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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 2366232" data-attributes="member: 19675">I like RIFTS, I really do...and no, I'm not going to compare it to a garbage scow. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I've played it & I've GMed it- as well as many other games (all versions of D&D, HERO, Traveller, Paranoia, and many more).  People complain about the power differentials and compare classes like Glitterboys and Dogboys to illustrate it, and I think that misses the point.To my mind, Palladium made no effort to balance the O.C.C's and R.C.Cs other than by differing their XP progression charts...AND THAT IS NOT A BAD THING.RIFTS is one of the few games in which you can have a starting party with wildly different levels of power between characters.  (Hell, you can play a vagabond!)  This means your players have to think because sometimes 1 PC can solve the whole encounter, and others times, he'll be the lone survivor of a TPK...maybe.  Unlike most RPG encounters, RIFTS is full of encounters that must be avoided or tactically analyzed and planned for, rather than just go in, attack and heal up later.In a sense, instead of a typical RPG party which is like a squad of infantry, a RIFTS party is often much more like a group of infantry supporting a Tank.  In that, its more like playing a Superheroic game than a hard SF or Fantasy RPG.Note, however, I'm not enamoured of all of the rules.  Some are quite clunky and unwieldy.But it was the setting that attracted me to RIFTS.  I bought RIFTS at the same time I bought TORG and Shadowrun because I wanted a game that fused fantastic and SF elements.  Other than homebrewed HERO, I haven't found a better fusion of those elements (though I also hold Shadowrun in high esteem).And, to be perfectly honest, I'm probably going to use aspects of it in a D20 Modern Fantasy campaign.Were I to start buying RIFTS today, I'd buy the Core Rulebook, Atlantis, Mercenaries, Juicer Uprising, Coalition, Bionics, the Book of Magic compendium, Sourcebook 1...and leave most of the rest on the shelves until it went on deep discount.  If you have other Palladium stuff, like the Palladium RPG or Heroes Unlimited, I'd also buy the RIFTS conversion book.  Not that there's not good stuff in there, but as was mentioned before, there's a lot of stuff that simply isn't essential.</blockquote>

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