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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5483582" data-attributes="member: 93119">KS also has a slew of house rules he uses when he plays at conventions at the like. The cognitive dissonance within Palladium is astounding.I have a ton of Rifts books and at one point used to play fairly regularly. I fully agree that the rules are a complete hinderance to the game. Wik is correct about GMs in the game, there's little to no good guidance for GMs on how to make the game playable for everyone. Two characters in the same party can very easily have vastly different power levels, the Glitterboy and Rogue Scholar being good examples. A D&D style encounter where the characters square off against a group of similarly powered foes is completely inappropriate for Rifts.To build balanced challenges you need to offer every character their own tailored challenge. The Glitterboy should fend off the cyborg mercenaries while the Rogue Scholar hacks the security panel to get into the secret facility. The portions of an encounter need to play to each character's strengths or someone is going to end up bored out of their skull. None of the books cover this, it's something I've only learned from running or playing in horribly unbalanced games. As mentioned there's also no good way to figure out the relative strengths of two characters or creatures. Equipment like power armor and plasma rifles skew those comparisons even more. The setting itself has interesting bits but it often has as many holes and oversights as the rules themselves. Everyone is illiterate but they can manage to build plasma rifles that can level a city? Right. I can understand the polar opposite states (Chi-Town and Tolkeen) but there's just no real neutral states. You're either peace and love hippies or fascist a-holes. While the metric ton of splatbooks have lots of back story they don't have much advice on how to actually use it as either players or GMs.</blockquote>

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