I hope it isn't--this is one of my favorite threads on here, presently. If I get the time any... time... soon, I'll go ahead and throw together something about one of the dimension books. Maybe Phaseworld?
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
FATAL had one or two good ideas, specifically that of using standard deviations in stat generation. Beyond that, though, I agree: total train-wreck.
Although if Rifts added the "optional" FATAL character stats, I'm sure there would be an O.C.C. which would grant bonus attacks for having a giant penis (which would then grant bonus attacks in your penis-shaped power armor-- WHEEEEE!).
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EVE: Online - the most fun you will ever have not playing a game.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Those sound absolutely terrible in every way. The worst thing I remember attempting to play was Cosmic Enforcers:
It's semi-compatible with Rifts, requiring only minor tweakage to get working 'right'. But it's ten times as broken. Balance is a dirty word when it comes to comparing the character classes or combat in general. In a sense, it's like taking Phase World, Rifts, and Heroes Unlimited and throwing them into a stew--with Cosmic Enforcers being the resulting dregs.
You've got space opera, aliens of the good and bad variety, super heroes and villains (there's a list of important figures at the end of the book), cyborgs who are more akin to mad scientists experimenting on themselves, three (just three) poorly drawn/conceptualized space ships available, and very little in terms of exposition to set the scene. There's a Jesus figure who heads the aforementioned Cosmic Enforcers (the equivalent of the Green Lantern Corps, I guess) but he's so powerful as to be bored and not all that reliable. His best bud, some black Superman wannabe, is taking up the reins, but is in over his head. There's some kind of alien, bug-like invading force (if memory serves) as a generalized villain--you get the picture.
It's a mess, but we managed to glean some amount of fun from the husk of this thing... amazingly. Granted, it's no Synnibar (which, the more I read that word, the more I desire a cinnamon bun), but I suspect that few RPG's could stack up to that in terms of sheer pants-on-head crazy antics.
I played exactly one session of Rifts. My friends played: a Crazy, a Temporal Warrior (or knight? something to do with time from the England book), and a vampire.
I was a headhunter. I had a laser rifle.
Granted, it was a completely sick laser rifle; I believe it was a smacked-up version of the Juicer rifle from the first book.
Then our GM moved away, and the rest of the group wanted me to take over running the game, but my experience running D&D 3e had given me the ability to recognize an unmitigated clusterfuck when I saw it, so we went back to D&D.
This was well before I recognized the inherent ridiculousness of Rifts (cyborg ninjas! mega-juicers!). I still buy the books from time to time, for some reason. I like the setting a lot, I just don't have the patience to play the game itself, especially when there are so many better options that I haven't even played yet (for example: I have been itching to find a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader game since they came out).
One aspect that made rifts memorable for me is the back story and exposition on the world presented a bit in the original book but well developed in almost every world book. It all made sense in it's own universe and never really made major leaps of logic or sense (besides MAGIC!). Humans acting like humans in dozens of cultures and variants, or the inhuman societies/monsters controlling/enslaving/eating/living peacefully beside them. It was also generally well detailed to give the GMs a great deal to draw on.
Void Slayer on
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Rifts had a lot of good world development. Going back and reading it for this, some of it was nonsensical or silly, but it's all useful and there if you want it.
As opposed to settings for a lot of other games where there's a ton of responsibility on the GM to come up with that stuff.
This was well before I recognized the inherent ridiculousness of Rifts (cyborg ninjas! mega-juicers!). I still buy the books from time to time, for some reason. I like the setting a lot, I just don't have the patience to play the game itself, especially when there are so many better options that I haven't even played yet (for example: I have been itching to find a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader game since they came out).
I think this is how Palladium has stayed in operation over the years. No one actually plays the game, but we all just buy the books 'cause we find the setting exciting and interesting.
God damn, I played for my first and last game session back in the year 19 hundred and 95 and I'm still intrigued..
I stuck it out with Rifts for years, man. I'm one of the only people I know to do so, other than the people I ran games with. I've purchased most of the world books and have actually run campaigns in those settings. I know, right?!
Always had a soft spot for Underseas and Atlantis. Mercenaries was pretty awesome, despite the power creep. It provided a pretty clear guideline on how to run a no shits merc. company. Never cared much for Africa (four horsemen, blah), England (modern Arthur legend, herp derp), Australia (Mad Max!!), or Canada (not much goin' on, eh).
Let's not forget magic demon-powered robot vehicles and power armor that slowly transform their users into demonic shock-troopers for an alien intelligence.
RIFTS is the perfect example of how a rich, creative setting can overcome any collection of bugfuck awful rules, even if that setting is more or less insanely silly.
Fairy food, when consumed, can do anything between make you hallucinate a civilization of giant friendly beetles to permanent and disfiguring mutations. England was all about plants, even more so then south America.
Ramjet ammo though, let you take an otherwise worthless modern automatic pistol or rifle and outfit it so that it could harm a dragon or alien tank. Would not do much more then piss said giant ancient monster or sci fi super weapon, but at least you might stand a chance. In groups. Most of the group would die horribly.
