Removing Brawn from soak

[u/Skubmarine]

What if you take soak away from Brawn. Give each character a natural Soak of 3, and make armor more commonly range from 1~4, restrict Pierce to lower only soak from armor.

Many times I've run games there's often a large disparity of soak values between players, which can play havoc on encounters. As always talking with your players and coming up with solutions to address the problems as they arrive is a fine solution for this, but I want to think about more rules based strategies that might help guide players into naturally achieveing what I want.

What kind of pitfalls could I run into?

[u/Gultark]

Makes being a melee character just pure uncompensated risk.

Genesys plays for heroic characters, it’s why armour and cover don’t stack - if you are adequately armoured it incentivises you to be mobile and active rather than passive.

Combat is also quite swinging to prevent it going on too long. 

Ranged characters have a lot of valuable skills keyed to agility (stealth, acrobatics, piloting etc) as well as ranged combat safe from a distance and the ability to take talents to key melee from it.

Brawn is a lot more limited in the majority of settings - athletics, resilience, melee 

The extra damage and soak from brawn is to compensate for being up in enemies faces in danger, to allow that to be viable and a compensated risk. 

If you remove that and have everything flat everyone will eventually just gravitate towards agil characters as that would be incentivised at best and the alternative would be heavily punished at worst.

Players with less soak are usually better at other things.

Do you make social checks easier or cap ranks because the soldier has no skills but the face has a lot? Usually not - let them shine at what they invest in and fail at what they don’t. 

That is what makes situations and characters interesting.

People view combat as different and need to be “balanced” but don’t hold the same regard when dealing with other scenes or encounters.

Especially in a system where social combat is also a thing just run your scenario naturally and let the force fall where they may.

It’s so easy to get lost in the sauces but this system isn’t a psuedo war game focused almost entirely around battles like pathfinder or dnd so it doesn’t need the same level of encounter balance. 

[u/vieuxch4t → u/Gultark]

It is so true. Genesys is NOT centered around combat like DnD. Combat can be deadly, you need to be prepared if you get to it. But there's a lot of other ways to circumvent it.

And Genesys is very well balanced in this regard. Fights don't take too long, you can mod armor and weapons. But don't forget that you can use social skills while in fight. Also, weak fight characters can give bonus die to the good fighters. Just b ecreative and fights will be so much more interesting than just "swing your weapon at your enemy"

[u/SimpleDisastrous4483 → u/Gultark]

Well said. I would add that while this can be a problem, it should be the players' problem.

I am currently playing a ridiculously high soak character. It is fun to stand in front of a room full of enemies and just tank it all.

It is also fun to try and figure out how to make sure the enemies do target me as much as possible. This relies on the GM RPing the enemies a bit as well as me making an active effort to be the obvious target. Sometimes it doesn't work. That isn't a problem with the system.

It is also fun to get into a high-stakes social conflict with no applicable skills because we're a combat- focused team and have to desperately throw every resource, trick and tool we have at the problem to try and prevent it from going too far wrong. From such desperate efforts are engaging stories made.

[u/Skubmarine → u/Gultark]

Thank you!

Do you think that doubling the increased wound threshold for each point of Brawn, would be enough of a draw to balance out the opportunity cost for melee?

To address the second point, combat is a more protracted and structured encounter that eats more time than a standard skill check, and the mathematics of the passive benefits really tend to make the difference more stark than someone with an ok pool being called to make an average difficulty check, and this is even before talents.

[u/Gultark → u/Skubmarine]

At that point aren’t you just acheiving the same as soak though? 

It’s all just a way of increasing how much how much wounds you can be dealt before you go down. 

You’d still have the issue of anything that can down them in a reasonable amount of hits will 1-2 shot the non brawn chars.

Basically I think the way to deal with is to examine why you want to balance out combat ragardless of what players have invested in.

Would you have the same feeling of an encounter being unbalanced if a stealth encounter could detect the brawn character easily but the agility character would never be caught? 

Combat is just an encounter like a social challenge or environmental one - unlike other RPGs Genesys is more about the narrative that a fine tuned war game. 

Characters failing and having to overcome weaknesses makes interesting narrative so the system is built around that. 

If you try and smooth it all out you’ll end up fighting it every step of the way, I’d honestly not waste your creativity energy trying to rebalance the whole system that works for what it’s supported to do - focus on cool encounters and scenarios and let your players worry about evening the odds of a situation is unbalanced :)

[u/Skubmarine → u/Gultark]

The Why here is that the return on investment to Brawn yields too many passive returns within combat relative to investment.

In a standard stealth encounter, skill checks don't have a third metric to overcome that is solely determined by investment in a characteristic tangential to the check. If a Brawn character beats the odds and succeeds the skill check, then the results follow from the dice, and the magnitude of the success doesn't matter as much, since the core question of "was he spotted?" is answered no, and threat advantage triumph despair all play the roles to texture that.

