:cool:

I sort of wish I hadn't derailed this thread so badly, so on the original topic:

I haven't played Rifts in a very long time, but in the last campaign we moved to a 10:1 MDC/SDC conversion rate and that seemed to work OK. Part of this was due to a messy PC vapourization- a Blind Warrior woman I was playing became a fine mist, though I forget the exact details now - and part due to us using the Rifts rules in a multi-genre game - including a visit to the Forgotten Realms where no one else had MDC gear.

This wasn't an overly serious game, but if I were running Rifts again I might try that as a rule. It just seems like a good compromise between "Palladium SDC" default where characters can have hundreds of SDC and be very difficult to kill, and "Palladium MDC" where characters vapourize pretty easily. (again going back a long way, but in the first game of Rifts I ever played, another guy's Ley Line Walker got blown away in the first shot of the first combat - d4x10 MD [40] vs. 35 MDC body armour).

Guns tht kill you with one shot, clearly a broken system.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;407751That's the one!
I tried convincing myself he's just wearing form-fitting Black Russian style armour over it, but I'm really suspicious its a laser.

Thanks for making me look that up. That's just one of the problems in that picture, too.

Also notable is the image of zombie wyverns being commanded by the Spectre in a v-kini banana hammock.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;351846I think it's 100 SDC to 1 MDC.

In practice I had no problem with MDC, but I think a better solution is to use something closer to D&D3.5 style Damage Resistance:

Damage Resistance: 20 (or 50)/MDC Weaponry

(The real rule would be closer to DR 100/MDC weaponry.)

MDC weaponry could be multiplied x10 damage against SDC targets which would be pretty lethal but not automatically game-ending, and it would allow for a Rifts that didn't have everyone sleeping in their armor.

I agree that there are more flexible mechanics than the MDC rules.

If the rules are set up correctly, the use of defenses, which subtract from damage, will have the same results. As long as the defenses make it so that even the max damage from lower power weapons will never do any damage, they will confer immunity.

The cool thing about defenses is that you can extend that base concept.

You can damage a normal person with a baseball bat or a pistol, but these weapons have no effect on a tank.

You can damage a tank with a bazooka, but that sort of weapon would have no effect on a kryptonian.

You can damage a kryptonian with a nuke (actually that depends on which version of Superman you subscribe to, but for the sake of argument, I'm assuming that you could damage Superman with a nuke), but nukes have no effect on Galactus.

Running things using defenses lets you have all sorts of different levels of invulnerability (not just baseball bats and tanks).

Quote from: Cranewings;351849The problem with using Damage Reduction is that it allows small arms to damage heavy armor sometimes, which they can't.

That shouldn't happen if the rules are set up correctly. If your pistol can never ever do more than 20 points of damage, a character with 21 points of defense is effectively immune.

Quote from: Settembrini;407831Guns tht kill you with one shot, clearly a broken system.

If it were real-world guns, which are made for killing, that might be OK.
But how can you argue that a system where you can be killed by one shot from a futuristic death ray isn't brok...wait.

MDC pretty much makes the game unplayable, to me.  It makes characters want to eat, sleep and shit inside their glitter boy or body armor.

It is singularly one of the most terrible ideas Siembieda has ever had.  It's a terrible fix for a problem that did not exist, at at best is a half assed patch that's ran the system for 20 years (into the ground).

My group will not use the MDC system to the point of expelling Palladium altogether (and when I was 15, Rifts was one of my favorites).  

However, now I'm older and the nostalgia bug is creeping, so we're restoring the SDC games to rotational order, probably starting with TMNT.

For me and my players, MDC just gets in the way, and is entirely overkill where it's not needed or wanted.

Palladium's SDC system is simple (very simple) but elegant in it's way.  It's certainly not WFRP 2e or Dark Heresy, but we might find time for a SDC megaversal game in the near future.

The one thing the MDC system is guilty of is taking a large chunk of 'gaminess' out of it.  Your players don't want a rendition of Gone with the Wind or War and Peace or Vanity Fair every time...they want to play a game.  If Rifts were more balanced as a whole, the MDC system could have merit.

Currently it's a laughing stock and the butt of frequent design slurs.

A nuclear Ray gun or rail rifle should automatically kill you with a near miss. Would it be better if people had 20 hps, guns do 2d6 x 100 and armor had a thousand? It is the same thing.

It is also an easy way of pointing out that some weapons are too low tech to hurt new armor.

There are other ways of handling that.  Does every character have a nuclear ray?  Maybe they shouldn't.

Anyways, if you want a bitch to die just invoke the 'instant death' clause that every early video game had when you fell on a spike.  That is, some weapons cause instant death, no matter what, and you shouldn't be on the receiving end if you want to live.

Personally, I think those sorts of things should be relegated to pivotal moments, such as the plasma discharge from a leaking power plant while fighting in the containment area.  SPLOOSH = death.

Like I said, it takes the gaminess out of it.

Also, please stop talking about 'realistic' and 'real life'.  It's unbecoming for game nerds to try to make rules that mimic real life, or try to argue about how in real life something would happen while in the game it's dumb it doesn't happen.  

That's like me going outside and digging a ditch or baling some hay, then complain to whatver gods are listening about how it's not like my game.    :banghead:

Quote from: Cranewings;407932A nuclear Ray gun or rail rifle should automatically kill you with a near miss.

I agree. And I don't have that big a problem with weapons that can automatically kill you. As long as you take that into account with the game, it can work.

   
You can have everybody either being an MDC creature, or living in their armor (which is what I've seen in most Rifts games I've played in). Of course this leads to a kind of MDC inflation where MDC is nothing special, because everything is MDC.

