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What is Rifts like?
- Thread starter Devall2000
- Start date
Was it the right size?
And if it was...how did you know?
The Lost Muse
First Post
How much setting info is in RIFTS Ultimate Edition? Is it enough to get you started - more importantly, is it semi-coherent without pointing you to the umpteen other books published?
zacharythefirst
First Post
This is as close as I can get to describing Rifts.
I lurves it.
The system gets flak, but we've houseruled the bits we didn't like for years. Whatever else, its easy enough to change or alter what you don't like. Even if you do hate the rules, IMO its still worth it for the setting.
I lurves it.
The system gets flak, but we've houseruled the bits we didn't like for years. Whatever else, its easy enough to change or alter what you don't like. Even if you do hate the rules, IMO its still worth it for the setting.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
Timmundo said:
Good question. The answer is "Disapppointingly little"
I have a copy of RUE in front of me right now and, as has always been the case with Rifts, the bulk of the core book is dedicated to rules, not setting detail. That said, if you have any passing familiarity with the setting, there is enough information in the core book to run a loose Coalition States campaign (i.e., the basics of life in the Coaltion States are laid out, though nothing more). For some unknown reason, they removed the random monster creation rules from the core book, which means that you must own other supplements to populate your world with menaces other than Coalition soldiers. While the random monster creation rules were by no means a masterpiece of game design, they definitely made the game more self-contained. I lament their loss in the RUE.
If you want to explore any area outside of the Coalition States, fight anything other than Coalition soldiers, or want detailed information on life inside the Coalition States well. . . other sourcebooks are definitely required. And, unfortunately, there is no kind of core campaign setting book for Rifts Earth (i.e., no equivalent of products like the various D&D setting core books that give you a good look at the whole setting under one cover).
I didn't buy any of the revised stuff once I realized they weren't correcting any eratta or cleaning up any of the wonky rules. I didn't realize they actually removed something useful from the core book.
NICE!
As for the rest of it- RIFTS information is doled out in the expansion books at such a pace as to make it almost as shameless a money grab as a CCG... unless, of course, you are particularly interested in DIY for all of the details outside of the Coalition.
NICE!
As for the rest of it- RIFTS information is doled out in the expansion books at such a pace as to make it almost as shameless a money grab as a CCG... unless, of course, you are particularly interested in DIY for all of the details outside of the Coalition.
Trickstergod
First Post
Rifts is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not like Rifts.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
Dannyalcatraz said:
Yes, as I said, it was disappointing. OTOH, I traded some unused D&D books for my copy of RUE and Conversion Book I, so it didn't seem like much of a loss (not as much as I expect it would have had I paid cash for the books, anyhow). In retrospect, I should have known that RUE was going to be disappointing when Gabriel reviewed it over at RPGnet, as he was once a huge Palladium fan (annoyingly so at times) and couldn't muster anything but the faintest of praise for the product.
To paraphrase a great alien mind:
"RIFTS is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad."
"RIFTS is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad."
Prince Atom
Explorer
I played RIFTS(C) for several sessions a few years ago. I had a Glitter Boy; my soon-to-be-girlfriend had a cyberknight; the GM's wife was playing a young elemental wizard; and among our three other friends, a techno-wizard, a were-lion, and a dragon.
The Glitter Boy's main armament is the Boom Gun. For the uninitiated, it's a hypervelocity electromagnetic gun firing a flechette round. I could fire that puppy three or four times a combat round, but I didn't use it often, despite it being one of the more powerful power armor weapons in the main book.
In one of the earliest combats that I can remember, we had ventured into the ruins of DC to raid the remains of the Smithsonian. As I recall, a leather aviator's jacket that we found on one of the dummies there eventually sold for a mountain of cash. Anyway, we got into a fight with another group, practically on the steps of the capital.
I was thinking differently, trying to think modernly, because in FRPGs I have noticed a tendency to go toe-to-toe with enemies and then not budge out of your square until you have to move to reach more enemies. So I wanted to try a more fluid sort of combat with RIFTS, and I moved my mecha over behind a ruined car, for cover, despite being only covered from the waist down, I was so tall in the Glitter Boy.
