Just picked up RIFTs for the first time since 1993 ...

[kigmatzomat]

Rifts is kinda like watching Dukes of Hazard reruns. Yeah, when you were 5yro, wearing orange footy pajamas with the General Lee on it, it was cool. Now you watch it and cringe.

Sometimes those things have a kernel of quality. Rifts does where the Dukes didn't really. But Rifts is lacking in a lot of ways. Fixable ways. But I've given up on it being fixed because KS doesn't believe they are broken.

KS does find decent authors for setting books and his own writing, while a little stilted IMO, is still pretty good which makes any Palladium book decent fodder to be converted to another system.

 

[boredgremlin]

I have to agree with the general consensus. Rifts fluff is really cool, and makes a great campaign using some other ruleset.

But... rifts mechanics are a rediculous mess. They are so bad i ran one practice session with some long time gamers and between all 3 of us we couldnt get through a single session without having to look at the book and flip around, and argue about rules.

It was like someone took a D20 rules lawyer, hopped him up on crack, and told him to write a mechanics system. Its clunky, slow, has different rules for just about every major archetype with no guidelines on how to mix them, and to top it off the ultimate edition is laid out and edited so poorly that its almost impossible to even find the right rule for any given situation.

 

[chobin foot]

I don't think anyone would say that rifts has the best mechanics of any RPG. (A lot of people don't say that about d20 either).

Precisely... You'll find any number of threads on other boards (*ahem*rpgnet) that flame D20 & its fans because the rules are pretty particular to people who like D&Disms. D20 is far from perfect.

There's good and bad to a lot of games & game systems. People could complain about clumsy & slow when it comes to D&D and its 5' moving miniatures-based gameplay... it doesn't negate the fact that a lot of people like playing D&D, warts and all.

 

[pawsplay]

I bought used copies of Rifts and Palladium Fantasy to ransack for my own homebrews. Rifts was visually and thematic appealing, but had all the internal logic of He-Man, and the game line seems to have suffered principally from a lack of editing. Kevin has a first class imagination, but there's a lot of evidence, both from the text and from things former writers have said, that suggests he doesn't like stick-in-the-mud concepts like copy editing, line development, cutting material, and so forth.

Rifts is a glorious mess. I've been toying with the idea of a Hero conversion, with some setting tweaks, working mainly from the the core book and Atlantis.

Palladium is a first class setting, in many ways better and truer to classic swords-and-sorcery than Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance. However, the game system is a mess, and what unique (and beneficial) traits the engine had have been stripped away in order to make the game more Rifts-compatible. Also, the setting underwent minor but often noteworthy and random changes, such as monks turning from pacifists to kung fu fighters, palladins from elite knights to supernatural warriors (a la D&D paladin), and so forth.

 

[WayneLigon]

Back when I was 16 I guess I was overwhelmed by the overall coolness of the art and the PA concept.

I'd even go so far to say that the very, very good art has sold more RIFTS and Palladium-in-general books than any real love of the rules system. People see that clean, imaginative, sleek and very cool line art and somehow manage to convince themselves that the line is playable. It's not just RIFTS, either; I've seen that happen with a couple of other things. Tony DiTerlizzi's beautiful and evocative art probably carried the Planescape setting and I have no doubt that Brom's stark and bizarre imagery is the reason Dark Sun is so well remembered.

 

[Jer]

I'd even go so far to say that the very, very good art has sold more RIFTS and Palladium-in-general books than any real love of the rules system. People see that clean, imaginative, sleek and very cool line art and somehow manage to convince themselves that the line is playable. It's not just RIFTS, either; I've seen that happen with a couple of other things. Tony DiTerlizzi's beautiful and evocative art probably carried the Planescape setting and I have no doubt that Brom's stark and bizarre imagery is the reason Dark Sun is so well remembered.

