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

[JRR_Talking]

Yeah

at on point i got drawn in just by flipping through the book and reading the intro.
The you buy it
Then you read more and think, wow some very cool concepts but maybe a bit 'uber' in places.
Then your tell your players, they go 'oh' too, then the glitter boys et al start to appear and then you realise how bad the mechanics get and utter lack of balalnce to stuff

very cool art though

John

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

I find Rifts to be a very fun game, so I disagree.

 

[jdrakeh]

1) Does Palladium produce a core rules guide that just hashes out combat, movement, actions etc. ?

No. The closest thing they have to that is the RIFTS Ultimate Edition book (the hardcover), which functions pretty much like the D&D PHB does, only for Palladium (as opposed to d20). Unlike the PHB, however, the substance of RUE is entirely closed content. There is no "Palladium SRD" or anything. Nor, I suspect, will there ever be one.

2) Is there anything resembling grid based combat in RIFTs ?

No.

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

Rifts has cool art, a cool setting, but a terrible system.

Very, very true.

I've often felt RIFTS was a great idea, just a lousy execution, particularly with the escalation of power-classes in subsequent splatbooks. D&D 3.X is guilty of this as well, particularly the Fighter vs. Whatever debates that spring up with alarming regularity on their forums, but the majority of core classes are still very playable and enjoyable as is.

I'm not saying that Palladium needs to hope on the d20 bandwagon (which will never happen as Siembieda has proven to be excessively paranoid about "protecting" his IP, even when it comes to fan-based websites that support RIFTS or Palladium as is and not convert it to other systems), but as time goes on and less gamers want to spend the time and effort to learn a system that is unnecessarily complicated, Palladium is either going to have to evolve or perish. And given Siembeida's legal actions in the past against the game's own fanbase, I wouldn't be surprised if it ultimately came down to the later.

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

Your post is the same thing I've read about a hundred times on RPGnet and other sites. It's old.

And yet for a lot of folks, oh so very true. Which is why you keep seeing posts about it.

 

[anhar]

I've got some friends who are crazy over palladium, and especially RIFTS, but I never could understand the fascination. Maybe it's just because I'm used to HERO system and 3.X DnD, but the Rifts books were nearly unreadable for me, and combat especially was largely undecipherable. And the combat was a strange mix of realism (I.E. megadamage weapons autokill targets without megadamage armor. makes sense, no matter what level he is, Conan shouldn't be able to take a tank shell) and ridiculous unrealism (15kg light megadamage armor concievably lets you take a mini-nuke, or a shot from a railgun that requires a 15 ft tall robot to have laser drilled foot anchors in order to fire safely. oh, and that mini nuke/boomgun shot will either utterly kill you, or leave you standing with badly damaged armor, but completely physically fine underneath.)

I could be wrong about that last point but I'll be damned if three readings of the combat rules let me know that.

Maybe HERO system just spoiled me, but if I hit a normal size/weight guy with a mini-nuke, I expect to see him fly, even if his armor does survive.

I agree that the concept and art and background do seem really cool, and the character creation does allow for alot of cool concepts. (crazy hero ftw). But honestly in todays environment, compared to the competition, the books don't really look professionally made/formatted.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

I played Rifts extensively. Hell, if third edition hadn't come alone, me and my players would still be playing Rifts and Palladium Fantasy. And yet, I had to review the combat rules before each session. And pray they didn't start a fight....

 

[nedleeds]

Gave it another read through and IMHO its a bit of a lost cause for somebody used to D20 grid base combat. I'm not saying it completely sucks, but for somebody used to flanking and AOOs and a general sense of direction in combat the random hodgepodge of random modifiers strewn through 360 random pages is too much. Perhaps if the book had a chapter on combat at the beginning, and 3 or 4 concrete increasingly complex examples it might make some sense. I can't imagine a fight between 2-3 melee combatants, another 2-3 trying to fire missile weapons, then throw a dragon and mech into the mix with their own rules. "I'll dodge the missiles", "You can't", "why", "because it's a volley of 4", "so I could dodge 3?", "yep", "then why would anyone fire less then 4", "...".

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Palladium products take up more of my shelf space than any RPGs except D&D and HERO.

However, I rarely play the games themselves (only 3 campaigns since I first picked up the game in the 90's)- I use them for mining for other games. Sometimes I even run RIFTS campaigns using some other ruleset (usually HERO).

My basic take is the fluff is better than industry standard, but the mechanics are and have always been bad.

 

[interwyrm]

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). The game does have some awesome flavor though. I think the best thing to do with it is just extract the fluff.