Rifts

So apparently we have a page about the tabletop game Rifts but no forum thread on this game. I started playing in a game last semester, and so far it's been freaking awesome.

Despite the Palladium system being about as intuitive as juggling bricks with your toes, the setting has the rather distinct honor of not only making All Myths True but having just about everything from all genres of fiction ever included in some way shape or form.

D: at the Palladium system.

I only played one session with the full system, and that's more than enough for me (my brain exploded and picking up the pieces took me quite a loooong time...). The other times I played it was using a highly house-ruled version (basically because the GM got pissed at it).

It is a brilliant setting, don't get me wrong. But the system just has SO MUCH to desire.

I'm thinking about porting it to another system like the World System or even something like Dn D (which is comparatively less complicated).

Running it in Fate would rock pretty hard.

Fortunately, I'm playing with a GM who I consider top notch, and he's basically applied house rules to the worst parts of the system, which makes it much more bearable.

My favorite part about this campaign has to be what our party consists of...

First we have a cyborg bounty hunter (myself) from Texas who is basically a walking arseenal; his gear consists of, among other things, a jetpack, a grappling hook launcher in his arm, a concealed weapon in his leg, a laser sniper rifle, several assault rifles with underslung grenade launchers, a pair of plasma pistols, and a giant freaking chainsaw sword for a melee weapon. He's unprincipled in alignment, and rolled "pathological loner" for an insanity during character generation.

Then there's the only other member of the original party remaining, an Adventure Archeologist from Southern Canda. She's not especially good in combat, but the large array of skills her OCC gives her makes her both the "face" of the party and the skill monkey. Good times were had when we infiltrated the base of a Rogue Coalition batallion "New Hope" style using a Trojan Prisoner, and she bought him time to teleport out by feigning a seizure. Her alignment is neutral good.

Our third party member is a dragon hatchling who, after only a few weeks of life, has managed to amass a rather sizable horde of weapons and other loot, which he completely refuses to lend or sell except for ridiculously unfair leases to other party members. Initially, he was largely concerned with aquiring shiny objects, but since then, he's aquired a taste for weaponry. Just last week, he picked his definitive alignment. To the surprise of nobody, he's the chaotic neutral equivelant.

The fourth and fifth characters are the most recent additions to the party; a neutral evil cyborg thug/assassin who has the distinct honor of failing about 80% of his horror saves, constantly freaking out over just about everything, and a Mini-Mecha pilot whose secretly a coalition intelligence agent. The latter spent all but his first and the two most recent sessions attempting to run to Lone Star City and warn the coalition about a cult that seems intent on turning everyone into tang.

edited 18th Mar '13 10:02:44 AM by Archereon

I've played a handful of ongoing games. In the first, it was just a few sessions (it was in a seedy Gaming Store in a small town, and one player disappeared), and I was a Great Horned Dragon Hatchling named "Raegon" who thankfully rolled the highest number of MDC (it's CRAZY to me that it's 1D4x100- imagine being the poor guy who rolled a "1"!), but I found that my damage potential was remarkably low. The other party members included a Mega Juicer, a High Wizard who was also a 12-foot tall guy, and a Burster (kind of low-powered), in addition to the GM's own character from his other GM campaign, a Felinoid Blood Rider (yes, he's an anime fan)- a catgirl riding a Deinonychus, basically.

The longest-running was an e-mail campaign where I played the Splugorth Bio-Wizard Juicer/Maxi-Killer (basically using the image from the book as an exact template) who was the classic "Token Evil Teammate" who talked about how everyone else was gonna get enslaved by her masters when she finally didn't need to hang around them for survival anymore. It was a REALLY large party, but I remember very little about the game after all that.

There was another mini-campaign I ran with friends, where the three of us each played three characters. One friend & I played Juicers, while I had a Martial Artist Headhunter and a Hamster-man (acting more like Conker than anything, and this was before Conker's games ever came out), and he had some Tech-guy and a girlfriend for his character. I can't remember what the other guy played. We ran a few lame campaigns (my best story idea was "can you guys KILL MY WIFE because she spends too much of my money!") before the other two killed my characters in a huff because I wanted to wait and watch wrestling before coming over to play one day. 14 year olds SUCK.

Oddly, I think I'm worse at playing the game NOW than I was when I was a youngster. I can barely make heads or tails of a system that I thought I had a good handle on, back when it was my FIRST RPG system.

I will say this for the Palladium system: it may look like a damned retroclone, but the OCC/RCC system works better for Rifts than most universal-system conversions (GURPS, I am looking at you), simply because it throws any and all considerations of game balance up in the air and tells the GM to sort it out. And you can't really have a Rifts adventuring party without first taking game balance and executing it by firing squad; the important part of Rifts is ensuring that every party member can survive an adventure, and that every party member has a niche to excel in.

I haven't tried it under FATE, though. Any system for RIFTS does need to be able to acknowledge and survive the fact that combat power is outright exponential, and I'm not sure FATE is quite "narrative" enough for that.

I am a Perpetual Dog Boy. I've been playing one off and on for more than half my life at this point.

Though there have been other things, like the All-Glitterboy campaign and the NGR campaign, for some reason I always come back to the Psi-Hound and Marcus, CSA-16422121.

Any system that needs to be taken apart and "balanced" so that every player can have fun is not a good system.

Knowing what FATE is like I'd say that it'll rock pretty hard, so long as your GM is narrative-focused as opposed to simulationist (though why the hell would a simulationist run a narrative system like FATE?).

Man, the art in the Rifts books could be hit-or-miss, though. Wayne Breaux and his love of boxes & pylons and Kevin Siembieda both come across like first-year art students. Neither should have ever really been published in a professional work, save for Breaux's occasional Glitter Boy picture (he did get a bit better later).

Comparing the stuff in the first Rifts book to the later stuff, ESPECIALLY the guys who did the Free Quebec & Coalition War Machine updates to all the gear, is absolutely remarkable. Perez's grungy, dinged-up armour looks amazing, and the guy who did all the C.S. Armor after a point was great, too. Rifts Japan is full of great art as well.