Palladium is notorious for being vague on how combat rounds are meant to play out.  Or, even how you're meant to add up your combat bonuses.

How do you run your game? 

The two big ones for us:

1.  A single dodge is good against any and all attacks directed at you until we come back around to you in the initiative order.

2.  You can dodge gunfire.  It's an opposed roll system.  Roll 5 or more to hit somebody, and higher than their dodge if they opt to do so (and they always do).

We later added a house rule that dodging vs gunfire needs to be somebody who is super agile/flying, or you have cover to duck.  However, we had stopped playing Palladium games by then, so it's untested.  It sounds like a good house rule.

Differently every time depending on the time of day, the position of the moon and stars, whether or not my pierogis were too soggy, etc just like every Palladium writer and Kevin Siembieda himself at his open houses. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on Today at 08:49:25 AMPalladium is notorious for being vague on how combat rounds are meant to play out.  Or, even how you're meant to add up your combat bonuses.

How do you run your game? 

The two big ones for us:

1.  A single dodge is good against any and all attacks directed at you until we come back around to you in the initiative order.

2.  You can dodge gunfire.  It's an opposed roll system.  Roll 5 or more to hit somebody, and higher than their dodge if they opt to do so (and they always do).

We later added a house rule that dodging vs gunfire needs to be somebody who is super agile/flying, or you have cover to duck.  However, we had stopped playing Palladium games by then, so it's untested.  It sounds like a good house rule.

I actually really like your rule #1 and we always (at least in Robotech and Rifts) let people dodge ranged fire (whether bullets or energy).   My old long time group was unfortunately quite gonzo where half the players powergamed though so not allowing that would basically kill everyone who didn't have a ridiculous character in one shot.

Even though I do like dogging on Robotech and Palladium in general, we did have awful amount of fun with Robotech when me and my friends were much younger and before we found Mekton. Speaking of damage. Woo. It was awesome when Southern Cross sourcebook added laser pistols that did 1d6 MDC. Yes, that's right hand held pistols doing mega damage. Oh, this isn't that awesome, but it was before RIFTS was a thing. Nothing like have a western style shootout where one shot is pretty much going to vaporize the other person.

Kevin S. Has been on podcasts recently, mainly the GlitterBoi (that's not miss-spelled), and the one I watch, The Legion of Myth. 

Kevin actually said that his rules are loosely-goossey deliberately.  He WANTS it that way because he doesn't feel there is a correct way to handle any and all situations.

It's a feature, not a bug. 

Also, he feels this gives GM's some agency to run every encounter differently, if they so choose.

It's one of the reasons his games are infuriating.  They just don't make sense sometimes. Example; why does Boxing make you shoot your gun of your army tank faster than a non-boxer?  Boxing gives that character another action/attack per round.

If you ask Kevin, then he'll probably ask a counter question, "Well, how did you and your GM handle it?"   Whatever you reply with is what he says you should do.

There is a meme about fans of Kevin run up to him at conventions and hug him for his great games, then threaten to punch him for his poorly written rules.

I'm less frustrated these days as I now know that he had a logic to it.  It's a weird, fucked up sort of logic that irritates me as a GM to not "know" if I'm playing it right, but muddle thru as best I can.  But, it doesn't hurt as much now that I know it's not me.

Also, to hell with the Boxing skill as written.  New house rule: It gives an extra attack only in unarmed melee combat when using fists and feet. Use a sword, gun, crossbow, blowgun, or main guns of your battleship, no extra attack. 

When I played Palladium FRP as a kid, I think we just ran it pretty much BECMI-style because I really didn't know any differently. Looking at the 1st edition rules, it is straightforward enough with how dodges and parries work that I don't think it'd be a big deal to do properly (and in fact I ran a PFRP game last year for a couple sessions, went fine). When I got Robotech, TMNT, and Ninjas and Superspies, same thing, it worked "good enough".

Then came Rifts...MDC REALLY fucked up the system beyond what was in Robotech specifically because it's easy enough to ignore megadamage when it's ONLY robots in that combat, but throw in everything else with no actual AC system...yeah. That said, when I only owned the main book and the first few sourcebooks, it worked fine as much as I can remember. Even using the Mechanoids. It was probably around Mercenaries I started seeing how dumb things were getting with a literal arms race of PC powers and bloat. No longer could an actual character like my headhunter or assassin be viable when everyone else had MDC PCs. Can't get into a bar fight in a rando frontier town because the dude punching you might have supernatural strength and turn you into paste with one punch. Further, the whole "you can't dodge more than X missiles" rule in some of the later books was ignored because it meant everyone would just fire that many missiles, no less, which is stupid. You can dodge 9 missiles, no problem, but 10 (or whatever it was)? Yeah, those ALL hit you!