You can have combat be a last resort, where people avoid such horrible weapons.

Or you can have a very deadly game.

And there are probably still other options, if you are creative enough.

Quote from: Cranewings;407932Would it be better if people had 20 hps, guns do 2d6 x 100 and armor had a thousand? It is the same thing.

On this one, I'd prefer an exponential system, like the Richter Scale, or the scale from Mayfair's DC Heroes game.

If we were going go with an "every point doubles" scheme, we could have
Power Level 6 = .44 magnum bullet
Power Level 9 = 50 cal HMG Bullet (8X as powerful as a .44 mag)
Power Level 13 = Light Tank Gun (128 X as powerful as a .44 mag)
Power Level 18 = Heavy Tank Gun (4096 X as powerful as a .44 mag)

On this scale, based on the idea that 1 MDC = 100 SDC, we could probably assume that Mega-Damage starts at about Power Level: 11, or Power Level: 12.

You could make the impact of weapons vs armor fairly non random (assume that 1 bullet from the same type of gun is pretty much the same as another when in comes to armor, and the randomness is saved for the damage that gets through defenses).

Then, for example, 8 point armor would totally protect you against the normal bullet, mostly protect you against the Heavy Machine Gun, and not have that much effect against the Tank Gun (a lot of damage would get though).

On that scale, 20 point armor would make you immune to most conventional weapons, but you could still be hurt at Ground-Zero of a nuke.

That is awesome.

Depends on how it was handled. I liked the Robotech varient of it way more than the RIFTS version. RIFTS never made any sense with the super tin-foil armor, and city busting handguns. At least in Robotech, the big guns were relegated to mecha only and the Cyclone Power armor made for a nice middle ground.

1) I am a Palladium fan.
2) I do not like everything about MDC.

Both MDC and SDC need an overhaul.

SDC has the issue of making armor useless at higher levels...which you can houserule by making the "to hit" roll based on the D20 + Modifier, but the AR roll based on the D20 only.   Personally, I've been happy with that modification.

MDC has the issue of everyone packing death rays...which kinda sorta gets houseruled if you do the 1 MDC = 10 SDC.

However, I do like the 1 MDC = 100 SDC because it drives home the "OMG death ray" concept.   In my games, you also suffer 1 SDC for every 1 MDC that your armor suffers.   That's reduced to 1/2 in PA and 1/10 in Vehicles / Mecha.

I don't invoke the -10 Dodge rule ever.  I want people to be dodging blasts and leaping for cover.   That's why you have 4-5 actions at 1st level.

However, to make the weapon damages more sensible I also do a ranking system:

Personal vs. Squad Support vs. Vehicle/Mecha vs. Spaceship

Personal = pistol and rifles that a human can carry.
Squad Support = stuff you need a cyborg or big beasties to carry
Vehicle / Mecha = anything mounted
Spaceship = anything mounted on a huge vessel

Each weapon does x2 damage to the rank below.   Thus, if I fire a Mecha weapon of just 4D6 at a puny human, he takes 4D6x4 damage.   So railguns rock since you get x2 damage against anything less than cyborg/large monster.

I don't divide damage upwards.  

Personally, I usually add a Fate Point system into Rifts.  I rank the OCC / RCC combos on a 1 to 5 scale.  1 being best (Cosmo Knight or Glitter Boy) and 5 being worst (Vagabond) and you begin with a number of Fate points equal to your ranking.   I keep the Fate points secret and that's the number of miracle saves from death they get.

If Rifts had a faster chargen, I wouldn't worry about it.  But 1 hour chargen means I want less PC death.

Pundit,
  Regarding your OP. I am of two minds:
1) I LOVE MDC in the Robotech RPG. It makes perfect sense in a game where people fight inside and outside of mechs.
2) Regarding most other uses of MDC, I do not approve. In heroes unlimited it created a sort of physical invulnerability, but didn't have any balance to it. In Rifts, it just created a have vs. have-not economy where if you didn't have an MDC duster and a weapon that did MDC, you just had to run and hide a lot.

  MDC sort of made an appearance in the Recon games, it made sense there too. I mean no amount of M16 fire is going to bust open a Sherman, right?

Quote from: StormBringer;407747That would make more sense, but I've always understood 'vibro-blade' (in general terms) to be something along the lines of an electric bread knife made out of adamantium, or ceramic alloys, or whatever the hardest material is in the game.

While Vibro-weapons tend to be made out of MDC materials (what isn't?), it's supposed to be the vibrofield that allows it to cut nearly anything.

I think the techno-babble* is it allows the weapon to cut down to the molecular level (between atoms, or what not), and that's why it can cut through anything, given time.

*Techno-babble is related to Handwavium, last I checked.

Quote from: everloss;407644Sorry for the Necro-bump but this caught my eye.

I actually don't understand your question about parrying in Palladium.  I've always thought parrying was pretty well described from the original Robotech RPG onward.  But to put it simply, parrying in Palladium is to use an object to block an attack.  To do this, the defender must roll higher than the attacker on a 20 sided die.  Dodge works exactly the same way, however they have clarified that one can only use Dodge once in a round, and that Dodge counts against all incoming attacks.  The idea being; You see a group of bad guys with guns and dive behind a robot's leg for cover.  All of those attackers have to roll to attack against that single dodge roll.

Huh? Where was this clarified?
I've certainly never used the dodge rules in that way; I've always read it and played it as dodging had to be rolled against each individual attack and cost one of your actions each time.

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