[OT] What can you all tell me about Rifts?

[Tsyr]

Here are the books I would really consider "important" for Rifts:

Rifts main guide (duh)

Rifts Conversion Book 1 (Lots of usefull tidbits)

Atlantis (Atlantis plays such an important role in many nations)

Triax and the NGR (Ok, I'm biased here, I love that book... but its truely my favorite place to play a military type campagin... I have a week stomach for playing coalition military... as I may have hinted at before)... besides, it has a lot of great rules for borgs and mecha that are usefull anyplace, with a little bit of story flexing.

Mercenaries (Everything you could ever want for playing merc groups, which is a cornerstone of many Rifts games... rules for second-hand gear, el-cheap-o gear, forming a merc company, several prominant players in the north-american merc scene, etc.)

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Beyond those, these next ones are useful if you have a focused interest in the topic...

The Vampire Kingdoms (If you plan to play around the mexico-texas-ish area, or just want some undead killing action)

The Coalition War (Updated metaplot info for the Coalition and its ongoing battle against pretty much everything, including the newer technology they are using)

The Coalition Navy or Rifts Underseas (If you plan to run a naval-ish campagin)

Rifts England (If you want to run a pseudo-fantasy setting, England is the place... also has rules for faries, farie rings, druids, alchemy, etc... plus all the details on the new court of King Arr'Tur, the wizard Mrylyn, etc...)

The Juicer Uprising (if you have players who run Juicers alot, and you are a good enough GM to handle a couple juicers... some can't, I've found... beyond just new juicers, it also have rules for sports designed for juicers, special weapons built to take advantage of a juicers strength, vehicals designed for a juicers reflexes, rules for death-cultist juicers who become undead, meta plot info on the Coalition's plan to get rid of juicers and create supersoldiers with them (both at the same time...), and a lot of stuff on juicer lifestyle)

Japan (This is a fun setting... its got its "mythic" area (like the England book) with "mystic" ninja, samurai, etc... and its high tech area, with powerarmour, lasers, nanotech, cybernetics, etc... plus areas of the islands are covered with demons, vampires, etc... It's got it all in a very tiny area )

Wormwood (If you want to run Rifts, but not on Rifts Earth, this is interesting. Wormwood is a living planet in a connected by rifts to ours. It's even more grim that Rifts, and is a place with a very strong "good vrs evil" conflict. I love wormwood myself, but a lot of players think it's a bit too strange... it's definetly non-typical, even by rifts standards...)

The rest are pretty much take-it-or-leave-it, IMHO...


Im with Ashram, sorry guys... In Rifts, balance really isn't THAT important. But on the other hand, it's also not that hard to maintain. Set a power level and run with it... your perfecty free to tell your characters "Nothing more powerful than a headhunter or psi stalker" if you want to... or for that matter, your free to tell them nothing less powerful than a Juicer. It's your game. And as long as you play to the strengths and weeknesses of your party, people WILL have fun. Got a juicer that's having a bit too much fun? Seems his reputation procedes him, the merc group your competing with has purchased a couple suits of Juicer-Killer power armour. In Rifts there is ALWAYS a counter for EVERYTHING, you just have to be able to think outside the boundries of your planned adventure once and a while.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

I like Ryan Dancy's sentiment (as espoused on Monte Cook's boards): Rifts fills a niche and there's not one blessed thing wrong with that.

 

[Chun-tzu]

I used to play Rifts, and have most of the books. I agree with opinions that it is a great setting, and that balance is something the GM needs to provide. That said, it's actually not terribly difficult to balance out characters given the various super-items in the game. Even a regular human guy can kick serious butt if you give him a greater rune weapon, or a good suit of power armor.

Rifts does epic gaming in a way that D&D just can't match. The Rifts setting is wonderfully chaotic, in that the people of Rifts Earth are beset by dozens of world-threatening scenarios. The vampires in Mexico. The Xiticix insect invaders (you can run an awesome Starship Troopers style campaign with the Xiticix Invasion book in Canada. The demon hordes in Germany. The Coalition in North America. The 4 Horsemen in Africa. It is a world desperately in need of epic heroes. At the same time, you can have characters with epic power levels but without losing that human touch, e.g. regular humans in power armor.

Psionics is far more fun in the Palladium system than d20. Psionic characters are great. Magic characters are a little under-powered (imagine that). Technology-based characters and enhanced humans tend to be better characters than wizard types. For many characters, power does not increase greatly by level (there are 15 levels), and 1st level characters can provide a credible threat to 15th level characters. And in a way, that can be better than D&D's system, which in some ways requires greater suspension of disbelief.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

I have no direct experience with Rifts though I did collect and play the Robotech game that was put out.

