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Palladium Books and The Games They Make This opening post will never live up to the ridiculously informative opener of the last thread by Alien Rope Burn, seen here. Give it a look for a more in depth history of Palladium and the personalities that drive it. I don’t have nearly as good a grasp of Palladium’s overall history, but I have a fair amount of experience with the games. That said, I guarantee I hosed up some of the rules timeline in the following post. Palladium Books is the ongoing project of one man, Kevin Siembieda. Almost everyone else who made it have moved on or been pushed out. He founded the company based on a bunch of D&D rules changes that came out of his Defilers campaign, and the result was Palladium Fantasy. Before we get there, though, let’s look at some of the other, early stuff. Early Games  Palladium began by producing The Mechanoids Trilogy, beginning in 1981. It was a science fiction setting that involved an invasion of a human colony on a far away planet by Dalek-like robotic creatures. It represented a very early version of the metaplot concept that would take RPGs by storm in the 1990s. It seemed to have a much longer life in Siembieda’s head than with players. Palladium Books produced Valley of the Pharaohs in later 1983. It was a forgettable historical RPG that has no redeeming value other than as a curiosity. They also made a series of system neutral, but clearly designed for D&D, books about weapons and armor. Those were a real success and sold decent numbers for the time that seem positively mind boggling by today’s standards. A hundred thousand copies? Good god. Finally, once they were chugging along nicely they created the revised edition of a Vietnam War game called Recon. It’s not popular and seems like a very narrow scope for Palladium to be a good fit. Palladium Fantasy The first major release by Palladium, which came out in 1983 and was an altogether decent (for the time) rewrite of D&D that does the same kind of high fantasy. Armor class became armor rating and scaled up instead of down, hit points are the same idea but you start with more, spell casting is based on spell slots, and stats are similar but differ slightly. Like most RPGs of this era, the core stats are rolled with 3d6 but can go higher with good rolls or with the benefit of being nonhuman. Mostly it was full of elements that would become familiar to fans of fantasy heartbreakers: more of everything. More classes, more stats, more races, more spell levels, more ‘realism’ in tracking armor’s damage, etc.  Things it did well compared to D&D: it adjusted the XP system to be based on play rather than monsters and treasure, it kinda made the alignments less gamey and overlapping, it provided a combat progression for classes that made them feel slightly different in a fight, and it provided a skill system that was much more detailed than the nothing present in early D&D. Mostly it was a springboard that provided the rules backbone for all future Palladium games. In the mid-nineties it got an updated version that brought it in line with the Megaversal system as it existed in 1995, much to the detriment of the game as a whole. Heroes Unlimited  In 1984 Palladium took a crack at the fledgling superhero RPG genre. They commissioned a great cover from legendary comic book artist Jim Steranko and repurposed their Palladium Fantasy rules to fit the more cinematic themes of superheroes. Or, at least, they tried to and came up well short. Characters used classes based off their origin (alien, military experiment, Batman-esque mastery of physical combat) and their powers came from their origin. The game suggests (but does not require) random generation and characters are wildly varying in power and combat capability. Even by the standards of the time it was a thoroughly mediocre superhero game. Unfortunately, the game was preceded in the world of superhero RPGs by Champions, which was the standard to which all other superhero games were measured against until perhaps 15 to 20 years ago. It was not a flattering comparison. HU was rarely able to produce heroes similar to those in most comics and was really only comfortable with street level vigilantes or minor heroes. Spiderman would have been on the high power end of a Heroes Unlimited character. A guy with an automatic rifle was more dangerous than even dedicated damage dealing heroes. The skill system was not updated and made a hyper competent hero seemingly unable to complete any simple task. Attempts to design more four-color combat gave us several system innovations that would last throughout the years. First was SDC, or Structural Damage Capacity. Originally it was only used as hit points for inanimate objects, but now heroes could have it in addition to their hit points. SDC totals would inflate over the years and make combat a brutal grind. HU also gave us a magic point system for its magicians, as opposed to a pseudo-Vancian one, that would also become the standard for future games. Finally it game use the vaunted Physical Skills that minmaxers would be eternally grateful for. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness In 1985 Palladium produced the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness RPG. It was a fortuitous licensing opportunity since the cartoon had not yet appeared but the comic, which was only a year old, had been a massive hit. I assume Siembieda caught this one since he had a background in small press comics. He later claimed that when the cartoon came out it spelled the end of anyone buying his game since Turtles had become the domain of children. I find that hard to believe since he kept making books until 1990 when he lost the license, but who knows.  Mostly the game is a reprint of Heroes Unlimited rules but without super powers proper. Instead the characters get Bio-E points that allow them to buy powers and abilities of the animals they’re mutated from. It’s a mostly fondly remembered game for a number of reasons. For one, it featured a lot of great art from Eastman and Laird. For two, while the rules are unimaginative, the setting books were chock full of wild ideas and great art from other artists. Plus it probably tapped into a latent furry market that had not yet coalesced into the modern juggernaut it is today. After The Bomb was originally a post-apocalyptic side setting to the Turtles RPG that was later turned into a full line when it became clear that Palladium would not retain the rights to TMNT. Robotech  Following their success licensing Turtles, Harmony Gold gave Palladium the rights to produce the Robotech (and later Macross) RPG. The game continued to use the amended Heroes Unlimited version of the Palladium system but added a new element that would come to symbolize Palladium rules: MDC, or Mega Damage Capacity. The giant robots of the Robotech Universe operated on a different scale than man-to-man combat and threw around MDC damage, which counted as 100 points of SDC damage per MDC. The line was notable for coming out before much Robotech had been translated and therefore having a number of continuity errors. Other than MDC, the game introduced a new combat skill/track, this time for fighting in robots. It also added a missile chart that would see quite a bit of use in future lines. For this game, in this universe, the SDC/MDC distinction made perfect sense and helped drive home the point of giant robots to the RPG player. How MDC would later be used in Rifts is what most people remember, and not fondly. Overall the Robotech game was another copy/pasted set of rules with a lot of decent art. By around 2000 they lost the license and had to sell off everything they had, but then were granted a new license for Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles in 2008. Several more books came from that line. Beyond the Supernatural  In 1987 Palladium branched into the horror genre for the first of many times. BTS was intended to be a competitor for Call of Cthulhu and other games in the market at the time. It used the same Megaversal system as other Palladium games but dropped the power level of the character classes to make them more fragile for thematic purposes. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough and play was never as intense or deadly as CoC. There was simply too much cinematic combat DNA left in the rules. For rules innovations it put an emphasis on low level psychic powers which would expand their scope and form the backbone for psychic powers in future game lines. Ninjas and Superspies In 1988 Palladium put out a game to appeal to Eric Wujcik’s personal favorite topics: martial arts and cybernetics(?). The game was a mishmash of James Bond and Bruce Lee movies that heavily, heavily favored the latter. A large portion of the book was dedicated to various martial arts and the combat bonuses they provided. Another part was intended to represent the James Bond superspy genre, but mostly focused on high tech gadgets (good!) and minor cybernetics (weird!).  The most interesting innovation was rules for creating organizations. Whether you intended to build something the size of MI6 or as small as a neighborhood dojo, you could sort of do it. The organizations were ranked on a mix of player facing and GM facing elements, such as the ability to provide weapons and equipment or the overall reach of their worldwide influence. Points were spread about to the various categories and could increase over time. Rifts  And finally we reach the game that made Palladium a household name and, for a time, the third largest RPG company in the world. Rifts! If you don’t know, it was a post apocalyptic setting where a mass death event unleashed a break in reality that opened magical holes in the planar fabric and allowed all sorts of aliens, monsters and magic to enter the world. Society collapsed. People reacted by either going with the flow and using magic as a tool, or going reactionary and becoming anti-alien fascists. The setting is mostly known for becoming a kitchen sink that incorporated all the rules that Palladium had thus far produced. Your base characters were either SDC or MDC creatures based on...author fiat, mostly. This is where MDC began to break down as a concept. Sure, giant robots were present as well as giant robot-sized dragons, and MDC made sense for them. Unfortunately we also got foot tall fairies who could, by the rules, pulp a human being with the swing of an arm or punch a modern main battle tank to pieces in one round. MDC didn’t translate from Robotech as well as