|
Slimnoid posted:In the Rifts® Ultimate® Edition®, there's an O.C.C. called the Elemental Fusionist. It's based on a class from the N-Gage game Rifts® Promise of Power™ that no one bought because no one had an N-Gage. My copy of the Rifts Ultimate Edition not only has the Elemental Fusionist OCC, but also has a full color insert ad for the N-Gage game, which was still expected to do well during the printing of the book. I've been meaning to try and emulate it, but the thing that always strikes me about the ad is that the juicer in it looks like a big douche, he's got like thick blond 80s cartoon short hair. Also when I was a wee lad we also ran the poo poo out of Palladium of any kind, and also make all kinds of houserule fixes to try to make the game functional. My biggest personal memory is that our attempt to fix the huge bonuses to hit that everyone had was just to switch from rolling D20s to D30s. Ah, youth.
|
#
¿
May 13, 2013 16:40
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 19:04 |
|
|
Did anyone else ever notice the "25 XP for completing a successful skill check" thing in the XP acquisition chart? My characters would always backflip everywhere.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2013 19:27
|
|
|
I still run Heroes Unlimited when I can get a group together. No mega-heroes, you're allowed one free reroll during random character generation (mostly it's a Get Out of Mutant Animal Free Card). That game remains a blast as long as you more or less ignore about 40% of it.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2013 16:23
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I would at least let mutant animals in Heroes Unlimited the option to use the superpowered mutant animal rules from TMNT Adventures, which give bonus BIO-E and the ability to buy certain superpowers. Heh, if someone is super desperate to use the jankity-rear end Bio-E rules I certainly won't stop them, but giving them 200 Bio-E still isn't going to make them not suck compared to everything else in the book. The rules are just too outdated. All those animal psionics are the worst. Normally the free reroll was just to let people get out of overcomplicated character builds, like if they rolled up tech experts and didn't feel like spending the next hour itemizing costs on a robot suit that would more than likely never come up. 1 major and 3 minors or 2 major, that's the way to be.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2013 18:32
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:There are a lot of lovely, lovely options in Heroes Unlimited, honestly. (Heya, Physical Training!) It's not really any much fun unless you get to roll on those crazy power charts with all the fixin's, even if you end up with Clock Manipulation + Static Electricity Manipulation. I'm sure I have the slim volume with T-Rex in it. For the life of me I can't remember which one it is, since I have like After the Bomb (slim and fat version), TMNT Road Trip, Mutants in Orbit, Mutants of the Yucatan... I was so deep in Palladium Kool-Aid in the 90s.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2013 20:00
|
|
|
clockworkjoe posted:I'd like to hear more about how the Coalition War was hosed up. I never read into it. The last book I read about the CS war was the military campaign book that stated the CS had 1 million SAMAS units in storage. One. loving. Million. SAMAS power armor units. Right? The US now (with an exponentially larger population, safer access to factories, a literate workforce, and no Xiticix attacking) has 637 operational F-18s. But no, let's say a million, of which 3% don't know anything about Anthropology and 7% have been to Rubio's on a Tuesday.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2013 21:47
|
|
|
My buddies recently ran a whole campaign set in the Coalition War, but they smarted up the Coalition a bunch (Samas were basically personal guard, the rest of the Coalition build effort went into stuff like high-altitude bombers and surface to surface missile research). It went fairly well, we basically played a team dedicated to assassinating the Prosek family with a side order of doublecrossing the "allied" Fed of Magic before they doublecrossed us. This was actually super recently, like campaign ended last month. But we long ago abandoned Palladium's wonky engine outside of occasional games of HU, and my buds spent years developing a homebrew D10 engine to run Rifts in (mostly Exalted DNA), which is actually pretty drat fun.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2013 22:06
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:There's like a quiet paranoia that runs through a lot of the writing on the Rifts books where if the PCs will be given any sizeable power or allowed to defeat any of the major villains, the setting will be wrecked, so it tries to nip that in the bud whenever possible. The general assumption is that PCs will be wandering murderhobos and the idea that characters might shape the world significantly often isn't really taken into account, despite it being a big post-apocalyptic blank slate. Well yeah, if your party actually makes anything new happen, then Simbieda has to drive over to your house, write a new foreword explaining how all the changes were his idea, and staple it into your book. He doesn't have time for that! This is exactly what I remember when I first read the Africa book. There's these four horsemen of the apocalypse, and they start in different parts of Africa and if they reach each other they become a giant death monster that will destroy the world. So you're supposed to kill them before they reach each other, and there's rules for how much less deathy the death monster is per missing horseman. But even the least horseman is like gently caress-you powerful with insane stats, tens of thousands of MDC and ridiculous regeneration rates, insane weapons that would instantly vaporize any non-Cosmoknight party you tried to put together. I remember thinking "well, thanks for putting all that in, I guess so we know that either Africa has a hard time limit or that we should just pretend you didn't write any of that?"
