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I still love Rifts more than it deserves but there are just so many wasted opportunities. The Coalition could have been much more interesting even as a fascist state, instead we get the illiterate one-trick skullpony. I mean there are legitimately scary things that came out of the rifts, like ghosts that can possess your trash. A human-centric state opposed to all this demons and monsters nonsense is a reasonable supposition--but the Coalition is just so dumb and poorly thought-out. I just cannot understand that being the wehraboo hill one would want to die on.
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Feb 7, 2017 19:32
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Preparing for a move, and I found a couple of old Palladium catalogues. By old, this one I scanned is turning twenty sometime this year. I figured it was worth a giggle to share it. https://imgur.com/a/qru61
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Mar 30, 2017 01:45
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That publication order, by the way, is why you'll see me skip over Psyscape in the World Book reviews coming up, since I do them in publication order.  As I've mentioned elsewhere, Carella was supposed to write it and then left Palladium, kicking it way down the release schedule (but that release schedule is at least the order in which they came out IIRC). This is definitely the time that Siembieda took over the line in Carella's absence and wrote or "co-wrote" pretty much all the books in this period. The Palladium Old Kingdom books never emerged, I don't believe, I think Bill Coffin's Western Empire replaced them in the schedule. Recon just ended up being a compilation / reprint and not the promised rewrite. Everything else is relatively accurate.Ugh, I know too much.
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Mar 30, 2017 03:41
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I had a few people arguing on my twitter feed yesterday that the MARS classes are exceedingly powerful in Savage Rifts, apparently able to be easily turned into better combat characters than Juicers with average rolls on their Fortune & Glory and backstory tables, plus the free 20 xp. Anyone encountered that?
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Mar 30, 2017 05:59
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It's... possible? I admit I haven't experienced it. I know there are some specialized builds that break the game, like a M.A.R.S. build that takes a bunch of armor options to end up with an armor rating in the 30s, or a Burster build that does 50+ damage. The balance in the game is to some extent by "feel" - Glitter Boys and Flame Wind Hatchlings get the most points for their packages, but the Glitter Boy does only one thing exceedingly well (do damage) and the Flame Wind Hatchling gets a poo poo-ton of advantages but isn't particularly great at anything. Mind Melters are the worst off on sheer points, surprisingly, but they have one of the broadest powersets. Of course, a lot of that is based on how Savage Worlds quantifies things and stuff like edges and drawbacks aren't super-tight in their balance. But yeah, you can do stupid things with M.A.R.S. builds if it's allowed, it's something I'd put the kibosh on if I saw it. But given the M.A.R.S. builds I've seen for my game are a perfectly reasonable cyber-warrior or a d'norr rogue scholar skill monkey, I'd say most M.A.R.S. characters will be okay unless they deliberately know Savage Worlds and try and do a degenerate build (and / or get great rolls for whatever they're trying to do).
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Mar 31, 2017 17:59
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Honestly I really enjoyed the read and my only concern was turning Mystics into faith healers. It's an interesting concept but it leaves me wondering if the game is balanced around having a healer, and if so, if one healer framework is enough. I guess there's doctors.
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Mar 31, 2017 19:31
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I've heard that Robotech the Shadow Chronicles RPG is actually good. Is this false?
