Rifts

Anybody have the Savage Rifts PDFs available online yet?

Is SW going to be releasing world books or new setting content for Rifts, or just rules?

Other urls found in this thread:

mediafire.com/folder/226mdddz5ei89/Savage Worlds
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Players and DM's guides are both out, ask in PDF thread
As a longtime Rifts player I think it's great, looking forward to pitching it to my group, they never would have gone for the old Palladium rulesets but this is so much tidier and cleaner

Instead of making a new thread, I'll just ask this here since it's about Rifts.

I read all about how terrible the Palladium system is: how unbalanced the classes are, how terribly organized the books are, how stupid the skill system is, how attributes have little to no mechanical impact, how it's obsessed with random die rolls for everything, and probably much more that I can't think of right now. But here is my question:

Is Palladium Rifts actually playable as written?
Presuming core book only.

Yes, it's perfectly playable rules-as-written.

Also it really is unbalanced as hell. I mean Dragon Hatchling and Mecha Pilot are starting classes that are freely available, as are Wilderness Scout which is just a redneck with a bow, or Vagabond, which is a street urchin.

That said, Rifts espouses the philosophy that every character should be given something to do that makes them important. Plus, since it's an "old school" RPG combat is less of a focus, so even though the mecha pilot can make combat trivial against anything that isn't a tank or another mecha, his mecha doesn't have much use outside of combat.

Also the skill system isn't really that bad. It's not great but it's not terrible. It's just simple d% roll under. The biggest problem with it are there are shitloads of skills, and your skills improve incredibly slowly and at a fixed rate.

The part about the books being terribly organized is 100% true. So is the part about attributes having little to no mechanical impact, unless they're high enough (and since the game assumes you're going to roll 3d6 in order for chargen that's very unlikely by default).

Personally I like the system in a Forrest Gump kind of way. It's clearly flawed and retarded, but I still find it entertaining.

There are two issues with palladium rules.

The first is that the classes are horribly unbalanced and power levels have a huge disparity. Dragon hatchlings vs vagabonds, for instance.

The other thing though is that the power disparities only make so much difference. Check the rules for shooting - nobody gets too much difficulty hitting and dodging is always difficult.

Any combat scenario will depend heavily on number of combatants almost as much as the power level of the individual combatants. Nothing is really immune to being dog piled by larger numbers of opponents.

This too.

It also depends on your GM and which sourcebooks he allows.

The game I was in, we had a Wilderness Scout, a Mystic, a Gunslinger, and a Coalition Commando. So we were all just guys on foot, but our GM also showered us in anti-tank weaponry so even mecha, tanks, and the bigger supernatural baddies were well within our means of defeating.

>Personally I like the system in a Forrest Gump kind of way. It's clearly flawed and retarded, but I still find it entertaining.
That's a good way to put it. I like its quirkiness and retardation too, for some goddamn reason.

I think one reason I like it is because you almost have to homebrew it to make it functional, and for me and my group homebrewing is part of the appeal. It's a challenge.

>Is Palladium Rifts actually playable as written?
>Presuming core book only.

Yes? Kind of? I mean the core book doesn't have any monsters in it, so you have to make up your own. Except there are no monster-creation rules, so you're shit out of luck until you buy a supplement. Also no rules for drowning or freezing...until you find right one of 50 supplements.

So yes, it's playable if you can handle a shitload of homebrewing.

I think someone should write up a simpler, more coherent version of the Palladium rules, but Siembieda has a habit of suing people left right and center, so an OSR version is probably never going to happen.

>pic related
>I wonder what the Always-Offended Brigade would think of Rifts covers nowadays

>I think someone should write up a simpler, more coherent version of the Palladium rules, but Siembieda has a habit of suing people left right and center, so an OSR version is probably never going to happen.

It could happen, you'd just have to write around the copyrights. Call it like the Irridium System or something. Maybe something less obvious but drawing from the same ruleset.

It's worth noting that Palladium itself is already just a homebrew of AD&D.

Let's start:

> Attributes
Intelligence Quotient - Intelligence
Mental Endurance - Willpower
Mental Affinity - Influence
Physical Strength - Strength
Physical Prowess - Prowess
Physical Endurance - Stamina
Physical Beauty - Beauty
Speed - Speed

Hit Points - Life
Structural Damage Capacity - Toughness
Armor Rating - Armor
Potential Psychic Energy - Energy
Inner Strength Points - Folded into Energy

...

