A Rifts Balance Discussion for Roguewriter & Buzzard

[reiella]

Edit: By the way, by bringing up HU it seems like you have the impression that just because the Rifts setting supports every type of character from every Palladium game that a GM has to allow it. Not so... how many DMs refuse to use the Psionics handbook in their campaigns?

Well, the same can be said for pretty much any of the supplements, and it is a fair point (and why I kinda tried to stick to the core book for my examples). However, the statement that you can just 'disallow' it is an answer to pretty much 'all balance' issues with a given system.

See Phase World. See Phase World supplements that reference and interface with Heroes Unlimited. You don't even need to look at the conversion books for cross-over. As an aside, you can get similarly power level without even 'jumping continent' at all, Lone Star and the West regions have some ... interesting stuff going on.

 

[Darrius Adler]

Wasn't that company WoTC? Yeah I think it was. Yeah KS hates the d20 system...in fact for a while there Palladium was calling themselves "the original d20 system" in an ad.This is not true and it's also a crappy d20 system. I think that KS was insinuating that WoTC ripped off Palladium. I think it's the other way around (they ripped off TSR). Man I h8 palladium.

If Palladium did this it was probably on the idea that they have many published game worlds that all use basically the same system so they are interchangeable. Though it’s incredible that they would make that claim with the fact that ONLY THEY can publish compatible books. Honestly GURPS is closer to "original d20". You buy the Core Rule book for GURPS and then the world/supplements to use with it.

My favorite example of unbalanced comes from Heroes Unlimited. I literally watched a player random-roll an experiment character that was invincible. Invulnerability power coupled with the stat booster powers that basically made his saves so high that he couldn’t fail a save against magic or Psi. From the experiment chart he got something where he didn’t need to eat or breathe.

Of all of Palladium’s current games I would like to see a d20 Nightspawn (yes I know the name changed but I refuse to fuel Todd McFarlane's oversized ego) most. It is the one remaining Palladium game that I will put up with the crappy system in order to play.

 

[Caliban]

First of all, I believe that you can only Sneak Attack once per round even if you are using paired weapons only your first attack gets the damage bonus.

Nope, Rogues can do their sneak attack damage on every single attack that meats the requirements. If they have 5 attacks, and they are flanking someone, they can sneak attack 5 times in a round.

 

[Green Knight]

Edit: By the way, by bringing up HU it seems like you have the impression that just because the Rifts setting supports every type of character from every Palladium game that a GM has to allow it. Not so... how many DMs refuse to use the Psionics handbook in their campaigns?

Nevermind Heroes Unlimited, then. There's an OCC from Rifts Mercenaries which allows the PC to take super-powers (I think one Major and one Minor), and it'd be perfectly in line with a Chi-Town campaign. Or how about Skraypers? That's in the Rifts universe.

And as the previous poster pointed out, once again the onus is put on the DM, rather then being built into the system.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

And as the previous poster pointed out, once again the onus is put on the DM, rather then being built into the system.

Find me a game where it isn't up to the DM to balance the game. D&D still isn't balanced in my opinion. ECLs are a drag at early levels but later on a few levels just doesn't matter that much compared to powerful innate abilities.

 

[Darkesyde]

the problem character

Used to play Rifts way back when it was new and the original hardcover was the only book out and everything was cool and balanced because we had no other choice. Flash forward several years playing with a new group and a couple dozen books later (juicer uprising was the new book out) and on several occasions i made character that imbalanced the party had to retire a couple, one died a suspect death, and one ended being outclassed after getting the entire group killed and having them recreate, but from my personel experience it is more in the player's hands to balance his character with the group instead of the gm doing it.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

but from my personel experience it is more in the player's hands to balance his character with the group instead of the gm doing it.

There's a concept that hasn't been discussed yet... players voluntarily balancing their characters. I totally agree, the standpoint thus far has been that players are basically kids trying to get as much as they can within the rules and the GM setting limits which pisses the kids off. Come to think of it, I have actually had the pleasure of playing with folks who balance their characters themselves... WHAT A CONCEPT!

 

[Particle_Man]

And when the weakest, lowest level character of one class is tougher than the strongest, highest level character of another class, and the first player wants to play one and the second player wants to play the other, which player voluntarily gives in?

