Coverting Rifts to D&D?

[Krieg]

Actually I would recomend taking a look at Guardian of Order's D20 books, especially BESM & D20 Mecha. GOO's modified D20 system is probably the closest you will find to Palladium's, complete with attack bonuses as skills etc. Plus it is flexible enough to handle just about anything Rifts throws at you with a little work.

 

[diaglo]

only way to do it. is do it yourself. so it fits the campaign you want to run.

otherwise, you are gonna get a lot of people telling you how you should do it. and well... their advice is like... not to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

[Sejs]

your tellin' me d20 future has dragon borgs and cyber nija & samurai

... yes. That's exactly what he's telling you. d20 future has all the stuff from Rifts: Japan in it. No really. Honest.


Nah, it's like Diaglo said - if you want an exact translation, 1 for 1, of Rifts material to the d20 system, you're going to have to do it yourself. The d20 modern and future books will give you some good baselines, but be serious - it won't give you the exact lowdown on Rifts stuff in particular. That's matierial that belongs to someone else.

 

[Kanegrundar]

I was working on this very thing a few months ago. The conclusion that I came up with was to scrap any ideas on a 1 to 1 conversion. The Palladium system is such a mess, that you'd be better off just trying to re-create the feel of the setting. That said, here's a list of books I used to run my Rifts D20:

D20 Modern
Darwin's World 2
Gamma World PHB
Mutants and Machines
Ubarn Arcana
Menace Manual
Book of Vile Darkness
CoC D20
A little bit from just about every D20 Monster book I own (BIG list)

I would now add D20 Future since it's out (wasn't when I ran that campaign).

Most of the conversions ended up being lower-powered compared to their Palladium counterparts, which is A-OK IMO, and even then I only converted the ones that didn't have a direct D20 counterpart.

All in all, it ran well. It wasn't Rifts, but had the post-apocalyptic feel that I was going for.

Good luck,
Kane

 

[warlord]

I was thinking of using the D&D magic and psionic systems and classes and just throw in some swrpg rules for powered armor and ships. Also juicers should be a class with the ability to increase physical stats like str & dex by aout 2d4 for a short period of time. Also is there any way to add some rifts stuff to D&D and have it still be D&D?

 

[Felon]

I was working on this very thing a few months ago. The conclusion that I came up with was to scrap any ideas on a 1 to 1 conversion.

What, no mga-damage? You don't want to see a character mow down a forest of redwoods with a casual sweep of his pen-laser?

You don't want to see two guys acting out one of those cool martial arts battles depicted in countless illustrations--only to find that their blows harmlessly bounce off each other's mega-resistant armor?

 

[Felon]

I was working on this very thing a few months ago. The conclusion that I came up with was to scrap any ideas on a 1 to 1 conversion.

What, no mga-damage? You don't want to see a character mow down a forest of redwoods with a casual sweep of his pen-laser?

You don't want to see two guys acting out one of those cool martial arts battles depicted in countless illustrations--only to find that their blows harmlessly bounce off each other's mega-resistant armor?

The best thing about rifts were those great illustrations. They really showed the industry how much slick visuals enhanced the final product, making them well worth the increased production costs. That system needs to get flushed though.

 

[Aaron L]

Dragonstar could be a place to start.

 

[Dragon-Slayer]

I would have to also agree with the addition of Omega World, which, in my opinion, is probably the best mini game that Polyhedron offered (with the Knights of the Lich Queen a close second). The look and feel of the game is excellent for a Rifts-feel game, I wish that Gamma World d20 had gone in the same vein instead of the somewhat clumsy direction it took.

Roudi: Good to see that thread bring about something good as it was an interesting thread with many good ideas.

I agree with Felon as well, a d20 version of Rifts, especially sans MDC would make a lot more sense and more than likely over the clunkiness of the current Palladium system. The art is topnotch throughout, with talent from Kevin Long to Ramon Perez. The lack of internal consistency, combined with nonsensical rules like MDC and the Palladium Books release date track record (abyssmal) really sometimes make one wonder why the company and the product line are still so popular and alive. I love the setting of Rifts, the ideas presented by writers like Kevin Siembieda, C.J. Carella and Bill Coffin (just to name a few of the talented writers, including many of the fans in the quarterly Rifter) are often excellent and innovative, but the meandering and oft contradictory storylines, mixed with the powercreep and diversion from the core rulebook really brought the game down in my eyes. I have in the past run several fun, non munchkin campaigns and the game is really fun if you don't snoop around in the rules and storyline too much.

 

[warlord]

Ok Converting Rifts to D20 seems like alot of work so people of ENworld I turn to you to help me make this the official Rifts d20 thread. My first ideas for rifts would be to use the some of the D&D base classes like Wizard & Sorcerer for the federation of magic and Samurai from CW. THe classes from SWRPG could be used to if the D&D classes were given a class bonus to defense. Psychic Warrior,Fighter,paladin and ranger would work well for the cyber knights also for coalition specialists like their army rangers and the dog boys seem like psycic warriors so it fits. For robots and ships I'd use the SWRPG system with sheild point as a replacement for SDC & HP for replacement MDC. Also I think armor should have a defense bonus and DR to offset the highly desturctive nature of Rifts weaponry. I mean half of the coalition's power aromors have missles that do 1d6x10 1 lucky roll could easily kill some weaker characters.