[OT] What can you all tell me about Rifts?
- Thread starter Devall2000
- Start date
Crothian
First Post
kibbitz said:
Personally, I'd go here:
http://www.megaverse.palladiumbooks.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi
That's the offical Palladiumbooks message boards. You'll find a pretty good comunity with good advice on how to handle some of Palladium's rules problems. It makes more sense to me to ask Palladium questions on the Palladium boards, just like I ask all my d20 questions here and not over there.
JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Rifts is a great setting but ...
Power levels are off balance.
Advice for handling varying power levels is somewhat lacking.
Outside of that, I have to say that there are a lot of great options and opportunities for role playing and roll playing in Rifts.
The setting is very vast and Palladium has taken advantage of Rifts connection to other universes by making unique settings like Phase World and Wormworld to interlock with Rifts.
I'd start with the basic book, Rifts, and see how that strikes you. If you enjoy it, the compendiums might be your next best bet followed by the Rifter, which has optional, but usually entertaining stuff in it.
Power levels are off balance.
Advice for handling varying power levels is somewhat lacking.
Outside of that, I have to say that there are a lot of great options and opportunities for role playing and roll playing in Rifts.
The setting is very vast and Palladium has taken advantage of Rifts connection to other universes by making unique settings like Phase World and Wormworld to interlock with Rifts.
I'd start with the basic book, Rifts, and see how that strikes you. If you enjoy it, the compendiums might be your next best bet followed by the Rifter, which has optional, but usually entertaining stuff in it.
Crothian said:
Personally, I'd go here:
http://www.megaverse.palladiumbooks.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi
That's the offical Palladiumbooks message boards. You'll find a pretty good comunity with good advice on how to handle some of Palladium's rules problems. It makes more sense to me to ask Palladium questions on the Palladium boards, just like I ask all my d20 questions here and not over there.
What ever gave you the idea that my question wouldn't be "'Which way to a good Pallidium board?"
But seriously, thanks for the info 
Kaptain_Kantrip
First Post
Rifts has got to be the single most brain-dead money-grab RPG scam of the century. "Let's just toss every kind of genre into one setting and let 'em duke it out!" Pathetic. Not to mention the system is broken. SDC is one thing, but MDC? Forget it! 
Ashrum the Black
Explorer
Hold the phone...
Okay okay, it's obvious I'm in the minority here but here goes. In rifts game balance doesn't matter.
I've have game mastered a group for close to two years and in that time I had every thing from a charater that attained demigod status for a little while to a few lowly coalition grunts running around trying not to get killed. Each and every character had lots of fun. Why? Because the DM (me) did his job. I supplied opertunities for all the characters to shine. The techno wizard had his gizmos, the troopers where the tacticians and the combat monster got to blow stuff up. Everybody was happy. Did the grunts jump into the middle of the combat between the demigods. Heck no! They sat back out of range and used heavy ordance when they could.
Yes, there can be issues where a DM allows a cosmo knight and a human scientist to work together. So what? If they each have an oppurtunity to shine and their players are having fun then who care that the cosmo knight can nuke a small star ship and the scientist can barely lift a 40ilb weight.
I guess what I'm saying is that rifts is the one system that allows you to play anything, and I DO mean anything you want. It's up to the DM to provide the oppurtunity for each charater to have fun. If he's planning on running a heavy combat game and there will be no time for any tinkering in down tiime then a techno wizard make no sense. If all the character will be fighting gods and mechanoid motherships then it doesn't make a lot of snese for the characters to be playing straight up vanilla humans. Unless that's what you want.
Rifts is what you make of it. IT is the only system I know of where you truely can do anything you want with it. My campaign ended up with the characters blowing up a planet with an imprisoned old one in side. Come on, tell me you havn't always wanted to do THAT!
Yes, there's more work there for the DM than there is in say DND. But the options and possibilities are greater as well. Trade offs jimmy, it's always trade offs. And now I'll get down from my soap box and reinstate lurk mode.
Okay okay, it's obvious I'm in the minority here but here goes. In rifts game balance doesn't matter.
I've have game mastered a group for close to two years and in that time I had every thing from a charater that attained demigod status for a little while to a few lowly coalition grunts running around trying not to get killed. Each and every character had lots of fun. Why? Because the DM (me) did his job. I supplied opertunities for all the characters to shine. The techno wizard had his gizmos, the troopers where the tacticians and the combat monster got to blow stuff up. Everybody was happy. Did the grunts jump into the middle of the combat between the demigods. Heck no! They sat back out of range and used heavy ordance when they could.
