Weekend Nonsense: Favorite Bad RPG

[Jer]

That right there was why I could never get in to Palladium products. There were skills that gave all kinds of bonuses that EVERYONE took, like Boxing and Weightlifting. Just kind of ruined the system for me.

One of the things that made Palladium games thrilling for me when I was 12-13 and impossible for me to play now is exactly that. That and the layout of the rules - when I was young and apparently had infinite amounts of time to deal with an RPG system finding "hidden" things in the rules like extra attacks from taking Boxing was fun (and there wasn't an internet back then for people to tell me all of the tricks to take to build a character either - it was all about finding it for yourself if there wasn't someone already playing the game to point it out to you). Now that I'm old I just find it tedious and the layout of the books a bit overwhelming - even as someone who played in a few different Palladium games back in the day.

 

[aramis erak]

One of the things that made Palladium games thrilling for me when I was 12-13 and impossible for me to play now is exactly that. That and the layout of the rules - when I was young and apparently had infinite amounts of time to deal with an RPG system finding "hidden" things in the rules like extra attacks from taking Boxing was fun (and there wasn't an internet back then for people to tell me all of the tricks to take to build a character either - it was all about finding it for yourself if there wasn't someone already playing the game to point it out to you). Now that I'm old I just find it tedious and the layout of the books a bit overwhelming - even as someone who played in a few different Palladium games back in the day.

For me, I love Palladium's world building.
I don't mind the combat system.
I do mind the lockstep skill advancement, the lack of interpersonal skills/social conflict, Personal SDC, MegaDamage, the meaningless attributes....

That leaves adapting them, or sticking to the 5 that have on three of those.... Mechanoid invasion, Mechanoids The Journey, Mechanoids: Homeworld, THe Mechanoids, and Palladium Fantasy 1e/1eRev. Or the three with fewer: Recon, Valley of the Pharaohs, and Amber. I don't care for Amber - wasn't big on the Amber novels, either. With the right group, in a private venue, Recon could be fun. In a public venuse? No way.

Note that neither Recon nor Amber use the normal palladium rulesystem. Valley seems to be early experimentation away from the palladium core. Odd, but interesting. Used to be a free download from Palladium's website... but now they're charging for it.

 

[James Gasik]

Amber is a setting I adore, I loved the books. But the system...wow. Do you really need to trust the GM! I played for about a year with a GM who, well, let's be honest. If he didn't want you to succeed, you weren't going to, no matter what your Attributes were. A lot of times, the only time Attributes seemed to matter was in PVP, which I'm not a huge fan of.

And whatever Attribute I was best at, seemed to be trivialized more often than not. His common complaint was that I "just wanted to win" all the time. Which confused me, if I'm First Ranked in, say, Warfare, I'm an amazing warrior who can overcome anyone who decides to face me in a fair fight. A big factor in the game was trying to switch the combat from an Attribute you were bad at, to one you were good at. But every time someone came at me with a sword, this ensued:

"So what is the guy doing?" "Oh you know, feeling out your defenses, parrying, that sort of thing." "I'm better than him, right?" "Oh yeah, by a lot." "I'll slip an attack through his guard to let him realize that (hoping to get the guy to surrender)." "Ugh, this again? Why won't you realize you can't just win right away? This is going to take time!" "Ok, so I have to slowly wear down his defences?" "Yes, which makes this an Endurance test." "Wait, what? He came at me using Warfare, why is it Endurance now?" "Because you couldn't defeat his defenses right away." "So how to I change it back to Warfare?" "I don't know, tell me what you're doing." "Describes a shield bash to throw the enemy off balance." "Uh, that sounds like Strength. What's your Strength again?"

And so on. Any time I'd have an advantage and try to press it, he'd suddenly want to change the combat to something else, and then force me to figure out how to get the advantage back again. We'd spend a lot of time on this, while other characters would go "Uh, I touch the guy so I can overpower him with my Psyche." "Ok, he falls down."

I finally decided that I really needed dice in my life, so I can actually "see" how good I was, so I never touched the game again. Relating the story now though, I don't know if I can completely blame the GM or not; he often seemed annoyed that I knew more about the setting's lore than he did, having read all the books multiple times, and even owning the Illustrated Encyclopedia (when I had a hard time getting anyone else to even look at my paperback copy of Nine Princes in Amber)- maybe he felt threatened, or thought I was trying to exert undue influence over the narrative?

Either way, since the system has no real way to break up a dispute when the players are at loggerheads other than a loosely defined system of "good stuff/bad stuff" (ie, unspent points at character creation gave you a loose sort of karma), I'm left to conclude that whether or not it's a great game depends on the group.

 

[Jd Smith1]

For me, I love Palladium's world building.
I don't mind the combat system.
I do mind the lockstep skill advancement, the lack of interpersonal skills/social conflict, Personal SDC, MegaDamage, the meaningless attributes....

That leaves adapting them, or sticking to the 5 that have on three of those.... Mechanoid invasion, Mechanoids The Journey, Mechanoids: Homeworld, THe Mechanoids, and Palladium Fantasy 1e/1eRev. Or the three with fewer: Recon, Valley of the Pharaohs, and Amber. I don't care for Amber - wasn't big on the Amber novels, either. With the right group, in a private venue, Recon could be fun. In a public venuse? No way.

Note that neither Recon nor Amber use the normal palladium rulesystem. Valley seems to be early experimentation away from the palladium core. Odd, but interesting. Used to be a free download from Palladium's website... but now they're charging for it.

