Why so anti-Palladium

[Crothian]

TB, Crothy, Saev and Tree:

So by all your accounts they are just really lousy people who don't really care about their customer base?

A.

No, but they don't seem to care about people that might be interested in playing but not like their current gaming base.

Also, I don't know it for a fact but I have heard from more then one source that Palladium really treats its freelancers badly. They are very controling, too much so in my opinion. For me it was not just one thing that made me turn away from them, but a long list of factors that just steadily got worse and they seemed unwilling to either see the problems or do anything about them. One could say I didn't leave Palladium, they left me.

 

[BSF]

Well, people might not be eager to provide examples of bad behavior unless they are already published. It is generally considered to be rude to do so. Somebody might pipe up though.

From my seat, Palladium always had cool ideas, but the mechanics side of things could use work. I'm not anti-palladium. I'm anti-bad-material. My wife was a dear and bought Fast Forward Entertainment's Treasure Quests several years back. It was a little old school in feel and I kind of enjoyed my overview of it. Then I started looking at details. You know, stat blocks, treasure, etc. 3rd level clerics with a will save of -1? Barbarians that get an AC bonus because of Uncanny Dodge? I'm sure if I looked hard enough I could find stat blocks that were correct, but why bother? Some of Palladium's stuff strikes the same chord with me. Perhaps not as blatantly wrong, but if I have to put a lot of work into making a book usable for my games, maybe I should buy another book entirely.

 

[Ottergame]

A few persons have made vague statements about how the Kevin S. is a raving egomaniac. Can you provide some examples, links to examples, or some other kind of support for this assertion? I'm not suggesting anyone is lying; I'd just like to see the evidence and decide for myself.

I don't know of anything really documented. I've never really cared to much to go to google and type his name in and see what comes up. I can only relay my personally experiences, and those of a couple of friends who mine who knew them quite well from what I understand.

Like I said before, his wife never seemed to be bad, she just wasn't much of a people person to me. Kevin, though, tries to keep his hands on everything that goes on there. That wouldn't be a bad thing is Palladium was still a small company, but when they got big, it led to ever increasing book delays as he would go through everything and make sure it met his standards. While not a bad idea, when you have so much stuff going on as they did, it let to a huge clogging of books, to the point RIFTS was the only thing getting on time support.

I can't speak for freelancers, as I never was one or knew any on more then a "Hey, you're that guy who got his name in 8 point font on the inside cover, below Kevin's 80 point!" basis. But I've -heard- about them not paying freelancers at all/less then promised for both writting and art submissions. Also from what I've seen, Kevin took more then his fair share of credit for stuff, to the point he would put his name on the front cover of a book he had almost 0% input on.

I just don't understand the company, how that if half the bad stuff is going on that I've heard really happens, how come they aren't long gone. They are abusive to their players and to their talent, yet people still play.

 

[Caspian]

Hmm, well there's a bunch of things that could be said. These things generally de-evolve into a flame war. Safe to say, there aren't too many long time fans for some reason, many of the people I knew when I was a fan aren't big in the Palladium communities anymore.



Jonathan

 

[sirkillian]

Yes, I am refering to the Palladium Fantasy RPG, which happens to be the name of the company as well. But RIFTS and the fanatasy RPG are definitely not the same monster.

If I found people who like and wanted to play the Palladium Fantasy RPG I would do so in a heart beat, irregardless of its flaws it is still a very cool world and a fun time to be had by all.

Yes, Kevin has his people relations problems, I had a series of personal e-mails with his wife abot 5 years ago and all I can say from those is that she seemed to be a very nice person. Definitely seemed like a night and day couple to me. He is the darkness and she is the light that kept/keeps him sane. Or sane enough, or whatever the case actually is.

I will agree that their attitude, at least Kevin's, sure doesn't convey the idea that a customer is important. Plus I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't run into nearly as many Palladium OR RIFTS fans like I used to. Especially since the year 2000. Coincidence? I think not.