Yes, there can be issues where a DM allows a cosmo knight and a human scientist to work together. So what? If they each have an oppurtunity to shine and their players are having fun then who care that the cosmo knight can nuke a small star ship and the scientist can barely lift a 40ilb weight.
I guess what I'm saying is that rifts is the one system that allows you to play anything, and I DO mean anything you want. It's up to the DM to provide the oppurtunity for each charater to have fun. If he's planning on running a heavy combat game and there will be no time for any tinkering in down tiime then a techno wizard make no sense. If all the character will be fighting gods and mechanoid motherships then it doesn't make a lot of snese for the characters to be playing straight up vanilla humans. Unless that's what you want.
Rifts is what you make of it. IT is the only system I know of where you truely can do anything you want with it. My campaign ended up with the characters blowing up a planet with an imprisoned old one in side. Come on, tell me you havn't always wanted to do THAT!
Yes, there's more work there for the DM than there is in say DND. But the options and possibilities are greater as well. Trade offs jimmy, it's always trade offs. And now I'll get down from my soap box and reinstate lurk mode.
sword-dancer
Explorer
Cullain said:
It´s a must for GM to decide which power level he wants in his campaign, or if he decide to ignore it.
That`s it, game balance is not an inbuilt feature.
Kevin Simbieda had said it more than once by really powerful characer classes.
Or an equivalent over character classes who may have problems.
If you are the human city rat, vagabond in an party of true atlantean undead slayers, demigods ant titans you aren`t supposed to functrion of the same parameters.
OTOH we were a party of a wolfen demigodess(Ley line Walker(aka wizard) Mindmelter(psionic), godling of the norse pantheon, dragon (hatchling?) tattooed technowizard(vampire hunting specialist), an advanced machine man in the adventure before the new.
what happened our must needed popwer was the psionic ability machine ghost, to go in the computers.
If we had thought to fought our enemies mtm we would have been annihilated.
Nothing an descent gifted equipped human hadn`t could do also.
We play a very rules light combat, and it functioned very good.
sword-dancer
Explorer
Re: Re: Hold the phone...
My first Rifts Character was an rogue scholar, who is in combat not a bit better than the vagabond
El_Gringo said:
My first Rifts Character was an rogue scholar, who is in combat not a bit better than the vagabond
Gospog
First Post
To answer Deval's question (at least from my perspective):
RIFTS is a multi-genre game. They threw everything into it but the kitchen sink. That makes for a lot of really cool stuff in the game, but can be a pain whn you need to decide what you need to leave out.
The rules are poor. A lot of people hate them. I ran a campaign for two years straight, and we just threw out the rules that didn't work for us, and generated a lot of house rules. If you have a high level of trust in your group, between Players and the GM, this may be an option for you. It worked fine for 2 years for us.
I personally like the story a lot. RIFTS is full of robots, cyborgs and monsters, duking it out. Whether or not this involves roleplaying is really up to your group. But the robots and monsters are there.
I tended to use all of the big monsters (as PCs, sometimes) in the begining, and then we had fun toning it down to play humans near the end. So it is flexible in that respect. There is no warning label that warns you away from mixing the high and low power PCs, but a little experience playing should give you the basics pretty quick. It's not rocket science.
I'd say that you only really need the basic RIFTS book. You might also want to check out the Rifter. It's cheap, and has a ton of material in every issuue. I steal ideas from it for several different games, not just RIFTS.
Good luck, and have fun!
RIFTS is a multi-genre game. They threw everything into it but the kitchen sink. That makes for a lot of really cool stuff in the game, but can be a pain whn you need to decide what you need to leave out.
The rules are poor. A lot of people hate them. I ran a campaign for two years straight, and we just threw out the rules that didn't work for us, and generated a lot of house rules. If you have a high level of trust in your group, between Players and the GM, this may be an option for you. It worked fine for 2 years for us.
I personally like the story a lot. RIFTS is full of robots, cyborgs and monsters, duking it out. Whether or not this involves roleplaying is really up to your group. But the robots and monsters are there.
I tended to use all of the big monsters (as PCs, sometimes) in the begining, and then we had fun toning it down to play humans near the end. So it is flexible in that respect. There is no warning label that warns you away from mixing the high and low power PCs, but a little experience playing should give you the basics pretty quick. It's not rocket science.
I'd say that you only really need the basic RIFTS book. You might also want to check out the Rifter. It's cheap, and has a ton of material in every issuue. I steal ideas from it for several different games, not just RIFTS.
Good luck, and have fun!
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