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May 11, 2017 20:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's... possible? I admit I haven't experienced it. I know there are some specialized builds that break the game, like a M.A.R.S. build that takes a bunch of armor options to end up with an armor rating in the 30s, or a Burster build that does 50+ damage. The balance in the game is to some extent by "feel" - Glitter Boys and Flame Wind Hatchlings get the most points for their packages, but the Glitter Boy does only one thing exceedingly well (do damage) and the Flame Wind Hatchling gets a poo poo-ton of advantages but isn't particularly great at anything. Mind Melters are the worst off on sheer points, surprisingly, but they have one of the broadest powersets. Of course, a lot of that is based on how Savage Worlds quantifies things and stuff like edges and drawbacks aren't super-tight in their balance. Mind Melters are actually fairly bad though I think. The other iconic frameworks generally have some reason you'd consider taking them over a M.A.R.S. character trying to do the same thing, but a Personal Concept Option Master Psionic is basically just a better version of the Mnd Melter if you have even middling rolls. They also don't really have extra flexibility when compared to the other power-based iconic frameworks. Even with the loose-ish balance they could stand a bit of a power boost. LGD fucked around with this message at 01:36 on May 12, 2017 |
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May 12, 2017 01:32
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I've heard that Robotech the Shadow Chronicles RPG is actually good. Is this false? As a game, it's still at the core the same Robotech that was released in 1986. It's unfortunately tied to Shadow Chronicles as well, which isn't exactly a great entry point for the franchise (it is, essentially, the deep end). It's got some better writing since it wasn't all done by Siembieda (though some of it was) but still has all of the essential issues - and how carries a bunch of system baggage loaded onto it from Rifts, and it also contains odd decisions like having the utter missile dominance of later Rifts books (very high damage values) for... some reason? It also inflates M.D.C. values as well, which will make fights more sloggy outside of missile barrages... I'd say it's false as far as mechanics go, with all due respect to CroatianAlzheimers' work on the line - I don't know about how the supplements shake out, admittedly. But at its heart it's a old, antiquated system that doesn't do much to live up to its source material that's had a variety of messy notions tacked out. I'd say if you really want to run it, buy it for the art and reference material, then run it with Battle Century G or any other mecha game of your choice.
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May 13, 2017 18:21
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Just wanted to bump the thread to note that Rifts is up for an Ennie for Best Rules. It's the Savage Worlds conversion. 
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Jul 14, 2017 03:13
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Much like Palladium, this thread gets just enough attention to not slip into oblivion.
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Jul 14, 2017 06:36
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Erick Wujick got a Lifetime Achievement Ennie and into the Origins Hall of Fame posthumously. I'm not sure but this may be their one of their closest brushes with an product award... wait, no! Rifts: Promise of Power won Gamespot's E3 2005 Best.of Show!... ... Best N-Gage Title of Show, that is.
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Jul 16, 2017 03:09
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I didn't really get a strong response in the GM advice thread, so I thought I'd ask here - 1. What would be a basic outline for a oneshot of Rifts? I'm still not really sure what you should do with the setting. I'm thinking something simple like: "You're on the outskirts of a Coalition outpost. There is a MacGuffin inside. Get in, take it, and get out. No restrictions on collateral damage" 2. What kind of opposition would be appropriate for a group of starting characters? It seems like most characters would have access to MDC weapons, so I was thinking like a dozen Coalition Grunts in the Dead Boy armor scattered across the outpost. But then someone just might take a Glitter Boy and blow up everything from a mile away, or does it not work like that? 3. Are there any restrictions or guidelines you'd place on character creation? I'd like to keep the rolling mechanics for stat generation, but then allowing people to assign rolls to the stats rather than in order, and maybe if they want to have a particular class, to increase any lacking stats to the minimum. Are there any classes that I should consider "banning", or at least keeping an eye out for with regards to the larger group composition? I mean, Vagabonds seem like they'd be a joke class to throw in alongside everyone else.