On some level you have to accept the "imbalance" as a given.

There's just no reliable way to portray a 10 foot tall war machine as the balanced equivalent to some dude who happens to be addicted to super-steroids. It would ruin a lot of the scaling in the game that, I think, makes it genuinely fun. There are clear spheres of influence and effectiveness within the game world, balance be damned, so when you encounter someone better than you it's more dramatic.

Just my two cents.

Are you re-doing the system?

Skelebots would make poor Terminators.

I agree. I'm not a fan of trying to make every person in a world balanced. Some people and things are just naturally way more powerful.

What Rifts needs is a power scale that just lets the GM and players know what is powerful and what is weak. Right now it's kind of a crapshoot until you've learned all the ins and outs of all 500 OCCs/RCCs.

Does anyone have any experience with Palladium Fantasy? I don't care about the system, I just want to know what the setting is like. How is it the same/different from other typical fantasy settings?

>That said, Rifts espouses the philosophy that every character should be given something to do that makes them important.
That sounds good in theory. The trouble is that there are plenty of cases where two different Rifts classes fill the same role except one of them is better at it than the other.

It's an early take at trying to make an all inclusive setting. There are Wolfen, trolls, changelings and some other shit as playable races.

The different types of casters are interesting, but like pretty much all Palladium shit fail to hit the mark. For example elementalists. Elementals won't attack them unless directly provoked. They see the elementalist as kin etc.

So why it's a neat flavor piece, the elementals will still happily just kill the rest of the party.

There is just really nothing that sets it apart. Wolfen are the PROUDNOBLEWARRIORS, and elves are elves and dwarves are dwarves.

Earthdawn at least went out of the way to subvert and reimagine D&D fantasy tropes, but Palladium just reeks of fantasy heartbreaker.

It IS the classic Fantasy Heartbreaker. It is what I use to explain the term to people that don't get it.

Be careful. The neo-luddites that managed to upload the Player's Guide put it on an adware/malware ridden shithole of a site instead of the fucking standard sites. When I grabbed it all three of my anti-bad shit programs lit up like the Fourth of July.

If you grabbed it, why don't you upload it to a decent site, like Mega or something?

My PC quarantined and deleted it, so no I don't have it.

Take a look at actual skulls, the nose is wrong; since it's not made up of bone it actually extends away from it, instead of your snubby upwards things
Otherwise nice pic, saved

>Yes, it's perfectly playable rules-as-written.
This is a lie.

Plato actually argued that exact point, multiple times in fact. The Platonic ideal demonstrated in the Allegory of the Cave and in his dialogues with Gorgias and Phaedrus both identify truth as an abstract form, separate from thought and reality.

Understand that Plato defined ideas as real and prescribed them physical qualities due to their ability to spur others to action. Because ideas can cause physical change they are, as far as Plato was concerned, as real as any person. So when you consider these things you begin to understand why Plato was such a stickler for logic, reason, and why he founded some of the basics for ethics.

Truth IS abstract. Truth can form from an untruth - he says as much when he lays into Gorgias for arguing about the true nature of rhetoric, and again in the Republic when he stressed the importance of a moral education.

tl;dr
People should read stuff before they draw political cartoons about the stuff they haven't read.

Well said, but to be fair it's unlikely the cartoonist would have drawn a cartoon about Plato if he hadn't understood that point and made the connection.

ps: what an oddly intellectual turn this thread has taken. A Rifts thread, of all places.

GM'd a Palladium RIFTS campaign for over 4 years. Ran a TMNT & Other Strangeness campaign for over 2 years. Palladium is perfectly playable.

Palladium's system isn't so much "shit" as it is involved. The mechanics are actually super simple - d20 rolls for attacks/defending and percentile for skills. It's just there's a lot more looking-in-the-book than most modern neckbeards (aka Dungeon Worlds and FATE players) care for: MUH STORY. MUH CHARACTER CONCEPT. MUH FEELS.

My groups has really been enjoying the Savage World's conversion, even though we've only played two games so far. It does play a lot smoother than Palladium's version, but compared to other SW settings, it has a lot more crunch and variables. Way more calculating and modifiers to consider. A lot of high-level powers that we keep forgetting are activated, need to be activated, have since stopped being active, etc. A LOT more damage flying around (for a SW setting). Characters with modifiers that make the SW target number of 4 a joke.