they hoped. Other rules that were either in the main Rifts book or eventually brought in from earlier game lines: cybernetics, magic, psychic powers, organization creation rules, and robot combat skills. Anything they had written was fair game, even eventually super powers and fantasy elements came into the game with the Conversion Book. Nothing Kevin or his writers had ever written went to waste. Rifts produced an endless variety of books that outlined the world. They began with North America. In an odd bit of regional preference based on Palladium being from the suburbs of Detroit, most of the early setting material centered on the states surrounding Lake Michigan. The more populous coasts were mostly ignored and only some of the east coast has been outlined, while the west coast has only seen skeletal writeups to this day.  Other parts of the world got some very dodgy, mostly one dimensional treatments. England’s book was King Arthur and druids, but also strange time traveling aliens and a lot of herbs. Africa as a continent was completed in one, relatively small book and was as racist as you might expect. Mexico was overrun by vampires. Most of Europe was lost to demons and gargoyles, except for a speciest technological society in Germany. Japan gave you the deep choices: be a regular samurai, or a cybernetic one. The books moved into other dimensions which allowed them to print pretty much anything and claim it was a Rifts book. The Wormwood dimension was basically an excuse to give Timothy Truman his own RPG. Phase World was loosely connected to Rifts but mostly acted as in-house scifi setting of a more traditional bent, although it kept magic. The strength of the Rifts setting was gonzo character ideas and great art. It remains that way to this day. Eventually Palladium decided to produce a Rifts prequel called Chaos Earth that isn’t quite its own line despite its pretensions. They also made miniatures, two series of novels and a video game for the rarely lamented N-Gage handheld system. Rifts also spawned The Rifter which was basically a magazine/mini-sourcebook for all Palladium games that came out quarterly. It only ceased production recently and was an amazing feat of publishing in this day and age. It acted as a proving ground for many of the writers and artists who came to Palladium in the last two decades. Nightbane Nightbane was originally called Nightspawn until Palladium was sued by Todd McFarlane. The game allowed you to straight up rip off Clive Barker’s Nightbreed and have weird, inhuman monsters as characters. Unlike Nightbreed, your weird, inhuman creatures were there to fight an even more dangerous evil from outside reality. Humanity, if they knew you existed, hated and feared you, but you still protected them. Basically you were horror themed superheroes. I think it was intended to be a competitor for then-dominant Vampire: The Masquerade. If so, Palladium showed a better understanding of how their audience actually played than White Wolf by just dropping the politicking and undead ennui in favor of cool powers.  What Nightbane was famous for was just how crazy character could be. It included a whole bunch of random tables (and more still in expansions) that would alter what your character could look like in their monster form. The simple end of things might be an inhumanly beautiful angelic being with butterfly wings. From there you get weirder, like a clawed, hairy ape man with dozens of eyes and mouths peppering his body. At the deep end you might end up with a half motorcycle, half lizard monstrosity. The tables made for absolutely amazing characters. The line was more or less killed when CJ Carella left the company. Systems Failure A fairly forgettable cash in on the Y2K bug panic. Literal bug monsters crash all electronics and keep popping up if you try and use them! You fight these bugs with primitive means! You come into the scene ten years after the crash and have to deal with a society that has fallen apart. It was a single book and I never saw a single person play it. Splicers  Yet another post apocalyptic game, but with a traditionally Palladium weird take on things. A nanobot plague infected basically all ferrous and non-precious metals and made them take robotic from and attack people. An artificial intelligence was behind this attack and was bent on the extermination of humanity. The only way to fight back was to use advanced biological technology lacking in metallic content. It was another take on weird superheroes versus an existential evil in a post apocalyptic scenario, only with a body horror flavor to it. That said, it was a somewhat creative take, even if the justification for biotechnology seemed more ridiculous than usual. Dead Reign Zombies were pretty damned popular in the 2000s, and in 2008 Palladium finally cashed in on the craze. I don’t know a ton about this game line due to my own boredom with zombies, but I understand it has the usual Palladium problem/opportunity of failing to stick to one theme and has brought in zombies and zombie-like monsters of all sorts. Somehow it also has seven(!) books at this point. Robotech Tactics  In 2013 Palladium decided to enter the lucrative world of Kickstarter, and more specifically the Kickstarter model of making a game with oodles of plastic