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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 9174455" data-attributes="member: 6779310">I've run Robotech, Palladium Fantasy, and TMNT; I've played Palladium Fantasy, Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas and Superspies, and Robotech.The worst thing to happen to the Palladium system was Megadamage, IMO, and it turned it from al right to more suck than a convention of hoover selling vampires or a nation's worth of sexworkers.AT time of initial release, Mechanoids was doing the same kind of thing that  many others were...classes generating skills, with two mechanical approaches - in Palladium's case, 1d20 roll high for attacks and defenses, armor as soak, 1d100 roll low for non-combat skills, and no official method of making checks against attributes. The several years later Arcanum also used percentile non-combat skills, 1d20 for combat attacks and defenses, and a damage soak from armor. A number of other smaller games did likewise. There are a number of differences between Palladium and The Arcanum, and they all, from my viewpoint, do a much better job.In 1981, had I encountered Palladium, it would have displaced D&D instantly, simply because of the combination of skills and setting... but I didn't encounter it until after D&D BX, AD&D 1e, Star Frontiers, and Classic Traveller... and the systems were always a "I should really run this in something else, but not D&D, either."The saddest part is that only the game engine is bad. The settings are «bleep»-«bleep» «bleep»ing awesome.And that makes the disconnect that much worse.MegaDamage, in Robotech, makes the game into a supers situation - no mortal can stand up to Robotechnology weapons, and no mortal can harm them without robotech or nukes. And the nukes aren't a guarantee.It's alignment system is ever so slightly better than AD&D's , but that's no saving grace.The attributes mostly matter for allowed OCCs.The racial classes? pretty comparable to BX... and similar in time... but with significan odds of rolling the different dice and not meeting the cutoffs...in 2012-2013, when I was teaching grades 5 then 6, many of my students were playing palladium - mostly fantasy and rifts, but some Robotech... the local pawn shop had a huge rack of games about 2/3 of it was used palladium books, in a cycle of bought by elementary kid, sold to the shop when they found something better between grades 8 and 10, then bough by the next cycle of 4th and/or 5th graders.</blockquote>

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