It's been really fun though. It's the only game I run at the moment. It's the new shiny toy.

I keep seeing people say RIFTS is for munchkins and powergamers. Is that true? I've never played it.

How does Rifts stack up against Torg? The two were basically direct competitors, weren't they?

It's got 8 billion classes and races and things, and Kevin doesn't believe in making all of them balanced. In principle this isn't too bad of a thing, but it does mean that the GM has to keep saying 'no' to all the things that the munchkins have dug up out of World Book 97426 Revised

>Palladium is perfectly playable.
Just not "as written". A lot of GM interpretation of incomplete rules is required. A gift for narrative combat is required (because the game only pretends to have a tactical combat system), and you'll get no help balancing scenarios or PC face time from the books, because they assume that you already have the GM Mojo.

The game comes from an era when "balanced scenarios" weren't a concern. You didn't have to hold your players hands. They didn't expect to be able to defeat anything put in front of them because of challenge levels or some shit.

The whining about class balance is ridiculous too. Even Savage Worlds couldn't do it. A dragon is a dragon. A rogue scholar is a rogue scholar. If a GM doesn't want a Kaiju in the same party as a tribal spearman, don't allow it. Hell, I even started my SW Rifts game as a MARS game to slow ease in the the overpowered "iconic frameworks". Basically that's the equivalent of running a Palladium Rifts Merc game.

I played in a few games of TORG last year with a FLGS group. I'm not super familiar with the setting, but the way the group played it made it have a more pulpy feel. It had the mixed genres going on, but it felt more like Indiana Jones gallantly robbing a relic from a mummy than giant mechs nuking demons.

It also had a lot of mechanics that felt like precursors to Savage Worlds -- I'm pretty sure I read that the guy that wrote SW worked on TORG as well.

>Indiana Jones gallantly robbing a relic from a mummy
The Egypt/mummies sourcebook was actually the pulp-world sourcebook as well, so that might have helped. Other bits of the setting include Fantasy England and the Cyberpapacy (France).

Torg is, I'm pretty sure, based on the same system as Star Wars D6.

Naw, it uses a d20 and has some kinda chart you compare your roll to on the bottom of your character sheet. At least that's how the version I was playing worked.

>TORG

Sluggy Freelance joke goes here.

More seriously, was "TORG" an acronym? Did West End Games ever decide what it stood for, if anything?

Also,

>dat cover art tho

That Other Roleplaying Game.

Yeah, it was a joke name.

That wouldn't surprise me.

From what I see in the Wikipedia article, the game suffered from its own success--published material was poorly edited and declined in quality badly, and some of the official published material was basically self-parody that mocked the game setting. The writers were basically phoning it in, and it showed, and rapidly reached a point, when West End Games was in financial trouble and about to go under, where no one cared any more.

It seems like an amusing game system, if a bit more muh magical realm than most (seriously, look at that cover art). It's a shame about the writing.

>Is Palladium Rifts actually playable as written?
Yes, it is playable. I played it for years. I wouldn't recommend it though. The problem isn't that the rules are too complicated or don't work. They're just really inelegant. Like you have 8 attributes, but most of them have no real mechanical effect unless they're exceptionally high.

It doesn't have to be, but it easily lends itself to powergaming. One of the optional playable races is literally demigod.

Lovin' bumpin' Rifts

So why have attributes at all if they do nothing mechanically except in the rare case you roll high enough?

Aside from fluff of course, though even that explanation can be done away with because you can just fluff up the things those atributes would effect. I all seems rather pointless and almost a bad parody of DnD stats

>So why have attributes at all if they do nothing mechanically except in the rare case you roll high enough?
Because Kevin Siembieda couldn't design his way out of a wet paper bag. Seriously, the Palladium house system is a horrifically overwrought redo of D&D, with a ton of "common sense house rules" thrown in and then badly explained (or not explained at all in some cases).

Rifts is a bad system wielded to awesome as fuck setting material that just brims with enthusiasm. Savage Worlds is a much better fit for the game overall.

>Gm hates Pathfinder
>Goes on about how well made Palladium and Rifts is
>We begin to play and realize the thing about the attributes and not long after, how strange skills and combat works
>Refuses to hear anything bad about Rifts, all the while calling Piazo hacks and thieves
I wonder why I ever got into this hobby

Ok, Ive had a little time to look over the Players guide and the DM book now.

