A review by mburnamfink
Cortex Prime Game Handbook by Amanda Valentine, Cam Banks
4.0
The Cortex system was developed over a long series of licensed games: Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroes, and Firefly. Licenses expire, and many of these books are basically impossible to obtain. Cortex Prime is the unified, license-free, generic Cortex system.
Generic systems are tricky beasts, because there really isn't such a thing. Roleplaying games are about fiction, and mechanics help us support that fiction by providing accessible questions and answers detailing "what happens next." Cortex's DNA is heavily inflected by its TV license history. What should happen next is what would make for a good episode, which most broadly means a face of successes and complications until our heroes win the day, or suffer a painful lesson.
Where this gets complex is that Cortex Prime isn't a game book, so much as a game toolkit. Characters are built around mandatory Distinctions, and then at least two of the Prime Sets: Affiliations, Attributes, Powers, Relationships, Reputations, Roles, Skills, or Values. Resources and Assets round out the stuff that a character will be able to draw on. Each trait is rated from d4 to d12, rolled in a dice pool, and then the highest two are kept, with the biggest die not totaled counting for effect. Plot Points enable you to add more dice to your total, trigger cool SFX, or increase the impact of your action. By page count, Powers get the most space, covering the gamut of comics inspired superhero abilities. This makes sense, we know how drive or fight work as skills, while elemental control or flight might need some more explicit rules. And Powers serve as a decent framework for thematic high-concept scifi gizmos, fantasy magic, or TV treatment of forensic science or computers.
Cortex falls in an odd place where it's not a simulationist or gamist game, but it's also fairly divorced from narrativist RPG design styles. And while the mechanics are not hard, the dice pool manipulation is fiddly. I've had to explain how Resistance rolls work in BitD literally every session. I have no idea how my groups would ever master the intricacies of calculating effect size, dice doubling, stepping up, or any of the other dice tricks Cortex relies on (and on a side note, calculating probabilities in this system is a nightmare. Working on some Python to do it via Monte Carlo simulations, but ugh!).
At the end of the day, Cortex Prime has a lot of options, and both players and GMs will need to do a lot of work to get the game they want. GMs have to select which suite of mods will form their version of Cortex. And players need to absolutely nail their Distinctions. Good Distinctions mean characters interacting with the PP economy and driving the story. Bad ones mean the game is poorly designed.
I still really like Cortex, though I've yet to play a session, and it's good to have a live version of the rules not tied to either Leverage (though I could go for a Leverage rewatch about now) or the incredibly idiosyncratic organization of Firefly. But Cortex has to beat several options, such as other generic systems like FATE and GURPS, a specific system for the game you want to play, or the baseline energy of just doing it poorly in D&D. And I'm not sure Cortex Prime is elegant or compelling enough to clear those barriers.
Generic systems are tricky beasts, because there really isn't such a thing. Roleplaying games are about fiction, and mechanics help us support that fiction by providing accessible questions and answers detailing "what happens next." Cortex's DNA is heavily inflected by its TV license history. What should happen next is what would make for a good episode, which most broadly means a face of successes and complications until our heroes win the day, or suffer a painful lesson.
Where this gets complex is that Cortex Prime isn't a game book, so much as a game toolkit. Characters are built around mandatory Distinctions, and then at least two of the Prime Sets: Affiliations, Attributes, Powers, Relationships, Reputations, Roles, Skills, or Values. Resources and Assets round out the stuff that a character will be able to draw on. Each trait is rated from d4 to d12, rolled in a dice pool, and then the highest two are kept, with the biggest die not totaled counting for effect. Plot Points enable you to add more dice to your total, trigger cool SFX, or increase the impact of your action. By page count, Powers get the most space, covering the gamut of comics inspired superhero abilities. This makes sense, we know how drive or fight work as skills, while elemental control or flight might need some more explicit rules. And Powers serve as a decent framework for thematic high-concept scifi gizmos, fantasy magic, or TV treatment of forensic science or computers.
Cortex falls in an odd place where it's not a simulationist or gamist game, but it's also fairly divorced from narrativist RPG design styles. And while the mechanics are not hard, the dice pool manipulation is fiddly. I've had to explain how Resistance rolls work in BitD literally every session. I have no idea how my groups would ever master the intricacies of calculating effect size, dice doubling, stepping up, or any of the other dice tricks Cortex relies on (and on a side note, calculating probabilities in this system is a nightmare. Working on some Python to do it via Monte Carlo simulations, but ugh!).
At the end of the day, Cortex Prime has a lot of options, and both players and GMs will need to do a lot of work to get the game they want. GMs have to select which suite of mods will form their version of Cortex. And players need to absolutely nail their Distinctions. Good Distinctions mean characters interacting with the PP economy and driving the story. Bad ones mean the game is poorly designed.
I still really like Cortex, though I've yet to play a session, and it's good to have a live version of the rules not tied to either Leverage (though I could go for a Leverage rewatch about now) or the incredibly idiosyncratic organization of Firefly. But Cortex has to beat several options, such as other generic systems like FATE and GURPS, a specific system for the game you want to play, or the baseline energy of just doing it poorly in D&D. And I'm not sure Cortex Prime is elegant or compelling enough to clear those barriers.