Savage Rifts or Palladium Rifts? What's your jam?

You'd be smiling too if you had like six dicks and three blind chicks around all the time.

That's the general consensus, yeah. Aside from a few nutcases who insist on it being perfect.

Palladium by far.

The system is fine. So much of it is quick and easy percentile, except when you reach combat. Combat does take a while, but if you keep it moving and know the system well, it doesn't have to be any slower than, say, 3rd ed. For things like conditional tables (psychosis and the like), just keep a notecard and refer to the rulebook when needed. Instructions are usually very clear cut.

Rifts has a horrible reputation propagated mainly by people who I think haven't played it very much. It's fun and the long character creation process is not a flaw, it's an attraction. The fact that RIFTS has a trillion OCCs spread over tons of sourcebooks is one of the big attractions to me.

Savage Rifts misses the point for just that reason. You can't recreate Rifts without also recreating all the world books, source books, and other megaverse books. And if you were to try to do so -- i don't see the default system as being so bad that it warrants a costly complete replacement. As someone who also frequents Starfleet Battles and other crunchier games, the tables fit my style.

In short, if you support paring down rifts from 100+ books in a crunchy and highly detailed system, to 1 book in a loose narrative system, maybe rifts just isn't for you. It seems like a needless radical shift that completely changes the spirit of the original

>a few nutcases who insist on it being perfect.
They love that it is an incomprehensible anti system. It reinforces the whole RPG's-are-nonsense vibe.

My favorite character class from the main book will always be the Vagabond.

>100+ books in a crunchy and highly detailed system, to 1 book in a loose narrative system, maybe rifts just isn't for you

That's a decent point. For people who like complexity, baroque mechanics and a billion options for their characters, Savage Rifts is a poor cousin. But maybe after 20 years it too will have 100 splatbooks and world books for you to lust over.

I'm trying to run a low-power horror game set in Rifts where they level up to normal Rifts level nonsense. What system would be best?

Savage Worlds has a lot of books. I ran a game once where we had a Vampire, a Clockwork soldier with a clockwork sniper rifle, Hellboy, and a guy with twenty different laser eyes

I've played both. From a DM perspective I like savage rifts in Palladium. It was tedious to build mooks, I always ended up randomly picking an armor & weapon, & throwing in a bonus now & then. Very underwhelming. Fromy a player perspective I like both, so I guess Savage Rifts wins, even though I wish they hadn't made a faction of goody two shoes. I liked that everyone was kind of shity in Rifts one way or another. My favorite campaign was playing a CS SAMAS Pilot, warring against D-Bees. & I wish the Federation of Magic wasn't so fucked up, I used to like them too

>twenty different laser eyes
What do they all do?!?

Beyond the Supernatural.

Standard Rifts gives a pretty massive difference in power levels between "mundane" humans and anything supernatural, so it would be like a horror game already. Anyone stepping outside a city without heavy weapons is basically a helpless victim waiting to happen.

You'll probably have to houserule more importance to the "horror factor mechanics" and use them more than they normally come up. Though that would probably have to change over time as your characters power up.

So who is going to make troll accounts for the RIFTS™ Boardgame © and see if Carmen will try to an hero again?

>like the cheesecake aesthetic
>like the chrome
>hate one system and uninterested in the other

I've tried running Palladium man I just can't do it again

Palladium strikes me as a clusterfuck of complicated and horribly imbalanced rules spread out over all kinds of badly organized splatbooks with a fetish for TLA's. Like D&D 3.5, but less balanced and coherent.

Ooooh ooooh me!

Here's the thing though: Rifts isn't supposed to be mechanically balanced, and they don't even claim it is. I think Kevin even admits it in the GM's Guide. A Rogue Scholar is going to be nowhere near as capable in combat as a Glitterboy for example. But Rifts is technically an old-school RPG and combat isn't the be-all-end-all. It's the GM's job to ensure all characters get a chance to shine. The Glitterboy needs monsters to vaporize with his Boomgun, the Rogue Scholar needs ancient ruins to explore and lost artifacts to find.

I'd try savage rifts over rifts but there's no link to download and see if it's something I'd enjoy

Be ready, the kikescammer starts in two weeks. Last I heard a bunch of the Robotech Tactics guys are going to turn it into a trollercoaster.

It's not the Rifts has unbalanced OOCS & RCCS
It's that the DM is alwaystill going to struggle to challenge the party without accidentally nuking them. The way MDC vs SDC works, your character can withstand a close proximity explosion from K-Hex, no problem, then die to a dude with a holdout because your glove slipped, & he shot exposed skin. Tack on three different systems to handle stats skills & combat, half dozen ones for magic/psionics etc. It gets unwieldy. The only way for RIFTS to function without overload is to have the DM limit things which kinda sucks

Its not really a debate about whether rifts is balanced or not. Everyone already knows it isn't remotely balanced. Its that the system itself is a hash of mechanisms that barely function at all without massive houseruling and gets laid out in a completely disorganized way.

Which really is the only reason why the massive imbalances are forgivable, unlike say D&D 3.x which strongly implies that all the classes are balanced with each other.

The best bits in Rifts books are the weird tangents Kevin goes off on every now and again. Like his "No Neutrals" rant and this piece someone posted here a few Rifts threads back. If Kevin had an editor we'd never see shit like this as it would be the first thing cut for page count.

See Rifts is not designed as a 'tournament' game. Something standardized like D&D encounters would be pretty hard to do in Palladium. You can tell even from the writing in the books that the Megaverse's goal is not really to provide a complete, self-enclosed game. It's only supposed to provided the tools for you to establish your own game, with your own pick of what's available and possibly some of your own rules. This is evident in the fact that something like 30% of all the rules they offer are billed as "optional".

Therefore, since it isn't a true out-of-the-box game, it doesn't need to be "balanced". There are OCCs that could kill other OCCs a hunded times over in one shot. It's just your group's job to, when designing a campaign, adventure, or module, pick a balanced subset of those OCCs. I find this fun, some don't.

I am curious, what is the most crazy powerful OCC or RCC to play?

Dragon in human form piloting glitter boy armor.

Or demigod or godling. Or Cosmo knight. Or superhero that is literally invulnerable.

Seriously, if you want to play the "most powerful hero" game there's practically no upper limit.

The Dominator RCC from Phase World gets a base 2D4 x 1000 MDC and wields a weapon with 1D4 x 100 MD. And this is as it starts.

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