OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
edited April 2011
You're still talking about a game where on one page they're describing classes capable of breaching dimensions and leveling earth-shattering spells and on the next illiterate street rats--and both are player classes just hanging out there.
I'm pretty sure that the cosmo knight is one of those classes/races that the company cautions GM's about for balance reasons.
Which reminds me of the one thing that a lot of people forget about rifts: It's only as nutty as the GM allows it to be. Myself, I was willing to allow my players to take a fairly impressive variety of classes and equpiment, but they had an obligation to explain how all of it made sense. Maxi man with 2 symbiotes? Sure! Dog Boy with genesplicer mods, psynetic impants dual wielding swords of atlantis from the comfort of his TW terrain hopper power armor? Alright smart guy lets hear the details.
This game is always my favorite part of character creation. I once came up with the backstory for a "template pile" character (regular guy with a LOT of half-this or elemental-infused that templates) who was essentially the eternal straight-man in what appeared to be a cosmic comedy. From reincarnations to dimensional impressments he was just trying to make it as a lawyer, arguing cases for his clients from his humble iron-age township to the nightmare realms of the elemental tyrant-kings.
I still play Rifts every Sunday. I'm quite fond of the Necromancer OCC, actually. The ability to meld additional arms onto yourself is quite useful. Oh, and lets not forget the power of Deathword.
I always wanted to see the Diabolist represented in Rifts, but it seemed to be a Palladium-only occupation (if you could call it that--more like an obsession, the way it's described). It was always a tricky class to play, though, since literally every bit of 'magic' they have access to requires preparation to use. They essentially set up magic traps, so to speak, with circles and power words. Lots of ritualistic stuff, too.
I suppose this was also pretty close to being a summoner, though I can't remember if that was its own class or not. The aforementioned power circles were often used to trap summoned demons so they could be "trained". Of course, the book was pretty clear that demons hate calling any human master and always try to twist things around while still following the letter of the command so that they'd win their freedom somehow--usually with the demise of the summoner. Kind of an evil genie situation.
Never did play one myself since I'm not a masochist, but I had fun with someone who thought they were clever enough to pull it off.
Call the care police. Palladium is all about simlation and as such it applies this sort of logic that so many RPG's don't have the balls to attempt wherein not every class is a perfect match. Frankly, this is only a problem if you are focusing all your efforts on running a 4thE combat campaign and one or two players didn't realize thats what you intended at character generation and ran with characters that can only hope to sit on the side lines.
"Your military trained commando has the same chance to hit as this yokel farmer with minimal weapons training."
"Your accomplished surgeon has a 37% chance of successfully performing a pinky toe amputation."
"You're trying to make your mech walk forward slowly? That's going to require a roll under 46 on a percentile die."
Oh, and my favorite;
"There is no measurable difference between someone with an IQ of 160 and a 4 year old with downs syndrome."
Rifts is about blowing ridiculous things up in ridiculous ways while play acting in what is amazingly detailed and incredibly captivating. But there is absolutely no mechanical merit to anything in this system when viewed through either a gamist or simulationist lens. There is something to be said for it in terms of narrativist merit, but let's not pretend that it successfully models reality in any substantial way.
As bad ass as Cosmo Knights are, I'm still very fond of Mystic Knights (or for a PC, the good guy version Knights of the White Rose). Bad ass in close combat, magic and psychic powers (they even get a few super psi powers) and, just to top it off, they're pretty much immune to energy weapons. If I remember correctly I think they can even absorb energy weapon fire and restore PPE (or I could just be completely misremembering).
Also, I love the Madhaven book, that place is nuts. If you want your party to die in extremely terrible and horrible ways or, if they survive, come out completely batshit crazy, send them to Madhaven.
I've always found that a good rule of thumb in Rifts, is to keep two or three back-up characters in your notebook. Because when the GM says 'the nuke goes off', or 'the Pharoh sees you', or 'the bartender slides you a glass filled with a pink liquid' you KNOW your char is about to have a bad day.
"Your military trained commando has the same chance to hit as this yokel farmer with minimal weapons training."
"Your accomplished surgeon has a 37% chance of successfully performing a pinky toe amputation."
"You're trying to make your mech walk forward slowly? That's going to require a roll under 46 on a percentile die."