I am actually excited to play this. Im DLing a huge Rifts torrent now for fluff material, and Im looking into buying physical copies of the Savage Rifts book.

I think they really nailed this and hit a great sweet spot.

Holy shit I am actually excited to play/run a game again. Hot diggity damn!

What makes the game fresh and exciting? As someone who really likes the Rifts setting but doesn't care about any system at all, is it worth changing to?

Character creation is now a breeze, while still maintaining the uniqueness of each character even if you have two Combat Cyborgs or Cyber Knights etc.

It feels so far (just from reading at least) that they really knew the rifts source material and did a good job of capturing the parts that made it interesting an iconic, while at the same time, expanding on, with Savage Worlds mechanics.

Speaking of Savage Worlds mechanics, I think that the addition of these rifts rules really polishes off the Savage Worlds rules, making them more complete.

Without playing it yet, I would rate it at about 7-8/10

Im really impressed with the quality of the writing and rules.

Im really looking forward to the fluff world setting books. Like, A lot now.

So what? As long as the GM is running the game this way, it doesn't matter if another class can do it better.
>That said, Rifts espouses the philosophy that every character should be given something to do that makes them important.

Rifts can never die.

It basically did.

Savage Worlds is bringing a dead broken system back to life.

Be Thankful.

Anyone got a link to SW Rifts books?

Palladium might, unless ole Kevvy is getting an assload for the SW adaptation. They spent all their Robotech Kickstarter jewgolds and the backers are ramping up to start a class action lawlsuit.

That's the only reason in my head Kevvy finally let another system adopt RIFTS. Other companies have been trying for ages. I saw an interview where he said he just casually gave in because it sounded like a really good idea. AKA "Fuck I need money to pay back these Kickstarter people. I thought they were like all the other Palladium neckbeards and would just let me have their money and give them some sub-par product a few years late!"

>Anyone got a link to SW Rifts books?

Look in here:

mediafire.com/folder/226mdddz5ei89/Savage Worlds

Need that Savage Foes though!

Torg was never any where near as popular as Rifts in the 1990s.

Torg had much more civilization then Rifts. Rifts is more post apocalyptic.

The files have been updated today, as well.

>The files have been updated today, as well.

Um, which files? To where?

The pdfs available from the PegInc website.

zOMG the headers in the Savage Rifts GM Handbook are all the titles of 80s songs...!

Here's the thing. Paizo was using tools that were placed in the open to be used, but WotC built 3.0 on the R&D of late TSR, who were cheerfully "borrowing" from better companies the whole time.

TSR stole it, WotC laundered it, and Paizo took out the largest loan...

That's *heroes". Heroes Never Die.
-Mercy

Character creation is a lot more flexible. You could easily play a Rogue Scholar who dabbles in magic for instance. There's even an option that's basically make your own class.

Thanks, user!

>TSR stole it, WotC laundered it, and Paizo took out the largest loan...
Holy crap, you are completely delusional.

Yeah I love that.

Also anyone got a link to the Foes of North America yet?

You going to hook it up, user? Or are you just being a naughty tease?

Thank you based user!

>SW outer space
>SW Jame Bond 007
>SW Magic
>SW Pulp

Holy bonkers, do you need ALL these supplementary books to play Savage Rifts properly? Or just the GM book?

You really only need the three main books: GM's Guide, Player's Guide, and Savage Foes of North America. That folder is just a collection of Savage Worlds settings - Rifts included.

So 3 books instead of the traditional 1 book from Palladium? Oh well. Hopefully they're all these little $12 comic book sizes.

Does that mediafire link have Savage Foes or is that not out yet?

What's the street date for these books to hit FLGS shelves?

>There's just no reliable way to portray a 10 foot tall war machine as the balanced equivalent to some dude who happens to be addicted to super-steroids.

Marvel Heroic does this superbly imo. The "stats" in it are "solo", "buddy" and "team", and literally mean whether your character focuses on solo stuff (Superman) with a sidekick (Batman) or as part of a team (the X-Men).

Rifts player don't want to be sidekicks.

That's what NPCs are for, silly.

That doesn't address PC balance at all.

PC class balance is for retail WOW kids and feminists.

>
>PC class balance is for retail WOW kids and feminists.
Oh you manly atheist rebel, you!

