Quote from: Atomic Scotsman;381851Heroes was okay, but the Marvel game from back in the day was much better.

HU is, IMHO, exactly like SW supers: it's not the most comprehensive supers RPG ever that will give you everything from Roscharch to the Silver Surfer, but it works. I've just posted a more detailed opinion here at that other forum.

Quote from: Atomic Scotsman;381851Ninjas & Super Spies was less a game and more a giant list of equipment and OOC's.

Yes! And that was the beauty of it!

N&SS had like, one paragraph of setting, about how the PotUSA and the Soviet premier were but "innocents" in shadow wars, fought by the titular ninjas and super-spies, which determined the true destiny of the world.

Then it gave you everything you could possibly dream of to fight the aforementioned wars, from agency creation rules to cybernetics to mystic kung fu.

It's really barebones, true, and if it was released today it would be lambasted by every reviewer ever. But back in the day, for me, it was a hell of a lot more effective than many a game with detailed, lovingly crafted, painstakingly researched setting (though I confess I'd love to see an author like Robin Laws or Kenneth Hite cook up a fleshed-out setting for N&SS).

I'm gushing, I know. Sorry. But when you're 16, and the author just says, "here are some ninjas, and here are some superspies, now go save the world from the commies and the Mafia", that's all you need to go apeshit.

Quote from: The Butcher;381857(though I confess I'd love to see an author like Robin Laws or Kenneth Hite cook up a fleshed-out setting for N&SS).

Mmmm, Kenny Hite.

I am loving DAY AFTER RAGNAROK

Quote from: The Butcher;381857I'm gushing, I know. Sorry. But when you're 16, and the author just says, "here are some ninjas, and here are some superspies, now go save the world from the commies and the Mafia", that's all you need to go apeshit.

Haha, well sure. And I was about that age too when this stuff was coming out. TMNT and ROBOTEH were more to my taste. I was a huge fan of the comics (fuck that cartoon!), and the anime/manga. RIFTS and Nightbane (which I thought had a different name at one point?) were the only original PB IP's that really interested me.

We played a few games of HU -it was a lot of fun. But that was also about the time that I started discovering that there were actually systems that were's Palladium or D&D. SO I was starting to drift away.

Quote from: Atomic Scotsman;381662Well that is a problem, but one of Palladium's own making. Within the RPG community I've always gotten the very strong impression that Palladium in general, and RIFTS in particular, is considered a huge fucking joke.

And even though I love Palladium I know that's 100% due to nostalgia.

Yeah, sure, there is a loyal core that keep the company afloat for now, but that won't last.

So if the majority of the community seems to think your product sucks, I would say that's a pretty good reason to do something new.

You know, people have been predicting the fall of Palladium for decades now, mostly people that hate either the games (for being too "infantile") or the guy behind them (for a multitude of reasons, some justifiable, many not).  
Palladium has survived countless waves of collapse in the industry that took out many of its direct competitors and those who were seen by "the majority of the community" as being so much better/deeper/smarter/whatever. So yeah, if I was Siembieda, I'd be laughing my ass off at the self-styled spokespeople of "the majority of the community" (which is really a bunch of Swine at RPG.net and the Forge coupled with some rabid Palladium-haters).
Palladium recently released the new Robotech RPG, which apparently has done very well in sales, in no small part due to the brilliant marketing strategies of making the book manga-size so it would sell where the kiddies' manga books are (ie.making there be at least a fucking chance that the book will be noticed), and pricing the book affordably.

Also, if that RIFTS movie is ever made (by Bruckheimer or anyone else) that will be quite the game-changer too.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Spinachcat;381815At the Open House in 2007, I got to play Phase World (Rifts in Space) with author Carl Gleba who is a good writer, great guy and talented GM.  We had 8 players at the table and Carl did exactly that.  He threw out Init and Actions and just went around the table saying "What do you do?" and it worked fine.

Not to nitpick, but as far as I'm concerned, Mutants In Orbit is "RIFTS in Space".  Phase World is another setting for RIFTS, that happens to be in space.


RPGPundit

I'll be the first to agree that online forums of any sort are a poor, biased sample of the greater universe of gamers out there.

And I'll be the first to concur that Palladium's longevity is, by any standards, a success story. Witness TSR's bankruptcy, SJG's dependence on Munchkin, WW's scaling down of RPG production in favor of e-pub and PoD efforts. Palladium survived all of it, plus its own homebrewed financial scandal.

I don't have any hard data, but I can't shake the feeling that Kevin Siembieda's doing something right. Like someone posted elsewhere, it might not be a growth strategy; but it's a good, solid survival strategy of the sort that would give Zombie Darwin a boner.

In this, I subscribe to Pundit's observation. In Kevin Siembeda's place, I too would be disinclined to give any credence to the rampant online criticism against the aging and unchanging Palladium system, the cavalier attitude to deadlines, the amateurish layout or other common online complaints, as long as I was selling well enough to get me out of a tight spot, while the other big names of the industry are cutting back on their publishing efforts.

