cashew | Cortex Prime is an over designed piece of crap

Cortex is a TTRPG system that's meant to be a universal system.

Ok, quick explanation: in TTRPG space there are two design paths. First path, design a system to represent relevant player actions in the setting which the game is meant to take place. This is exemplified by D&D, where the system accounts for magic and spells because the setting is meant to have magic and spells.

Second path, design a universal system meant to be used to resolve story conflicts that is setting agnostic. Systems such as FATE, GURPS, RISUS and Cortex are all such games.

And sure, Cortex Prime might have won tons of awards for game design and presentation, but also...no. So I'm going to vent about my problems with Cortex.

Anything Cortex can do, I can do with RISUS

Cortex's core system is the concept of opposing dice roll and generating "hitches". Opposing dice roll refers to a mechanic where rather than "roll over/under" a number, both sides roll and the bigger number wins (think Poker hands style). The purpose is, of course, to obfuscate the probability of success while making it easy to understand more dice = more chance of success.

The "hitch" mechanic refers to rolling 1 in the dice pool creating a narrative complication that the GM (game master) can use to cause problems for the player down the road.

OK, that's a very simplified summary. There are many, many more rules on the minutiae of how things like hitches, plot points, traits, quirks, etc. can be used. But all the extra rules are really just fluff, because stripped down to the core, the system is ultimately opposing dice roll.

Which RISUS is also able to do with a handful of d6s. And its rules fit on 4 pages instead of taking up a 300-paged tome.

The "hitch" mechanic is immensely stupid. Nope, sorry gamers, relying on player dice rolls to generate a mechanical resource for the GM to make PC tasks more complicated is just dumb. I'll explain in the next section

Cortex tries to mechanized storytelling badly

So, there are a lot of rules lite systems that focuses on narrative game mechanics (PbtA being such a system), where the game rewards the players with a mechanical benefit for managing to weave their character traits into the roleplaying. This is good design, because it's using the incentive system to drive players to engage in roleplaying. But see, the important bit here is the mechanic rewards roleplaying, something the players have 100% control over.

Cortex makes the mechanical reward based on the dice outcome. And not only that, but also limits the GM on what they can do based on dice outcome. The "hitch" mechanic is an example of giving the GM a resource to use against the player...except the GM doesn't need any resource to use against the player because the GM is the literal God in a TTRPG since the GM ruling is the ultimate last word.

So, not only can the player not plan for when they can earn mechanical benefits (because it's determined by dice rolls), the GM can't adjust difficulty on the fly because the availability of levers for difficulty adjustments are dependent on dice roll results.

So, there's basically zero tactical way of really planning for the "hitches" that comes up, and if you can't plan ahead, there's no functional difference to the probabilistic variance between a dice roll and a coin flip.

At that point, you may as well just flip a coin to determine whether you generate a "hitch". See what I mean when I said Cortex is overdesigned?

Once you bring in all the modular rules that removes things like opposing dice rolls and replace dice with modifiers, it really starts raising the question of why bother?

Cortex misses the point of a universal rules system

The reason universal TTRPG systems exist is so that once players learn the basics they can carry those basics into any game designed using that system with minimal friction. The setting and modifiers and trait selections might change, but the basic resolution mechanic doesn't. Players know easily what to expect, even if they're playing a different genre.

But the problem with Cortex is that no two Cortex games play the same. Due to modular rules that can eliminate opposing rolls, even the most core mechanic isn't a guarantee. At that point, the advantage of learning a universal system is...pointless. Especially one that's crunchy. There's no reward for system mastery because you have to master it all over again when you switch games.

It's not surprising to me at all that the system is basically dead. (Aka, no one is producing any more products for it either from primary publisher or third party publishing.) Compared to the popularity of D20 (D&D hacks) or D100 (Basic Roleplaying System, exemplified by Call of Cthullu) or SWADE (Savage Worlds and its library of games), or hell even FATE (which gained popularity with licensed games like the Star Wars franchise), Cortex has...very little to its name.

So. In conclusion, Cortex is an overdesigned piece of crap.