But what about OEM WOW kids?

Yeah, it's one the only Savage Worlds setting that I've ever seen that broke the books up like that. I guess they're going the nickel-and-dime route now.

Savage Foes is out, it's just no one has put it up yet. There was a recent update to all three of the "core" PDFs. Those in that Mediafire link are the old versions.

I think the physical books come out around the end of this year or beginning of 2017.

Backerkit gets locked down next Wednesday, shipping after that. They're also doing Gencon pickups.

Right. I was thinking Mutant Crawl Classics.

So retail shipping when?

I don't see any pteorders on Amazon.

You can preorder shit through the Backerkit, I think.

>The "stats" in it are "solo", "buddy" and "team"...
Plus Distinctions and Power Traits and Specialties, but it still ties everything together well because of how you're limited to only call on so many different things unless you want to also burn resources.
Plus the Total + Effect mechanic means a clever nonpowered hero can shine just as much, if not more than, a powerhouse like Iron Man or Wolverine so long as they know how to leverage what they *can* do.

As long as you have a way to get a d10 in your pool semi-reliably you can swing with the big leagues well enough.

Bumping for Savage Foes.

I'd bump her...savage...no, no, I'm sorry, the analogy totally falls apart.

You tried and that's what really matters.

Probably.

Veeky Forums I need you to deliver the foes!

Hellfrost was split into 3 core books, though it's a licensed setting and not an official Pinnacle one. Though like Hellfrost, there's just a ton of extra mechanics Rifts adds to the Savage Worlds system; I don't mind it for the depth we get. Just a little bit more crunchy while still being FFF.

I wanna kick people in the dicks when they mention "Fast, Furious, Fun". I basically wanna kick anyone in the dick when the recite a brand's motto.

>So 3 books instead of the traditional 1 book from Palladium?
Those three books are pulling in a lot of content that isn't in the Rifts core book. Like the D-Bee races in the player's guide, and most of the stuff in the Foes of North America book.

Also, the three of them together are about as big as the regular Rifts core. They do, however, require SavWorlds Core.

>What Rifts needs is a power scale that just lets the GM and players know what is powerful and what is weak.
This so much
Once you get past the hassle of digging through the book to find all the rules the biggest problem you face is character creation
Which isn't to say it is difficult to create a character just that your players need to be on the same page it's kind of hard to run a game where you have two characters that are essentially a street punk and a doctor while the others are a DRAGON and a walking ROBOT DEATH MACHINE

This is probably what interests me the most about this whole thing
RIFTS is a great setting even if people hate the rules they never knock the setting
But it's a kitchen sink setting tied to a rigid class based system no multi-classing no nothing
In a world where material from literally every Palladium game is applicable and has a justifiable in setting reason for being there the fact that you're locked in to one class and one set of abilities is ridiculous
I've always wanted to be able to play a Crazy Power Armor pilot or a Magic using Merc or any of the hundreds of possible combinations without having to comb through sourcebooks to find something that might resemble what I want

I'm really diggin how Cyber Knight armor works in Savage Rifts
Like a summonable techno-organic shell type thing

Best use of "Nanomachines, son" in the whole game.

lol yeah... "Cyber Knights" that don't have cybernetics. Most appropriate name ever.

I'd argue that maybe Kevin doesn't understand what the word means, but Cyber-Ninja seems to imply that he does.
Maybe he didn't and somebody told him?
Maybe that's why Rifts Japan was delayed?

Do we know if there are any further books for SW:Rifts coming? Like, are they gonna do Old West? I loved that book in Rifts proper.
Psi-Slingers, 4-Armed Quickdraw Cyborg Gunslingers, Area-51 selling SAMUS knock-offs which are actually the original design. Cactus People immigrants and cyborg horses...

I swear I would not be suprised to find that the video for MUSE's Knights of Cydonia was entirely based on guys campaign in that setting.

Probably he just thinks the title is cool.
And it really does suit the potluck of ideas that makes the setting so fun.

I still wanna play that old-west Crazy Gunslinger out to get revenge on the Brodkil crazy for killing his [INSERT FAMILY MEMBERS HERE]

You could still do this with the custom MARS iconic framework. It's basically the catch-all until they come out with more splat books.

The 3 books that are out now refer to future books - not by name, but they do mention that there will be supplements.