Quote from: CRKrueger;943078If you have made it work, what have you done?

After years of tinkering, trying other systems, etc. our group stopped worrying and learned to love the game. Basically, we created characters, and during the game we rolled a D20 from time to time to resolve combat and d100 to test skills. We stopped asking ourselves if it made sense or whatever. Each member in the group GMed the game and it finally worked like a charm. I came to understand that it's the way Siembieda runs is own games. Lots of rulings and roll some dice when in doubt.

Each player has to be well-versed in the rules concerning his character though (which requires a bit more investment than say, Call of Cthulhu) but it's not rocket-science either.

So, my advice : roll characters, play a game. There's really nothing more to it.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943078Now I know the standard response is "Everything" and the fix is "Use a different system".  
Lets assume we're not doing that.  
No Coalition Politics Talk please.
Ok, we've now had our pre-session communication about addressing the thread premise.

For ME, the issue is how much 'work' do you want to put into houseruling to fix the system until YOU (the person wanting to change, if at all) decide it's not worth it.  At some point, and it's different for everyone, you realize 'screw it, I'll run something else.'  Everyone has a different threshold.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943078At least on this site, there's a lot of love for Palladium Fantasy RPG 1st Edition, TMNT and Robotech, so where did the wheels come off the wagon?  People OSR the fuck out of D&D, d100 every older system you can think of, but Rifts seems to be "throw up your hands and say 'Fuck it'." Let's try to identify the Pain Points with the Rifts system and see if there's any mitigations we can apply.

1. Mega-Damage - Ok, the MDC/SDC divide is a big deal for a lot of people.  For people who hate MDC, is the problem that SDC weapons cannot effect MDC material or is it that MDC weapons multiply the damage by 100?  If that is the case, the go-to hack I've seen is to just make MDC x10 instead of x100 but keep the SDC invulnerability.  So, you still can't take out a Coalition Abolisher with an army equipped with M-60 machineguns, but it is possible a human can survive small amounts of MDC damage.  The other hack is to go the Savage Rifts route and don't have infantry weapons do mega-damage, so you keep the man-scale and vehicle scale weapons separate, more like Robotech.

The issue there is the math and how it effects the world in play.  A group of five men in C-80 gear with CR-14 assault lasers can within a couple of rounds blow the utter hell out of a UAR-1 Enforcer bot, the equivalent of a tank.  Now, this looks cool, but when you decide to actually use it in the sense of a military context, when you can arm, armour, feed and house that same five man crew for about 3 years for the price of one of those robots, why do the Coalition have anything other than power armour again?  Financially speaking it makes no sense for the robots, especially given how the combat system works.  15-25 attacks vs. 5 per round says dead robot.

Now, to fix this, all you really need is a tiered system, where each rank above armour does x5 damage to the target below that tier, and 1/5 to a target above.  It'll make robots/tanks and bigger objects actually a bit of a threat.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430782. Layout and Indexing - Obviously this is huge.  Kevin's layout skills at one point were acceptable for a one-man show (in a quaint and charming humorous way), at this point, they're downright embarrassing(in the perhaps there's a neurological explanation way).  A major problem with learning and using any Palladium system, but nothing we can do about unless we win the lottery.

Not an issue for me.  Is it legible?  Does the art look nice and appealing?  Yes?  Done.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430783. Damage Scaling and "Balance"(for the Rifts value of balance) - One of the problems with Rifts is that the signature weapon is the Boom Gun.  Kevin wants to keep it the most powerful weapon in the world, so even though the Coalition and Triax are nearing Golden Age Earth tech levels, they can't seem to make a weapon that can rival it, even massive cannons placed on a Battletech-sized robot or mounted on a vehicle the size of 20 M1 tanks can't match it.  However, a simple laser rifle can, when fired using the autofire rules (I guess they fixed that, saying energy weapons don't autofire).  This is a big one, because you potentially have to redo everything to compensate.

This goes back to the above, but the issue isn't the Boom Gun honestly.  It's the Glitter Boy's armour.  For such a scary weapon it can't actually do much damage to anything in a single shot, it does on average 90 damage, to a frame that has about 770?  Nope, not really not all that scary.  My 'fix' was to introduce the 'scaling' system I mentioned up above.  And made the Boom Gun a Robot Class weapon, whereas the armour itself is just Power Armour class.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430784. A million-million classes. - For me, this isn't too much of a dealbreaker.  Who cares if the classes are balanced?  A Cosmo-Knight and a Vagabond walk into a Juicer Bar...  Forget it Jake, it's Rifts.  But it is a pain in the ass trying to tell a newbie what's the difference between some of the various classes though.  You have to basically make the decision without an eye to most of the mechanics (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) but thanks to the Toughness Feat, for 17 years, players have been obsessing over "Chargen Traps".