But I still love the world of Palladium, but not RIFTS.

Why I like Palladium Fantasy. Palladium Fantasy was the first role-playing game to focus on role-playing instead of killing the next monster and collecting the treasure. You got expereince for role-playing, it was such a cool thing to do. The combat was simple. I roll a d20, over 5 hits the armor, you roll above the AC and you hit the monster. A magic user never forgot his spells. I stopped playing AD&D to play Palladium and becuase of the thier fanatsy setting, never picked up 2nd Edition.

Now I sit here working on my first D&D games as a DM in 18 years and I cant decide if I schould contiune or scrape it and run Palladium instead.

 

[Nisarg]

I was a huge Palladium.

You were??

Wow, that must have been awful... how huge? As huge as the London Palladium? Did people try to perform rock concerts inside you, or just plays?

Hehe seriously folks.. I agree with both sides here. Palladium does have issues; some of these issues vastly more important than others. Not releasing books on time is one of them, being belligerent toward their own fans is another. Then again, the first is something many otherwise good companies do, and the latter is also exaggerated from time to time, as in "he didn't listen to my TOTALLY UNREASONABLE DEMANDS therefore he hates his entire fanbase".
And yes, the system is out of date. Its not the only out of date system out there.

The fanboys of palladium are another problem, not the fans as a whole, but the "fanboys": the absolute nutcases for Palladium, which are pretty extreme people, and there seems to be a lot of them. On the other hand, there are tons of Palladium fans that are perfectly fine.

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.
Principly among this is that its making GAMES (not "works of art", not pseudo-intellectual angst-filled garbage), that are playable on various levels, but with the main emphasis being on lite diversion. Not every RPG needs to be mentally "Lite", but the industry would do well to realize (and WoTC has, to some extent) that the majority of gamers (not us, the minority of fans for whom RPGs are a lifestyle) are actually just looking for something "lite" and a good way to kill an evening. They aren't looking for meaning and purpose within an RPG. Just killing things, and taking their stuff, and in a way Palladium takes that concept to its logical conclusions.

Secondly, something Palladium is doing that no one else is right now, NOT EVEN Wizards, is directing their games to a teenage audience. That's why, despite the "critics" having constantly panned and hated Palladium for the last 15 years, its stood the test of time. Because it gets gamers young, and keeps many of them. While other companies have strategized to make increasingly sleek products that are increasingly more expensive, aimed at a 25-35 year old budget, palladium has made games with a lot of concepts and artwork that the average 14 year old would find "cool", and kept the production (and yes, quality) relatively low to keep the price point affordable for the teenage budget, as well as interesting to the teenage mind.
This is what Wizards and the rest of the big gaming companies have to start doing if they don't want to see their market grow increasingly old and start waning and dying off into nothing. Its not too late now, but at some point it will be, and Palladium has got the right idea about how to get the next generation interested.

Nisarg

 

[Saeviomagy]

TB, Crothy, Saev and Tree:

So by all your accounts they are just really lousy people who don't really care about their customer base?

A.

Weeeellll... That's not quite what I said. They do threaten litigation against fans (wizards of the coast's bulletin boards have a "no conversions of palladium's games" rule for instance). I seriously doubt that having conversions out there would hurt their bottom line - you'd still need to buy their books for the good bits (ie - the setting). It seems like a silly and petty thing to do.

The system has never been updated or fixed, just stuffed into different setting books. My view is that if the system isn't perfect (and no system is - double for palladium's) then no effort improving it shows a distinct lack of care for the fans of that game. CoC falls into the same niche.

As for what sort of people they are? Who knows. Never met em. However the company is a big fat jerk.

 

[scourger]

I had Heroes Unlimited (HU) first. I found it a pretty neat game that I ran a couple of times and shelved.

