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Rifts - I think I've just finished my last game of it.
Kevin R Brown
__BANNED USERS regular
__BANNED USERS regular
Disclaimer: This is just a rant.
I've been trying with every string of my heart to love - or at least warm up to - this game for close to ten years now. I think I'm calling it quits after tonight.
I was introduced to Rifts and it's assortment of Compendia and World Books by a friend of mine when I was still in junior high. It looked promising (Hell, every time I crack it open and get some people together to give it just one more go, it still looks promising); dragons, Jedi knight analogues, cyborgs, horrors from beyond time and space, giant bugs, robot vehicles... how could you go wrong?
But, somehow, Siembieda just found a way to make everything that should have been fun as frustrating as possible. I mean, almost nothing should be more cheesy fun than stomping your Glitter Boy into the heat of battle against hordes of Brodkill while your Cyber-Knight allies speed around to flank them on their Hovercycles and Cyber Steeds, right?
Everyone roll for Initiative.
Everyone roll for Horror Factor.
First player roll to hit.
Target roll to parry or dodge.
Target roll to roll with the impact.
Target roll to resist vs whatever.
Player roll for damage.
Do some reasonably complicated math to figure out what the damage actually did to the target.
Target rolls for bio-regeneration.
It takes longer to take one frakkin' swing at a gargoyle in Rifts, sometimes, than it does to resolve a whole round of combat in D&D 3.5 or 4th Edition.
I only ran two encounters for the night, and it was visually conspicuous at the outset of the second one that nobody looked forward to doing it.
I learned after I first started playing that creating pre-generated characters was pretty much a must unless you wanted to burn 2 hours or so with everyone filling out the most banal attribute and skill system ever devised, which is tolerable but can be a bit of a drag for some players; the SDC vs MDC damage system is neat sounding at first glance, but in practice is less than worthless; the weapon and special ability choices are neat, but utterly pointless - there's no reason not to simply use your best attack every single round; the random result tables are scattered throughout myriad books and need to be either written down or dog-eared (or both); many O.C.C.s are completely worthless; etc.
Dammit, I wish I could like this game. A lot of the character concepts are fun sounding, a lot of the art is evocative and the setting is the good kind of cheesy.
Somebody needs to make a 2nd edition or a homage title of some kind. Hell, maybe I will.
I've been trying with every string of my heart to love - or at least warm up to - this game for close to ten years now. I think I'm calling it quits after tonight.
I was introduced to Rifts and it's assortment of Compendia and World Books by a friend of mine when I was still in junior high. It looked promising (Hell, every time I crack it open and get some people together to give it just one more go, it still looks promising); dragons, Jedi knight analogues, cyborgs, horrors from beyond time and space, giant bugs, robot vehicles... how could you go wrong?
But, somehow, Siembieda just found a way to make everything that should have been fun as frustrating as possible. I mean, almost nothing should be more cheesy fun than stomping your Glitter Boy into the heat of battle against hordes of Brodkill while your Cyber-Knight allies speed around to flank them on their Hovercycles and Cyber Steeds, right?
Everyone roll for Initiative.
Everyone roll for Horror Factor.
First player roll to hit.
Target roll to parry or dodge.
Target roll to roll with the impact.
Target roll to resist vs whatever.
Player roll for damage.
Do some reasonably complicated math to figure out what the damage actually did to the target.
Target rolls for bio-regeneration.
It takes longer to take one frakkin' swing at a gargoyle in Rifts, sometimes, than it does to resolve a whole round of combat in D&D 3.5 or 4th Edition.
I only ran two encounters for the night, and it was visually conspicuous at the outset of the second one that nobody looked forward to doing it.
I learned after I first started playing that creating pre-generated characters was pretty much a must unless you wanted to burn 2 hours or so with everyone filling out the most banal attribute and skill system ever devised, which is tolerable but can be a bit of a drag for some players; the SDC vs MDC damage system is neat sounding at first glance, but in practice is less than worthless; the weapon and special ability choices are neat, but utterly pointless - there's no reason not to simply use your best attack every single round; the random result tables are scattered throughout myriad books and need to be either written down or dog-eared (or both); many O.C.C.s are completely worthless; etc.