However, Kevin Siembieda himself catches plenty of flak online, and I'm not sure I can ascribe all of it to the "Swine" types. Crazy obsessive attitudes towards IP protection and mistreatment of freelancers (cf. Bill Coffin's epic RPGnet rant, and Josh Chewning's falling-out post-Dead Reign) seem to be recurring themes.

I have no horse on this race. I'm not out to demonize the man, but I wouldn't dismiss all the online derision as garden-variety swinery either. Like it or not, he is a polemic and polarizing figure, like so many others in the hobby (Gary Gygax, anyone?).

tl;dr. Kevin Siembieda is a genius. He may also be a jerk. Who cares?

I did say that some of the complaints against Siembieda were justified.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Tavis;381852The Megaverse Ambassadors thread has some great pregens in terms of having all the character-making work done for you, but none of them I've seen so far have the iconic illustrations of that OCC which I consider essential - why play a glitter boy if you can't admire your shininess?

Thank you for the praise!
But the reason I didn't include any artwork is for the afore-mentioned probability that Palladium would ask me to remove it, even on a demo game provided free of charge to promote their own gamelines... :duh:

EDIT: oh, and Atomic Scotsman you're right; Nightbane used to be Nightspawn. Todd McFarlane (of Spawn fame) sued Palladium, to require them to change the name.

Quote from: Novastar;383544Thank you for the praise!
But the reason I didn't include any artwork is for the afore-mentioned probability that Palladium would ask me to remove it, even on a demo game provided free of charge to promote their own gamelines... :duh:

Oi! Well, I think what I'm going to do is to make a distilled layer for those awesome pregens - so that players will get the original sheet with all those numbers, and then a second sheet with a scanned pic, hit boxes for MDC, and the handful of most essential bonuses. (What those are I have yet to determine). Plus a space for a character sketch 'cause you gotta have that. I'll be glad to share these privately once they're ready!

I tried some token-based Rifts house rules with my son while playing "Lego battle chess." We used this for trying out Chainmail's man-to-man rules too, and it's good for getting a feel of the weirdnesses of a system:
- put a bunch of chess pieces, figures, etc. on the board
- let your eight-year-old decide what weapons and armor they have
- on your turn, move some of the figures and have them attack (the anarchic aspect of this layer makes it fun for said eight-year-old; letting them break the nominal rules of chess in any way they want buys you space to dictate the details of the combat system you're testing)
- resolve the attacks as normal, not worrying too much about anything but hit/miss (e.g. here I just gave each sttack a d6 damage and gave us both a stack of 20 Legos for MDC)

What I did here was:
- players roll to hit
- on your turn, you decide how many of your four tokens to spend on attacks or save for defenses
- roll 5 or better if in melee (adj. chess pieces), 8 or better ranged
- spend a token to dodge/parry

In practice, there didn't seem to be a lot of fun in saving tokens to parry; you might as well go all-out and attack. This might be because we had low investment in each chess piece, so saving your skin wasn't a priority. Still, I think it convinced me that I want an alternating system where each player takes an attack, or loses their next attack, as in the rules.

Here are the new iteration of my house rules, based on this experience:

GENERAL
- A round is nominally one second long, so that most combat happens in bullet time
- The order of player turns within a round is always in fixed initiative order - 10+Init, highest first
- The number of phases in a round is equal to the highest level of attacks in the party (or among the enemy).
- Each player can act on each phase, but your action can't be an attack unless you have a token
- To allow for more interesting actions during a split-second round, all PCs have techno-wizard/magical/psionic gear that allows them to communicate telepathically with anyone they can see in compressed bursts of thought, or teleport anywhere. (This avoids the problem where one PC is doing something in the next room at the start of combat, and it's all over by the time they arrive two seconds of game-time and 45 minutes of real-time later). Teleporting is risky; if you roll doubles on your post-teleport action, a dimensional shift happens
- When a PC would be killed by mega-damage, they can save themselves by invoking a dimensional shift, which affects all PCs and whatever NPCs the GM decides. The player can either choose the miraculous event that lets the PC crawl unharmed from the wreckage of their MDC armor, or the terrible consequence of the dimensional shift (e.g. a Splugorth battle-cruiser appears in the skies). Whichever one the player doesn't choose the GM does, and tries to make things as bad for the player as is compatible with fun.

