Anyone else here ever played RIFTS? What a glorious clusterfuck of a system

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FATAL tier or not, I'll defend it because I still had fun. With FATAL, it was just bad.

Man, I miss Kevin Long's art.

Long was a hack when it came to mecha. He blatantly ripped shit from various anime. For instance the SAMAS has MADOX-01's backpack and wings.

Yeah, I know, but I still love his style, and his colour pieces were original and vastly atmospheric. They are what really gave life to Rifts.

Rifts rips off of everything, so it goes that the art rips off stuff too

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I ran it constantly in the 1990s and had every book. It’s essentially AD&D with a crappy modern ranged combat system and a D100 based skill system. We house ruled MDC to a 10 SDC to 1 MDC ratio instead of the canon 100 SDC to 1 MDC ratio. This keeps gunpowder weapons relevant.

The trick is to keep the N. American setting mostly desolate uninhabited wilderness and wasteland. There is so much fluff content to mine it is staggering. Was a very popular game with excellent abet B&W art. Sadly dated layout and rules.

As far as OCCs Try running a classic N. American campaign using only Rifts Main Book, SB 1, Rifts Conversion Book 1 and maybe Vampire Kingdoms.

>The trick is to keep the N. American setting mostly desolate uninhabited wilderness and wasteland.
Couldn't agree more with this. The original premise of Rifts is great but the power creep and mega-technology got so out of hand in later books that it became almost a parody of itself.

Instead of powerful nation-states and million-man powered armor armies, Rifts needs more isolated post-apoc wilderness and weird spooky shit, with fewer human empires.

Did you ever improve or simplify the game rules to make it easier?

Any tips for running it smoothly?

Played Rifts for my first 8 years of gaming, ran it for 2 of those. Best fucking gaming years of my life. The system mechanics might be wonky but the atmosphere of the game just really encourages either a beer and pretzels game or a roleplay/immersive storytelling experience. I LOVE Rifts. I swear, if there was a game system that embodies the rule of cool, it’s this one.

>Dare you enter my magical rift?

Get Savage Worlds RIFTS. Makes everything so much better while keeping all the fun parts of the setting.

Gonna greentext some shit that someone wrote to improve Rifts:

>Connect attributes to skills and establish some mechanic for rolling against your attribute in situations where you either have no skill or no skill applies.

>Go to fewer, more general character types, and make them more template-style, ala WEG's D6 Star Wars.

>Streamline the engine to use fewer kinds of dice. Also, orient the dice-rolling so you are always shooting for a high number or always shooting for a low number. This “roll high for combat” and “roll low for skills” thing is stupid.

>Ditch random chargen. Purchase-based systems are the way to go. If you have to, include random chargen tables in the back as an appendix.

>Ditch the color inserts in the middle; they do not add substantially to the game or its feel, and they add to the book’s cost. Use that money for additional interior art.

>For the love of God, stop pasting the books up by hand and use Quark or PageMaker or something. This will stop widows, orphans, and will make it a lot easier to make changes late in the production process.

>Come up with some kind of universal mechanic that replaces P.P.E., I.S.P. and Chi, if for no other reason that to put an end to the many enormous threads already taking up bandwidth on the topic.

>Make spell casting a single action no faster or slower than, say, firing a gun.

>Revise the infamous dodging penalties so it is no longer the case that a Mega-Juicer can't dodge a bullet any better than a 90 year old grannie in a wheelchair.

>Never, ever use more than one exclamation point. Also, stop using quotation marks to enclose text that really ought to be italicized.

>Study other games to see how they are organized. Rifts has to be organized better. There's just no two ways about it. Keep the relatively simple layout design, though. It's easy to read.

>Remove autododge and autoparry rules; they make combat take too long. Revamping combat is a huge task, this is just the first small step.

>Keep mega-damage but put it more on a Robotech level (minus capital ships), so personal weapons are largely S.D.C., vehicular and mecha weapons are largely M.D.C., and the overall numbers of M.D.C. remain a bit lower. Mega-damage can work this way. It does not work when every-freaking-body is packing M.D.C. heat and as a result, everybody in the game wears M.D.C. armor or is an M.D.C. creature just for the sake of balance.

>If you find random hit determination rules "fluky and unrealistic," as has been printed in Rifts and other Palladium games, then why bother printing the separate M.D.C. values for every component of a vehicle or suit of armor? Just go with base M.D.C. or base S.D.C. That way, tech layouts take up a lot less space on the page.