The original Recon combat rules were better, but the system was pretty simplistic. It can be a fun campaign with friends. The 1st ed expansion into the Middle East and Cold War Africa hold a lot of potential.

 

[Jer]

For me, I love Palladium's world building.
I don't mind the combat system.
I do mind the lockstep skill advancement, the lack of interpersonal skills/social conflict, Personal SDC, MegaDamage, the meaningless attributes....

I like the world building and the combat system is simple enough and close enough to pre-3e D&D to be workable (I honestly cannot say at this point if we were really playing Palladium's combat system or if we were just playing a modified D&D combat system with guns in it. Everyone got multiple attacks so we were probably closer to Palladium than not but without a time machine my fuzzy memories will probably never know).

The thing I appreciate most in retrospect with Palladium games is the embrace of randomness in character creation. Just every thing imaginable will have a table to roll on. It's not for everyone - if you're the kind of person who comes to the table with an idea for your character up front the random chargen is probably infuriating. But if you're in a "go where the die rolls take you" sort of mood the committment to the random character creation minigame is just impressive even for a game of its time - and I actually don't mind the meaningless attributes because that's the trade-off that makes the random chargen work in the Palladium system. If the attributes were as important as they are in modern games most Palladium characters would be utterly useless rather than just mildly incompetent. (From what I remember in the Palladium games we played the only thing that mattered were high attributes giving you bonuses to things - low attributes didn't really penalize you, which is how a game with random 3d6 down the line attribute generation can work without being horribly broken).

I also have to admit that the game that was my entry into Palladium and the game we played the most of is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This thread caused me to reopen my Palladium books again and I came to a realization - TMNT and Other Strangeness is probably the closest that Palladium ever had to having a "Basic Set" for the game - at least among the ones I own. The book is short, character creation is actually simpler than most of their games despite the BIO-E system because you don't have to wade through dozens of character classes to figure out what your options are, and the game is fairly focused on the kind of game you're going to run with the system (i.e. make up some mutant animals and have them fight some ninjas). It was probably the best intro to the system for us back in the day - if we'd tried to start with Heroes Unlimited or - Grod help us - Rifts - we probably would have bounced off of it. (As it is we kind of bounced off Rifts anyway - we played it a bit but it never really hooked us the way TMNT did).

 

[RuinousPowers]

Amber is a setting I adore, I loved the books. But the system...wow. Do you really need to trust the GM! I played for about a year with a GM who, well, let's be honest. If he didn't want you to succeed, you weren't going to, no matter what your Attributes were. A lot of times, the only time Attributes seemed to matter was in PVP, which I'm not a huge fan of.

And whatever Attribute I was best at, seemed to be trivialized more often than not. His common complaint was that I "just wanted to win" all the time. Which confused me, if I'm First Ranked in, say, Warfare, I'm an amazing warrior who can overcome anyone who decides to face me in a fair fight. A big factor in the game was trying to switch the combat from an Attribute you were bad at, to one you were good at. But every time someone came at me with a sword, this ensued:

"So what is the guy doing?" "Oh you know, feeling out your defenses, parrying, that sort of thing." "I'm better than him, right?" "Oh yeah, by a lot." "I'll slip an attack through his guard to let him realize that (hoping to get the guy to surrender)." "Ugh, this again? Why won't you realize you can't just win right away? This is going to take time!" "Ok, so I have to slowly wear down his defences?" "Yes, which makes this an Endurance test." "Wait, what? He came at me using Warfare, why is it Endurance now?" "Because you couldn't defeat his defenses right away." "So how to I change it back to Warfare?" "I don't know, tell me what you're doing." "Describes a shield bash to throw the enemy off balance." "Uh, that sounds like Strength. What's your Strength again?"

And so on. Any time I'd have an advantage and try to press it, he'd suddenly want to change the combat to something else, and then force me to figure out how to get the advantage back again. We'd spend a lot of time on this, while other characters would go "Uh, I touch the guy so I can overpower him with my Psyche." "Ok, he falls down."

I finally decided that I really needed dice in my life, so I can actually "see" how good I was, so I never touched the game again. Relating the story now though, I don't know if I can completely blame the GM or not; he often seemed annoyed that I knew more about the setting's lore than he did, having read all the books multiple times, and even owning the Illustrated Encyclopedia (when I had a hard time getting anyone else to even look at my paperback copy of Nine Princes in Amber)- maybe he felt threatened, or thought I was trying to exert undue influence over the narrative?

Either way, since the system has no real way to break up a dispute when the players are at loggerheads other than a loosely defined system of "good stuff/bad stuff" (ie, unspent points at character creation gave you a loose sort of karma), I'm left to conclude that whether or not it's a great game depends on the group.

I ran Amber for a number of years when it came out, and even as a GM I often wished for some dice. I actually created somewhat of a diceless FATE with stunts and aspects, long before i heard of FUDGE or FATE.

 

[aramis erak]

The original Recon combat rules were better, but the system was pretty simplistic. It can be a fun campaign with friends. The 1st ed expansion into the Middle East and Cold War Africa hold a lot of potential.

But original Recon is expensive to obtain, as it wasn't Palladium, wasn't popular, and was published in small run a LONG time ago.
Paladium's Revised Recon is better than standard Palladium as far as I can tell without putting in player hands...

 

[Jd Smith1]

But original Recon is expensive to obtain, as it wasn't Palladium, wasn't popular, and was published in small run a LONG time ago.
Paladium's Revised Recon is better than standard Palladium as far as I can tell without putting in player hands...

Yeah, Recon 1E is one of the few print games I kept during my recent purge of gaming materials.