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Jul 23, 2017 06:54
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1. "What do you DO with Rifts" is perhaps the game's most significant problem. They set up hooks sometimes but often they just toss the kitchen sink out there and expect you to figure it out. So, "fetch MacGuffin from Coalition guys" is a perfectly valid hook, as long as your adventurers have a reason to be working together--Rifts often seems to have the assumption that you're some kind of mercenary team, but it never explicitly states this as an expectation, or gives hints on how to connect a Hydra, a Glitter Boy, a Techno-Wizard, and a Godling together. If you're making pre-gens then that part is easy at least. 2. Rifts does not do balance very well and you are likely to end up fudging something, at some point. If your party has a Glitter Boy, you can fairly accurately rely on them annihilating 3-5 grunts per turn--any Palladium player is going to stack all the physical skills they can and pump PP as high as it will go, giving them a really good chance to hit even without called shots, and with the Glitter Boy called shots matter less. So, if somebody is playing one, increase the number of opponents. Just remember you have to roll all of their multiple attacks per round in return, and those plinky lasers do add up. 3. Allowing people to assign stats is fine for humans, but a lot of nonhuman races get modified stat rolls. For those cases it's easier to just increase stats to the minimums or ignore the minimums anyway because they're not well thought out. ARB explained the really deeply broken combo that can be made with the Sea Inquisitor previously but I doubt most people would think to do that, Godlings are a more likely threat to game balance--they're just plain superior to humans but then they get an OCC as well. For a one-shot it doesn't matter as much but if somebody is really determined to play a Vagabond you could just give them some better gear or magic items maybe. But yeah banning a lot of the 'useless' classes might be a good idea.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:54
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Rifts is basically sandbox D&D but with power armor and Dragon-Blood Neo-Juicer Borgs instead of elves and fighters. This is (one of) the game's (many) flaws, which is that underneath all the 80's action figure sugar-rush hyperactive 12-year old dress it's yet another game where the general throughline is "a bunch of rootless wanderers wander rootlessly, killing bandits and raiding dungeons for loot and/or quest items." Like you can try to make a Rifts game that had a much stronger sense of plot or story about, I dunno, liberating the Coalition States or battling the machinations of one of the twelve billion hyperintelligent alien overminds/AI cores/demons/whatever that are constantly dicking around with earth, but it's not like you couldn't do that sort of thing in sandbox D&D already, so.
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Jul 23, 2017 23:54
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If you have time on your hands, I did audio reviews of Rifts Game Shield & Adventures and Rifts Index & Adventures 1, which have bad adventures but can give an idea of intended play. Like Kai Tave said, Rifts' intended structure is basically a Points of Light D&D with mostly overland questing instead of a lot of dungeons (though there is the occasional dungeon-styled affair). Generally the two main campaign assumptions is either being a group of well-meaning mercenaries or working for one of the larger military factions as scouts or special forces (usually the - ugh- Coalition or New German Republic, but working for the New Navy or the Empire of the Sun or similar groups would be more palatable personally). It's hard to give advice on proper challenges because a lot of it comes down to the classes being played and the players playing them. For example, psychics and wizards generally don't deal out a lot of damage, but a cunning player can use their abilities to shut down foes entirely in other ways. Out of the corebook, the Glitter Boy and Dragon will distort the power curve the most - the GB because of their sheer ability to deal and take damage, and the Dragon because of their high ability to take damage coupled with a wide range of abilities. The worst classes in the corebook are those that are humans without A) a wide range of useful skills and B) any notable special abilities. In the corebook, this is typified by classes like the Coalition Grunt, City Rat, and Vagabond. Outside of the corebook, it's harder to say, but most broken character types tend to be high-power supernaturals of various sorts, but once again it often comes down to specifics - a godling or demigod can be amazingly potent if they're built right... or they can only be marginally better than other characters. I wouldn't expect most players to know enough about Palladium to properly break Rifts, in any case. Cosmo Knights are the most infamous class, but even they have some notable weaknesses. I would have people at least roll an extra d6 for stats in place of the bonus d6 they get for high rolls, personally (save for powerful supernatural creatures like Dragons, I'd