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2013 15:43
|
|
|
PlaneGuy posted:oooooooooooo what do lasers actually sound like? So far the real ones don't make any noise beyond their power source or any mechanical servos aiming them. They also don't generate a visible beam. Of course those are lasers used to shoot down missiles and mortar shells by tracking their trajectories and warping/ignting them while they fly, so a gun that shoots a hole in a guy with a solid read beam of light might follow different rules.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2013 20:11
|
|
|
SavageMessiah posted:Yeah and his grasp of the usefulness of military hardware is... dubious. Half the stuff that Golden Age Weaponsmiths digs up and retrofits would be museum pieces NOW, much less in 100 years. The canonical KS tank is the vietnam era M48. It comes up all over palladium stuff and I honestly think its just because he had a picture of one lying around that he could reuse. He also has rules for TK P-51s. There are currently 84 flying P-51s. Most aren't actually flying, they're just "flyable". I assume the Rifts would not be friendly to them. But sure, every TK wizard can just grab one from the store. And if we're talking museum pieces then why the hell do we need the rules for P-51s, they'd be P-51 shaped statues before the wizard started with them. Of course we're talking about the guy who fills page after page of his professional for-sale books with pictures of tubes that have handles on them and fanciful gun names.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2013 21:34
|
|
|
SquadronROE posted:Does Rifts play well with a PBEM or PBP system? I know for a fact I can't get enough people around me interested in this, but I'd still love to play around with the universe. It'd be a little trickier to play in PbP that D&D because it has actively rolled defenses and more resources to track (each player has attacks per round as a resource for example, and can expend them for certain active defenses, so that's a new track). Each round of combat would take way longer. However, I think it would work as well in PbP as it does anywhere else. Which is to say the whole game is a congealed mass of confusing bullshit and crazy-man ravings wrapped around an incredibly cool setting. It would play like annoying balls but you'd still have a blast. Or just bug me for my sweet-rear end D10 conversion. I bet it's  though, now that I think about it, even if it's a fan work.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2013 16:35
|
|
|
I doubt it is the one you are familiar with, as far as I'm aware there are six people that have read it, heh.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2013 18:51
|
|
|
My personal favorite campaign, though it was a short one, was playing Coalition soldiers lost in a magicked-up sort of dark gothic forest. Neuron Beasts and Witchlings in the shadows, attacks from raiders, terrified settlers fleeing Dybbuk packs, soldiers being picked off one by one as the beasts of the woods isolated the weak... It was awesome. I think we called it Violin Company.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2013 18:12
|
|
|
Personal favorite Heroes Unlimited game experience- I gave my friends about half an hour to construct characters using a few copies of the book, total random rolls, and my personal one free reroll rule (mostly to get out of having to play Palladium's ancient old mutant animals). The only other instruction was "patriotic American heroes" for a one-shot game. They ended up with: Religious Right - Mutant with Mega-Wings, Godlike Aura, Energy Projection: Electricity. He was a southern baptist preacher turned angelic superhero that strove to uphold the all-american ideals of the bible. Team leader. Dressed like a southern preacher with a vest and slacks, had a short conservative haircut, and always carried a bible in one hand. His electrical expulsions were bolts of lightning from his eyes. Stealth Bombshell - Magic Weapon: Sword. Her sword gave her Supersonic Flight and Bend Light. A former Air Force officer who discovered that she could magically transform any sword held by a statue of Blind Justice into a magic blade that left glowing stars and stripes in the air as it passed. Looked like if Jennifer Connelly had played The Rocketeer instead of just being rescued by him. Rolling Blackout - Experiment with Darkness Control, Extraordinary Physical Prowess, Energy Expulsion: Electrical Field. A secret experiment by California power industry officials, Rolling Blackout could cause shutdowns in power grids but had gone rogue. Hairless, with albino skin, always wore sunglasses and a giant boater hat to keep out the sun, carried a variety of ceramic weaponry because he had a mild allergy to metal touching his skin. Hawaiian Punch - Karate Master. Owner of the oldest dojo in the Hawaiian Islands, survivor of Pearl Harbor, and 96 years young. Basically the standard cackling old martial arts master in a Hawaiian shirt. Think Master Roshi and you're already there. They were all members of a secret governmental superpowered security agency, known colloquially as The Moral Minority. Led by the reanimated zombie body of General Douglas MacArthur (brought back in death by an ancient Hukbalahap ritual and an errant bolt of lightning, he has returned), they fought against the evil influence of communists, foreigners, and the excessively liberal. For the one-shot they had to defeat a secret plot by the Prime Minister of Canada (who had redubbed himself "Minister PRIME") to activate his army of superpowered sleeper agents (all Canadian celebrities) and take over the USA. So they fought Shatner with slow-motion control, Trebek with a prehensile moustache, Dion with sonic screams, etc. It was the best game ever, despite a relatively weak system. I have been meaning to run a Moral Minority game again for years and years, and will get to it soon.