Oh, and my favorite;
"There is no measurable difference between someone with an IQ of 160 and a 4 year old with downs syndrome."
Rifts is about blowing ridiculous things up in ridiculous ways while play acting in what is amazingly detailed and incredibly captivating. But there is absolutely no mechanical merit to anything in this system when viewed through either a gamist or simulationist lens. There is something to be said for it in terms of narrativist merit, but let's not pretend that it successfully models reality in any substantial way.
This is what I loved about Rifts. The rules really make no sense from any perspective--they certainly aren't simulationist nor are they gamist--they are just insane. With that said, if playing a Dragon piloting body armor with a magical spell capable of summoning 11d100+3d6 demons to end the world is wrong, I don't want to be right.
As you may recall from one of our very earliest installments, every character in Rifts has some degree of potential to manifest psychic powers. For most, this is relatively low; PCs who don't take a psychic O.C.C. (or P.C.C. depending on who wrote the book) have a 1-in-4 chance of having a few minor psychic abilities and a pittance of I.S.P. (inner strength points) with which to power them. With the additional upside, of course, being the ability to use TW items.
Quite a few classes, including most spellcasters and virtually every variant on everything ever, come with some minor degree of psychic power without actually being specifically psychic O.C.C.s. There are also quite a few races that have their own inherent, 100% occurance psychic powers, and sometimes these races' powers are potent enough to rate their own special class. Of course, being a 7 foot tall bright pink man with glowing veins in your head has a tendency of making you a bit of a target at times.
This guy seems legit.
For the humans (un)lucky enough to be blessed/burdened with psychic powers, it can be something of a mixed bag. Sure, you can read auras or levitate that beer out of the fridge, but there is a very high likelihood that you have a tracking chip in your head and a barcode on the back of your neck that identify you as a threat to Coalition national security. And that's if you were (un)lucky enough to miss out on the powers that actually pose a threat to someone in M.D.C. armor. Those people tend to get disappeared.
Social difficulties aside, having a little bit of psionic ability can be rather useful. As mentioned before, even just a few I.S.P. gets you access to techno-wizard items, though you might not be able to charge them on your own.
The actual powers, though, are kind of a mixed bag. Something like Object Read can give you a huge information advantage and slice straight through many of the setting's mysteries with little or now effort. Resist Fatigue, on the other hand, has no actual game effect and really only has an application if your GM decides to beancount sleep. This is sort of the theme with psionics; borderline useless to completely overpowered depending on the requirements of the specific campaign and the inventiveness of the player. Really, really uneven in quality. Pretty textbook Rifts.
There are some things you never want to use object read on.
The powers themselves are divided up into three categories, with a fourth that is only accessible by a privledged few (which we will be getting to in a future installment); Healing, Sensitive, Physical and Super.
Healing powers... heal. Kind of. Most of the time. Other times they put people to sleep or perform exorcisms or Detect Psionics. Weeeeeeeee!
Sensitive powers are mostly sensory. Mostly. Presence Sense, Sixth Sense, See the Invisible, etc. Plus Mind Block, the one basically required psychic power that represented the only defense against psionic incursion. Because cutting yourself off from things is sensing them, I guess?
Physical powers do physical things. Telekinesis, Ectoplasm, Levitation, and so on. And Resist Hunger, Resist Fatigue, Resist Thirst and Death Trance, all of which make perfect sense in this category and wouldn't at all be better off in Healing no sir.
Super psionics are pretty super. Psychic swords that can cut through M.D.C. armors, mass dominations, Hypnotic Suggestion, pyrokinesis and quite a few other rather impressive powers make up this list. These are the powers that the Coalition is actually scared of, and the reason that everybody who can do so much as levitate an eyelash gets barcoded and monitored.
Regulating this might not actually be a terrible call.
To recap from an earlier installment, Minor psychics get any two powers from one category and Major psychics get 8 powers from any one category or 6 powers from any of the three categories. Classes that give out psychic abilities usually specify a list of available powers, or only give access to one or two of the categories.
The only characters that can select powers from the Super category are those who get that ability from their class. Mostly this means Mind Melters and such, but dragons get some Super psionics as they gain levels, as do Mystics. By later books, it started to seem like classes that couldn't use at least Psi-Sword were in the minority.