leave their stat rolls alone). I could have trauma from reading statblock after statblock of published NPCs with statblocks that are statistical impossibilities, though. Personally when it comes to running Rifts I reduce the attacks (by about half) and M.D.C. (by about 80%) of "mook" NPCs and leave the full PC-style statblocks for named NPCs, and even give things like "boss monsters" bonus attacks. Palladium can really bog down when presenting equal opposition (which is usually what a Coalition troop is going to be for a group of largely human PCs) so I've played around with the power level of NPCs in the past to accommodate that when I've run it as a lark. Granted, I think there are a lot of interesting ideas one could pursue in the setting beyond just wandering heroes for hire, but this is long enough and I'll leave it at that.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:12
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occamsnailfile posted:1. "What do you DO with Rifts" is perhaps the game's most significant problem. They set up hooks sometimes but often they just toss the kitchen sink out there and expect you to figure it out. So, "fetch MacGuffin from Coalition guys" is a perfectly valid hook, as long as your adventurers have a reason to be working together--Rifts often seems to have the assumption that you're some kind of mercenary team, but it never explicitly states this as an expectation, or gives hints on how to connect a Hydra, a Glitter Boy, a Techno-Wizard, and a Godling together. If you're making pre-gens then that part is easy at least. Thanks. The concept of The Tomorrow Legion from Savage Rifts was something I was hoping to leverage as a justification for a bunch of different persons working together in a common cause. I just don't like the Savage Worlds ruleset at all. occamsnailfile posted:3. Allowing people to assign stats is fine for humans, but a lot of nonhuman races get modified stat rolls. For those cases it's easier to just increase stats to the minimums or ignore the minimums anyway because they're not well thought out. ARB explained the really deeply broken combo that can be made with the Sea Inquisitor previously but I doubt most people would think to do that, Godlings are a more likely threat to game balance--they're just plain superior to humans but then they get an OCC as well. For a one-shot it doesn't matter as much but if somebody is really determined to play a Vagabond you could just give them some better gear or magic items maybe. But yeah banning a lot of the 'useless' classes might be a good idea. Thanks. I was thinking of just using the Corebook for now, so I don't expect a lot of "dumpster diving" for obscure OCCs/RCCs from other soucebooks. Kai Tave posted:Rifts is basically sandbox D&D but with power armor and Dragon-Blood Neo-Juicer Borgs instead of elves and fighters. Alien Rope Burn posted:If you have time on your hands, I did audio reviews of Rifts Game Shield & Adventures and Rifts Index & Adventures 1, which have bad adventures but can give an idea of intended play. Like Kai Tave said, Rifts' intended structure is basically a Points of Light D&D with mostly overland questing instead of a lot of dungeons (though there is the occasional dungeon-styled affair). Thanks. It seems a lot simpler to think about it that way. Alien Rope Burn posted:I would have people at least roll an extra d6 for stats in place of the bonus d6 they get for high rolls, personally (save for powerful supernatural creatures like Dragons, I'd leave their stat rolls alone). Do you mean just a straight 4d6 roll, rather than 3d6-with-another-d6-if-the-original-is-high-enough?
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Jul 24, 2017 04:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks. It seems a lot simpler to think about it that way. I mean I'm admittedly being a little lovely about it as is the way of our people but I'm also being serious, Rifts is essentially just a giant sandbox sorta game with no greater goal or purpose than what you give it, and most of the time that's going to be trekking to X in order to get Y for Z or fighting random Coalition patrols on your way to...actually I'm not really even sure that there's a huge exploration element to Rifts because it likes to talk up the apocalypse but honestly it's a post-post-apocalypse setting, I'm sure there are some ruins and underground labs and stuff but for the most part society has made a lot of headway towards pulling itself out of the post-rifts chaos that toppled the old world.
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Jul 24, 2017 06:04
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There are supposed to be more exploration elements in dimension-hopping but with the amount of material you have on Earth it never ends up feeling very necessary to do, and involves a lot more heavy lifting for the GM in creating whole worlds to explore. This usually ends up with a GM making up some weird one-note dimension that has a single gimmick--there are even some of these mentioned briefly in some of the various books, like the source of the eyes you see all over Splugorth stuff. Also, opening and closing rifts is mechanically pretty difficult and not something PCs would do lightly most of the time.