Everyone wants to feel useful, to feel they contributed to the adventure, and when you end up sitting on the sidelines while everyone else, or just one class, does everything, you get bored and feel useless.  You need to prune the classes you're not going to use for that game.  Also, some classes are supposed to be 'strong' but mechanically, not so much (Pre-Tolkien War Cyber-Knight, I'm lookin' at you, bub.)  Again, though, you can easily fix this by deciding what sort of campaign you intend to run, and limit the classes to that.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430785. Skill system - Skills and rules scattershot across 75 books is a problem, but in the end, it's percentage based.  Because of that and the layout issues, decoding the skill system seems like it's akin to reading Al-Azif in the original Sabaic w/Zabur script (with resultant Sanity Loss) but it isn't really, it's fairly straightforward if you treat it like looking at Pendragon or Runequest skill systems as painted by Stafford on the side of a Medicine Tent during a really awesome Peyote trip, it all starts to make sense.  Knowing Kevin himself doesn't really run with things RAW, but just freeballs it most of the time explains much.

The arcane formula for the percentiles can be a bit of an issue, but the real problem is that some physical skills are effectively mandatory, like Boxing with it's free attack and bonus SDC.  But at the same time, it makes sense that some physical skills give you abilities, in my case I rolled the bonuses into the HTH combat system.  Expert and Martial Arts got the Boxing Bonus, and I think I gave Martial Arts the Gymnastics SDC stuff, but it's been so long I've forgotten the rest of it.

Then there's also the useless or confusing skills that everyone gets, but no one uses, like Detect Ambush.  That should have been renamed to 'Perception' or something, because it's best used for that.  However, because the name and fluff are so specific it ends up rarely being used in a lot of cases.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943078So what, for you, makes the game unplayable, not fun, not worth it, whatever?  If you have made it work, what have you done?

Here's a few more issues:  Any stat below 16 (save some side cases) is functionally pointless, this is baked into the system and can require a bit of work to reverse engineer, but some stats (like MA) can be traced back to give bonuses all the way to 11+.  The SDC creep which means that unless you're using an MDC weapon for any non-Supernatural creature, often means that an assault weapon or even a .44 Desert Eagle (which in an old BTS supplement did 5d6, but was lowered to 4d6) barely scratches a man (However, that's easily fixed.  Turn SDC into non-lethal resistance, like your skin, but any attack that's considered lethal goes DIRECTLY to hit points.)  Sometimes a player can get some much SDC to soak a single point MD shot too.

There's also a lot of basic rules that got changed over the years, like the -10 vs. Ranged attacks.  Sometimes you got to add your Dodge bonus, sometimes not.  Sometimes it was there, sometimes not.  It's very inconsistent.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;943175There's also a lot of basic rules that got changed over the years, like the -10 vs. Ranged attacks.  Sometimes you got to add your Dodge bonus, sometimes not.  Sometimes it was there, sometimes not.  It's very inconsistent.

This is a biggie. RIFTS seems more like K Seimbeida's collected rulings, instead of a set of rules. Reading the FAQ in the first Sourcebook or the Conversion book, for example.
(And then the Unlimited Edition makes things even more confused.)
If you take RIFTS as a book of suggested game rules, it makes a lot more sense. It doesn't make the game any easier to parse, though...

I'm a pretty big fan of Mechanoid Invasion Book III.  Not sure you really need more than maybe six pages of rules for Palladium.  Heroes Unlimited first edition is where it went off the rails for me with the inconsistent and cludgy physical skill rules.  I'd probably rule that buying specific skills builds specific stats.  Body Building builds PS, Gymnastics builds PE, Chess and Mathematics build IQ.  That kind of thing.  You'd just add your stat to 5% per level for everything but you'd still get education level bonuses.  But maybe education levels should count as literal experience level levels, that rule never quite seems fair.

I'm okay with mega damage but when it's applied equally to battle cruisers and laser pistols it's kinda irrelevant.  I'd go with perhaps three scale factors, kilo, mega, and giga to fix this with maybe a 20% overlap from one to the next.  For example a weapon that does 80 - 800 damage could still damage KDC.  And yes, if you're using mega it should be x 1000000.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943078Forget it Jake, it's Rifts.