To use a psychic power, a character spends an action and a specific number of I.S.P. and the effect just kind of happens. Depending on where you look in the book, high tech armor may or may not prevent the use of psionic powers, particularly the use of a helmet. I would be surprised if anyone ever actually enforced that bit, but it's there. Occasionally. Kind of like the thing that is only mentioned in the Ley Line Walker's equipment section about how heavy armor reduces their "speed and mobility by half."
I'm sure those rocks are going to be useful against body armor.
Unlike spellcasting, there's no option for blood psionics. Any power that a psychic uses takes their own energy. Psychic abilities can, however, be augmented around ley lines, but just in terms of what they can do (damage, duration, etc). There isn't a way to channel ley line energy into psionic powers like there is for magic.
I know this was something of a dry installment, but it's kind of hard to snark about bland game mechanics. The psionics rules aren't even inspiring enough to snark about. Next week I promise we'll get back into the more overtly ridiculous stuff. I know I can make this promise, because we're starting with this guy;
Bizarrely, the Burster from the main fucking rule book is one half of the winner of the southern california "most overpowered rifts character" contest, which is Burster/Scarecrow, an immortal, undestroyable construct of pure evil.
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
Depends on what's desired.
As of the fourth printing of the original sourcebook, the following hold, and note that these all fall under the Super category:
Empathic Transmission costs a measly 6 ISP, and can cause people to violently attack those they hate, force hostiles to stop their rampage, etc. Useful, but not exactly what you're looking for. Damned cheap however.
Hypnotic Suggestion costs another 6 ISP and is basically inception. Another cheap, but effective ability.
Mentally Possess Others does exactly what it sounds like--the psychic takes complete control of the other person (but his body goes into a trance). This one's a bit more expensive at 30 ISP, but you could cheerfully have someone fillet their mother and finish it off by blowing their brains out.
I don't remember what the orphan children->ISP conversion is--but that's maybe 1/4->1/3 of a level 1 Mind Melter's ISP.
Saving against that is...interesting. The default rule says savings throw for non-psionics is roll 15+ on a d20, minor and major psionics roll 12+, and master psionics (like Mind Melters, Bursters, etc.) only need to roll a 10. High Mental Endurance (one of the many basic statistics) provides a bonus.
Thing is, Mentally Possess Others doesn't list a Savings Throw--and most other relevant abilities put something like "Savings Throw: Standard" there. So...does that mean you can't even defend against that sort of attack?
In terms of defense, Mind block will block it, for 4 ISP for a few minutes (10 per level). There is also a group mind block which is generally effective in the super category 22 ISP 10 minutes per in a 120 foot radius. The draw back here is you need to have these activated before the effect, as I doubt the controller will turn your mind block on or let that super one get off in time to do anything useful.
The best was mind block auto defense in the super category which took away permanently 14 isp, but the mind block would just pop up whenever, at no cost, though you could voluntarily keep it off.
Various classes gave bonus to psionic defense, as did exceptionally high Mental Endurance.
In terms of mind control, 30 ISP got you total physical control. For 10 ISP you stole ALL knowledge and ALL skills. If you saw in the Rouge Trader game on these boards where I was an astropath you learned how powerful that is, as I manged to completely mess up susan's surprises by dong the same on one guy. No risk of opening a warp breach in Rifts though, just a small amount of ISP one could regen in about an hour.
One note Optimus did not include I believe is that psionics could be used at the same rate as physical attacks. So any good psychic should take boxing, because learning to punch fast makes your brain able to deal out more deadly bolts of mental energy!
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 don't remember what the orphan children->ISP conversion is--but that's maybe 1/4->1/3 of a level 1 Mind Melter's ISP.
There's no option to kill orphans for their inner strength, unfortunately. All power must be provided by the psionic character themselves, outside of a few specific instances like Mind Bleeders.
One note Optimus did not include I believe is that psionics could be used at the same rate as physical attacks. So any good psychic should take boxing, because learning to punch fast makes your brain able to deal out more deadly bolts of mental energy!
I did make mention of it, but I didn't dwell on it. Psionic actions take the same amount of time as physical ones, so if you have 7 melee attacks and the ability to dominate enemies psychically, you can theoretically dominate 7 enemies. There's a Juicer variant built around this sort of thing, as a matter of fact.
