The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[RealAlHazred]

Great, now I've been forced to remember a horrible gaming experience I had decades ago. I was convinced to try RIFTS, but we had random tables for everything, including Occupational Character Classes. So, after hours of chargen, we had:

• A Glitter Boy in invincible power armor who had a railgun so powerful, when he took a shot anchoring bolts shot out of his armor to keep him from flying backwards.
• A Cyberknight who was basically a Jedi.
• A Dragon. (This was a Racial Character Class, but I guess he go to that table somehow.)
• A full Borg conversion guy, 99% of whose entire body was made of metal. We joked that it must have been a single kneecap or something.
• A Technomage who somehow had both magic and high-tech in abundance.
• And me... A Vagabond (as in, a guy with no really good Action-Oriented skills), who used a pipe gun that failed to shoot 10% of the time and scavenged leather armor scraps.

The system uses regular damage and Mega-Damage. A point of Mega-Damage was equal to 1,000 points of regular damage. So, unless my character put on enough leather armor scraps to make up 1,000 points of armor (spoiler, even a mammoth didn't have enough hide for that) it wouldn't stop even a single point of damage from the Cyberknight's lightsaber, which did 1d6 MD. The railgun was some absurd number of points.

Early on in the first session after chargen, we fought some scrub minions. I wasn't able to get under cover in the first round, so the GM figured out randomly who got pegged when a grenade went off. Surprise! It was me! It was okay, though, he minned out the damage so I only took a single point!

Of Mega-Damage.

So, I was wiped out in the first shot. Somebody else was playing a character who had MD armor, but the illustration showed a character in, like, a two-piece bikini. We joked that the shrapnel just happened to bounce off of the strategically-placed bits of MD cloth.

Anyway, that game was a complete waste of 8 hours of time. At least everybody else looked like they were having fun.

 

[Ryujin]

Great, now I've been forced to remember a horrible gaming experience I had decades ago. I was convinced to try RIFTS, but we had random tables for everything, including Occupational Character Classes. So, after hours of chargen, we had:

• A Glitter Boy in invincible power armor who had a railgun so powerful, when he took a shot anchoring bolts shot out of his armor to keep him from flying backwards.
• A Cyberknight who was basically a Jedi.
• A Dragon. (This was a Racial Character Class, but I guess he go to that table somehow.)
• A full Borg conversion guy, 99% of whose entire body was made of metal. We joked that it must have been a single kneecap or something.
• A Technomage who somehow had both magic and high-tech in abundance.
• And me... A Vagabond (as in, a guy with no really good Action-Oriented skills), who used a pipe gun that failed to shoot 10% of the time and scavenged leather armor scraps.

The system uses regular damage and Mega-Damage. A point of Mega-Damage was equal to 1,000 points of regular damage. So, unless my character put on enough leather armor scraps to make up 1,000 points of armor (spoiler, even a mammoth didn't have enough hide for that) it wouldn't stop even a single point of damage from the Cyberknight's lightsaber, which did 1d6 MD. The railgun was some absurd number of points.

Early on in the first session after chargen, we fought some scrub minions. I wasn't able to get under cover in the first round, so the GM figured out randomly who got pegged when a grenade went off. Surprise! It was me! It was okay, though, he minned out the damage so I only took a single point!

Of Mega-Damage.

So, I was wiped out in the first shot. Somebody else was playing a character who had MD armor, but the illustration showed a character in, like, a two-piece bikini. We joked that the shrapnel just happened to bounce off of the strategically-placed bits of MD cloth.

Anyway, that game was a complete waste of 8 hours of time. At least everybody else looked like they were having fun.

The first time that I played Rifts I was in a very similar situation. IIRC 1 MDC = 100 SDC. I played a Mystic Magic OCC, in a group of MDC characters. I think that I had armour that had a whopping 40 MDC which would last about 2 hits from any of the other characters in the group. I lasted until the second fight.

Realizing that my fellow party members were a bunch of munchkins, I went about creating the most broken characters that I could after that. My first follow-up was an invulnerable super hero character that I named Stainless. At one point that character was stuck to a Carpet of Adhesion and was constantly taking damage until the spell ran out. The enemy didn't last long after that. My next character was even worse; a Demigod Apok.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Great, now I've been forced to remember a horrible gaming experience I had decades ago. I was convinced to try RIFTS, <SNIP>
Anyway, that game was a complete waste of 8 hours of time. At least everybody else looked like they were having fun.

This, this is why RIFTS never flew with me. I always ended up the guy with the paper bag for armor and a rubber band for a weapon.

 

[Aeson]

I liked the setting. I have a lot of the books. I'm not so sure about the mechanics.

 

[Ryujin]

I liked the setting. I have a lot of the books. I'm not so sure about the mechanics.

They're the same mechanics as pretty much every other Palladium RPG. The difference is Mega Damage. They even give conversions from their other games to Rifts.

 

[RealAlHazred]

IIRC 1 MDC = 100 SDC

That's right. I'd forgotten and added a "0". Mea culpa! Still absurd, though!

I liked the setting. I have a lot of the books. I'm not so sure about the mechanics.

I thought the setting as depicted in the core book had a lot of story potential. Then, each release after that made it feel more and more different. Like, in the original book it seemed like only a few million humans might be left on Earth. And then, by the time the last Coalition books came out, my buddy who is a super-fan was telling me Chicago alone had a population in the tens of millions. The "setting creep" from the supplements leeched a lot of the flavor I liked out of the setting.

 

[prabe]

Congratulations! You have read something in the least generous way possible!

 

[J.Quondam]

I keep seeing the thread title and thinking, "So... that's like a three-quarter vampire, right?"

 

[Aeson]

I keep seeing the thread title and thinking, "So... that's like a three-quarter vampire, right?"

Blade's half brother?

 

[Malmuria]

The reason the architecture looks the same everywhere is because it's a mediocre, inspiration-less setting filled with copy/paste cliches and crude, one-dimensional cultural appropriation.