How to make Rifts better?

Can Rifts be simplified so that it doesn't need 15 books to play?

A Rifts-Light, if you will.

Don't do this.

MDC should be plenty available. It's common in world & in the setting. Don't be a dick just because MDC can lead to murder hobo shenanigans.

Most enemies & even shitty mages/psychs throw MDC, if you restrict the players then they could die fast.

There are power levels though. Be well aware that anything that isn't a pure combat/mage/psych class will be useless. Any class can have good skills but not all classes can kill good & Gymnastics is a great physical skill for everybody btw

I am up for people to post homebrew rules to piss off the DMCA happy dimwit who wrote Rifts.

This system needs saving. Savage Rifts is fine but either Palladium or its fans will salvage the game and the former always sabotages its own efforts and the efforts of the latter.

Savage RIFTS it's a bit too bright & heroic than the original but much more concise & a much better rule set

I like the idealism of the Tomorrow Legion. A shimmer of light in a bleak world. My friend uses the lore from the Palladium books a lot though. We even met Cactus people.

I don't mind them doing good & such, but they go out of their way to vilify the CS who I've always seen as just a human response to being out matched & out populated on our own native earth. They pretty much say that if you aren't in the Tomorrow Legion then you are a degenerate raider, or super Nazi, or demon worshipper.

You are misunderstanding me. I'm saying treat everything as SDC outside of a few mech sized effects and weapons. Otherwise, you are going to be vaporizing half the world every time you get into a fire fight.

Play with a GM who doesn't sweat the small stuff and understands how to have the explosive and subtle character types both shine in the same session.

There are times where I think the best way to improve the Palladium rules is to go back to formula by slamming AD&D and BRP together and then trying to keep it coherent.

Oh. My apologies. This is okay a long as it's a good homebrew way with a decent DM to abdicate.

The rules are kinda completely fucked in multiple ways, but they still work in a crazy stupid way. If you want to you can still use Rifts Ultimate Edition, but I highly recommend looking Savage Rifts - All the RIFTS goodness in a significantly less broken system.

Also if you do end up going the RIFTS route, look at 's option, or else you'll have players running around literally vapourizing people by touching them (No hyperbole BTW, 1 megadamage if I remember correctly is 100 SDC, more than enough to pulverize a normal human being. Meaning you could go around poking people with a vibro-scalpel and watch them explode like pretty meat pinatas)

Is it possible to simplify Rifts - have fewer skills, fewer weapons, not so many weapons, OCCs, etc.?

Or is that no longer Rifts?

Biggest fix I remember was that someone used to have some changes to ranged and missile combat, until it got taken down.

Mainly stuff for allowing PP to apply on ranged attacks because pointing the gun where you want it sort of matters, better odds of at least taking out SOME of a missile cluster if you miss the first one, Boom Guns with an open choke to act more like shotguns, etc.

>Otherwise, you are going to be vaporizing half the world every time you get into a fire fight.
Nigga that's the point. The game straight up says that a post Rifts laser pistol has the firepower of a pre-Rifts tank. A shootout is supposed to take down buildings

While that seems cool, it is a retarded design choice.

It's a setting not a rules set

Depends on how you use the simplified game. If the play is still gonzo, it's still Rifts.

I wouldn't play it as is, but then I've been exposed to much cleaner designs.

What *would* I do?

Plan A: Play something else entirely. Can't? Okay...

Plan B: "Acquire" text-capable PDFs and strip the text out to an editor, then start a process similar to the differences between 2nd and 3rd Ed D&D: unify mechanics, consolidate skills, convert some of the differences to "feats" of a sort, and codify, using a TLAR system if nothing else, the power tiers available to players.

If I'm attempting to convert the masses, the next step is two essays: the balance essay and the combat essay. Just as KS *eventually* did, explain the lack of power balance and how to handle it, then explain the options for running fights. With ranges running from arms length to horizon or orbit, and energy delivered ranging from pinprick to Death Star, typical RPG tactical engines are essentially useless except as tools for narrative combat. Some of the advice from superhero games applies to Rifts: even out the fun and the power will take care of itself; give everyone something to do; and let *everyone* be THE expert at something.

Start by changing MD to 10 or 20 SD. That lowers the discrepancy.

Rifts always inspired silly ideas in me.

Long, long ago, when I was interested in Rifts, I had a plan to create a technomagical Detrct Evil sensor system and use high-altitude drones to construct a topographic Evil Map of the world, thereby getting a general idea of which places harbored world-ending threats. I still like this idea and would like to use it in something someday.

>The potential of the Detect Evil spell was recognized early in the history of collaboration between mages and engineers: the utility of a device which could positively identify unscrupulous people was clear. Refinement and development of the concept led to the construction of the first ethico-encephalography machine (EEG), which could provide highly accurate readings of moral impulses given a quiescent patient, a set of electrodes attached to the skull, and a six-hour scanning period. The hoped-for ethical-imaging cameras, however, proved elusive. Prototypes were difficult to calibrate, sensitive to vibration, and suffered from disappointingly low resolution. Ultimately, advances in moral optics proved insufficient to overcome these obstacles, but the underlying technology found new life in the form of moral remote sensing and ethicospatial analysis.

>While that seems cool, it is a retarded design choice.
Welcome to RIFTS™

Rifts doesn't need to be fixed. It's charm is how bad it is.

Rifts isn't even that bad. It's a standard D20 / D% game. The only real issues it has is the retarded level of powercreep and the devs fetish for random tables.
It has flaws for sure but I'd play it over a shit system like Pathfinder or Shadowrun any day.