I'm going to be covering some of the more ridiculous possibilities when we get to the Mind Melter in a week or so.
Got all the classic Juicer abilities + Super Psionics + a surgically attached helmet that doubled all power durations and gave them an extra pool of 80 I.S.P. to play with.
I've always wanted to see them make a Rifts movie, or Rifts video/computer game. I think the ability to be anything you can dream of would be amazing in a game. And imagine the effects a movie or game would have!
The thing I love about Rifts is simultaneously one of its greatest weaknesses.
Sure, you CAN be a Demigod Werewolf with psychic and magical abilities who pilots a techno-wizardry upgraded suit of power armour... but like Superman, your GM is going to need to throw foes of equal or greater power (or small armies) at you to present a challenge.
When I first started playing, I had my power gaming phase going; min/max'ing hardcore, and often ended up being the Big Gun of the group, but eventually I started aiming to be a lot more low key within the group, going from being the guy with millions of credits in implants, power armour and a rune weapon, to a non-combat oriented master psychic who specialized in more defensive abilities, recon and travel.
Hell, even with the earlier (more munchkin'y) characters I'd have to 'reset' every so often; making an excuse for my character to drop off a lot of his best shit for the military to reverse-engineer in order to justify working with the new batch of level 1's my group was notorious for starting up without an even more massive gap in power level.
Note: while my characters may have gotten out of hand at times (with GM approval), we did have other times when the group had absurdly powerful characters running around, where mine would somewhat change from being Batman amongst a group of rookies to being Batman with the Justice League; standing shoulder to shoulder with literal demigods and dragons.
IMO, a lot of the balancing act has to do with how well the group and GM are able to work together. It helps greatly if the GM can communicate what type of game they want to run and the players show some self restraint (and the GM vetoes where necessary) in character creation/gear selection. "Weapon of choice" is a dangerous set of words to put in a character's starting gear when the player was just looking through the Atlantis or South America sourcebooks.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Atlantis is ridiculous (as is South America, I suppose), but the Naruni 2nd Wave Catalog, Phase World, and Splyyn Dimensional Market sourcebooks? Good God, ya'll.
They were written by an author named C.J. Carella, who was fairly notorious for massive power creed. Which is to say that if the average rifle elsewhere did 1d4x10 damage, one in his books likely did 1d6x10. Power armour in older books fired a volley of 4 mini missiles, his probably fired 6-8+.
Note, those are just for context, I don't have actual numbers in front of me, but in terms of balance, the two South Americas had some pretty batshit crazy stuff in them.
And I do recognize that it might not've been in his control (or entirely so at least), but whoever was editing those books either seemed to bump his numbers up, or turned a blind eye to the higher numbers he often went with.
Edit: And yes, Anti-Monsters were scary as hell. Good guys, great to have on your side, but definitely not slouches in raw power.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I liked the flechette cannons in South America 2 that basically fired a burst of rail-shotgun ammo, and did something absurd like 2d6x10+10 damage.
Also every Naruni gun ever was OP in the standard rifts setting. The cartridge plasma machinegun that was essentially so cheap as to be free to your standard adventuring party and did more damage than every coalition weapon system ever introduced? An excuse to be the most powerful badass on the block, basically.
Heh, wasn't there a shotgun in one of the New West books that did, like, an order of magnitude less damage but still supposedly had a horror factor.
Horror factor itself was such a silly concept. While I totally get that there are hardened special forces out there who scream like little girls at the sight of a spider, I do admit to having a hard time believing that half the shit in the game that possesses a horror factor would, in fact, horrify your average adventuring party.
"Look, it's cute that you think you're super badass and shit, and I'll admit the 6 tentacles and the fact that your face ignores the laws of physics to some degrees is pretty spooky, but me and my boys and girls took down a fucking Vampire Intelligence yesterday. Before breakfast. You go sit in the corner and think about what you've done."
Hell, a couple levels in, your average PC group should have a HF against most opposition.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Heh, wasn't there a shotgun in one of the New West books that did, like, an order of magnitude less damage but still supposedly had a horror factor.
Horror factor itself was such a silly concept. While I totally get that there are hardened special forces out there who scream like little girls at the sight of a spider, I do admit to having a hard time believing that half the shit in the game that possesses a horror factor would, in fact, horrify your average adventuring party.
