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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SSquirrel" data-source="post: 5483494" data-attributes="member: 5202">I disagree Wik, all games require a good DM.  If they don't, you're probably playing a board game.  That doesn't mean that all systems need a good DM to make a balanced group.  RIFTS has a super wide gulf between the high and low that you can experience in character creation.  I've played RIFTS with crappy GMs and it sucked.  I've played D&D with crappy DMs and it sucked.  Making an unbalanced party will lead to unhappy players 9 times out of 10.  The DM should let people know in advance what to expect.  If he tells you to expect a lot of action and combats while dimension hopping and you choose to make a Rogue Scientist, that's your own fault.  When I ran RIFTS I limited people to specific books and ruled out certain RCC and OCCs from each book.  That helped establish a more level field and ensured that people would be useful on a more regular basis.  Some systems are more inherently balanced than others.  4E vs RIFTS is no contest there.  Call of Cthulhu you can certainly make someone who is much better at combat, but you'll still probably die to shoggoths anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The ideas and the artwork of RIFTS have always been the big draw of the setting for me.  The blind slave warrior women w/a splugorth on the cover of the main book when it was first released.  The ley line walker.  The red borg.  The art took you places and reading about the world was awesome.  I grew up about an hour from Chillicothe OH, so it was really cool to learn it was the center of the Federation of Magic or that there was the City of Brass in Mammoth Cave.  The Deep South is now a big swampy dinosaur infested area.  Central America is infested with vampires and they have taken the "can't cross moving water" myth and turned it into techno wizard water guns holding them back. hehSome of the stuff you find in the setting is just plain ridiculous, but so much of it is really cool.  Now, it's known that Kevin does no playtesting, so there's no way anything is balanced.  As long as you know that and plan around it, it can be a great game.</blockquote>

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