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2013 22:24
|
|
|
I loved how temporal wizards started at a die-roll level, like level D4+1, because of time manipulation. That was the biggest fuckoff to game balance there has ever been. It's like the Grand Canyon of fuckoffs, it's just beautiful.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 01:15
|
|
|
occamsnailfile posted:That isn't how it's written in my copy but their optional level mechanic is still super-bizarre; if they study longer they have to start at an eviler alignment and start rolling for random insanities and be either 3rd or 5th level along with more spells and bonii. If you're referring to the Raider--they're supposed to be NPCs though the text goes out of its way to be like 'well if you really want the decision is ultimately up to the GM but you shouldn't' sort of waffling. It makes me wonder what happened around an official Palladium table to get that in there. I think the higher-level wizard and warrior options were meant for speed-generating assistants to a Raider but then they don't have prebuilt Raider statblocks at higher levels, who the hell knows. Oh man is that what that was about? That's hilarious, like knowing that the Temporal Raider had between 5-30 more HP and was 24% better at Basic Math would have made for a more compelling enemy. I love Palladium so much.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 01:32
|
|
|
Simbieda wrote super villains the way kids pretend-play them. I swear I am 100% certain that he'd float an idea like the horsemen to his staff, then they'd say things like "I shoot my holy TW cannon at them" and he'd say "nuh uh, because they have a magical field of bugs that protects them from holy energy, C.J.!" and it would just go on like that til they had filled a page. Whatever his staff didn't think of counts as a weakness.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2013 21:01
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, a number of books have gone into reprint now. And my second thought on seeing that is "Oh no, don't tell me you're putting your kickstarter money into a reprint of Mystic Russia and Palladium Fantasy books?" Hoping not, but every time Palladium gets a money injection, you tend to see the reprints roll out, because Kevin's seemingly focused on always trying to keep good chunks of their 30-year game line in print. They didn't change any old stuff or take anything out. It's just added in nonsense, like every other Palladium "2nd edition" with the exception of Fantasy. If it's like the Rifts hardbound reprint you'll be losing the cover art anyway, which would be the one reason to really want the original, short of I guess a deep, guttural loathing of mega-heroes (I know I have that).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2014 23:27
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Between the Wolfen, New Kennel, and Dog Boys, Palladium loves playable canines. And Coyle, Kankoran, and several races of alien canines in the execrable Aliens Unlimited.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2014 19:43
|
|
|
I just read their quickstart pdf. It's pretty basic. They address one of the weird questions that crops up from their rules right in the FAQ in the newbie guide too, which is actually kinda cool. Basically since the game uses exploding dice and dice represent stats (like you have a D8 in strongitude or whatever), you are percentage-wise more likely to explode your dice every time your stat gets smaller. They address that. Good for them!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2015 18:31
|
|
|
I had a few people arguing on my twitter feed yesterday that the MARS classes are exceedingly powerful in Savage Rifts, apparently able to be easily turned into better combat characters than Juicers with average rolls on their Fortune & Glory and backstory tables, plus the free 20 xp. Anyone encountered that?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2017 05:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 19:04 |
|
|
Honestly I really enjoyed the read and my only concern was turning Mystics into faith healers. It's an interesting concept but it leaves me wondering if the game is balanced around having a healer, and if so, if one healer framework is enough. I guess there's doctors.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 19:31
|
|