"Look, it's cute that you think you're super badass and shit, and I'll admit the 6 tentacles and the fact that your face ignores the laws of physics to some degrees is pretty spooky, but me and my boys and girls took down a fucking Vampire Intelligence yesterday. Before breakfast. You go sit in the corner and think about what you've done."
Hell, a couple levels in, your average PC group should have a HF against most opposition.
Failing a Horror Factor save, which is basically a flat d20 roll against a target number in most cases, means that you lose your first attack of the fight, start at the bottom of the initiative order and can't defend yourself from the first attack of the person or creature that made you make the horror factor save.
Horror Factor is really good against Juicers, especially if you happen to be casting it down off of something that can fire missile volleys.
Failing a Horror Factor save, which is basically a flat d20 roll against a target number in most cases, means that you lose your first attack of the fight, start at the bottom of the initiative order and can't defend yourself from the first attack of the person or creature that made you make the horror factor save.
Horror Factor is really good against Juicers, especially if you happen to be casting it down off of something that can fire missile volleys.
So, wait.
There's no difference between a raw rookie and a seasoned combat vet who kills gods as a hobby for this?
So, if for some reason you rolled up, oh, Jenkins from Atomic Robo, he'd have the same chance of filling his pants at the sight of a plasma rifle as Aunt May?
Wow. Not the most thought-through of mechanics, I gather?
Some classes give a one-time bonus against horror factor. But that's about it. And it's usually small if it exists at all, +1 or +2 in most cases.
So a first level, green merc recruit and his commanding officer that has been serving for decades have the same chance to avoid peeing themselves when a dragon shows up.
Some classes give a one-time bonus against horror factor. But that's about it. And it's usually small if it exists at all, +1 or +2 in most cases.
So a first level, green merc recruit and his commanding officer that has been serving for decades have the same chance to avoid peeing themselves when a dragon shows up.
In general I found a lot of later books were better about including random bonuses to OCC/RCC/PCC listings (sometimes spread out over levels, sometimes just a big dump of them to start with), and a small bonus to HF saves was often included within these.
Which just makes it funnier, because it meant that in many cases, 1st level Joe Nerdsalot the non-combat character may well have a better HF save than the 15th level Badass McKillsGods because the latter character was primarily made using older books.
I recall a number of Hand to Hand skills eventually having bonuses to save over levels as well, though these might've primarily been found in ... err, Japan and one of the Rifters, I think? I think Commando might've had a bonus as well (the Hand to Hand to end all Hand to Hands).
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Japan had a few overpowered hand to hand combat skills, I think Kendo gave you automatic dodge at level 9. Honestly, I thought most of it was pretty balanced (so only minor power creep except the dragon borgs) though the OCCs tended to be strong but only in one area and the Republic of Japan as a setting really gave a good modern humanity vs the future feel.
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!
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Balance? Phah!
This game is always my favorite part of character creation. I once came up with the backstory for a "template pile" character (regular guy with a LOT of half-this or elemental-infused that templates) who was essentially the eternal straight-man in what appeared to be a cosmic comedy. From reincarnations to dimensional impressments he was just trying to make it as a lawyer, arguing cases for his clients from his humble iron-age township to the nightmare realms of the elemental tyrant-kings.
I suppose this was also pretty close to being a summoner, though I can't remember if that was its own class or not. The aforementioned power circles were often used to trap summoned demons so they could be "trained". Of course, the book was pretty clear that demons hate calling any human master and always try to twist things around while still following the letter of the command so that they'd win their freedom somehow--usually with the demise of the summoner. Kind of an evil genie situation.
Never did play one myself since I'm not a masochist, but I had fun with someone who thought they were clever enough to pull it off.
Call the care police. Palladium is all about simlation and as such it applies this sort of logic that so many RPG's don't have the balls to attempt wherein not every class is a perfect match. Frankly, this is only a problem if you are focusing all your efforts on running a 4thE combat campaign and one or two players didn't realize thats what you intended at character generation and ran with characters that can only hope to sit on the side lines.
It's terrible at that, too. :P
"Your military trained commando has the same chance to hit as this yokel farmer with minimal weapons training."
"Your accomplished surgeon has a 37% chance of successfully performing a pinky toe amputation."