miniatures and nothing much else. They teamed up with Ninja Division to make the miniatures and run the Kickstarter. It turned into a huge debacle that I only know the basic outline of. According to Siembieda, Ninja Division was licensing the Robotech setting and was supposed to do everything: create the miniatures, run the Kickstarter, and ship everything out. According to Ninja Division, that wasn’t the case. Since both companies have a miserable history with deadlines its not 100% clear who is at fault for the game coming out way late and with less stuff than was promised. That said, stories of Palladium meddling, such as wanting to change the miniature scale once Ninja Division was near production, made the rounds. Jamming ‘RPG’ into the title, making it officially Robotech RPG Tactics despite not being in any way an RPG, sounds like a stupid Palladium demand. In the end the game was a flop. The rules were bland, the miniatures were scaled a bit too small and absolutely had too many little pieces, and half of the promised content never materialized. Savage Rifts Going against decades of his own entrenched biases, in 2016 Siembieda allowed Rifts to be ported to the Savage Worlds RPG system. The setting is reversed to a slightly earlier era and a group called The Tomorrow Legion exists now. That’s not important. The reason people got on board was to finally see Rifts in a rules system that isn’t slapped together like Frankenstein from parts of a bunch of 1980s games. It was a bit of a mixed bag. Instead of the long, boring combat with a million modifiers that Rifts players were accustomed to, you had a comparatively simple rules system that had rocket tag combat. The designers did a fairly good job of simulating some of the more interesting aspects of the setting, such as Juicer burnout, and managed to keep most of the gonzo ability to make characters out of almost anything. The art is good, but feels like a step down from 1990s era Rifts.  Savage Worlds may be a monumental improvement over the creaky Megaversal system, but it’s still a 17 year old game that has its own share of design issues. As mentioned, the combat is perhaps a bit too quick and tends to break down completely at higher power levels. Out of combat gameplay is much less detailed, but that’s fitting for Rifts. Regardless, the first Kickstarter was a success and spawned a second, also successful Kickstarter for more world books. It feels like Savage Rifts is probably the future of Rifts as a whole. These days Palladium is a shell of its former glory. Siembieda has never stopped producing rules using the almost 40 year old Megaversal system. He still makes a respectable amount of content for a small RPG publisher but the days of making 10+ books a year across a half dozen game lines are long gone. Most of the names that made Palladium great have either left in a cloud of acrimony or gone on to better paying gigs. The great art that was a hallmark of earlier games has often degraded and even been replaced with Poser art. The content produced seems less creative and more like easy lists of equipment and monsters. For decades now people have been clamoring for Siembieda to let go of the reins and allow new rules to finally make Palladium games less like living fossils from a bygone era of RPG design. If the recent experiments working with other companies are any indication, this may finally, slowly, be coming to pass.
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Dec 17, 2020 16:48
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I've been playing in a RIFTS game for six months or so, and I can say that a competent GM and some VTT support it's surprisingly fun! We ended up chasing down the BBEG a dozen or so sessions before the GM planned us to fight him to have a talk, and stopping him with a barrage of ship-mounted missiles. "They hit the *rolls dice* middle vehicle, which is the one carrying the. . . *checks notes* guided missiles. Wait, I forgot to check what sort of missiles they were. He's managed to steal a bunch of *rolls dice* where the gently caress did he find 26 heavy nuclear missiles?!" Thankfully, we were outside of the vaporization zone and had enough time for us to build up several layers of ablative armor outside our tank. Unfortunately, that amount of nuclear missiles wasn't enough to kill a guy who had been augmenting himself to fight vampires. poo poo's wild. It also turns out if you're playing in a RIFTS game with common MDC weaponry, a doctor isn't very useful. Wish I'd realized that before making a doctor and getting attached to him through play!  We did try Savage Rifts a few years back and it is so much better to play. The rulebook makes sense, the rolls make sense, and everything just feels better to do, mechanically. It lost some of the gonzo power creep that we love about the game, but I suppose that's just a symptom of having something that approaches balance in the design. Seperately, years ago, I played in a Splicers game briefly where we missed the line limiting dice explosions in rolling stats. I ended up with a guy with a natural 49 PS, which it turns out is higher than any suit can support. I immediately balanced it out with a natural 3 PB. There's no point to this story, that's just the favorite stat line I've ever rolled.
