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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 1977283" data-attributes="member: 14159">Palladium was one of the first games I ever played.  After being introduced to RPG's via the d6 Star Wars RPG, and finding an AD&D 2e group in college, I met a big RIFTS fan who got together a large game.  Now, over the years he was always a big Palladium fan, who always took every opportunity in conversation or message board to plug Palladium and was quite proud that he had every book (except one or two he just couldn't find) ever published.   Now, he hasn't bought a new book in 5 years (the power creep and recycled materials got too much for even him) and is a firm hater of the the company (although he still runs RIFTS, using his own home-brew d20 conversion).  Why does he hate the company?  Well, after being a loyal fan, writing letters to them, generally being a first-rate fanboy for almost a decade, when d20 came out he recognized it as a superior system.  He joined a mailing list discussing ways to make a d20 RIFTS conversion.  Yeah, you see where this is going.  They were only at the point of deciding the basic ideas of how to convert it when they all got nice, elaborate threats from some Palladium lawyers about copyright and trademark infringement.  Their outright hostility towards fans who want to continue to buy their products but play them in another system is one thing that I know has made some of their own fans hate them.In each of their books they inherently presume you have every book ever published.  Every book is full of references to everything that came before, and it seems very designed to cater only to the dedicated "fanboy", and to get up to speed costs very big money.  They have endless, infamous power creep in their games (I was in one game where every PC was made with the core book except for one, playing some odd Juicer variant, and he singlehandedly kicked the tails of everyone in the party with raw firepower when he decided to betray us).  Nothing seems playtested at all, and the purely random character creation (if you roll lucky, you get incredibly powerful psionics that can overshadow your actual class abilities) or random ability scores so you have to hope you can roll the stats for what you want, but probably won't be able to.  Then add to it really lousy production values, with cheaply printed books with horrible art and abyssmal editing editing and much of the book seems recycled from other books or just cobbled together at the last minute.In short, they have all the bad design and legal ideas that plagued TSR in the "bad old days" of AD&D 2e and made people leave it in droves only to come back to d20/3e.I think it's very telling that the 3 RIFTS games I've seen played by people I know (in 3 different social circles) over the last 5 years, every one was done with a different home-brewed d20 conversion (2 using d20 Modern/Future and apparently being quite succesful with it).  Every group of players who play RIFTS and d20 that I know of ditched the horrible, train-wreck of the Palladium system for d20 the moment it hit.  In fact, I don't know anyone who has bought a RIFTS book in 5 years (other than anecdotal evidence at my FLGS of a few hardcore players who keep up with anything they make).As to the "Palladium markets to teens" bit.  When I was in Junior High and getting interested in RPG's in the early 90's, everybody knew about D&D, so people naturally gravitated towards it on name recognition alone (and being all over the place didn't hurt), but being a big Star Wars fan and seeing the references to things from their RPG in other Expanded Universe books (like Thrawn novels being written to intentionally coordinate with the RPG) meant I checked out the SW RPG.  It's also a lot easier to get ahold of RPG's now than then, because when I was growing up, if you wanted to buy RPG's, there was no big superbookstore in the neighborhood with the biggest games in the industry, there was just this one little bookstore that had a small shelf of D&D books.  I know I never heard of Palladium until I was firmly a gamer.I seriously doubt they are currently the #3 company.  If I go to a Mass Market bookstore, I will see books by WotC, White Wolf (and it's SSS label), and occasionally a few books from AEG and Mongoose.  Mongoose has probably supplanted Palladium in the #3 spot a while back (those industry stats are even admittedly suspect, and they are over a year old).  If they do have a lot of sales, it is apparently to a small, dedicated cadre of fans who don't interact much with other gamers.</blockquote>

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