"You're trying to make your mech walk forward slowly? That's going to require a roll under 46 on a percentile die."
Oh, and my favorite;
"There is no measurable difference between someone with an IQ of 160 and a 4 year old with downs syndrome."
Rifts is about blowing ridiculous things up in ridiculous ways while play acting in what is amazingly detailed and incredibly captivating. But there is absolutely no mechanical merit to anything in this system when viewed through either a gamist or simulationist lens. There is something to be said for it in terms of narrativist merit, but let's not pretend that it successfully models reality in any substantial way.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Also, I love the Madhaven book, that place is nuts. If you want your party to die in extremely terrible and horrible ways or, if they survive, come out completely batshit crazy, send them to Madhaven.
This is what I loved about Rifts. The rules really make no sense from any perspective--they certainly aren't simulationist nor are they gamist--they are just insane. With that said, if playing a Dragon piloting body armor with a magical spell capable of summoning 11d100+3d6 demons to end the world is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Aaaaaaand we're back.
The graffiti is optional.
As you may recall from one of our very earliest installments, every character in Rifts has some degree of potential to manifest psychic powers. For most, this is relatively low; PCs who don't take a psychic O.C.C. (or P.C.C. depending on who wrote the book) have a 1-in-4 chance of having a few minor psychic abilities and a pittance of I.S.P. (inner strength points) with which to power them. With the additional upside, of course, being the ability to use TW items.
Quite a few classes, including most spellcasters and virtually every variant on everything ever, come with some minor degree of psychic power without actually being specifically psychic O.C.C.s. There are also quite a few races that have their own inherent, 100% occurance psychic powers, and sometimes these races' powers are potent enough to rate their own special class. Of course, being a 7 foot tall bright pink man with glowing veins in your head has a tendency of making you a bit of a target at times.
This guy seems legit.
For the humans (un)lucky enough to be blessed/burdened with psychic powers, it can be something of a mixed bag. Sure, you can read auras or levitate that beer out of the fridge, but there is a very high likelihood that you have a tracking chip in your head and a barcode on the back of your neck that identify you as a threat to Coalition national security. And that's if you were (un)lucky enough to miss out on the powers that actually pose a threat to someone in M.D.C. armor. Those people tend to get disappeared.
Social difficulties aside, having a little bit of psionic ability can be rather useful. As mentioned before, even just a few I.S.P. gets you access to techno-wizard items, though you might not be able to charge them on your own.
The actual powers, though, are kind of a mixed bag. Something like Object Read can give you a huge information advantage and slice straight through many of the setting's mysteries with little or now effort. Resist Fatigue, on the other hand, has no actual game effect and really only has an application if your GM decides to beancount sleep. This is sort of the theme with psionics; borderline useless to completely overpowered depending on the requirements of the specific campaign and the inventiveness of the player. Really, really uneven in quality. Pretty textbook Rifts.
There are some things you never want to use object read on.
The powers themselves are divided up into three categories, with a fourth that is only accessible by a privledged few (which we will be getting to in a future installment); Healing, Sensitive, Physical and Super.
Healing powers... heal. Kind of. Most of the time. Other times they put people to sleep or perform exorcisms or Detect Psionics. Weeeeeeeee!
Sensitive powers are mostly sensory. Mostly. Presence Sense, Sixth Sense, See the Invisible, etc. Plus Mind Block, the one basically required psychic power that represented the only defense against psionic incursion. Because cutting yourself off from things is sensing them, I guess?
Physical powers do physical things. Telekinesis, Ectoplasm, Levitation, and so on. And Resist Hunger, Resist Fatigue, Resist Thirst and Death Trance, all of which make perfect sense in this category and wouldn't at all be better off in Healing no sir.
Super psionics are pretty super. Psychic swords that can cut through M.D.C. armors, mass dominations, Hypnotic Suggestion, pyrokinesis and quite a few other rather impressive powers make up this list. These are the powers that the Coalition is actually scared of, and the reason that everybody who can do so much as levitate an eyelash gets barcoded and monitored.
Regulating this might not actually be a terrible call.
To recap from an earlier installment, Minor psychics get any two powers from one category and Major psychics get 8 powers from any one category or 6 powers from any of the three categories. Classes that give out psychic abilities usually specify a list of available powers, or only give access to one or two of the categories.