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Dec 17, 2020 20:48
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bbcisdabomb posted:I've been playing in a RIFTS game for six months or so, and I can say that a competent GM and some VTT support it's surprisingly fun! We ended up chasing down the BBEG a dozen or so sessions before the GM planned us to fight him to have a talk, and stopping him with a barrage of ship-mounted missiles. "They hit the *rolls dice* middle vehicle, which is the one carrying the. . . *checks notes* guided missiles. Wait, I forgot to check what sort of missiles they were. He's managed to steal a bunch of *rolls dice* where the gently caress did he find 26 heavy nuclear missiles?!" You probably didn't need to worry too much because, strictly by the rules, a heavy nuclear missile has a blast radius of 50 feet and doesn't include any rider effects like fallout or EMP. Plus, if you're only getting blast effects and weren't directly targeted you take half damage. With a lucky roll your Glitter Boy might even survive! bbcisdabomb posted:It also turns out if you're playing in a RIFTS game with common MDC weaponry, a doctor isn't very useful. Wish I'd realized that before making a doctor and getting attached to him through play! Unfortunately it's one of those things that people learn and eventually come to terms with: if you're playing Rifts and you're playing an SDC character, you've made a mistake. bbcisdabomb posted:We did try Savage Rifts a few years back and it is so much better to play. The rulebook makes sense, the rolls make sense, and everything just feels better to do, mechanically. It lost some of the gonzo power creep that we love about the game, but I suppose that's just a symptom of having something that approaches balance in the design. I hope to get to play this game someday. I played a session of Savage Worlds a long time ago, but I don't have any real experience with the system. I remember spending a lot of one combat stuck Shaken and unable to get out of it until the fight was almost over. It soured me on the game for a lot of years. I'm pretty sure SWADE fixed the stunlock issue, though. I need someone who knows the system to walk me through the pitfalls because at this point in my life I have less patience developing system mastery for yet another game.
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Dec 17, 2020 23:05
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i'm shillin' MegaDumbCast, a podcast that i dig very much. it has gone through, page-by-page, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited and Beyond the Supernatural picking out the dumbest thing on every page. it's great stuff for a very specific kind of dweeb like me that finds insanely bad rules writing, poorly thought out fluff, or just the occasional Straight Up Bigotry Oops endlessly fascinating. currently he's doing a thing with a White Wolf game instead of palladium but that's still three books of backlog to work with.
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Dec 18, 2020 21:03
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Kobold Sex Tape posted:i'm shillin' MegaDumbCast, a podcast that i dig very much. it has gone through, page-by-page, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited and Beyond the Supernatural picking out the dumbest thing on every page. it's great stuff for a very specific kind of dweeb like me that finds insanely bad rules writing, poorly thought out fluff, or just the occasional Straight Up Bigotry Oops endlessly fascinating. currently he's doing a thing with a White Wolf game instead of palladium but that's still three books of backlog to work with. I listened to a few episodes and it's good, but man, they have an intimidating quantity of backlog. I made this thread due to some recent use of Palladium Fantasy 1e to hit an old school gaming itch that popped up among my players. One of them wanted to do an old school game and two others got on board as a break from our long running 13th Age game. I didn’t want to run another 1st level AD&D campaign and managed to convince people to go with Palladium Fantasy, albeit with changes. We’re starting at 5th level because I’ve never had a Palladium game get past that level, and we’re using the melee rule adjustments suggested here. It has been an interesting experience. The melee is much more exciting and varied compared to anything else I’ve seen outside of purpose built games such as D&D 4e. Sure, beating AD&D combat isn’t hard to achieve, but I like it. The players have quickly moved beyond normal expectations of either AD&D or even Palladium combat. More emphasis has been put on ranged combat and trying to set up ambushes. The melee classes have moved toward heavy armor and polearms to hit earlier and harder and hopefully survive retaliation. I like that this falls more or less in line with combat evolution in the late medieval/early renaissance period which seems to be the implied tech level of the game based on the weapon and armor selection. It also gives a huge advantage to large/giant races that makes them more of a threat than simply