I did actually start a post on Runequest, the previous request, but life got in the way... and for some reason my heart wasn't in the per request runequest entry...

I'm planning to hit this thread up this weekend. Need to jettison the self imposed critical pressure when I do.  

Palladium/RIFTS etc:

Mechanically the Palladium House system varies only on the margins between various iterations, something that has remained true for the nearly thirty years its been around. Many of the changes have been simple additions of subsystems, while others have been in the methods used in character creation, the UI in my earlier metaphorical take.  From a marketing standpoint this is one of many strengths of the palladium ruleset, in that it allows you, the user, to pick up any book from their entire catalog and, with virtually no effort, begin using it immediately with ANY OTHER BOOK right away, regardless of wether or not they were meant to be used that way.  It is possible, for example, to mix and match Teenage Mutant Turtles with RIFTS: Russia straight out of the box, despite the decade plus gap between publication dates and the radically different settings they supposedly represent.  I won't suggest this is a deliberate design goal, but it winds up being true regardless.
Beyond that, the Palladium system is essentially a reaction to, an evolution of, D&D, at least as it existed thirty years ago. There are vast similarities, levels and classes, d20 dice used to resolve combat, hit points and so forth. One could easily see the original Palladium system starting life as a collection of house rules that simply evolved into its own system.  More than that, I think, its a more specialized take on the D&D rules, designed for a specific style of game play. I'll try to cover both angles, so bear with me.
In D&D you use a d20 to determine hit or miss chances, as determined by your class and, at the time, by a somewhat dense collection of look up charts (forgive me, but I actually don't know how it worked prior to AD&D or in the other branches of D&D at the time... a lapse on my part, I know.). In Palladium that has been replaced with a low fixed target number. In D&D the 'to hit' is static, the defender is essentially entirely passive, while in Palladium the defender actually defends.   D&D originally didn't have a skill system, anything outside of combat was essentially 'off the map', while Palladium is almost entirely Skill System with combat grafted too it (so much so that a large number of skills determined combat ability), without actually being a skills based game.  D&D gave EXP via gold collected, Palladium gives it by tasks performed... I could do a compare and contrast all day long. At the time, one might have said Palladium was a clear improvement over D&D IF you agreed with their 'style' of play.  Palladium attempts to be more emulative, less abstract and tactical, which is why models and maps are virtually ignored across their entire lineup.  Of course, game engines continued to evolve and now some of the 'fixes' to D&D are no longer relevant and may look a bit out of place, or just too simple.  One example of this would be the fact that you have two seperate systems mashed together rather than a more unified resolution.  You have D&D style combat, with d20's and bonuses, and you have a very simple percentile skill system, with a vast list of skills. Skills that are designed to work with the combat system (the Combat skills, weapon skills and even horsemanship... but not driving!) don't work,or look like, the other skills in the system because they actually belong to another system (combat) entirely!  For the most part it is functional, but it is ugly and it looks, to professional gamers anyway, hopelessly old fashioned.  However, in practice, a new gamer handed a palladium rulebook (Palladium, RIFTS, Chaos Earth, Robotech, TMNT, Hero's Unlimited.... shall I go on?) will have no more, and probably less, trouble grasping the entire system... for his purposes, than he would with almost any edition of D&D.  In part because the rules are simple rather than comprehensive, and partly because the average player doesn't care about systemic evolution within the hobby... and good on him!... and in part because most editions of D&D presumed multiple play styles, and attempted to cater to them all, while Palladium stripped out everything but their presumptive default, which happens to fall in a very comfortable zone for most players.  We can call it the 'lazy man' system, if you like. The average lazy man doesn't want to measure exact movement on the map, or worry about where he's facing, he wants to run forward and zap teh badguy with his laser gun.  Palladium encourages this sort of play.