The only characters that can select powers from the Super category are those who get that ability from their class. Mostly this means Mind Melters and such, but dragons get some Super psionics as they gain levels, as do Mystics. By later books, it started to seem like classes that couldn't use at least Psi-Sword were in the minority.
To use a psychic power, a character spends an action and a specific number of I.S.P. and the effect just kind of happens. Depending on where you look in the book, high tech armor may or may not prevent the use of psionic powers, particularly the use of a helmet. I would be surprised if anyone ever actually enforced that bit, but it's there. Occasionally. Kind of like the thing that is only mentioned in the Ley Line Walker's equipment section about how heavy armor reduces their "speed and mobility by half."
I'm sure those rocks are going to be useful against body armor.
Unlike spellcasting, there's no option for blood psionics. Any power that a psychic uses takes their own energy. Psychic abilities can, however, be augmented around ley lines, but just in terms of what they can do (damage, duration, etc). There isn't a way to channel ley line energy into psionic powers like there is for magic.
I know this was something of a dry installment, but it's kind of hard to snark about bland game mechanics. The psionics rules aren't even inspiring enough to snark about. Next week I promise we'll get back into the more overtly ridiculous stuff. I know I can make this promise, because we're starting with this guy;
He's a walking Surgeon General's Warning.
Next Time:
Fire is fun
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
How much juice does "Happily kill best friend then eat a grenade" level mind control cost?
And how does one save against that kind of ability?
Why I fear the ocean.
As of the fourth printing of the original sourcebook, the following hold, and note that these all fall under the Super category:
Empathic Transmission costs a measly 6 ISP, and can cause people to violently attack those they hate, force hostiles to stop their rampage, etc. Useful, but not exactly what you're looking for. Damned cheap however.
Hypnotic Suggestion costs another 6 ISP and is basically inception. Another cheap, but effective ability.
Mentally Possess Others does exactly what it sounds like--the psychic takes complete control of the other person (but his body goes into a trance). This one's a bit more expensive at 30 ISP, but you could cheerfully have someone fillet their mother and finish it off by blowing their brains out.
I don't remember what the orphan children->ISP conversion is--but that's maybe 1/4->1/3 of a level 1 Mind Melter's ISP.
Saving against that is...interesting. The default rule says savings throw for non-psionics is roll 15+ on a d20, minor and major psionics roll 12+, and master psionics (like Mind Melters, Bursters, etc.) only need to roll a 10. High Mental Endurance (one of the many basic statistics) provides a bonus.
Thing is, Mentally Possess Others doesn't list a Savings Throw--and most other relevant abilities put something like "Savings Throw: Standard" there. So...does that mean you can't even defend against that sort of attack?
The best was mind block auto defense in the super category which took away permanently 14 isp, but the mind block would just pop up whenever, at no cost, though you could voluntarily keep it off.
Various classes gave bonus to psionic defense, as did exceptionally high Mental Endurance.
In terms of mind control, 30 ISP got you total physical control. For 10 ISP you stole ALL knowledge and ALL skills. If you saw in the Rouge Trader game on these boards where I was an astropath you learned how powerful that is, as I manged to completely mess up susan's surprises by dong the same on one guy. No risk of opening a warp breach in Rifts though, just a small amount of ISP one could regen in about an hour.
One note Optimus did not include I believe is that psionics could be used at the same rate as physical attacks. So any good psychic should take boxing, because learning to punch fast makes your brain able to deal out more deadly bolts of mental energy!
I did make mention of it, but I didn't dwell on it. Psionic actions take the same amount of time as physical ones, so if you have 7 melee attacks and the ability to dominate enemies psychically, you can theoretically dominate 7 enemies. There's a Juicer variant built around this sort of thing, as a matter of fact.
I'm going to be covering some of the more ridiculous possibilities when we get to the Mind Melter in a week or so.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Got all the classic Juicer abilities + Super Psionics + a surgically attached helmet that doubled all power durations and gave them an extra pool of 80 I.S.P. to play with.
BALANCE!
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
man, I kinda wish I knew whatever happened to all my old sourcebooks
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Sure, you CAN be a Demigod Werewolf with psychic and magical abilities who pilots a techno-wizardry upgraded suit of power armour... but like Superman, your GM is going to need to throw foes of equal or greater power (or small armies) at you to present a challenge.