>Forget the Siege on Tolkeen ever happened. Excise it from the catalog. Officially deny its existence at conventions. Write some kind of code to systematically erase its every mention on the Internet. And if all else fails, claim it is the product of an Alternate Universe Palladium and came through to our world by accident.

>Rewrite the Coalition. While I appreciate their morally murky qualities, the fact that these guys are an open emulation of the Nazis is something I find distasteful and would prefer not to publish. Make them bad, sure, just get rid of the whole Nazi mojo. I don't care if they are fighting something worse than they are. I would not want to be part of a publishing venture that suggests that under the right circumstances, the Nazi philosophy could be a good thing. My suspension of disbelief simply does not go that far. Frankly, given Palladium's concern over some reincarnation of Pat Pulling ruining their sales, and given the average age of the Rifts fan, I'm surprised Palladium caters to a postmodern Nazi jerkoff fantasy to the extent that it does.

I TRIED playing Rifts once upon a time and that’s when I realized Palladium rules are objectively bad.

As much as I like the world of Rifts, whenever someone gets bitten by the nostalgia bug and asks me to play, it’s always thumbs down.

>Stop referring to "I" when writing the books. This makes the product look amateurish. Also, stop using the books as a platform for publishing your particular views on gaming. Let how your game runs be your statement on game mechanics, not some strident defense of some rules that got flamed on the Internet a few years ago.

>Go with basic weapons-category descriptions rather than describing every single weapon in existence. It saves space that could be better used for world development.

>Step back from the ongoing metaplots and try focusing a lot more on picking through the ruins, discovering ancient techno-artifacts, mutants (one class of people who somehow were forgotten by World Book One).

>Use Warlords of Russia as the new standard for a tech-heavy environment. God, I hate Triax. I hate everything about it.

>Hire line editors for various parts of the Rifts world so there is some consistency. Hell, hire some additional *editors*. As it is, Palladium’s production methods are so FUBARed that KS gives his first serious look at a book about a month before it is supposed to go to the printer, which is not a smart way to publish something. Consequently, when production does not go exactly as planned, as is often the case in publishing, the rest of the schedule gets goofed up.

>Stop promoting books that have not been finished. Just don’t do it. And in the meantime, grant yourself amnesty for every single book on the production queue that you know damn well will never see print.

>Stay with the softcover/stitched binding; it keeps costs down. Stick with the policy of releasing limited-edition hardcovers. That way, only the people who really want to pay extra for a hardcover will. Palladium has always been way ahead of the curve on this one.

>Adopt a strict Rifts/non-Rifts production schedule to bring the alienated fans of every other Palladium line back into the fold. Don't worry, you can still put out plenty of Rifts product that way, and no line feels quite so exposed to the feast-or-famine cycle Palladium lines are currently exposed to.

>Stop censoring your own message boards so fans truly feel they can discuss anything about the game. Endure the 3-4 months of flamewars that will follow once you go without censorship. There will be some growing pains, but it will encourage a breed of poster who does not flame and ultimately will create an environment where trolls are shown the door by the revised old guard. The online environment becomes self-regulating and can endure discussions that might cover negative attitudes about Rifts.

>Stop mucking about and make some decent merchandising deals already.

>Run an annual player’s playtest convention, either online or at a brick-and-mortar location. Compile all the various player’s rules and patches, and publish the best of them as a PDF for free online.

>Here's something radical: Don't ever put out another sourcebook again. Just print corebooks and supplement everything in small doses via the Rifter. Sure, it might not be marketable, but since I just inherited the company, I've got nothing to lose. Plus, the Rifter has pretty decent readership. Hire some proven writers for the source material and go with less fan stuff. As it is, almost anybody can get into the magazine; make it tougher to enter and the quality improves. If you can't find the submitters, write the stuff yourself. It's a small book. You can do it. Have a major spotlight section every issue on Rifts and a major spotlight on another game, and have smaller sections for every other game line. No more fan fiction; save that for the website. Have a comics section in the back, even if you can't use KoDT anymore.

I am heartened to see that there are more than...uhh, 13 of us persons interested in RIFTS here on this board.

>Rewrite the Coalition. While I appreciate their morally murky qualities, the fact that these guys are an open emulation of the Nazis is something I find distasteful and would prefer not to publish.