So to actually answer the question, I think handwaving a lot of the stuff that makes no sense is the best approach, and also just assume the person who boxes has such great hand-eye coordination that their aim with guns is really, really, good and they can shoot more because they're not flinching from the recoil.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on Today at 08:49:25 AMPalladium is notorious for being vague on how combat rounds are meant to play out.  Or, even how you're meant to add up your combat bonuses.

How do you run your game? 

The two big ones for us:

1.  A single dodge is good against any and all attacks directed at you until we come back around to you in the initiative order.

Same.

Quote2.  You can dodge gunfire.  It's an opposed roll system.  Roll 5 or more to hit somebody, and higher than their dodge if they opt to do so (and they always do).

Same.

QuoteWe later added a house rule that dodging vs gunfire needs to be somebody who is super agile/flying, or you have cover to duck.  However, we had stopped playing Palladium games by then, so it's untested.  It sounds like a good house rule.

I'm good with being able to dodge gunfire just as a part of the system without needing to be super agile or whatnot. A moving target is harder to hit, and it's a heroic style game.

I also used a house rule that modified 20 or higher to hit (that actually hit) deals double damage, and a natural 20 deals 3x damage. I was never happy with how most damage in Rifts was stingy and most MDC values were generous bordering on silly.

I also used the MDC = x10 SDC instead of x100. I think the 100 value fits Robotech, but not Rifts.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on Today at 10:53:26 AMKevin S. Has been on podcasts recently, mainly the GlitterBoi (that's not miss-spelled), and the one I watch, The Legion of Myth. 

Kevin actually said that his rules are loosely-goossey deliberately.  He WANTS it that way because he doesn't feel there is a correct way to handle any and all situations.

It's a feature, not a bug. 

Also, he feels this gives GM's some agency to run every encounter differently, if they so choose.

It's one of the reasons his games are infuriating.  They just don't make sense sometimes. Example; why does Boxing make you shoot your gun of your army tank faster than a non-boxer?  Boxing gives that character another action/attack per round.

Yea. I wish I'd known this back in the day. And it's a crime against RPGs that Siembieda doesn't mention this in his books. We rely on the rules to give our games structure, and when that structure is rickety, the game runs poorly. Siembieda either needs to run his own games RAW and then fix those rules, or write up his loosey-goosey system into a set of rules and publish that instead.
Or he can keep ignoring the problem which is most likely.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on Today at 04:39:40 PMYea. I wish I'd known this back in the day. And it's a crime against RPGs that Siembieda doesn't mention this in his books. We rely on the rules to give our games structure, and when that structure is rickety, the game runs poorly. Siembieda either needs to run his own games RAW and then fix those rules, or write up his loosey-goosey system into a set of rules and publish that instead.
Or he can keep ignoring the problem which is most likely.

By all accounts, KS is literally one of the best GMs ever and he admits he pretty much just handles every game by fiat, the rules are for the PLAYERS to use to put their characters in context. I mean, he and Erick Wujcik collaborated quite frequently(EDIT: I mean he cofounded Palladium or am I mistaken?) and EW made Amber so...I am certain KS is cut from the same cloth. While Palladium games are D&Dish in nature, the games are run by a referee who rolls dice for visuals, looks at the situation, and determines the most reasonable outcome. I mean, I'm not against BtB by any means, and have run some "out in the open" games where I rolled everything in front of the players, but sometimes the dice lie.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on Today at 10:53:26 AMKevin S. Has been on podcasts recently, mainly the GlitterBoi (that's not miss-spelled), and the one I watch, The Legion of Myth. 

Kevin actually said that his rules are loosely-goossey deliberately.  He WANTS it that way because he doesn't feel there is a correct way to handle any and all situations.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Also, he feels this gives GM's some agency to run every encounter differently, if they so choose.
...

It's not a feature, it's BAD game design.

Kevin is literally offloading to the GM what the game designer should have sorted from day 1.

The advocates for this nonsense like Legion of Myth do themselves no favors by saying that it's not palladiums fault that some GM's are too stupid to properly curate their games.

Palladium games entire existence has been one of selling the sizzle, but shorting you on the steak.

Unfortunately the state of game design is generally bad enough that he has and will continue to get away with it as he always seems to find some fanboy to back up his craptastic game design.

Sorry, but no. Homebrew should not be the default option just to run your game.

He has some decent ideas, but someone really needs to go through and make a proper system out of them.