Void Slayer on
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
I stuck it out with Rifts for years, man. I'm one of the only people I know to do so, other than the people I ran games with. I've purchased most of the world books and have actually run campaigns in those settings. I know, right?!
Always had a soft spot for Underseas and Atlantis. Mercenaries was pretty awesome, despite the power creep. It provided a pretty clear guideline on how to run a no shits merc. company. Never cared much for Africa (four horsemen, blah), England (modern Arthur legend, herp derp), Australia (Mad Max!!), or Canada (not much goin' on, eh).
I really liked Australia. I think that book actually did a really good job of providing cool new material without all the power creep of, say, Coalition War Campaign or Juicer Uprising.
I trudged through Rifts for a long time in junior high, and it got me in to more functional games. I amassed a hoard of World Books that I barely got to use, but read each one cover to cover at least once. New West is still my favorite, if not for the giant Lone Star complex then for the Gunslinger OCC and the even twitchier Gunslinger Crazy. Shine on, you crazy game, you.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
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FandaHang a shining starupon the highest boughRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
Perhaps this would be an opportune time to revisit Glitter Boys for a moment.
According to the original edition of Rifts, the Boom Gun accelerates its ammunition to the astonishing speed of Mach 2. This is where the gun derives its power from, because as you'll recall, the ammunition isn't explosive or anything, it's just a flechette containing solid slugs:
We can presume they're hard, dense, M.D.C. slugs, since they would have to be in order to damage M.D.C. targets. But other than that, they're unremarkable. Judging by the illustration, they're less than 1/3 of an inch in diameter, which makes them comparable in caliber to the bullets used in many hunting rifles. They depend on reaching the science fiction velocity of Mach 2 to inflict their terrible carnage.
The only problem with this is that Mach 2 is very, very slow. It's about half the speed that the best modern rifles can manage. World War One-era rifles had more muzzle velocity than the Boom Gun.
The Ultimate edition of Rifts raised the speed to Mach 5, which is a bit more respectable - tank guns fire their projectiles at about this speed, so presumably that's what Mr. Siembieda was going by when he made the edit. And like the Boom Gun, tanks often fire kinetic energy penetrators, which is a fancy term for non-explosive rounds. They depend on the projectile's mass and velocity to penetrate their target's armor, just like Boom Gun rounds do. So far, so good.
However, modern KE-penetrators have stabilizing fins on the end of them, like an arrow. They need these because they don't benefit from rifling. Without the fins, they would lose a lot of accuracy due to tumbling in flight. As a railgun, the Boom Gun doesn't employ rifling either, but its flechette appears to be a smooth cylinder filled with other smooth cylinders. I'm thinking that its advertised effective range of two miles is somewhat optimistic.
So basically, one hundred years into the future, following a golden age of unprecedented scientific progress, the pinnacle of weapons development has managed to produce something with worse ballistic characteristics than today's tank guns.
As a point of interest: US Naval railguns that are in testing today have a muzzle velocity 50% greater than anything the Boom Gun aspires to.
Posts
Has someone been reading H:fy threads?
You know this is the whole impetus for researching space travel?
To go faster than the speed of light and do it with the various green and blue alien women folk.
Sadly for us, evolution being what it is, it's insanely probable that no alien species we'll ever meet will be attractive to us.
Unless you like your women like you your coffee boiling hot and painful to the touch, I guess.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
If the internet has taught us anything it's that no matter the subject material, somebody out there will find it hot and sexy.
but those people aren't usually astronauts.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
man you guys and your 'probability'
listen to Turkson on this one
because one day
there will be an astronaut
whose raw sexiness will change the galaxy forever
C'mon, you know that Kirk at least consulted with Spock and Bones on whether he could bang the Horta.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
Well, yeah, but she only had eyes for Spock.
Why I fear the ocean.
They are furries.
So is Bugs Bunny.
Or did power creep ensure the further posts take thirty days to calculate and destroy the universe when written?
Why I fear the ocean.
It makes vanilla Rifts look balanced.
Summer lab class is kicking my ass. Another two weeks and I'm free again to explore the weirdness that is Rifts.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
If you want to stare at the true face of munchkinism, you need to read about Synnibarr. My friends and I actually played this back in the day.
A decent review of it, but it only scratches the surface of how wacky the game was: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_4762.html
How the heck did you manage to play it? 'cuz just reading it sounds utterly incomprehensible.
Then I realize it had that effect on me from only hearing someone else describe it. I shudder to think what direct exposure would result in.
World of Synnibarr, SenZar and FATAL are all pretty wretched. I mean, it helps put things in perspective somewhat for RIFTS.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
In terms of themes it's actually kind of quaint compared to a lot of games out there.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Too bad its head is up its ass.
These other systems on the other hand sound like the work of diseased minds. FATAL in particular.
Although if Rifts added the "optional" FATAL character stats, I'm sure there would be an O.C.C. which would grant bonus attacks for having a giant penis (which would then grant bonus attacks in your penis-shaped power armor-- WHEEEEE!).