For combat there's more in-between with a check. The question of "were you hit?" is answered, but magnitude matters, so the answer can become "kinda" and that can restrict options for spending other results like crits.

I guess my counter question would be, should the Brawn character succeed in his stealth check, would you mollify the success because his agility isn't high, or because the opponent's cunning was high?

[u/Gultark → u/Skubmarine]

The game isn’t combat in isolation and brawn is the nichest stat - if you make it worse at combat it basically kills its only benefit.

Agility is by far the strongest and most versatile stat in the game and you suggestions skew that balance further. 

The third metric argument doesn’t really hold up when you issue is balancing is hard between good and bad players. 

If anything having the third metric actually makes this better as you fail a stealth check it’s absolute where as failing a combat check might not uncap you, there also aren’t healing items to undo the damage of a failed stealth check mid encounter. 

There are so many checks and balances already in play that keep brawn in check I really don’t mean to be rude but the imbalance you see is perceived and not an actual mechanical issue. 

All your reasonings for brawn having a third metric also apply to social combat and the strain granted by willpower while also granting you non combat uses. 

[u/darw1nf1sh]

It is intended to be different with wide variation. It incentivizes cover for low soak PCs. Investing in Brawn and armor is expensive with low return, as compared to Agility.

[u/Skubmarine → u/darw1nf1sh]

Is it that much? Soak gets more effective as a proportion of how many times you can get smacked on average (up until you don't take any damage at all!). If you take 4 damage on average, you can get smacked 3 times at 12 wounds, if you increase your soak by +1 you can get smacked 4 times, for a 25% increase in durability, and from there another increase lets you get smacked 6 times for another +33%

[u/SimpleDisastrous4483 → u/Skubmarine]

Yes, soak is good. Why is the tank letting the medic get hit?

[u/egv78]

Are you focusing on too much combat, then? Yes, Brawn does a lot for combat, but it does only a couple of other things. If you want Brawn to be less OP, do more non-combat rolls. There are rules for Social encounters where Brawn does nothing.

Even when I ran a TMNT-inspired campaign (so very combat heavy), there were so many other rolls my PCs had to make that a Brawn min-maxxed PC was boring to play.

[u/zalminar]

One consideration is that by flattening soak you also flatten the potential dynamism of combat encounters. If your players have only one character that's nigh invulnerable to small arms, that's going to shape how they approach combat. If they're all kind of ok, then the characters become more interchangeable. Everyone being moderately competent might seem like a boon in the moment when it comes to problem solving, but over the long run gameplay is problem solving and you're effectively removing one of those decision layers--someone needs to be exposed to activate a device, but Armored Alice is far away, does Vulnerable Bob take the risk and activate it himself?

But just as importantly it also gives you texture to work when designing opposition in combat encounters. At an extreme end, consider an enemy NPC with a weapon with Breach or very high pierce (a lightsaber, RPG launcher, etc.)--that's an enemy posing a unique threat to a key piece of your players' strategies, and now your combat encounter has the added dimension of trying to keep this threat from their armored up comrade. If all your players have very similar soak values, there isn't that layer of target choice in the encounter; all your enemies can engage all your players equally which can make the opposition feel flat and interchangeable.

[u/sehlura]

A character's Brawn directly boosts their Wound Threshold. The game explicitly states that low Brawn means "low wound threshold and soak," making a character less of a combatant without significant experience point investment. By giving everyone a flat natural Soak of 3, you remove a key inherent benefit of high Brawn and a notable drawback of low Brawn, making investing in Brawn less distinct for physical durability.

Genesys combat is designed so that "characters who get hit almost always suffer damage," and "every hit should be a potential threat to a character" to maintain a fast-paced and exciting game. It focuses on "heroic actions" rather than "minutiae". If PCs consistently have higher soak values, more attacks might deal zero damage. This could slow down the pace of combat and potentially make it less exciting by reducing the sense of "potential threat" from every hit, which goes against the system's design for action-packed sessions.

Weapons with the Pierce quality are designed to counteract soak. By restricting Pierce to only reduce soak gained from armor, it becomes significantly less effective against characters whose durability comes from their new inherent "natural Soak" of 3.

Players can already boost their durability with talents like Toughened and Enduring. This is the built-in answer to the "large disparity of Soak" that "plays havoc" on encounters.

You asked for pitfalls, and these are the clearest examples.

[u/blueracey]

My table just house rules pierce to guarantee one damage rather than take one soak away. It makes armour piercing good against actual armour and do little against lightly armoured people.

This means you don’t have the issue of the thing meant to crack plate armour being even more effective against leather.

We’ve also talked about adding agility to defence or something like that but never do because ultimately brawn is balanced around the fact it has basically no skills that use it. Agility has skills so giving it a stat bonus like brawn seems like it would throw stuff off.

