Grade the Megaversal/Palladium System

[Dannyalcatraz]

I have played a little Rifts, and "gonzo" is the word I use as well. The setting feels very artificial.
I also tried some Heroes Unlimited. The character archetypes (randomly rolled) are grossly unbalanced in power. Some are skill monkeys, and a few skills are problematic. (Boxing was mentioned.) Some roll random mutant powers (or do you choose? - I forget). Some buy cybernetic parts or other technology on a budget. Three very different build systems, and how could you balance them?
What I continue to do is roll random HU superheroes as seed ideas for HERO. It is great for generating ideas.

The system of interrelated games has no concept of or concern for balance. Remember, the core RIFTS book include the playable OCCs of the Glitterboy and the Vagabond.

 

[giant.robot]

The system of interrelated games has no concept of or concern for balance. Remember, the core RIFTS book include the playable OCCs of the Glitterboy and the Vagabond.

Ok we've got a street rat, a mechanic, a librarian, a vagabond, and a Glitterboy. You encounter a giant demon with robotic laser shooting tentacles.

All the players not playing the Glitterboy can just go home. Probably won't see you next weekend either.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

The system of interrelated games has no concept of or concern for balance. Remember, the core RIFTS book include the playable OCCs of the Glitterboy and the Vagabond.

The one game of Rifts I played I got to play a vagabond. I was not impressed.

That said, back in the olden days I found Palladium Fantasy (or as it was at the time, Palladium) to be a better option than DnD. There were skills! Characters could be tough, but were never so tough as to be able to walk all over the setting. I liked that magical types could theoretically access even the most powerful magic at any level. Getting it to work safely was another matter. Magic circles were cool. There was some good stuff in there.

Wouldn't play it these days. The system is too clunky. I don't really like class and level systems in any case.

 

[Velderan]

I played TMNT and Heroes Unlimited back in the early to mid 90s. I didn't vote in the poll because it’s been too long but I remember having fun with it, but I’m sure we made a fair amount of house rule changes as we tended to do back then. I recently picked up some TMNT books I found at my local Half Price Books so I’m excited to look them over and refresh my memory of how the game worked.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Ok we've got a street rat, a mechanic, a librarian, a vagabond, and a Glitterboy. You encounter a giant demon with robotic laser shooting tentacles.

All the players not playing the Glitterboy can just go home. Probably won't see you next weekend either.

I remember the guy that was running Rifts' solution was to have the Gitterboy character be out of their armor in every adventure, with no time to get into it. I don't think those games were fun for anyone and I turned my back on Rifts pretty quickly.

 

[CleverNickName]

Dang, a D-minus? Zero love, ten percent hate?
This has never happened before. Is it really that bad?

 

[Kannik]

Dang, a D-minus? Zero love, ten percent hate?
This has never happened before. Is it really that bad?

The rules really are not that good. At best they are a kluge-y mess, and full of old, half-baked ideas. Old, in both they were 'evolutions' of 1e D&D, and old in that they have never been revisited to un kluge-ify them. Like all game systems if you play it enough you stop seeing a lot of the oddities to make it work in your mind and at the table (and to be fair we do that with D&D as well), but once you are exposed to other systems that support the setting/fiction and the game better it becomes more and more of a chore to play in the Palladium rules set.

 

[RuinousPowers]

It's all the skills that add atribute points and attacks that just ruined Palladium Fantasy for me. Like, EVERYONE is a boxer.

 

[mamba]

Dang, a D-minus? Zero love, ten percent hate?
This has never happened before. Is it really that bad?

Will be interesting to see how the TMNT reprint fares then

 

[Osgood]

I played a lot of Palladium games in late 80s through 90s--Robotech, Rifts, TMNT, Heroes Unlimited--and we had a lot of fun with it. At the time, it had some things that, say D&D 2E lacked, like skills and a more detailed combat system. But even then, there were things that were off with the system, like scaling for difficulty on a skill, and man, talk about a game with no balance!

I really think that if they had really taken a good hard look at their system and modernized it, maybe during the d20 craze in the early 2000s (and not necessarily jumping on the d20 bandwagon) I think they could have become a major player. There were a lot of really cool, fun ideas among those messy, old fashioned mechanics. When the Savage Worlds version of Rifts came out, my group played a short campaign for a couple months, and while SW isn't my favorite system we had a blast. But you couldn't pay me to play the original system.