You win the thread. I know you started it, but that was really funny.

l'm imagining that scene would end up looking more like Desperado than a Hammer film, though...

Oh man, a good Rifts thread always gets me.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430781. Mega-Damage - Ok, the MDC/SDC divide is a big deal for a lot of people.  For people who hate MDC, is the problem that SDC weapons cannot effect MDC material or is it that MDC weapons multiply the damage by 100?  If that is the case, the go-to hack I've seen is to just make MDC x10 instead of x100 but keep the SDC invulnerability.  So, you still can't take out a Coalition Abolisher with an army equipped with M-60 machineguns, but it is possible a human can survive small amounts of MDC damage.  The other hack is to go the Savage Rifts route and don't have infantry weapons do mega-damage, so you keep the man-scale and vehicle scale weapons separate, more like Robotech.

10:1::SDC:MDC is definitely going to happen whenever I finally get to run classic Rifts again.

I am ambivalent on removing the MDC tag from personal body armor and small arms. It is certainlyvthe sanest thing to do but by this point, leveling houses with a laser pistol shot is a Rifts trope. I'll get back to you on that when I get to run Savage Rifts.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430782. Layout and Indexing - Obviously this is huge.  Kevin's layout skills at one point were acceptable for a one-man show (in a quaint and charming humorous way), at this point, they're downright embarrassing(in the perhaps there's a neurological explanation way).  A major problem with learning and using any Palladium system, but nothing we can do about unless we win the lottery.

I am OK with the simple layout but fuck it, man, indexing.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430783. Damage Scaling and "Balance"(for the Rifts value of balance) - One of the problems with Rifts is that the signature weapon is the Boom Gun.  Kevin wants to keep it the most powerful weapon in the world, so even though the Coalition and Triax are nearing Golden Age Earth tech levels, they can't seem to make a weapon that can rival it, even massive cannons placed on a Battletech-sized robot or mounted on a vehicle the size of 20 M1 tanks can't match it.  However, a simple laser rifle can, when fired using the autofire rules (I guess they fixed that, saying energy weapons don't autofire).  This is a big one, because you potentially have to redo everything to compensate.

Settembrini has already tackled this to my satisfaction in a rare coherent post, so I'll only say that more coherence in worldbuilding in general, and in tech levels in particular, would be great.

The contradictory rulings are a pain in the ass but having to decide between them is the essence of GMing (if still probably unacceptable by modern editorial standards).

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430784. A million-million classes. - For me, this isn't too much of a dealbreaker.  Who cares if the classes are balanced?  A Cosmo-Knight and a Vagabond walk into a Juicer Bar...  Forget it Jake, it's Rifts.  But it is a pain in the ass trying to tell a newbie what's the difference between some of the various classes though.  You have to basically make the decision without an eye to most of the mechanics (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) but thanks to the Toughness Feat, for 17 years, players have been obsessing over "Chargen Traps".

Another bit of madness which I wholeheartedly embrace.

Quote from: CRKrueger;9430785. Skill system - Skills and rules scattershot across 75 books is a problem, but in the end, it's percentage based.  Because of that and the layout issues, decoding the skill system seems like it's akin to reading Al-Azif in the original Sabaic w/Zabur script (with resultant Sanity Loss) but it isn't really, it's fairly straightforward if you treat it like looking at Pendragon or Runequest skill systems as painted by Stafford on the side of a Medicine Tent during a really awesome Peyote trip, it all starts to make sense.  Knowing Kevin himself doesn't really run with things RAW, but just freeballs it most of the time explains much.

This is what makes me give up on running Rifts every time.

I've considered using fixed percentages as per Pundit's fix, or 1d20 + level vs. a modified DC table a la D&D3, but you know what I think would work best? Scrap away the whole damn skill system. Let's ad hoc this bitch OD&D style. You're a Headhunter? You know tactics, you can recognize and do minor repairs on weapons, handle explosives, camouflage, whatever. CS Technical Officer? Basic soldier training plus your MOS. Rogue Scholar? You're handy with scholarly stuff, you can read and write, do math, recognize authentic pre-Rifts artifacts, know history, decode an alien script, etc. Rogue Scientist? Autopsy an alien, isolate a pathogen, maybe even design and repair a robot (make up "specialties" a la CS Tech MOS?). If there's a chance of failure I'll choose a die and assign a probability, like God and Gary Gygax intended.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;943175Here's a few more issues:  Any stat below 16 (save some side cases) is functionally pointless, this is baked into the system and can require a bit of work to reverse engineer, but some stats (like MA) can be traced back to give bonuses all the way to 11+.