having more hit points. Wolfen are now the threat that Palladium has always pretended they are. Doing this all on Roll20 is a bit of a chore at times. The sheer number of dumb bonuses has led to me producing a slate of bonus layouts for different situations, the primary one being whether the character is mounted or not. Using those, it hasn’t been too troubling but the fact that they’re needed at all is just more evidence that this isn’t a good game. Where the game falls down hardest is in noncombat rules. The skill system has always been the weakest point of Palladium games and my patchwork fixes (just giving people a pool of percentage bonuses to distribute as they want for each level and using FFG 40k increases or decreases to percentages for task difficulty) are just enough to make it work, but not enough to make it good. I also think that the game would benefit from better exploration rules and I want to add in a simplified version of the exploring rules present in Forbidden Lands. It will take a lot of work, though. Class balance is also, still, completely absent. Fixing this problem is more work than I’m willing to take on, so I just steered everyone away from the shittier classes. We’re only like four sessions in and I’m falling into the oldest grog trap of making an ‘improved’ version of a broken game. Classic heartbreaker stuff. Embarrassing.
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Dec 26, 2020 18:14
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I love my goofy Beyond the Supernatural, Nightbane, and Splicer books. Typical Palladium representation of fun setting, horrible gameplay.
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Dec 26, 2020 22:30
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I finally got a chance to play in a single session of Savage Rifts. Here’s a review and some notes. TLDR Version Pros – Obviously having a real system is better than the Megaversal System, even if Savage Worlds doesn’t always match the source material. Characters can cover a wide range of Rifts OCCs, and they give you simple tools to make anything not yet covered. Combat is much quicker plays smooth as silk. Skills finally work like you’d expect. Rules for travel and exploration add an element that should have been present in Rifts from the start. Cons – The damage system absolutely works in a different way than Rifts has experience in the past, and it changes the entire tone of combat. Things are either surprisingly easy to destroy or all but impossible. Character balance may be a vast improvement over original Rifts, but combat effectiveness is still all over the map. Full Impressions The game I was in was medium length session and involved some introductory stuff in a ‘burb, heading out for a week’s travel into the wilderness, and combat against a Coalition patrol. The party consisted of a combat cyborg, a cyber knight, a ley line walker and a MARS mercenary. This is about as close to the archetypal Rifts experience as I could imagine. The first major change is to the effectiveness of skills. In original Rifts play, I mostly tried to actively avoid using skills due to their low percentages. As a result, investigation or social portions of the game tended to be very uninvolved with the rules. Skills in Savage Worlds are much more likely to work and involve a comparable-to-Palladium single roll, plus it comes with a built in method for assessing the level of success. I liked all this, but again, it’s almost impossible not to improve on Palladium’s skill system. Compared to other, modern RPGs it’s a decent system that does the job without too many frills. The wilderness exploration and travel rules are neat. They feel like they took a page from Year Zero Engine games, and involve scouting rolls to find the way and avoid ambush. It’s fairly simplified but it works well and adds an element of danger to the wilderness that was only present in OG Rifts if the GM remembered to include it. Straight wandering monster tables suck, but blowing a roll and getting ambushed feels a lot more fair. Combat is where things veer off in new directions that I’m still getting accustomed to. There was a short first combat against some Simvan and their mounts on the way to the site of the rescue. This first combat went as expected, and was very quick and decisive. The combat cyborg got to revel in having laser blasts bounce off of him. The cyber knight’s psi-sword turned out to be shockingly deadly. Everyone else managed to contribute appropriately with weapons and magic.  the resident jobbers for this particular game The real problem fight happened when we got to a small town that was in the process of facing down a Coalition patrol. The patrol consisted of a half dozen dead boys, a SAMAS and a UAR-1 Enforcer robot. The MARS merc used full auto to turn the battlefield into a bullet hell for the soldiers and downed them all in short order. The SAMAS didn’t last much longer to the plasma ejector. The only problem was that last one, and what a problem it was. Canonically the Enforcer is a somewhat out of date robot meant for urban assault. In original Rifts it was basically a speed bump, only a bit more deadly than a SAMAS suit and certainly less deadly than two. It’s one of the lower end robots from the standpoint of MDC and ability to put out damage. A group of four adventurers with an average number of attacks and decent weapons could down one in two to four turns without too many surprises. If they were an optimized group with a minmaxer’s eye toward weaponry, a single turn is easy to achieve.  