[rant] With D&D, the characters are at least in the same ballpark, and in my personal experience a lot closer to balanced than you seem to find them. Note that on these boards, we do sometimes get "X is too powerful" or "X got the shaft", but what is interesting is that sometimes it is the same class that is thought to be too powerful or too weak by different groups. I don't think that is as common with Rifts. With Rifts, the classes are not even close to balanced. Looking at just the Rifts core book, a rogue scientist and Juicer don't belong in the same party. And it gets worse with the supplements (and these are official supplements, so there is no one else to blame). The GM has to ban an astonishing number of the classes to have anything like a balanced game. I would not be surprised to hear of people accidentally creating unbalanced Rifts characters (either too weak or too strong). With D&D, classes are more often banned for flavour reasons, but I have never played in a game where a core class was banned for being too powerful or too weak, nor (with ECL) in a game where a MM race was banned for being too weak or too powerful. Getting into oher books (especially some 3rd party publishers (although some 3rd party guys are models of balance, not all of them are)), there are sometimes classes (prestige classes would be the weak spot here) that come off as too weak or too strong. But interestingly enough, when this happens with a wotc class, wotc listens and responds. The Psion, which was too weak before, has been corrected in 3.5. The Duelist, which was too strong before, has been weakened in 3.5. There is even a book out now, called Unearthed Arcana, that gives a DM extra tools to tinker with the game if he thinks that a class is too weak or too strong in his or her campaign. Think of that. A tool to help the DM if he or she thinks his game is unbalanced. Rifts has never, ever, even tried corrected for balance, and it is not fair to place the entire burden of balance on a GM.

It would take a lot less energy for a GM to memorize the 3 corebooks of D&D from scratch, create an exciting D&D game world, and detail the major NPCS and plot lines for the pc's than to try to balance the classes of Rifts. In fact, it would be easier to make up a Rifts-like setting for a d20 game, using the d20 rules out there, than it would be to try to balance Rifts. And that means that you could get all the flavour of Rifts with balanced d20 rules, up to and including being able to play all the classes, something that one could never do in a Rifts campaign using Rifts rules.

Rifts is like a sopwith camel held together with chewing gum, and with a heavy weight on the right wing. Or better, like a leaky rowboat in the middle of an ocean that sprouts leaks almost faster than you can fix them (and you have to bail as you go),

D&D 3.5E is like a modern jet plane. It is sleek and balanced, and if it goes slightly off course is easily correctable with the touch of a clearly marked button. It is not only balanced, it is the most balanced roleplaying game ever created. And it allows the DM to spend more time with the fun aspects of the game (creating the plots, etc.) and less with the mechanical stuff. [/rant]

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Honestly? When I used to play Rifts I didn't really consider or care what the other players were playing. I played what I wanted to play on the virtue of my vision for my own character. I didn't worry about some other player hogging all the limelight in combat situations. My favorite character was the Linewalker even after numerous additional books came out. Yes, there were plenty of other players who seemed to get off on having the most powerful combat gods in the game but it just wasn't that important to me. The setting was great and it was because of the setting that I chose to play. Roleplaying to me is more than combat situations being strung together. The Rifts setting provided for plenty of neat roleplaying situations.

Palladium is VERY guilty of making their games combat focused. Beyond the Supernatural kind of ticked me off because with every page there was a picture of an investigator kicking butt with a gigantic machine gun. That was too bad... it could have been a great contemporary horror game but they made it into Ghostbusters. I tended to use the victim rules instead and had a better time with it.

edit: Oops... let me clarify. I think the artwork in a book goes a long way to prompting a style of play. Scientists with machine guns makes players assume the game is about shooting up monsters. Scientists armed with a flashlight creeping through a darkened library conjures up a totally different image of what the game is about.

 

[reiella]

There's a concept that hasn't been discussed yet... players voluntarily balancing their characters. I totally agree, the standpoint thus far has been that players are basically kids trying to get as much as they can within the rules and the GM setting limits which pisses the kids off. Come to think of it, I have actually had the pleasure of playing with folks who balance their characters themselves... WHAT A CONCEPT!

Sure it was, not too long ago either.

The player who rolled too high and voluntarily dropped his stats , and the very long discussion following.

The last time I played Rifts, I was a TechnoWiz in a group with rogue SAMAS pilots, a Glitterboy pilot, a partial conversion borg, and a hand ful of other nutcases... And of course, the few technowiz items I had prepared got destroyed in the first sight of combat, even with me running like hell . And I got to walk around and do next to nothing while waiting for any amount of downtime to actually try to restore it. But at least I got relegated to the 2.0 Cleric job for the bloody mechs... It wasn't fun, I made a new char because mine wasn't effective relative to the balance, and then the CosmoKnight started to trump everyone else...

Side comment, Linewalkers get a very special mention in the new Rifts Magic book. They're probably the one spell casting class from the Core books that simply doesn't care too much about new books/material since they can potentially learn any of the spells.

Of course, if the DM approaches the players from the beginning and tells them "Hey make mecha pilots", or "Hey, you're all from Tolkien" and such, balance becomes alot easier to obtain. The setting is great and well developed in my opinion. It just needs a better relative balance scale for me to consider it playing with anyone whom I don't know personally.