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Jul 24, 2017 16:42
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You know, the MegaDumbCast hasn't been mentioned here, and I've been predictably rather enjoying it. It's a podcast covering Ninjas & Superspies and all the dumb things in it page by page. If you like my F&Fs you'll probably like it. If you don't like my F&Fs, you may like it anyway, who knows?
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Sep 25, 2017 11:55
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Some more Savage Rifts books coming out supposedly in 2018:Shane Hensley posted:Working titles are Rifts® North America: Empires of Humanity, Rifts® North America: Blood & Banes, and Rifts® North America: Arcana & Mysticism. I'd gotten to hear hints of all this at GenCon, but it's good to see it confirmed.
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Nov 23, 2017 18:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:I didn't really get a strong response in the GM advice thread, so I thought I'd ask here - This question was asked a few months ago, but I still think the answer is needed for the RIFTS thread, since it really is a difficult system to run for new GMs. 1. The best thing about RIFTS is that you can do pretty much anything with it. You can send them on a search and recovery mission against the Coalition. You can send them on a wilderness exploration mission in South America. You can have them wander into a Texas border town and discover it's a vampire controlled hellhole and have them seek out and kill the Master Vampire or Vampire Intelligence (depending on the power level of the campaign) They can be assigned with taking out a new Xiticix hive that was just started a bit too close to someone's borders. You can make them a Coalition Special Forces Black Ops team and have them try and infiltrate Tolkien/Atlantis/Lazlo/Federation of Magic/etc. 2. This completely depends on how you handle 3 and 1. There are so many groups you can use as antagonists and each group has a ton of variety depending on the power level of the campaign you are running. 3. Reigning in character creation is one of the keys to running a fun RIFTS game. I have found in my years playing RIFTS that it's best to set a rough power level when you start the campaign. We tended to have 4 power levels. The first is the low power, high roleplay characters like the Wilderness Scouts, Rogue Scientists, Psychic Sensitive/Psychic Healer, dog boys, Psi Stalkers, etc. The second is the middle power, which is most of the Coalition/Triax/Mercenaries/other large military force classes, along with some of the mid power Psychics like Bursters and lower powered magic users like Mystics and Techno Wizards along with light power armor pilots. The third is most of the rest of the stuff, here you can have the heavy power armor/robot pilots, the decently powerod magic users like Tattoo Men and Ley Line walkers and the higher power Psychics like the Psi Techs and Psychic Warriors and the powerful combat guys like Juicers. Finally, you have the god tier stuff, where you can allow things like Dragons, Godlings, Cosmo-knights, Prometheans, Temporal Wizards, Necromancers, Mind Melters and Shifters. All of those classes can be broken in hilarious ways. Though, you can also allow them in lower powered games and just not allow them to do any of the crazy game breaking stuff (Cosmo Knights, Dragons, Godlings and Prometheans will always be super powerful however.)
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Dec 1, 2017 18:39
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Belatedly, MegaDumbCast has been doing a daily coverage of Ninjas & Superspies articles from The Rifter until the new year as a fundraising effort for his upcoming long-form coverage of Heroes Unlimited. A donation page can be found here, for the handful for people whose fancy that tickles. Also, having had a copy of Aliens Unlimited fall into my lap, I have to say it's one of the most cringeworthy books I've seen from the company. Not because of anything particularly regressive, but just because it's bizarrely straightforward and dull to the point that it almost feels like self-parody. A race of dog aliens that are pretty much humans with dog-heads? Check! How about seven "different" races of aliens that are humans with dog heads? Also check! How about race names like "Canis", "Lupis", and "Wulf"? Check, check, and mother loving check. 
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Dec 28, 2017 06:16
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 01:56 |
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Palladium's laziness really shines through in all the places where they make eleventy billion PC types based on animals.
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Dec 29, 2017 06:10
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