All I can say is the concept is cool but the rules and quality of product absolutely sucks.

They must have Helen Keller hired as Editor over there. Typos are a dime a dozen and those are the minor mistakes. Ive seen sections where entire paragraphs were accidentally repeated line for line one right after the other.

Also I could never figure it out but there was little on the way of rules for movement. You had mecha, transforming mech, ground troops, aircraft, every vehicle you could imagine yet very few rules if any on how they interacted movement wise. Very poorly handled.

 

[Tsyr]

I would advise you to not form an opinion of Rifts from the Robotech books... they have some of the worst editing Palladium has ever done.

 

[Crothian]

I would advise you to not form an opinion of Rifts from the Robotech books... they have some of the worst editing Palladium has ever done.

That is very true. Palladium in the 80's had bad editors. Now a days they are a lot better. The writing has also improved greatly as well.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Fair enough, the rules though are the same and I considered them to be very light to non-existant in some rather important areas like movement in combat.

That is very true. Palladium in the 80's had bad editors. Now a days they are a lot better. The writing has also improved greatly as well.

 

[buzzard]

Just to add yet another opinion about Rifts which is similar to the rest.

The game has a very cool setting. One person here said that it was all an evil marketing ploy (bad paraphrase). Well maybe it is. Then again maybe not. The back story is decent enough to justify what is being done. Also the freedom which is allowed is what makes the game appealing. You want to see if a super hero fares well against mecha? Give it a shot. Gods vs. high tech- blast away. The ability for roughly anything to happen is the strength.

Now for the weaknesses. Back in 2nd edition it always seemed that if your character wasn't powerful enough, you would simply buy a new supplement to power up. Rifts takes this to the Nth degree. Each successive world book and other supplement introduces more and more ultra powerful classes. Sure, the original book has hatchling dragons and glitterboys. They are pretty damn tough. Compared to the stuff in later books those guys are creampuffs. Granted a GM can control this, rather he MUST control this. The burden on the GM is huge. There is little in the way of specifics given in published adventures. Then again with the potential power spread, little else is possible. I don't mind playing the game, but I would never volunteer to GM.

Then there are the Palladium rules. I'm not sure I see why everyone busts on the skill system so much. I think it is OK. The combat system though, is poor. Many details of it are not thought out well. The whole SDC vs. MDC business is rather hokey.

To sum up, the game can be a lot of fun. However it is very demanding of the GM, and the rules will have to be coped with.

Buzzard

 

[clvrmonkey]

I like it

Generally speaking I like Rifts quite a bit. As stated above (several times) the setting is pretty good, allowing just about any type of game you want. I've never really had a problem with the rules. As far as I am concerned opposing dice rolls for combat are a hell of a lot better than THAC0.

The power levels do indeed go up dramatically with each new book. Don't know why.

My main problem with Palladium in general is that Kevin Siembieda is the George Lucas of the RPG world. The initial incarnation of his vision indicated a beautiful expansive world, allowing the community to build around it and make it thier own (to a point of course).

As the game continued to grow so did Kevin's ego. It became his way or the highway, even involving the community. I'm convinced that there is a room full of monkey's at Palladium who's sole responsibility is to produce cease and desist letters. Criticism of his setting is almost strictly forbidden.

An interesting note as this is a d20 site: before WotC made M:tG they published a little game called Primal Order. In the back of this book they included conversion rules for many different systems, including Rifts. They had all copyright information and gave credit where credit was due. Kevin sued them. Wizards lost. During the course of the suit Wizards formed a subsidiary (or something similiar) to persue the creation of M:tG so it would not be subject to any findings in the lawsuit. If it hadn't been for that move it is quite possible that WotC would have been put out of business.

Anyway, I think Rifts could be a very good, well-rounded RPG, but it's going to require some major changes, which it appears Kevin would see as a personal insult to his abilities.

Now I'm going to call my lawyers and wait to be sued.

 

[Chairman_Kaga]

Rifts=Trash

I played and GM'd Palladium games (all of them) for about 10 years. Why so long? Well, to be honest it was all there was super-hero wise without getting all of my players to go buy and learn a system like Champions or V&V (we was poor back in the day don't ya know).

I was forced to literally re-write a good section of the rule book over the course of those 10 years just to have something semi-plausible. In the end my house rules binder was thicker than the actual rule book...

I was forced to move on when Lord Siembieda decided it was ok to play a god...


Arrogant jack@55.