Character creation is as incoherent as the rest of the system, as unevolved. The D&D roots show, in the classes and levels, but again: While D&D classes were extremely reductive and abstracted, Palladium's classes are expansive and detailed, while actually not effecting play nearly as much. THere is, in fact, at least one class just for military radio operator (for a specific army no less) somewhere within the vast collection of world books, but this barely has any influence on actual game play for the player. Almost.  Aside from allowing entry into the two main supernatural subsystems, most classes are nothing more than collections of skills, most of which may be chosen by the player from broad catagories, allowing a high degree of customization. However: There is no real attempt to balance classes across books (or even within books!), and so you have classes that offer a veritable boatload of built in bonuses next to comparable classes that offer none. Something is always better than nothing, and even non-gamers can figure that one out quickly.  
Older versions of the game (TMNT and Heros Unlimited spring to mind) offer a different take on skills, HU defines classes as merely entry points to super powers, while TMNT doesn't have classes at all. Both have the player determine (Randomly by default) their educational level, which then determines their skills, with the break being that a single good roll (on the educational chart) can make or break your skill set for the rest of that characters play life.
The system is littered with other oddities and glaring flaws. While I personally think its neat that any character, regardless of class, has an option to use the psychic abilities, it does make a major facet of character building entirely random. The nearly chapter length section on Insanity in almost every book is obnoxious, then we have the D&D scaled attributes (3-18, determined by 3d6... sort of....) that actually manages to be more meaningless than D&D attributes, while having more total stats!  Seriously: Nothing under a 15 actually matters, while it is almost laughably easy for stats to climb to the mid twenties.  I'm not a fan of generating one number to find another number, nor am I a fan of illusory meaning. I grasp that some sort of slack is required to make systems work (For example: I can not, for the life of me, conceive of a method of altering the skill bonus derivatives in Traveller that would eliminate dead spaces in attributes and would still work as smoothly as what they have...), but Palladium takes this to a ridiculous extreme. There is no real difference, in any stat but Speed, between having a 3 or a 14, but there is a difference between 15 and 16, and a significant one at that.  This is simply a bad design, and one that would be easily fixed...

Of course part of the strength of Palladium is that it won't be fixed. In theory, twenty years from now I could pick up a random new palladium book and use it with all the books I have now with minimal effort. Combined with the purely business based decision to remain 'evergreen' in production Palladium holds a niche in the market it will likely never lose, and for GMs trying to get new players into the hobby I can see Palladium as a great go-to system as a point of entry for all number of reasons: Simplicty, graphic appeal, flexible playstyle, and broad genre appeal... and more besides.



Sorry for the late post. I was sleep deprived on Sunday, and I really did need to overcome a sudden, unexplained bout of performance clutching when people started tossing  requests at me!

Fair assessment really. The dice+bonus additive system was a step forward from the charts (I think Basic's charts weren't too different to AD&D - I think the standard character sheet had a space to write your personal line of the table on).

Kevin apparently didn't realize the full importance of XP for treasure though he talks about his dislike of 'kill factor' xp which in hindsight must be about AD&D. I like Palladium's xp system, though his speech always raises an eyebrow, given how friendly the rest of the system (from Alignment to skills) is to combat.

The huge and hyper-specific class lists sometimes irk me as well (e.g. Body Fixer and Cyber-Doc as different classes? - couldn't this be one class and pick skills to match?). Oh well.

True, though the class bloat doesn't really bother me much, personally. There is enough 'good stuff' per book that a few extra pages for massively redundant classes is trivial.

Now: Trying to resolve the issue of a guy who whats to play and RCC class with an OCC job?  That isn't "hard" but it would have been nice if, at some point, Palladium actually codified. (also: Class changes.  Very specifically, in Australian Line Juicer's write up they include very specific information on what happens if you change classes, making it somewhat (oddly for Palladium) an Optimal Class to dip into for the first five levels and 'move on'. Again: Houseruling a class change isn't hard, but given at least one class with specific rules about abandoning it, it would be nice to know how its SUPPOSED to work...)

The original Palladium Fantasy RPG has a fairly good multiclass system (IMHO - keep in mind this is coming from someone who liked AD&D multiclassing more than the 3E version, though).

I think Rifts on the other hand probably doesn't have a class change system since Kevin suspects (rightly in my case) that the players would immediately use this for evil, to build juicer T-man vampire cyborgs or something.  Though there are enough classes that require class change rules that in retrospect, it could really use something.

Thanks for the info. I had the second edition palladium fantasy rules at one time, no idea what happened to them.  Most of my Palladium stuff is RIFTS, with some of the Robotech/Macross stuff and at one time most of the TMNT/After the Bomb stuff.  

Ironically, I think, because I believe I have more campaign time in Fantasy than in Rifts and none at all in the other worlds.

I'm contemplating the Original Deadlands, probably with a rough tie in to Savage Worlds for my next one... mostly because its been on my mind for some reason than anything else.  Its getting to be that I have to go back through the list and see what I haven't done yet!

Thanks yourself, hadn't figured out the multiclassing thing until now. Deadlands would be interesting, I haven't seen it.