the Godzilla to our Tokyo Defense Force Here it was an impenetrable wall of steel. It has a total armor of 46(24). Out highest damaging attacks were the cyber knight’s blade that did 3d10MD with 8 armor piercing and a plasma ejector doing 3d12+6MD, no armor piercing. Even with exploding dice, back shots, plus a raise on the attack we’re averaging around 28.64 for the sword and 38.56 for the plasma ejector. Well short of being able to score a wound, especially when the fact that robots can’t be shaken is taken into effect. We managed to keep from being totally annihilated by having the ley line walker institute a program of debuffs to the Enforcer’s ability to shoot, which actually worked quite well and made it nearly as hard for him to hit us as it was for us to hurt him. It still took a lot of bennies and soak rolls to last through the initial light missile barrage. We eventually managed to get a lucky single wound on the Enforcer which, when combined with the magic totally fritzing out the pilot, caused him to flee. It took around five rounds of solely concentrating on the Enforcer to achieve this partial victory. The mercenary, with his auto laser rifle and decent body armor, was totally useless in this fight. Not tough enough to be a distraction, totally without a prayer of causing a wound. Let me be clear: this problem was entirely caused by inexperience with the rules by both the players and GM. Robots are deadly in this game, far in excess of anything they represented in the old school Rifts. In the original game robots were, by price, total garbage compared to power armor. They cost 20x as much and offered maybe a 50% to 100% increase in combat effectiveness. In this game they actually feel like a tank, able to run roughshod over infantry with little to fear from their weapons. If someone brings a robot to a fight, you’d better have a robot yourself, or at least a Glitter Boy. We didn’t get to have a robot on robot fight, but I would imagine it would be very short. The damage from robot scale weaponry seem appropriate, and a single attack or two could easily bleed off three wounds. Again, this doesn’t seem wrong, and seems comparable to combat between modern main battle tanks where the difference between a glancing shot and being totally destroyed is a minuscule change in the direction of enemy fire. I’m still coming to terms with the changes. A robot combat pilot in old Rifts was rarely worth the effort and expense of maintaining the drat thing. Now it’s probably the strongest choice in straight combat ability for starting characters. The criticism of this game as having rocket tag combat is not unfounded. The line between being able to damage something and being able to one shot it is far too fine for a game that uses exploding damage dice. This issue is so deeply built into the system that the only fixes are the ones they included as setting rules, and they’re partial fixes at best. I will either have to learn to accept it or give up on the game entirely. I do like the magic system in this game. We were lucky that the ley line walker player didn’t try to choose direct damage type spells and stuck with buffs, debuffs and environmental effects. The magic feels flexible and leaves a lot to the imagination, which is far removed from old Rifts, where spells were two paragraphs of Siembieda prose usually followed by unimpressive effects and odd hindrances. Having to carefully cultivate a spell list to keep on par with a bog standard soldier with a gun is no longer a big issue. In the end I would say I definitely prefer this game to OG Rifts. Combat takes about a fourth the time, noncombat is more than an afterthought, and magic feels appropriately effective. I just need to rewire my brain on anti-armor tactics and I should be fine.
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Jan 22, 2021 05:31
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Ahh, Palladium. Many hours were spent frittered away with the old Robotech RPG along with all of the fan content for Macross stuff being backported into it. The flight dodge tables had multiple different kinds of dodges and thanks to a GM who really loved franchise characters and flouncing them at every turn, we had to deal with NPCs that could eat a satchel full of explosions and fall into an active volcano and return the next scene to gloat about how our plans were ineffective. I gave that GM grief on that in depth back when I was a wee lad but in hindsight I respect his dedication to having binders full of Cyclone armor and all the extra backpacks you could slap onto a Veritech or whatever and if you wanted to hijack a Battroid armor, it was impossible but hey look at this cool diagram!
