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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RogueWriter" data-source="post: 1461172" data-attributes="member: 14455">Buzz, you're missing my point.  Rifts does have balance, assuming that your GM knows what he's doing.  Otherwise, he can very easy have an unplayable mish-mash for a PC party.  The balance comes from intelligent campaign design, not the rule system.  The rules just tell you what's possible, not how to put it together.  Don't want Cosmo-Knights? (And I don't blame you, who really does want a member of a Green Lantern Corps type organization made up of Silver Surfers in a PC party?)  Don't allow them in the campaign.  Easy.I think your "make a 1st level character," is very much ground in a D&D/d20 paradigm.  That may come from the simple fact that on the surface, the two systems seem somewhat similar in character creation.  Both have classes, both use experience levels.  But, don't expect the character class balance that is prevalent in D&D 3e.  It was never intended to be there, IMO.  Did you read my 17th level party example?  Or just skim it?  Because your point doesn't make sense to me.  The GM tells the players to make 17th level characters.  One of them makes a 1st level, and wants to play it that way (I hoped that was understood).  You're the GM, and you know that character isn't going to survive, something has to give.  That's the dichotomy I'm talking about.  That's the place where the GM has to enforce the campaign design.  Same goes for Rifts, it's simply more important, due to the vast differences in available power levels for characters.Now, about what makes a MDC creature...  I did say that those were general guidelines.  A glitterboy is a mecha pilot.  You should note that I did make mecha a separate category.  And, it should be.  You have an interesting difference in being gods of the battlefield when suited up/in the cockpit, as compared to being (to quote Clark Kent) "bones and meat like everyone else," when not.  Sometimes you can mix characters who are normally MDC with mecha characters, but it's a tad tricky.One of the things that makes Rifts easy to balance in campaign design is that everything is in separate sourcebooks.  While it's also a pain-in-the-*ss when trying to find stuff (thank you Palladium for putting out the compilation books), you can simply tone down a campaign by saying for example, "No Phase World characters."  That eliminates 3 sourcebooks, and those pesky Cosmo-Knights.I guess my real point is that Rifts can be a balanced game, if the GM is bright enough to put the required effort into designing a balanced campaign.  Rifts is a system that demands you do that.RW</blockquote>

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