play and build a pool that reflects their character’s choices.

The abstraction of range bands also means you’re prepping less—you don’t need precise battle maps! Instead you frame the environment in broad strokes and let range bands handle the rest: “you’re in a warehouse, crates and scaffolding everywhere, exits at opposite ends”. Range bands and dice results handle the rest. Leave some room for your players to fill in the gaps. When a player asks “how far to the exit?” you don’t measure. You examine the fiction. Are they near it? Short range. Is it across the warehouse? Long range.

A gunfight, a speeder chase, and a wizard pissing contest all use the same underlying logic—so do debates, interrogations, and negotiations. Genesys cares about narrative position, not simulation. What changes is how you describe the situation. In a chase, Engaged means you’re neck-and-neck. In combat, it means you’re in melee. In a debate, it means you’re face-to-face as the entire room watches.

Abstraction means you’re not tracking ammunition unless scarcity drives the scene. The environment gets expressed through the dice pool and its results. NPCs don’t need full character sheets to be dangerous or interesting; their abilities and motivations should communicate intent, threat, and flavor all at once.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Genesys shows up before you ever crack the book: people call it a generic system and mentally file it away as “blank,” “flavorless,” or “I guess I’ll have to do all the work myself.”

I get, it’s in the name. Gene[ric] sys[tem]. People saw marketing that kept saying “universal” and “setting-agnostic” and thought, “okay, so this is GURPS with weird dice. I can run anything, which means the system does nothing.”

Well, you’re wrong!

Calling Genesys generic is like calling a toolbox empty because it doesn’t come with a pre-built house. The book is upfront about the proprietary dice: they are designed to add complications and surprises, not just resolve actions (p. 13), and the rules are explicit that every skill check should move the story forward (p. 25). Genesys isn’t generic, it’s general purpose—built to deliver impactful stories with cinematic pacing and narrative stakes.

Genesys is an engine for collaborative storytelling, specifically intended to emulate moments that feel cinematic and dramatic.

The system offers tools that work across genres the way a film crew’s equipment works across different movies. The same camera, lighting, and sound design can shoot horror or romance; what changes is how you use them. The dice, the pool-building, the interpretation—those stay consistent whether you’re running cyberpunk, fantasy, or space opera.

Those dice are your primary tools to make movie magic, and Genesys assumes you want scenes to change when you roll them. It assumes that failure should still do something interesting, and that success shouldn’t automatically close the book on a moment. It pushes play away from procedural gating and toward narrative moments with unpredictable consequences.

That design choice shows up everywhere. Combat encounters assume dynamic objectives rather than static exchanges of damage. Social encounters resolve using the same structure as firefights, with motivations and leverage standing in for weapons and positioning. Even environmental factors like darkness, poor footing, or time pressure express themselves mechanically through Setback dice or difficulty modifiers. The system constantly asks the table to acknowledge the context and consequences so you can integrate them directly into the roll.

When you say it’s dark outside, there could be a wide range of answers to “How dark is it?” Dark enough to warrant a Setback die tells players it’s dark enough to impact the scene. — GCRB, page 131

The rules insist on follow-through. Every roll produces information that the table has to deal with, and the system doesn’t let you quietly discard a result because it’s inconvenient or boring. If the dice come up messy, the fiction gets messy too.

If you’ve ever described something bold and dramatic at the table, only to have it collapse into ‘you rolled a 12, you miss’—you know how frustrating that moment can be.

Many of us learned TTRPGs through systems that resolve uncertainty with a clean binary. You describe the action your character takes with as much gusto and flair as you can muster, and you either succeed or you fail. Sometimes there’s extra damage, or a crit effect, but structurally that’s it. The fiction does a lot of heavy lifting before the roll, and then politely steps aside while the math decides how things shake out.

Rules matter. What drives me to Genesys is how it promises cinematic play and then actually delivers mechanics that support it. The rules don’t just allow drama, they demand it.

The Book of Genesys is your answer, and I shall be your evangelist.

I’ve played and dissected a lot of games over the years, and this pattern shows up in a lot of systems. Genre-focused games like Call of Cthulhu or Blades in the Dark get around this by baking tone directly into their mechanics. Genesys manages to stay setting-neutral while still making the fiction pull its weight. The same core engine can handle dragon hunts, cyberpunk heists, political intrigue, or space opera without asking you to abandon narrative coherence to get there.

That’s where the funky dice come in. They don’t just answer the question you asked—they ask new ones. You can fail to jump a crevasse but find a secret entrance on the way down, or succeed in a negotiation only to realize you’ve accidentally insulted the Queen’s cousin. The moment doesn’t end when the dice hit the table; the results keep the story moving and hand the consequences back to the table to interpret.

‘Special dice’ seem like such a gimmick until you actually use them. For me it clicked almost right away; I watched a player fail to hack a door but discover the guard rotation in the process, allowing them to avoid attention. I didn’t have to plan for that, the dice told me what happened. That narrative feedback loop—where dice outcomes generate new story elements that feed back into future rolls—means GMs don’t need every answer prepared in advance. Players aren’t waiting for permission to do something cool. The core mechanic insists that something interesting happens every time you roll.

If you want a tightly controlled experience where you’ve prepared outcomes or plots in advance, that’s totally valid. Genesys does not support that style of play. It does support tables that like a little chaos, a little discovery, and that feeling that the story is unfolding in real time instead of the GM revealing it from behind the screen.