Then, a couple years later, I played in a Rifts game for a couple of years. I was surprised to see so much HU content in Rifts, including cybernetic sections that looked to be just cut & pasted from HU to Rifts. It was fun to play, though. The charcters were pretty munchkin.

A couple of years ago, I tried to run Rifts. That is how I came to understand why the other Rifts GM used the Conversion Guide to import creatures from the Palladium Fnatasy RPG into Rifts--it was virtually the only way to get a statted foe without a custom build. I found that Rifts has too little support for the GM. I tired to convert it to a couple of different d20 rules sets, but it eventually died after about 6 sessions (total).

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I hated being unable to choose your own stats. Even in 2e, with it's unbalanced stat system, at least you could arranged your rolled stats to taste. Sure you had exceptional Strength, but at least it had a ceiling on that. Palladium takes even that away! You had to take your stats in order. So of course my GMs wouldn't bend that rule. In what seemed like a desire to sabotage players who wanted to arrange stats to taste, for some races you had to roll 3 dice for some stats and 2 or 4 for others, or maybe 3d6 +4 ... yuck, never mind. If you rolled really high (I think you needed to roll a base 18, but maybe you just needed to roll 1 or more 6s) you had to roll extra dice for that stat.

Now I may be bitter about this, but I tried on multiple occasions to have a character with high Physical Prowess and Speed but not such a high Strenth. It never worked. The dice seemed to think I had to be a muscle bound warrior, even when I ended up with a character like an elf being stronger than a troll. Literally. Without cheating. I wanted to roll low Strength. I also only took two of those physical skills (boxing and running) which boost your stats, for a grand total of +1 Strength.

I didn't like the psionics system. You had to roll to be psychic. If you rolled "right" you had to be psychic. Finally I rolled a psionic character. My stats kind of sucked, but whatever... I was still flat-out the strongest character in the party, even stronger than the munchkin dwarf longbowman (don't ask) with the backgammon damage dice (don't ask) and the multiple bane blades (don't ask, please!) with many levels over the rest of the party (please don't ask!). It was like playing a 2e psychic all over again.

I found out it didn't have a metacap. This was after playing 3e psionics. As a result, I was unstoppable. My GM had to give all important NPCs psionic abilities so I couldn't simply "mind-hack" them, including his horribly munchkin angel who was solely designed to kill that munchkin dwarf. He asked me not to use evil eye on bosses.

The GM tried to tell me that psionics in Palladium was balanced because you had to roll on a table to get it. So, if I hadn't rolled that way, I would have chosen another class based on my stats (and not the other way around *rolleyes*)

Nonetheless, it's not like he thought there weren't problems with the system. He banned Hand to Hand: Assassin since everyone wanted it. TWF in Palladium was very broken.

PS I only had an ME of 14 but had a huge number of ISP. I mean, ridiculous enough that I could kill a bear with one mind thrust-replica in one round. Oh wait, I did do that. It actually took me an extra round since I didn't want to risk my enemy making his save, but since non-psychics are basically totally screwed against mind-bending, it didn't make a difference.

Anyone remember every low-level wizard taking Armor of Ithan? Now, compare them to the "slower" spellcasters... I especially like how the rulebook insulted the intelligence of those who couldn't play these slower spellcasters all that well.

The races were horribly balanced. Making matters worse, sometimes the weak races ended up overpowered! Things are strange when you end up playing a muscle-bound troglodyte when you didn't want to. (That DM made me roll extra dice for Strength since I rolled an 18. I rolled an 18 for Physical Prowess but he wouldn't let me.) Bad GMs have not improved my outlook on the game rules.

About the only good thing about the mechanics I could see was the ability to dodge and parry (they were actually different, though doding was very inferior) without covering yourself in magic items.

 

[arwink]

My problems with palladium started with the amount of time and effort I had to spend putting together a stat block.

They got worse right around the time I realised my two-foot tall elephant mutant was driving a truck on his own in teenage mutant ninja turtles.

Then they released rifts, and I happily drifted away.