Why so anti-Palladium

[JacktheRabbit]

Ahh the Palladium system.

I collected all of the Robotech books at the same time that a friend of mine was collecting some of the Rifts Books. I also picked up the base "DnD" clone book he put out.

Lets see what can be said for it.


1. Great ideas.

2. Horrible editting. I found blocks of 3 or 4 paragraphs that were entered double. Spelling errors were so common that you figured it was done by eight year olds.

3. No movement. None at all. How far can you move your melee guy to get in range of that ranged guy? Who knows. Guess the GM has to make it all up as he goes along and we all know how well that works between GM's and Players.

4. No balance at all. Sure some people say its not a big deal but it is. How can the GM throw foes at the party if the one player can kill dragons while the other can only kill kobolds?

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Finally, I agree totally with the person who said that there's actually a GREAT deal the gaming industry could learn from Palladium. Its the third best-selling company in the business, its doing something right.

Really? I always thought the "Big 3" were Wotc, White Wolf, and Steve Jackson Games. Is Palladium bigger than SJG or WW? Just curious.

 

[Crothian]

Really? I always thought the "Big 3" were Wotc, White Wolf, and Steve Jackson Games. Is Palladium bigger than SJG or WW? Just curious.

Palladium is usually listed as the third biggest after Wizards and White Wolf.

 

[Psion]

I am pretty sure SJG isn't in the top 5 these days. But I don't think Palladium is anymore, either.

Ah well, too lazy to google the latest available estimates.

 

[MerricB]

Really? I always thought the "Big 3" were Wotc, White Wolf, and Steve Jackson Games. Is Palladium bigger than SJG or WW? Just curious.

According to Ken Hite (see here - http://www.gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=96), the percentages for 2003 were about:

1st: Wizards - 43%
2nd: White Wolf - 19%
3rd: Palladium - 7%
4th: Mongoose - 5%
5th: AEG - 3%
6th & 7th: Fantasy Flight & Steve Jackson Games
FanPro, Hero, Kenzer & Company, and Decipher squabble over 1+% each of the market

Whether those figures are reliable is another matter entirely!

As Kenneth says: "C&GR numbers come from assembling response cards filled out by some self-selected portion of their subscriber base, which is to say from the realm of wind and ghosts. The numbers are barely data at all, and there is little or no reason to assume that they are representative even of the specialty hobby store market, much less the larger adventure game mass market in Borders, Wal-Mart, or wherever. However, until and unless Alliance Distribution decides to wake up and smell the synergy coming off their far more open corporate partner Diamond (which provides some pretty sound monthly order numbers to C&GR, meaning that the comics numbers can be checked against something), we're stuck with them. Fragmentary as they are, they're pretty much all the public data we have -- it's kind of like LARP rules. So put on your top hat, grab your teddy bear, and let's look at the record."

Cheers!

 

[LostSoul]

I had a lot of fun playing Palladium Fantasy. I enjoyed the combat rules - they made the combats very, very vivid, so much so I could see in my mind's eye each swing and parry that we were taking. I enjoyed it much more than any D&D game I've been in. (With one exception - where we changed the rules to include Parry rolls. I guess that's my preference.)

I didn't much care for the total lack of balance, but that wasn't an issue in our game.

I really liked the fact that at 1st level you weren't some dorky teenager just getting over his acne. You actually had some skill.

The world was cool, except for the fact that 25% (or something) of the people were psionic. Didn't like that.

 

[dvvega]

My first exposure to Palladium (the company) was RIFTS. The reason I was attracted to play the game was that Carella was one of the writers, as well as a friend of mine who wrote some of the sourcebooks (Rifts Australia naturally).

My impressions of the system (common amongst the posters) was that it had great ideas and concepts. The Juicer for example is a great conceptual idea which made it into a d20 3.0 experiment of a potion juicer,

However the mechanics were crazy. There was no balance between various sourcebooks. This caused problems because you could supposedly mix/match your sourcebooks but since power levels were uneven, a bit of this and a bit of that led to a lot of munchkin play.

So I like Palladium's ideas, but not their execution.

As to the comment of cheap books for the amount of material ... you cannot honestly believe that you are comparing apples to apples. Palladium printing and paper stock are sub-par compared to WOTC printing and paper stock. The artwork is also extremely varied.

Additionally, the attitude of the owner/writer towards customers who had fansites with actual information/stats, or anyone who attempted to convert Palladium material to another system, or said anything bad about Palladium is extremely whacked. And then losing Carella (I've read articles regarding Carella's leaving but I don't want to start a flaming war about that) was a blow to me since I like Carella's work (Witchcraft/Unisystem is decent).

So its not as much hate as dislike or disappointment.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmmm, examples of Sembieda's wackines...

He would write letters to White Wolf Magazine complaining that there were no articles for Palladium Games products in what was then a general gaming magazine (because no one was submitting them...)

Finally White Wolf got a submission for Rifts, huzzah! So they told Palladium that they had one to print.

Sembieda then replied that only Paladium was allowed to print Palladium game materials.

And bear in mind that the last letter complaining about the lack of Palladium support was less than three months before they told White Wolf not to print any that they might receive.

And at a convention in the way back I had the pleasure to hear, with me own shell likes, Mr. Sembieda describing the Palladium system as perfect, then refuse to talk to anybody that disagreed with him. That's right, he actually used the word 'perfect'. I never met his wife, perhaps she wasn't on hand with his meds...

And even compared to TSR Palladium is lawsuit happy, heck if I recall properly they sued WotC back when the company was still new and shiny.

My own problems with the game however are the hard core Rifts players we have in the local area - not as fanatical as the local GURPS crowd, but enough to make me swear off the game for lfe.

The Auld Grump

 

[the Jester]

Palladium: cool fluff, awful crunch.

I think everyone's gone into detail- the only thing I'd add is that seldomseen has a friend who worked on a Rifts book (don't recall which one, but his name's in the credits) who (as I understand it) has nothing good to say about working for Kevin S. and a lot of bad.

 

[Gundark]

I hate rifts.....and heros unlimited.....didn't actually play the fantasy version. What I hated was that combat took sooooo long to fight, people complain about D&D taking too long should play palladium. what the probelm was was you could parry or dodge a hit. Generaly parry/dodge bonuses were higher than strike bonuses....so you rarely hit, and even when you did a character could take soooooo much damage. The system was too power gamey. Yes I know that "you don't have to play that way" . But the game really encouraged that. I mean why be a doctor when you could play titan jucier. The splat books where about 50% guns and armour and VERY little world info. There were tons of OCCs that were just the same thing with a different name (Rifts had about) 3-4 different types of bounty hunters. That's why I'm so annoyed at the plethora of Prcs I see in d20. Punches did more damage than guns. They had this Mega damage system which worked quite well with Robotech, but they went overboard in Rifts. A character could pack a hand held weapon that could level a town. The game is 14 years old and is still in its first edition. There were tons of useless skills, so you would end up with these tons of skills that you would never use. 1st level characters could pound the crap out of 10th level characters. ........the psychology system was retarded....ie. you could turn in a homosexual from a near death experience......there is more but I won't go on.