Yep. I redid the stat bonuses table so that stats give bonuses at 10 or higher, and simply spread out the bonuses.

Curiously, we don't have any skill problems in our weekly game. The skill list from the GM's Mega-Sourcebook makes our lives easy.

The ONLY thing I would want to change is to simplify the skills system. That's it.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;943226Yep. I redid the stat bonuses table so that stats give bonuses at 10 or higher, and simply spread out the bonuses.

Hey, Rat?  Mind if I steal those?  They're brilliant, and I know of a friend who would love those, as much as I do.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;944149Hey, Rat?  Mind if I steal those?  They're brilliant, and I know of a friend who would love those, as much as I do.

Go for it. Keep in mind I haven't playtested with them, and a lot of monsters/NPCs would get bonuses where they wouldn't previously.

I just recently stumbled on this community, and I'm thrilled to see something like this. I GM'ed a RIFTS game for years in the 90s and have a lot of fond memories. My group was already familiar with the base system from the other Palladium games, so I was able to do some heavy tinkering without it becoming a clusterfuck.

This is what we ended up with:

1-Remove MDC and switch to DR/SDC system: From the other comments this appears to be a common solution, so I will be brief. All armor has the same SDC value as it had MDC, but gains a Damage Reduction value. Personal armor has a baseline 20 DR. Power Armor has 30, and larger robots and such have 40+.

When someone in personal armor is hit, half goes to the armor and half hits the wearer. Power Armor and robots take damage straight to the armor. The idea is that a Stormtrooper type grunt will still go down fairly easily while combat focused PCs, robots and such will not.

2-Damage overhaul: Use firearms as a baseline and increase the SDC damage for most MD weapons and spells, in some cases drastically. The idea is that an energy/rail gun should be a clear upgrade over a firearm. Add armor piercing and plasma attributes to allow those weapons to stand out without excessive damage increase.

3-Burst fire overhaul: Remove the "fire X rounds, counts as X attacks" mechanic and replace with a new burst mechanic for single attacks:

-Single action weapons (pump shotgun, Winchester) can shoot a burst of 3 for x1.5 damage.
-Semi Auto guns (pistols, etc) can shoot a burst of 5 for x2 damage
-Automatic weapons (assault rifle, machine gun) can shoot a burst of 10 for x3 damage.
-High ROF guns (MG-42, MAC-10) can shoot a burst of 20 for x4 damage.
-3 round burst weapons (M-16, Triax guns) can shoot a single burst as an aimed shot.

4-Cover save: I wanted a "reasonable" contested roll vs shooting to go with the rest of the system, and allowed an automatic dodge (without the -6 modifier) against shooting if the defender had effective cover vs the attack.

5-Boxing: Oddly specific but every PC made sure to take boxing. The extra attack from boxing is limited to a punch attack.

6-Skills: Percentage skills use d100 Rolemaster style difficulty checks.

7-Balance: Even with all of that, the massive amounts of classes are impossible to balance and I just let people pick whatever they wanted and scaled the game to that. My players generally did pick things that they thought were cool rather than the most mechanically powerful, but I'm not sure players in 2017 would do the same.

This did not work perfectly but did work pretty well for us, and we had a lot of fun games using the system over several years. Having said all that, I can't imagine running this in 2017. My 20 year old self liked complicating things a lot more than my 40 something self does. And in this day and age of carefully balanced MMO games and rulesets, giant stacks of rulebooks seem to be a relic. I still do really like Parry/Dodge/Strike though.

The biggest challenge with Rifts...

Is that it is an RPG you make your own, yet there are also 2-6 players interested in doing the same. As written, the system is inconsistent-but it is nothing a good GM can't handle.

It's a great setting with a system that deserves a major overhaul to the core concepts.

Back in the old days, there may have been a time/effort ROI that made sense for GMs to put in the hours, but in the age of a bazillion RPGs, its harder to justify.

Quote from: Spinachcat;945177It's a great setting with a system that deserves a major overhaul to the core concepts.

Back in the old days, there may have been a time/effort ROI that made sense for GMs to put in the hours, but in the age of a bazillion RPGs, its harder to justify.

This. "Some Assembly Required" is not acceptable for commercial RPG products anymore. Your customer had better be able to play it out of the box, as if any other game product, and nail the intended play experience; it's the difference between a car and a car kit. That's what WOTC and Paizo do better than the rest. Palladium's games are car kits, and given their competition it's not surprising that they endure only among hardcore kit types (which is not, and never has been, most customers; they want shit to Just Fucking Work).