Seig heil you little bitch. Human supremacist for life. Die DBee scum

>good
the cheesecake
Mutants in Orbit

>bad
everything else

Savage Worlds RIFTS is out and I wasn't made aware of this???
Where the fuck have I been???

Apparently in cryogenic sleep somewhere around Betelgeuse. It's only been talked about here for 2 years now!

Rifts had some really metal monsters for its time.

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Karl Proseck Did Nothing Wrong

>Responding to written communication
>Demonstrating Literacy
Buddy, you're already an enemy of the coalition

Motherfucking magic flying sharks, bii-otches!

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It's not really Rifts if the book covers aren't beat to shit.

Cyborg Dragon, anyone?

No, but I played a full campagn of Palladfium when I was teenager and it was like a better version of D and D at the time.
Mega Damage kind of ruins the system for me but I like the wacky setting.
I also like TORG and Gamma World for the crazy settings.

Wormwood has a ton of potential. It’s a really great book set on a living planet.

I love "kitchen-sink" sci-fi settings like Rifts, where you get dragons fighting zombies fighting alien invaders from Atlantis fighting techno-fascists, but yeah, the system is just so janky, bloated, and obtuse.

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No matter how well you take care of them the clear plastic outer layer of the cover begins to delaminate.

What's wrong with the Siege of Tolkeen?

I played it briefly, Im not a big fan of savage worlds in the first place and rifts just makes it into a disaster. I think its really hard to do right and it takes an extremely balanced and well coordinated party to make it fun for everyone. The one I was part of included a dragon, glitter boy, angel jedi and a full cyborg meanwhile I was just chilling around with my cowboy from the past who had a shotgun and a pistol. Dont do that.

Most of mine are just fine. Granted, I keep them on a nice, dry shelf and rarely take them out since I don't have a regular Rifts game, but they've been in good shape for 20+ years.

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Tentacle monsters get all the hot bitches.

What is this THING supposed to be?

>it's funner to say RIFTS than Rifts. Yes, funner is not a word either.
Hold up your spork for us, faggot

It's a Splugorth Slaver, a being created by an alien tentacle race to be basically a travelling battle-wagon that rounds up slaves for their empire. The women on it are Blind Altarians, another clone slave-race that are bred as Amazon-like fighting machines.

Ah, it's a long time since I read RIFTs. Now I remember why I liked it.

RIFTS names have always been hit-or-miss for me. Either I think it sounds awesome and want to find out more about it (like Splugorth, or Xitikits), or I find it to be infuriatingly dumb (Ar'thu? Gtfo). Which is which is entirely arbitrary.

For a moment there I thougth Gtfo was an actual alien name

I think I had way more fun listening to a friend describe it then I'd have playing it. And that opinion isn't even based on the mechanics.

RIFTS is either amazingly interesting or outright terrible. Shit like Anubis being an evil god. As far as gods go he was pretty fucking chill, he just took your ass down to the underworld, ripped your heart out to be weighed against a magic feather, and then either took you to your final reward or cast your spirit out into the desert to be purified. Pretty much Lawful Neutral at worst. I only think Kevin wrote him as evil is because he has the childish notion that Death= Evil and thus everything associated with death must be evil.

user, everything about Rifts is childish and based on Kevin's favorite childhood cartoons, comics, novels and movies. Finding flaws in Rifts is like counting explosions in a Michael Bay movie. Half of original Rifts RMB was based on fucking Thundarr the Barbarian.

>favorite childhood cartoons, comics, novels and movies
>t. intelleshtual
Implying this is bad

Say what you will about Rifts it sure had some fucking amazing art and world building

Please, I never implied that. I like all that childish shit.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I had a blast with Rifts after we realized we would never run an entire game session without messing up the rules at some point. Once we let go of that, the setting and craziness carried it the rest of the way.
Good times. Terrible game system, but good times.
It'd be a blast to play in or run a Rifts game on Roll20 or something. Everyone is so much better at PnP games now!

I'd love to play a one- or two-shot on roll20!

Just hard to find the time, and making characters is still a bitch 4-hour-long exercise.

There are a couple of Rifts games on roll20 right now:

app.roll20.net/lfg/search/rifts?days=&dayhours=&frequency=&timeofday=&timeofday_seconds=&language=Any&avpref=Any&gametype=Any&newplayer=false&yesmaturecontent=true&nopaytoplay=false&playingstructured=&sortby=relevance&for_event=&roll20con=

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I've played short Rifts games using the Risus NExus conversion and they were a blast.