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
It's semi-compatible with Rifts, requiring only minor tweakage to get working 'right'. But it's ten times as broken. Balance is a dirty word when it comes to comparing the character classes or combat in general. In a sense, it's like taking Phase World, Rifts, and Heroes Unlimited and throwing them into a stew--with Cosmic Enforcers being the resulting dregs.
You've got space opera, aliens of the good and bad variety, super heroes and villains (there's a list of important figures at the end of the book), cyborgs who are more akin to mad scientists experimenting on themselves, three (just three) poorly drawn/conceptualized space ships available, and very little in terms of exposition to set the scene. There's a Jesus figure who heads the aforementioned Cosmic Enforcers (the equivalent of the Green Lantern Corps, I guess) but he's so powerful as to be bored and not all that reliable. His best bud, some black Superman wannabe, is taking up the reins, but is in over his head. There's some kind of alien, bug-like invading force (if memory serves) as a generalized villain--you get the picture.
It's a mess, but we managed to glean some amount of fun from the husk of this thing... amazingly. Granted, it's no Synnibar (which, the more I read that word, the more I desire a cinnamon bun), but I suspect that few RPG's could stack up to that in terms of sheer pants-on-head crazy antics.
I was a headhunter. I had a laser rifle.
Granted, it was a completely sick laser rifle; I believe it was a smacked-up version of the Juicer rifle from the first book.
Then our GM moved away, and the rest of the group wanted me to take over running the game, but my experience running D&D 3e had given me the ability to recognize an unmitigated clusterfuck when I saw it, so we went back to D&D.
This was well before I recognized the inherent ridiculousness of Rifts (cyborg ninjas! mega-juicers!). I still buy the books from time to time, for some reason. I like the setting a lot, I just don't have the patience to play the game itself, especially when there are so many better options that I haven't even played yet (for example: I have been itching to find a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader game since they came out).
As opposed to settings for a lot of other games where there's a ton of responsibility on the GM to come up with that stuff.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think this is how Palladium has stayed in operation over the years. No one actually plays the game, but we all just buy the books 'cause we find the setting exciting and interesting.
God damn, I played for my first and last game session back in the year 19 hundred and 95 and I'm still intrigued..
Always had a soft spot for Underseas and Atlantis. Mercenaries was pretty awesome, despite the power creep. It provided a pretty clear guideline on how to run a no shits merc. company. Never cared much for Africa (four horsemen, blah), England (modern Arthur legend, herp derp), Australia (Mad Max!!), or Canada (not much goin' on, eh).
There's a clear winner here.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think I brought that up already.
Also, England brought us magical leaf MDC armour, so there is that.
3DS FCode: 1993-7512-8991
I'm assuming a Rifts magic mushroom is a more literally named fungus than its real life counterpart?
Ramjet ammo though, let you take an otherwise worthless modern automatic pistol or rifle and outfit it so that it could harm a dragon or alien tank. Would not do much more then piss said giant ancient monster or sci fi super weapon, but at least you might stand a chance. In groups. Most of the group would die horribly.
I really liked Australia. I think that book actually did a really good job of providing cool new material without all the power creep of, say, Coalition War Campaign or Juicer Uprising.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
That'll probably be about the time of the next update.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
According to the original edition of Rifts, the Boom Gun accelerates its ammunition to the astonishing speed of Mach 2. This is where the gun derives its power from, because as you'll recall, the ammunition isn't explosive or anything, it's just a flechette containing solid slugs:
We can presume they're hard, dense, M.D.C. slugs, since they would have to be in order to damage M.D.C. targets. But other than that, they're unremarkable. Judging by the illustration, they're less than 1/3 of an inch in diameter, which makes them comparable in caliber to the bullets used in many hunting rifles. They depend on reaching the science fiction velocity of Mach 2 to inflict their terrible carnage.
The only problem with this is that Mach 2 is very, very slow. It's about half the speed that the best modern rifles can manage. World War One-era rifles had more muzzle velocity than the Boom Gun.
The Ultimate edition of Rifts raised the speed to Mach 5, which is a bit more respectable - tank guns fire their projectiles at about this speed, so presumably that's what Mr. Siembieda was going by when he made the edit. And like the Boom Gun, tanks often fire kinetic energy penetrators, which is a fancy term for non-explosive rounds. They depend on the projectile's mass and velocity to penetrate their target's armor, just like Boom Gun rounds do. So far, so good.
However, modern KE-penetrators have stabilizing fins on the end of them, like an arrow. They need these because they don't benefit from rifling. Without the fins, they would lose a lot of accuracy due to tumbling in flight. As a railgun, the Boom Gun doesn't employ rifling either, but its flechette appears to be a smooth cylinder filled with other smooth cylinders. I'm thinking that its advertised effective range of two miles is somewhat optimistic.
So basically, one hundred years into the future, following a golden age of unprecedented scientific progress, the pinnacle of weapons development has managed to produce something with worse ballistic characteristics than today's tank guns.
As a point of interest: US Naval railguns that are in testing today have a muzzle velocity 50% greater than anything the Boom Gun aspires to.