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Jan 22, 2021 19:17
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EverettLO posted:
The thing that gets me about Savage Rifts is that it does the fiction as presented in Palladium's books so much better. Hell, it can actually replicate the fight in the Triax and the NGR opening comic versus the long, drawn out mash it'd be to try and run through that many MDC in Rifts (TM). I haven't gotten to play as much of it as I'd like, but other than some nostalgic heartstrings twanging over lost jank, it'd definitely be my go-to for a Rifts game in this day and age.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:57
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LeSquide posted:I haven't gotten to play as much of it as I'd like, but other than some nostalgic heartstrings twanging over lost jank, it'd definitely be my go-to for a Rifts game in this day and age. Agreed, and I should be comparing Savage Rifts to other modern RPGs, because anything is going to be an improvement on the Megaversal System. For a relatively modern system, Savage Worlds is just old enough that it hasn't filed away all of the weird rules interactions and unnecessary gun porn. I think any RPG that did, like a PbtA Rifts or something, would be missing a lot of what makes the game fun. LeSquide posted:The thing that gets me about Savage Rifts is that it does the fiction as presented in Palladium's books so much better. Hell, it can actually replicate the fight in the Triax and the NGR opening comic versus the long, drawn out mash it'd be to try and run through that many MDC in Rifts (TM). I haven't thought about that in a long time, but for people who aren't familiar, there are two comics in the old Triax and the NGR comic. The first one is about a newbie and an old hand NGR guy going out on patrol and fighting some gargoyle robots. The second comic is about an NGR assassin cyborg disguised as a gargoyle in an attempt to assassinate one of their leaders. None of it plays out the way it would using Rifts rules, and in the following I have highlighted why. Highlights from the first comic:    And the second one:   As was common in almost all RPGs based on 1970s and 1980s design, Rifts was totally unable to represent its own fiction when used as written.
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Jan 22, 2021 21:32
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Savage Rifts is so much better to play it almost isn't funny, but my group found it was too well balanced for us. A large part of my enjoyment of Rifts is how gonzo the whole thing is, like watching a mind melter literally melt someone's mind from the word go and we just couldn't make that happen in Savage. I could very well be wrong and misunderstanding Savage Rifts, of course. We eventually gave up after 4ish sessions and moved to playing Anima, because the GM is probably certifiably insane.
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Jan 22, 2021 22:46
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Honestly I've come to dislike RIFTS for being too gonzo and unfocused and much prefer more focused lines like Nightbane and or Splicers Still have a soft spot for Heroes Unlimited though as that was my first RPG book
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Jan 23, 2021 01:39
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I would love to play Nightbane, just in any other game system.EverettLO posted:If the recent experiments working with other companies are any indication, this may finally, slowly, be coming to pass.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:48
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Halloween Jack posted:I would love to play Nightbane, just in any other game system. I was more referring to their more recent Savage Rifts collaboration with Pinnacle that seems to have gone well, but sadly (or not so sadly) I think the Robotech Tactics disaster might have finally poisoned their reputation beyond repair. It was never great thanks to their love of hitting people on the internet with C&D letters and never meeting a schedule, but this one was over the top and screwed their die hard fans disproportionately. Any company who got into bed with them would have to know that the only way to work it is what Pinnacle did, which is to secure a license and totally cut Siembieda out of all other decisions. I never really played Nightbane but I do own a few of the books. It seems like the real pleasure to the game was in character creation. Combat was also a big part simply because the Megaversal system assumes combat is a huge part of the game. Palladium may have given up on the C&D poo poo in the last decade so I'd imagine it would be relatively safe to port it with twenty pages of gratuitous character creation tables to give it appropriate flavor. Cortex could probably work if you emphasized relationships more than I remember the original game doing. ' FATE might work, but seems like it might mush a lot of the flavor out of the character options and combat. OpenD6 variants would fit pretty well if you wanted something more old school from a design perspective and rules medium. A real psychopath would make my dream game based on 4e D&D or the Fragged system with each character creation option rolled contributing attacks and actions that work for grid based combat. The amount of effort required intimidates me just thinking about it. What a game it would be, though.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:11
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