I've also thought about creating a rules-light system for Rifts that was based on rough categories of abilities such as:

>Fighting
>Firearms
>Magic
>Psionics
>Cyber
>Lore
>Powers

Not him, but they basically pushed forward the metaplot for North America before they even had world books to establish the pre-Siege status quo of NA.
On top of that, to try and turn it into a murky grey battle instead of Coalition being unrepentant Nazis they pulled demon worshipping out of a hat.

The flaw with Rifts Savage Worlds is that they break their own advice. They essentially dump large flat bonuses to skill and damage rolls into everything, and put huge gaps in toughness values between infantry, power armor, and robots. So most mega-damage weapons either only wound a target once every ten shots or reduce it to a thin paste.

>Anyone else here ever played RIFTS? What a glorious clusterfuck of a system

Aside from having juicer characters that could deal MDC punches one of the coolest things was selling counterfeit Mexican vampire heads to the splugorth for millions of credits and developing an ultra high-tech Army and destroying all of North America

Do you think Kev realized how gay "glitter boy" sounded at the time?

>counterfeit Mexican vampire heads
Elaborate

I think at that time it had connotations of being cool, as in Glam Rock, Gary Glitter, Burning Chrome, The Thin White Duke, etc.

Then again, military jocks give all kinds of stupid names to their rigs and equipment in private, so even Glitter Boy might be something that would unofficially stand.

Also Kevin may be a prophet since we're getting more and more gay as the years go on, and Rifts's apocalypse takes place in 2099 AD. By then we might all be either Muslim or gay.

That would be funny.

Probably not. The 80s were a wild time.

>realized how gay "glitter boy" sounded

Eventually he did, as shown by the fact that later versions of said robot armor were called the Chromium Guardsman and the Golden Eagle.

Then again, one was called the Shadow Boy.

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Anybody have the latest version of the Savage Rifts books?

I overhauled it to run in gurps.

Fun world, it’s like fallout but even more nuts.

What books do you need to have this things setting?

Can someone post those?

Rifts is fucking bananas and I love it.

I played a giant octopus with four laser pistols and a megadamage-armor sombrero. When under attack, I retracted into my hat. I was killed by giant robots. Good times.

I had a lot of fun with it back in the day.

I like it, but I feel the setting jumped the shark around worldbook 3; since that's where every worldbook outside of North America just turned into various iterations of broad cultural stereotypes (Warlords of Russia was an exception here).

The Coalition is also kind of a dumb wankpile.

Oh and Triax and the NGR. It avoided that tendency as well.

You need the Rifts Ultimate Edition. There are zillions of supplements, like 60+, but you don't need them all, just 1 for whatever part of the world you're in. If you're going to get any books, I recommend:

>RUE
>Rifts Sourcebook 1
>Atlantis
>Vampire Kingdoms

These are the core, really.

If I had a billion dollars, I would hire the New Vegas/vtmb teams and have them make me a RIFTS RPG.

Ideally I’d get the guys who did the stalker gameplay to work on it too.

Yeah. It's not glorious though. And the same applies to the setting.

You mean a video game?

Palladium tried that once, it was awful. Well, the game itself was fair, but it was on the NGage...which no-one owned.

Well yea, but without NV’s crappy engine/gunplay.

A game with the world building and atmosphere of New Vegas and the gameplay of stalker would be nuts, especially in a good engine.

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Skip the ultimate edition and get the original core book. Proceed to run the setting as though the plot had never expanded beyond that.

Uncle Kev really loved boys.

>Glitter Boy
>Dead Boy
>Dog Boy

>this explains so much

Nah, UE has better versions of most of the "normal" classes. The original had NPC tier classes everywhere. So grab the UE for the mechanics updates and use the Original for setting info.

I agree, I wouldn't get the RMB at this point.

Rules clarifications alone are reason enough for the RUE, especially in this game.

You need a monster book like Palladium Fantasy Monsters & Animals or Rifts Conversion Book 1.

DBees (humanoid Dimensional Beings) of N. America has loads for player races.

I kind of want a survival rpg like Rust or Ark without the fanbase. Have people build houses, fend off attacks from Brodkil, find Golden Age robots half-buried in the dirt and restore them.