Rifts

Any books you’d recommend looking at? I like the look of Vampire Kingdoms (the original one) and wormwood.

Splicers is technically an alternate setting, but you can play feudal Guyvers and mutants vs Skynet. Or vs other noble houses of guyvers.

Reading it is fun.

Fluff-wise? Generally just choose the areas that interest you the most I guess.
I personally like the human tech stuff the most so the German, Northern Gun, CS and Quebec books are my favorites.

Splicers looked really neat, but I haven't looked too much into it. Chucks art in the Rifters seemed way cooler than the stuff in the core book though.

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It is shit. It says something when two of their iconic mecha outright steal from other sources. The Glitterboy's Boom Gun is the FAZZ's Mega-Launcher and the SAMAS is just MADOX-01 with a skull helmet and a few spikes.

I love Rifts, but I do agree with the critiques of it's mechanics being clunky and unbalanced. Also, there was a lot about the setting I didn't get until I realized how heavily influenced it was by Hero's Unlimited, the Superhero RPG from the same company. Once you realize it's basically a dark comic book setting it gets a lot more fun. In other words it's best when played for over the top power fantasies.

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RIFTS is basically the reducto ad absurdum for why games being designed to be fun to look at at the cost of gameplay is a terrible idea.

Interesting.... so you think even with a better rule set there’s nothing to salvage?

>Probably the closest thing to running Synnibarr
What about actually running Synnibarr?

Rifts is great, just make a bunch of house rules for the combat and things run smoothly.

Rifts is what you get when high school kids that played two or three other settings get together and say "why can't we have all this stuff smashed together in one game?" like, my friends and i made 2 or 3 crappy homebrews that were basically Rifts, expect that Rifts had a real publishing company and playtesters and artists and stuff.

it's a fun setting for fucking around with your friends. it *is* possible to make a mostly balanced party if you're careful about what classes you allow to hang out with each other. and you can find rules for about 75% of the shit you want to do if you and your pals have all read the books six times and know which obscure page to find the fucking table you need on.

if you're a serious gamer with a serious party you probably want to look elsewhere. despite all the skulls and postapocalyptic grimdark, the game really only works well if you're a group of pals fucking around drinking beer and having a good time in a weird setting.

i see a lot of posts on Veeky Forums by people who not only can't enjoy a game if they aren't exactly as powerful as everyone else in their party, they can't even enjoy a game if some other guy in their party is a little less powerful and they're "dragging us down" instead of optimizing the shit out of everything. and that's fine, but if you're that kind of player, Rifts will drive you insane.

Rifts is probably the worst for power fantasy, honestly. The megadamage settings favor the defender heavily and the combat curve is fairly flat. A level 1 grunt could shoot a god in the face pretty easily.
Intend to run more campaigns with Operators, City Rats, Scholars, and Body Fixers. There'll sometimes be the token heavy as well, like a borg or dragon hatchling, to soak things in a fight.

HU is great for power games if you run mainly mega-heroes, SDC settings at much more easy to feel powerful in and the bias is more toward offense over defense.
You could run a lower power game there, but I save that action for Beyond the Supernatural.

All in all, I enjoy the system and run most of my campaigns with it, even my own settings

Agreed. The system and setting are built on much older DNA than most games around these days. Talking about a game that started as house rules for oD&D and AD&D 1st edition that beat 2nd ed to market. It is all a wonderful kludge in old school styling.

That does touch on a key part of that old school design, classes are purposefully not meant to balance against each other.
More powerful things take longer to level, but right out the gate some things are more powerful because that thing is more powerful. That is their balance, they balance agaimst how their world works and never got caught up in the PvP level scheme 3rd edition brought to the scene.

And just like classes and creatures being different from each other, different things have different rulesets.
Psionics, Magic, Ki, Chi, Individual Superpowers, Mutations, Aliens, Robots, Cyborgs, etc all have their own unique rules and funtionality.

I used Hero for the rules and let the players go nuts on building characters. Nowadays M&M wouldn't be a bad choice either. Haven't played Savage Worlds Rifts yet but I'm willing to try it at least.

That’s kind of what I was thinking on using, one of those two sets.