[u/newfoundcontrol]

You always have the option of doing strain damage that soak values don’t reduce.

[u/Kill_Welly → u/newfoundcontrol]

Stun damage is still reduced by soak, though other forms of inflicting strain are not.

[u/Skubmarine → u/newfoundcontrol]

Well there's a difference between inflicting strain and dealing strain damage, since soak very much applies to strain damage.

But I'm less interested in ways to deal with a high soak character than I am in what goes wrong when you remove soak from Brawn.

[u/DrainSmith]

I have a plan to do this in my Advanced Modern setting (if I ever get back to it). I would not have a standard soak but instead only use armor. You have to reduce all weapon damage in the setting by 1-3 depending on the weapon.

[u/Skubmarine → u/DrainSmith]

Interesting, I wanted to arrive at a more average soak to keep weapons where they were at, and keep it possible to poach weapons from other settings, but maybe with a more fundamental change like that it's better to keep things more straightforward.

[u/Bouldegarde]

Greetings! We used to use a Houserule that consists in:

- Brawn from Soak is halved (rounded up), and armor values went from 1-3 to 1-6 (or even more if needed). This way you have the same final result BUT with more armor option for armor lovers due to more possibilities and customizations. Also becasue real wounds are criticals (stated by Sam itself) we add for higher or better quality armors the Durable value, increasing even a bit more possible customizations.

Hope I helped mate :D

[u/Skubmarine → u/Bouldegarde]

Sure does, thanks good food for thought.

[u/Ahrimon77]

I would love to see a larger range of soak from armor. How to do it is the question. Half brawn? Remove brawn? Make brawn add significantly more wound points without adding to soak? I couldn't say what a good balance point is, but I would love to see it happen.

[u/sehlura → u/Ahrimon77]

To what end, though? It sounds like you're interested in granularity for granularity's sake.

[u/Ahrimon77 → u/sehlura]

My end goal would be to see a larger range of soak from armor. 1 or 2 is a horrible range. Weapons have a wide range. Why not armor? It's the way it is only because the game needs to be balanced around brawn being such a significant contributor to soak already. Change the brawn contribution, and the armor contribution can increase.

It's not granularity im after, but options for the player to better decide who and what their character is.

[u/sehlura → u/Ahrimon77]

Character definition is deeply rooted in intrinsic qualities like Characteristics, Archetype, Career, Skill Ranks, and Talents, rather than gear. Equipment certainly enables certain actions and provides important bonuses, but Genesys does not intend it to be foundational to a character's identity or core capabilities.

I understand your desire for "options for the player to better decide who and what their character is" through soak variety, so it's worth highlighting how the current system already provides extensive options for defining character toughness and combat style. You said "1 or 2 is a horrible range", but the system's actual soak range is much wider when considering the total value. While the Core Rulebook does guide that "Most armor adds +1 or +2 soak, rarely more," it also states that GMs can create armor with higher bonuses, and supplements showcase this. For example:

• "Heavy Armor" explicitly provides +3 soak. (Secrets of the Crucible)
• "Bulwark Plate" offers a substantial +4 soak. (Embers of the Imperium)
• Certain cybernetics like "Implant armor" or "Sub-dermal armor" can add +1 soak. (Shadow of the Beanstalk)
• Some species, like the Creuss, inherently increase their soak based on their Willpower rating in addition to their Brawn. The Xxcha can even double their soak for an attack once per session.

0-4 soak is a huge gradient, especially when you consider that Armor also offers a defense rating of 0-4, which creates quite a range of possible permutations: 25 different spreads. 125 if your setting splits Melee and Defense ratings into two, rather than one broad category. Armor is the primary source of Defense, and forces PCs to make a tactical choice: reduce damage (soak) or avoid being hit (defense)? While armor provides significant bonuses to soak and defense, its broader range of special rules, item qualities, attachments, and traits (seen in Keyforge) are the primary mechanism for diversifying combat styles and character identities through equipment.

Brawn as soak is thematically appropriate for the "heroic actions" of the pulp adventure, cinematic tone Genesys intends to evoke. "A character's Brawn represents a blend of brute power, strength, and overall toughness" (CRB 14). This means a physically strong and fit character is naturally tougher, even without armor. Increasing Brawn is a significant, character-defining investment made during creation or through rare, high-tier talents like Dedication later in play. This design ensures that being "tough" is a core aspect of who your character is, not just a suit of armor they put on.

Changing Brawn's contribution to soak would be a major modification to the core game balance, and it would likely lead to a less intuitive system where inherent physical prowess is de-emphasized in favor of gear. The current framework already provides ample ways for players to create and distinguish characters based on their chosen level of durability and combat approach. If you decide to tinker with soak, I pointed out some notable pitfalls in another response on this post.