|
CroatianAlzheimers posted:Because someone might either actually steal or be accused of stealing some else's idea and there would be lawsuits. Seriously. I was part of a non-sanctioned freelancer incubator way back at the beginning of the 2000s called the Think-Tank. It was me, Jason Richards, Todd Yoho, Carl Gleba, and a bunch of other guys you've probably heard of. We did peer review, helped eachother out, had sounding board forums, it was really cool and a lot of the books that came out in the mid-to-late 00s came directly from that project. Kevin shut us down because he didn't want us collaborating for the above reasons. This is crazypants, but then, Palladium's obsession with 'non-registered trademarks' and other ideas about IP have always been pretty nuts. The first RPG I ever bought with my own money was Shadowrun, but Rifts came along and very quickly became my favorite--for one thing, even if the rules were insane, I could understand them. That was not as much the case with SR 1st. It was also very much like mashing your robot toys against your plastic dinosaurs in RPG form, and I was just at the age where I was supposed to transition to big girl toys. I still love Rifts more than it deserves, which is why I occasionally contribute to F&F writeups about it. ARB has dug up a lot of good material with this thread, but sometimes the books just speak to themselves--like the layout of Shadows Crossing sounds...very much like how England, a book I am working on right now, is laid out--from twenty years earlier. Though the Robotech book probably has better writing and fewer druids. Please, lord, fewer druids. Friends and I have run 'Rifts-like' games on our own doing forbidden rules conversions, but like everyone else we didn't post them on the internet because we didn't want mean letters over our elfgames.
|
#
¿
May 7, 2013 20:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 12:14 |
|
|
Asimo posted:Actually, this one's pretty easy to explain if I recall. Back when Palladium made that Nightbane RPG (in the mid-90's, at the height of the oWoD prime... not really a horrible game by Palladium standards and a pretty good "superheroes with fangs" deal as such go, but that's getting off topic) they got sued by Image Comics over the "Spawn" trademark. I forget if the details ever came out, but Palladium had to recall the books and reprinted them with the "Nightbane" title instead, and considering that I'm pretty sure the company has never been highly profitable it was probably a painful blow even if they didn't pay any settlements. More importantly, Siembieda apparently got some bad lawyer advice (or... knowing him, more likely misinterpreted good advice) that anyone would steal your trademark if you didn't violently enforce it, thus why Image sued them, so naturally he went crazy in protecting his IP at all costs. I read his official reasoning somewhere and it had to do with "protecting your hard work" and whatever which yes, sure, but he was being like the NFL: asserting copyright over things he could not have, like game mechanics themselves as we've discussed elsewhere. He also failed to register some of his important so-called trademarks until the 2000s when perhaps he finally realized that 'unregistered' means 'not'. Of course TSR used to be more sue-happy on early-internet people too, but they had more problems with folks posting large sections of rules or whatever, and eventually got over this. None of them ever matched the Scientologists.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2013 16:18
|
|
|
So I started (posting, it's written) an F&F writeup of Rifts: England since it's the next in the unreviewed series. Honestly I could keep going on those for a good while, probably longer than anybody else was remotely interested, but England was part of the initial line (ending with Africa) that involved the game's first grasps at a metaplot...and druids. And herbs. And a lot of talk about how pastoral and beautiful England is with its thousand-foot Millennium Trees. I didn't hate the book as a teenager, but I wasn't really impressed with it either. I hate it as an adult. It took forever to get through. It is not without a few gems (Temporal Wizardry) but they are often (Temporal Wizardry) completely unconnected to the book's Celtophile-Nausicaa theme. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3541453&pagenumber=37#post415913784
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 00:54
|
|
|
theironjef posted:I loved how temporal wizards started at a die-roll level, like level D4+1, because of time manipulation. That was the biggest fuckoff to game balance there has ever been. It's like the Grand Canyon of fuckoffs, it's just beautiful. That isn't how it's written in my copy but their optional level mechanic is still super-bizarre; if they study longer they have to start at an eviler alignment and start rolling for random insanities and be either 3rd or 5th level along with more spells and bonii. If you're referring to the Raider--they're supposed to be NPCs though the text goes out of its way to be like 'well if you really want the decision is ultimately up to the GM but you shouldn't' sort of waffling. It makes me wonder what happened around an official Palladium table to get that in there. I think the higher-level wizard and warrior options were meant for speed-generating assistants to a Raider but then they don't have prebuilt Raider statblocks at higher levels, who the hell knows.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 01:29
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, it's not really clear. I get the impression that it's supposed to be some sort of Faustian bargain for PCs, where if you agree to serve a Temporal Raider for X years, later on you get a boost in magic and levels? It's really really not clear, though. As for the waffling, that strikes me as pure Siembieda. (It's similar to the "not recommended as a PC" blurb you see on some races beforehand, rather than just flatly saying "not a PC" more clearly.) There's definitely that Faustian element, though leveling up never mattered a lot to a lot of Rifts classes. Woo, +5% in Radio: Basic, or whatever. I guess some of the mage classes got new spells but for a lot of classes it didn't make a lot of difference.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 03:23
|
|
|
That is a pretty good go at unifying some of the basic setting problems. A lot of actual listed costs of goods and services would have to revise (3K to charge an eclip, c'mon) but that's simpler in some ways. At the least, making nations feel more like existing entities rather than dots on a map.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2013 02:13
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:They produced a wodge of legalese for people to stuff into their pages back in the mid Nineties, but I think Geocities dying and a lot of ISPs canceling their free hosting packages has killed most of them off. Man, I saw that title and thought like 'mutant tribes war-hopping on the moon's surface' and then was disappointed. Rifts! 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2015 01:09
|
|
|
The next one's Japan and that's me, I'm still writing it. But not to worry! There will be lots of weeaboo cyborgs and ninja and cyborg ninja soon enough.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2016 00:30
|
|
|
I might spring for some kind of PDF level, depending, but I am also among those without a lot of faith in Palladium's ability to not somehow gently caress this up massively. It involves less production of physical items, but it is still touching KS's special baby Rifts.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2016 01:14
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 19:32
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2017 22:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 12:14 |
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2017 16:42
|
|