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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 2053778" data-attributes="member: 8158">RIFTS offered an unapologetically over-the-top setting, and the core book contained countless illustrations that fired up the imagination. In fact, RIFTS probably holds the distinction of being the first game where the designers realized that glorious, full-color, airbrushed eye-candy really pays off (this was a time when most RPG books were low-budget affairs that offered only pen-and-ink artwork). A lot of that appealed to folks, myself included. Now understand, the Palladium system itself is garbage. Utter garbage. Most games that offer a cumbersome combat system do so in order to portray a higher level of realism (e.g. GURPS). Palladium is cumbersome for no reason in particular. Way too many rolls involved, for one thing: I roll to attack, you roll to defend, if I hit I roll damage, then you roll to take less damage. And characters get lots of attacks in a given round.Technology is hideously powerful, borrowing the concept of "Mega-Damage" from the Palladium Robotech game, and taking it to an extreme. 1 point of MD = 100 points of "standard" damage (effectively 199 actually, since you are supposed to round up if you apply mega-damage to to a standard-damage creature or structure). In Robotech, mega-damage was restricted to big-ass weapons mounted on giant robots, but in RIFTS you could have a pen-light or pocket knife that does 1d4 MD. Since most characters are lucky to break 100 HP, guess what? HP mean nothing. Your armor became your hit points. The books routinely depict bare-chested characters engaging in frenzied hand-to-hand combat, but nobody every does that for reasons that should be fairly obvious.Magic is lame and weak, copied-and-pasted directly from Palladium Fantasy. It utterly failed to scale to the power level of technology (this may have changed with supplements). This is one of those areas where "metasystems" like Palladium and GURPS fail utterly. You can't say "here's a book for magic" and expect it to be portable to any setting, be it pulp fantasy or four-color superheroes or whatever the hell you'd call RIFTS. As has been mentioned, power levels varied way too wildly, especially within character classes. You've got everything from mundane professions like scout, scientist, or vagabond (yep, you can be a bum) all the way up to dragons, uber-powerful mind melters, and the ever-absurd glitterboys (which is not really a character class, but rather an excuse to have a 20-foot tall mech with a gun that does 3d6 x 10 MD). All level at roughly the same rate. Parties were just hodge-podges with no concept of what roles individual members should play.I pray for a d20 version one day, but from what I understand, RIFTS still sells. Can't imagine how.</blockquote>

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