And I unshipped my Boom Gun.
So my next action came around and I took aim at one of the bad guys and pulled my trigger.
Now, the thing about the Boom Gun is that its hypervelocity round breaks the sound barrier several times over. The Glitter Boy deployed pylons and has reaction jets to counteract the force exerted. So I was stuck in the ground.
I was the only one.
The sonic boom picked up the car I was standing behind, flung it down the street, knocked all the remaining glass out of any windows along the shot, deafened all of my allies, and only did a few points of damage to the target.
So that wasn't a good match.
As several people have said so far, RIFTS needs a GM who can handle widely varying power levels. My GM responded to the whole deafening-my-party problem by allowing the technomancer to make and distribute earphones that would negate the deafness from my sonic boom, as long as the person wearing it had ISP or Internal Strength Points to spend. These headphones cost 25 ISP every time I fired that dumb gun. Everybody in RIFTS has some ISP, but very few people have a lot, so that turned my boom gun from a never-use-it to a bust-it-out-on-the-BBEG-but-not-before. So I ended up running around with a laser rifle modified so's my butterfingers mecha could use it.
Oh, and there are 9 or 10 stats which don't affect anything unless they're 16 or above, except if they're very low, when you get into penalties. But basically everything from a 6 to a 15 in any stat is exactly the same. I think there are some rules for rolling against your stat to accomplish some things, but it's unclear whether you roll on a d20 or on 3d8 since all the stats go up to 24 or more.
So it really needs someone to make judgment calls and be able to head off rules arguments. Course, it helped my group that none of us but the GM knew the rules very well.
TWK
The Glitter Boy's main armament is the Boom Gun. For the uninitiated, it's a hypervelocity electromagnetic gun firing a flechette round. I could fire that puppy three or four times a combat round, but I didn't use it often, despite it being one of the more powerful power armor weapons in the main book.
In one of the earliest combats that I can remember, we had ventured into the ruins of DC to raid the remains of the Smithsonian. As I recall, a leather aviator's jacket that we found on one of the dummies there eventually sold for a mountain of cash. Anyway, we got into a fight with another group, practically on the steps of the capital.
I was thinking differently, trying to think modernly, because in FRPGs I have noticed a tendency to go toe-to-toe with enemies and then not budge out of your square until you have to move to reach more enemies. So I wanted to try a more fluid sort of combat with RIFTS, and I moved my mecha over behind a ruined car, for cover, despite being only covered from the waist down, I was so tall in the Glitter Boy.
And I unshipped my Boom Gun.
So my next action came around and I took aim at one of the bad guys and pulled my trigger.
Now, the thing about the Boom Gun is that its hypervelocity round breaks the sound barrier several times over. The Glitter Boy deployed pylons and has reaction jets to counteract the force exerted. So I was stuck in the ground.
I was the only one.
The sonic boom picked up the car I was standing behind, flung it down the street, knocked all the remaining glass out of any windows along the shot, deafened all of my allies, and only did a few points of damage to the target.
So that wasn't a good match.
As several people have said so far, RIFTS needs a GM who can handle widely varying power levels. My GM responded to the whole deafening-my-party problem by allowing the technomancer to make and distribute earphones that would negate the deafness from my sonic boom, as long as the person wearing it had ISP or Internal Strength Points to spend. These headphones cost 25 ISP every time I fired that dumb gun. Everybody in RIFTS has some ISP, but very few people have a lot, so that turned my boom gun from a never-use-it to a bust-it-out-on-the-BBEG-but-not-before. So I ended up running around with a laser rifle modified so's my butterfingers mecha could use it.
Oh, and there are 9 or 10 stats which don't affect anything unless they're 16 or above, except if they're very low, when you get into penalties. But basically everything from a 6 to a 15 in any stat is exactly the same. I think there are some rules for rolling against your stat to accomplish some things, but it's unclear whether you roll on a d20 or on 3d8 since all the stats go up to 24 or more.
So it really needs someone to make judgment calls and be able to head off rules arguments. Course, it helped my group that none of us but the GM knew the rules very well.
TWK
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