Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 1986178" data-attributes="member: 14159">Palladium classes aren't anything approaching balanced in any sense of the word, even from a participation/niche standpoint.For an example Look at Operators.  The one time I played in a Rifts campaign, I played an Operator (think the d20 Modern Techie AdC for a d20 equivalent for those not in the know).  The GM told me not to bother with the plain old Operator class in the main book, and to look at a later suppliment which had several versions of Operator which were superior in every way (I eventually took Armorer, which was just like operator, but it got more guns and even more skills, and better odds at being psychic).  So I could be a 1st level core book Operator, or a much more powerful version of that exact same niche with no drawback.  That's not exactly balanced, it's a textbook case of bad design.  That also shows one of Rifts real problems, the game itself is an arms race on an out-of-game level.  Each new book has yet more powerful classes, races, and weapons that kick the tar out of each book that came before, and it's pretty obvious that Palladium doesn't really care one bit about the balance of their suppliments (or automatically presume that they are balanced) since they don't even bother to playtest anything (read any one of the threads from ex Palladium staffers about how they act internally).The game is also assumed to be heavily oriented towards combat anyway.  In the ads, Rifts is always promoted for it's combat aspects, so much space is given to a metaplot oriented towards big battles (like Siege on Tolkeen) and weapons and combat abilities, it's easily as directed towards combat as any edition of D&D (i.e. it can be run as a low-combat roleplaying-heavy game, but the system and all support for it don't really follow that paradigm).</blockquote>

Verification