I like it quite a bit, but I'm also a big fan of the osr genre of games, which it feels very much like. It's clunky and an awesome setting, the clunkiness is a little charming, and easy to homebrew for whatever your group likes. It also falls into the whole "balance is strictly the GMs job, go crazy players!" that I'm a fan of even as a perma-gm. Most of their RPGs are worth looking into, though I'd probably stay away from Dead Reign, I'm running it right now for a group and the system just doesn't do too well for zombie slaying I think. But like anything they do, the setting is fully fleshed out and fucking awesome.

As much shit as we give rifts, That picture is metal as all fuck.

Rifts was, above all things, great at comic book back cover advertising.

Attached: rifts_ad_dragon (1).png (572x755, 561K)

What sort of maniac would do that?

the Russian books are a blast, especially if you like cyborgs

Check out the sourcebook for your own country, just for laughs.

What the fuck did France ever do to the people at Paladium!?

Non German Europe must of really pissed in KS's Cheerios at some point.

On a scale from jello to granola how much do you like crunch?

Like....its all Gargoyle rape land all the time.
Only Germany gets to fight back and Britain cant even do that because its fucked by faery magic back to the middle ages

Also your other options are getting given Insanity inflicting implants or be Russian.

To be fair have you seen the fucking Russian borgs? Sweet Jesus!

I love the Russian Borgs, hell even the basic Russian foot soldier borg with the hand blasters are kick ass.
The signature borgs for each of the Warlords though? Talk about overkill murder machines

I can picture that conversation. "I want to put your brain into this 12 foot tall tank with chainsaw hands"

I dont know to many people who would say no.

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Especially if the guy offering this procedure was already looming over you in said 12 foot tall tank on legs

I honestly had a good bit of fun with Palladium, but you really need to have a good GM to sift through the crap to mine the nuggets of gold. Diamond in the rough, all that good stuff. Game is horridly balanced in every way, so having someone to reign in the BS goes a long way to making it better.

I won't say it's absolutely amazing, but some of the things in it are pretty solid. Aztec vampire kingdoms are one of the most fun things.

>tfw live in Psyscape

the art really is what makes Rifts what it is.

It's worth looking at perhaps, but if you don't like Old School games you probably will see it only as a source of inspiration and nothing more.

A nice meaty sandwich... maybe a good Philly

What don't people like about KS? A friend of mine met him once at a con and they chatted for a bit about RPGs and Hyperion, the guy game him a free copy of the Rifts core rulebook.

Look up the Robotech kickscammer.

I wish there was a way to convert this fantastic setting to D20 so I don't have to deal with the shitty Savage Worlds mechanics without getting assfucked by lawyers for talking about it

So one the the biggest issues I have when running Rifts is how the damage to armor ratios seem way off, to the point of making combat dull and frustrating sometimes. When you have MD weapons that do 1-3d6 but armors with 100+ main body MDC it can take ages, let alone fighting a Robot with 600 or so.
Sniping someone in the head also seems impractical when it SHOULD be good, but even helmets can have like 70 MDC.

What ratios do you think armor should be knocked down by to make combat quicker and more lethal?

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>TFW These are the good guys of the setting (depending on point of view)

But d20 is the plane where rule lawyers hail from.

Attached: D20 Rifts.pdf (PDF, 4M)

Can Uncle Kev even afford a lawyer anymore? My guess is, he’s about to have a shitstorm come his way and doesn’t have time to check an Ethiopian water basket weaving board to see if somebody made his game better.

The core system is basically functional, not particularly good, but functional. On the note of the setting, I personally feel it jumped the shark pretty early.

If you and your friends/player are open to having to deal/home rule with the Palladium "system" then ya in for a good time. My group has used a couple source to get everything in where we want. We don't have much issues with power levels of our characters being a bit a wild between each other as that has been some of the fun of it.

Over all the system is like a old van. Ya fix it up, and replace or add new parts on it and everyone then can get in to go for a ride.

Still fuck this surfing rule being in only one book.

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>Over all the system is like a old van. Ya fix it up, and replace or add new parts on it and everyone then can get in to go for a ride.

Pretty much this, if you are willing to put some time into fixing it up then it's a blast. If you feel like a game should be functional out of the box then you will probably want to move along.

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Somewhat related note, the Robotech books are all half-off right now due to liquidation sale.

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It predicted the future.

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the new ones or the OG stuff like your pic is from?

Well I’m convinced to take a good look at it. May end up converting it, but part of me wants to try it RAW just to see the crazy. Thanks all!

Looks like all the new stuff.

This should help you with combat at least.

Attached: Combat-Compilation-Rules.pdf (PDF, 97K)