Dammit, I wish I could like this game. A lot of the character concepts are fun sounding, a lot of the art is evocative and the setting is the good kind of cheesy.
Somebody needs to make a 2nd edition or a homage title of some kind. Hell, maybe I will.
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
Kevin R Brown on
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My forum namesake here is actually that of my first Rifts character, who ended his career as a level 10 NGR Power Armour Pilot.
But yeah, creating characters in Rifts takes an eternity, the words "Weapon of choice" are terrifying (or at least an annoying conversation in the making; no, you may not start with paired runeswords just because you start with two "weapons of choice"), casters suffer from older generations of D&D syndrome; not all that scary at early levels, able to alter the very fabric of existance at higher levels. Which some might call balanced, but others see as the same failings that D&D just recently corrected; at level 1 my pilot fires his big ass rifle, and at level 10 he... fires his big ass rifle.
SDC's equivelent for comparison's sake is interesting enough, but in practice it's rarely an issue. So few characters can withstand even the slightest bleedthrough in damage that they have two states; alive and fighting, or dead, likely atomized by the blast/attack that punched through their last shreds of armour. Eventually I started using optional/created rules for bleedthrough damage on my characters, just for an enhanced sense of immersion wherein if my character survived combat but it was a rough one, he'd actually have taken some damage himself.
We had fun, and I still treasure the memories of gaming well into the night or even the weekend with those friends, but I'm glad we moved onto D&D 3.0, despite the shift from "anything you want" to "hooray, who wants some more fantasy?", the vastly better attempt to balance the classes (which say what you will about 3.0, it's orders of magnitude more balanced than Rifts), and have moved onto 4.0 this year, which while going slowly due to scheduling conflicts, appears to take that balance and goes the distance with it.
It wasn't easy to give up on a setting and characters that we'd spent literally years developing, but I agree that eventually it just becomes a massive hassle in many regards. Rules spread out everywhere, issues balancing encounters for the PCs based on wildly differing inclinations, PCCs, RCCs, OCCs and other things with CC in them, books written by C.J. Carella... *shudder* (setting: good. MASSIVE power creep in his stuff? Not so good)
Edit; that said, I'm not sure 4d6 or 2d4x10 or whatever really counts as "reasonably complicated math", and we even allowed for some burst rules that involved differing multipliers based on how long the burst was. And unless I'm misremembering, I can't recall any creatures that regenerate each time they're attacked, I'm pretty sure that was usually just on their turn.
Such a deep, great world and concept completely ruined by one of the most obtuse rulesets ever to exist.
I still hope someone buys the IP and makes a kickass MMO out of it though
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
There'd be a lot of challenges to overcome, but at the very least a combat rule overhaul and some character building/progression tweaks would be nice.
If nothing else, I'd be curious to see how armour/power armour/etc would apply as anything but an AC adjustment and/or a nigh-permanent "temp hp" like shield. Perhaps that with a damage reduction modifier based on the quality/type of the armour?
Eh, it'd probably be a mess without a LOT of work, but the option to convert an old character into something playable would just be too awesome. Fixing it while retaining the flavour wouldn't be easy though.
It would be better off in the white wolf system (whatever they call it), which can handle stuff like locational and catastrophic damage a lot more realistically. You can't really deal with weapons of the power they're talking about using the hit points abstraction without it getting ridiculous.
Even with that though, the pure diversity of all the stuff they created is forever bound to create balance issues. The game as it exists is really best played using 2-3 sourcebooks as a contained universe and incorporating the other stuff only in tangential ways.
ed: and I don't think saving the flavor would be all that difficult. If the flavor comes through in the face of their completely retarded ruleset, it won't become less vibrant if you put it in a ruleset that made sense
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
If you like the setting, and the Rifts setting is pretty fracking amazing, and just have a hard time with the combat mechanics, you could always consider working it into a Savage Setting with the Savage Worlds system. It would take some creative thinking with MDC and what not, but the whole idea of Savage Worlds is that it gives a simplified system you can port your setting into. That way you don't have to give up the joy of playing a Juicer on last call.
They just ported the Call of Cthulhu game over and my game group is looking forward to playing it this week actually.