When I first started playing, I had my power gaming phase going; min/max'ing hardcore, and often ended up being the Big Gun of the group, but eventually I started aiming to be a lot more low key within the group, going from being the guy with millions of credits in implants, power armour and a rune weapon, to a non-combat oriented master psychic who specialized in more defensive abilities, recon and travel.
Hell, even with the earlier (more munchkin'y) characters I'd have to 'reset' every so often; making an excuse for my character to drop off a lot of his best shit for the military to reverse-engineer in order to justify working with the new batch of level 1's my group was notorious for starting up without an even more massive gap in power level.
Note: while my characters may have gotten out of hand at times (with GM approval), we did have other times when the group had absurdly powerful characters running around, where mine would somewhat change from being Batman amongst a group of rookies to being Batman with the Justice League; standing shoulder to shoulder with literal demigods and dragons.
IMO, a lot of the balancing act has to do with how well the group and GM are able to work together. It helps greatly if the GM can communicate what type of game they want to run and the players show some self restraint (and the GM vetoes where necessary) in character creation/gear selection. "Weapon of choice" is a dangerous set of words to put in a character's starting gear when the player was just looking through the Atlantis or South America sourcebooks.
By worst I mean best.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Bolivians or something?
They were written by an author named C.J. Carella, who was fairly notorious for massive power creed. Which is to say that if the average rifle elsewhere did 1d4x10 damage, one in his books likely did 1d6x10. Power armour in older books fired a volley of 4 mini missiles, his probably fired 6-8+.
Note, those are just for context, I don't have actual numbers in front of me, but in terms of balance, the two South Americas had some pretty batshit crazy stuff in them.
And I do recognize that it might not've been in his control (or entirely so at least), but whoever was editing those books either seemed to bump his numbers up, or turned a blind eye to the higher numbers he often went with.
Edit: And yes, Anti-Monsters were scary as hell. Good guys, great to have on your side, but definitely not slouches in raw power.
Also every Naruni gun ever was OP in the standard rifts setting. The cartridge plasma machinegun that was essentially so cheap as to be free to your standard adventuring party and did more damage than every coalition weapon system ever introduced? An excuse to be the most powerful badass on the block, basically.
They were big enough that they scared people into standing still so you could shoot them.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Horror factor itself was such a silly concept. While I totally get that there are hardened special forces out there who scream like little girls at the sight of a spider, I do admit to having a hard time believing that half the shit in the game that possesses a horror factor would, in fact, horrify your average adventuring party.
"Look, it's cute that you think you're super badass and shit, and I'll admit the 6 tentacles and the fact that your face ignores the laws of physics to some degrees is pretty spooky, but me and my boys and girls took down a fucking Vampire Intelligence yesterday. Before breakfast. You go sit in the corner and think about what you've done."
Hell, a couple levels in, your average PC group should have a HF against most opposition.
How does horror factor work anyway?
Simple stun, CoC sanity system, what?
Why I fear the ocean.
Horror Factor is really good against Juicers, especially if you happen to be casting it down off of something that can fire missile volleys.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
So, wait.
There's no difference between a raw rookie and a seasoned combat vet who kills gods as a hobby for this?
So, if for some reason you rolled up, oh, Jenkins from Atomic Robo, he'd have the same chance of filling his pants at the sight of a plasma rifle as Aunt May?
Wow. Not the most thought-through of mechanics, I gather?
Why I fear the ocean.
So a first level, green merc recruit and his commanding officer that has been serving for decades have the same chance to avoid peeing themselves when a dragon shows up.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Welcome to Rifts!
In general I found a lot of later books were better about including random bonuses to OCC/RCC/PCC listings (sometimes spread out over levels, sometimes just a big dump of them to start with), and a small bonus to HF saves was often included within these.
Which just makes it funnier, because it meant that in many cases, 1st level Joe Nerdsalot the non-combat character may well have a better HF save than the 15th level Badass McKillsGods because the latter character was primarily made using older books.
I recall a number of Hand to Hand skills eventually having bonuses to save over levels as well, though these might've primarily been found in ... err, Japan and one of the Rifters, I think? I think Commando might've had a bonus as well (the Hand to Hand to end all Hand to Hands).