Hrm. On the one hand I agree with this in regards to Rifts -- I own a number of Rifts books, though we only played a handful of times in my younger days (we were far more into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than anything else Palladium offered at the time). I occasionally pick up new ones at the local Half Price Books, though often I'll pick one up with a really cool cover and some really nice interior work and then -- not find any fluff. Just pages and pages of weapon stats, OOC write-ups, RCC write-ups, and other things that I have no interest in because I'm never going to use the Palladium system as it stands now again. The fluff in Rifts is great stuff when you want to run an all out action RPG session that caters to your inner 14-year old. My biggest complaint is that there isn't enough of it to make the books worth buying for me.

On the other hand -- Planescape and Dark Sun both had a lot more going for them than the artwork. The Planescape setting especially, with its multiple Factions plotting intrigue, the evocative descriptions of the city of Sigil, and the interactions among all of the Outer Planes, gave me something that I hadn't seen outside of Vampire the Masquerade at the time -- and it let me do it without having to play a bloodsucking monster more suited for staking than for heroics. Like Rifts, Planescape's biggest failing in my mind was its ruleset -- 2nd edition rules couldn't really do justice to the setting. But unlike Rifts, the setting completely transcended its ruleset. Every single Planescape supplement that I own STILL gets pulled out today for ideas, or just for a fun read. Only a few of my Rifts books still get that kind of use today.

 

[s.j. bagley]

i have fond memories of the 'teenage mutant ninja turtles,' 'after the bomb,' and 'beyond the supernatural' games but rifts never did it for me.
and it's a collector's nightmare.

 

[LeaderDesslok]

Lasty year my gaming group and I started reminescing about the good old days, and eventually came around to talking about Rifts. We decided we wanted to try it again, so I went out and picked up the Rifts Ultimate Edition.

Artwork: aweome. Storyline: fantastic. Rules: ehh, not so much. I think that it would have been a much easier pill to swallow had the book followed some sort of logic in its layout. Rules for character creation don't start until page 289, and that's after a number of pages describing the OCCs. There's lots of skills in the book, but they are alphabetical by category (like the OD&D and AD&D2e PH spell listings were alphabetical by level), taking some time to figure out where things are. Worst of all were equipment listings. They're all over the place. I tried to create a Crazy character, who got something like $5,000 in black market equipment. The problem is that not everything lists a black market price, and the gear is spread out across at least 100 pages. Finally, after all that confusion...no index.

The number one thing KS could do to improve the line without changing the rules (as it seems he won't do) is hire a layout expert who knows how to create a readable book. I'm sure there's still a lot of good material in the books, I just can't find it!

p.s., we never got around to playing, it was way too much hassle. The lack of online support resources was also a huge turnoff.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

If I had the money, I'd buy Palladium, revamp the settings to d20, and pay Kevin to write the setting

 

[GreatLemur]

RIFTs Ultimate Edition is about a clear and readable as sanscript.

I think you mean Sanskrit.

But, yeah, you're completely right. Palladium's system is infamously terrible and outdated, and it's a real shame that they didn't bother to overhaul it for Ultimate Edition. Supposedly, they wanted to make sure the freaking boatloads of existing Rifts books were still usable, but I didn't whine about all the AD&D books I'd already bought when D&D 3E came out. I think what happened was as much about old Kevin Siembieda's unwillingness to see the problems with his beloved system as it was about loyalty to their small, die-hard fanbase (and apathy about the possibility of winning over new fans).

Anyway, Rifts is comepletely awesome in a mid-1990s, Image comics, lasers-and-mutants-and-dragons-and-magic-tattoos-HOORJ!!! kind of way, and I think it's also got the possibility to be a lot more, too. I mean, hell, it's the ultimate sandbox: You can do pretty much anything in it, and your biggest hassle will be finding a way to keep out the factors that you don't want.

If I was going to do anything with the Rifts setting--and I might, if my oldskool Palladium buddy ever has time to play--I'd just use the Rifts books for fluff and use Mutants & Masterminds for the system. That crazy-ass kitchen sink setting is better suited to point-based superhero-style character creation than D&D-inspired classes and levels, anyway.