I just picked this book up from a used bookstore, but I'm not sure if I'm ever going to attempt to actually play it...

Pretty much. Rifts has always been a setting with sweet lore and shit rules.

the rules for things other than combat is shit
the game is decent if you just use the rules for killing and no dice role play everything else

Even the combat rules are contradictory bullshit, though. How many attacks do you have without a hand-to-hand skill? Do the hand-to-hand attacks stack with those base attacks or replace them. The rules have said literally four different things in different books. That's just the start too.

you go with ultimate edition or game masters guide
no hand to hand gives you 1 action to use for combat in a melee round at 1st level
all the others with a skill start with 4, except assassin which gets 3, at 1st
not going to bother looking at the H2H skills from Japan/China to see if they deviate from that
you can get another attack if you take the boxing skill
many races and a few classes can give extra actions as well

So again: contradictory and complicated rules, spread over many books. Even if you go with commonly accepted interpretations of rules, you have rounds that take forever to complete, attrition-based combat where you have to be MDC or you don't matter, catalogs of guns that are 90% the same except for the handful that are ridiculously broken, and the list just goes on and on. Savage Worlds is going to be a much better option for running a game in Rifts than the Palladium system ever was.

>contradictory and complicated rules
there are just combat rules and skill rules
different hand to hand choices give you different amounts of actions
how is that any more complicated then seeing how many attacks a wizard, cleric, or fighter can make?
once you get past the number of attacks, which you are having difficulty with for some reason, the actual rules for combat have been copy+paste from the first printing
i will agree the combat can/will get bogged down when there are multiple individuals fighting
its much faster/simpler when its party vs solo
again, though, may systems have the exact same issue with combat
attrition-based combat can be mitigated with the right choice of spells
can't get around MDC really unless you have hundreds of SDC and can regenerate. so, you get this one
finally, going through all the supplements for gear and classes is appealing to Rift players
if you don't just play human, select a class from the 'core', get basic 100 MDC armor and a laser that does 6d6 mdc

Great setting, meh mechanics.

I'm currently doing a campaign in that setting. After a few weeks my DM threw out the system just swapped to d20. The setting is cool as fuck. You want to get Coalition War Campaign and or Rifts Mercenaries.

>the game is decent if you just use the rules for killing and no dice role play everything else
But combat is its biggest problem. Most classes (including many combat focused ones) feel useless in combat next to a Glitter Boy or other high tier class.

Shimbeba addressed this
a Glitter Boy is mobile artillery; treat it as such
everyone is going to target it first
it can't cope with more than 1 target at a time really
it can't deploy itself fast between firing

the gm can limit what classes and gear is accessible

The issue isn't specifically with the Glitter Boy. That's just one glaring example from the main book. The game is full of massive power disparities between classes. So much so that some players (even some playing soldier/warrior style characters) can easily end up feeling like their participation in combat doesn't really make any difference.

A Dungeons and Dragons style game. Pretty sure it was the result of a week long coke binge and several 24 anime marathons.

so, once again, no different than how a monk or fighter can feel in D&D

as said the GM needs to limit what classes/races are available and tailor the opponents that the party encounters

people aren't going to be in their giant robot 24/7 or what happens when they need to go into a structure or get to a town that doesn't allow those past the city wall
there are also anti-magic/psychic/tech classes/spells to deal with as well

brace for radical. It's not as complicated as it has a reputation for-but it is very poorly edited.

Why are you letting a walking tank be in a party with a scavenger? Just because you can, doesn't mean you should (and Kevin has a pretty long screed on this in all of his games). It's not the rules's fault if you make an incompatible party and then they don't play well together.

If you've ever played a point-buy sort of game, they have similar assumptions going in.

>Savage worlds would be better

There's too much Rifts bullshit to reasonably convert into another system

Wait for the Savage World version to come out. Kickstarter up and about.

eh, it ended like last week

Point-buy games contain guidelines for building a game at the power level you want. Rifts presents you with a long list of classes that, lacking any direction from the text, a newbie would assume are all meant to be roughly equally viable.

If you use a basic tier system to make the game work, then great for you, but Rifts-as-written has worse balance than 3e dnd.

>wait, you're telling me my Rogue Scholar isn't as good in combat as a Norse Berserker?
>sorry, i'm a newbie

you sure they're not just an idiot?

if you need a guideline just look at the experience chart to see how much xp they need to level ups

It's not supposed to be balanced! And unlike 3e DnD it tells you this, with a flagrant neon sign that lights up the night!

Rifts and Nightbane both state *very* explicitly that classes are not all equal because life isn't fair. They don't try to pretend that a Truenamer and a Wizard are on even terms. Yes the powerlevel stuff takes fine tuning to navigate, but it does on DnD as well-and unlike DnD it doesn't try to mislead you into thinking all classes are on even footing.

I don't know what version you're reading, Kevin has like two page rants on balance being a lie and not really relevant to making sure everyone has fun at the front of all his games.

The rules / formatting is shit. Chargen takes upwards of 2-3 hours if you're new to the game.

My RIFTS group has a saying for new players:
"What time is it? 4am? When are we actually playing? Never? Oh, okay."

That being said it's a very 80s cartoon / pulp scifi setting that is really over the top and doesn't take itself very seriously.

The Juicer is basically an Eversor without the constant psychosis (just short bursts).