COMBAT SPECIFIC
- At the start of combat, all players roll initiative, and the DM rolls initiative. Those who beat the enemy get a single attack token. The NPCs get their full complement of attack tokens.
- In the first round of combat, players go around once in this order & can spend their one attack token. Hits are noted but damage is not rolled.
- Once all tokens are spent, damage is rolled and allocated.
- After this "surprise phase" every PC gets next turn's full complement of tokens.
- Then NPCs go and can spend all of their remaining tokens. (This way it encourages them to dodge the first round's attacks, making the fight not end so quick, and also starting with a NPC barrage of fire makes it more likely that some of the players will want to do more-interesting things on the following turn like get into cover, repair damage, etc.)
- NPC's damage is rolled and allocated during the sequence, to keep players doing things.
- After NPC tokens are spent they get all next turn's.
- Now every player goes in fixed initiative order, one phase at a time, with the NPCs coming at the end of each phase and spending only one token per phase just like PCs
- PC damage to NPCs is still not rolled and allocated until the end of the round; there's a strategic element (aided by GM description of how things look) where you want to stop piling fire onto a target that's likely to go down and switch to a new one. Cinematically this is because it's cool when it takes a while for an enemy mech to stop moving and blow up; play-wise this is because me doing math to subtract NPC MDC totals is the slowest aspect, so making it into a "which enemies will die?" summary at the end of the round makes it suspenseful instead of a bottleneck that punishes players for doing something cool (hitting) with a slow-down before the next player gets to do their cool.

I'll playtest this with another game of battle chess, but I like some of the wacky ideas it's generated like the teleportation and dimensional shifts; now it's really starting to feel like Rifts to me!

Quote from: Novastar;383544EDIT: oh, and Atomic Scotsman you're right; Nightbane used to be Nightspawn. Todd McFarlane (of Spawn fame) sued Palladium, to require them to change the name.

That was a red letter year for obscure products in an obscure hobby to be targeted for lawsuits over names. I owned Nightspawn (and oddly, the name change actually turned me off of the setting.) at one time.  A niche game, not at all bad imho, once you accept that it IS a palladium game with all that entails.

I also own WW's Aeon, which was changed to Trinity that same year because MTV owns the rights to Aeon Flux, no relation, and threatened to sue.  Oddly, that was during the dead years between the big anime phase of Aeon Flux and the actually process of shopping around a generic action sci-fi movie that would use the same name to draw elite geeks and Charlize Theron in a catsuit to pull in everyone else.

I think that as eras of movies go, the aughts will be the era of shit movies that made assloads of money and stuck in the public conscience because they looked sweet.

The 80's, of course, was the era of gay pride movies featuring neutered muscle men with really big guns and a light coat of baby oil...

I'll get back to you on the nineties. It may just have been an oasis of urban hipster success, defying all the laws of gods and men in the process. Tarantino, the arch-blaspheme.  

Or I could be smoking the crack.  Always bet on crack. once you've gone crack you never go back...

Quote from: Spike;384304That was a red letter year for obscure products in an obscure hobby to be targeted for lawsuits over names. I owned Nightspawn (and oddly, the name change actually turned me off of the setting.) at one time.  A niche game, not at all bad imho, once you accept that it IS a palladium game with all that entails.

Actually, as much as I don't like the base mechanics of Palladium, they have always been a source of other excellent material. The random monster creator from Nightbane/Spawn being one of them.

The mutant creation rules out of TMNT are also pretty great.

Oh yeah. I was definitely thinking of that random table thing when reminiscing about Nightspawn.  

I mean: I've never exactly thought it would be cool to be a cenobyte, but the ability to make my own that are very explicitely not derivative from the limited, existing sample? That shit is gold.

Its a little harder to go outside that mold, and when you do there aren't too many options (angelic, angelic with wings, angelic with sharp teeth and claws....) as I recall, but definitely worth the price of admission.

One thing I have liked about palladium games is generally all of your choices have real mechanical impact on your character but there are so many ways to get to the same point that there isn't usually a single, domininant, must have trait.

Quote from: Atomic Scotsman;384357Actually, as much as I don't like the base mechanics of Palladium, they have always been a source of other excellent material. The random monster creator from Nightbane/Spawn being one of them.

The mutant creation rules out of TMNT are also pretty great.

Pretty well all of Palladium's random tables are win.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;384737Pretty well all of Palladium's random tables are win.

RPGPundit

Well . . .I don't know about random insanity tables.

When's the last time you got hit in the head and woke up with a powerful fear of hamsters?

But many of their tables, generators, etc. are pretty great.

What I like about stuff such as the Nightbane tables for character generation is that it gives you such a delicious mixed bag of traits and abilities. It forces you to not play your favorite pet character in yet another RPG setting.

Quote from: Atomic Scotsman;384773Well . . .I don't know about random insanity tables.

When's the last time you got hit in the head and woke up with a powerful fear of hamsters?

But many of their tables, generators, etc. are pretty great.

What I like about stuff such as the Nightbane tables for character generation is that it gives you such a delicious mixed bag of traits and abilities. It forces you to not play your favorite pet character in yet another RPG setting.

I don't quite recall the reference, but there was one book (Fantasy 1st ed maybe?) where characters could end up having to roll a sexual fetish and it said to used the phobias table, so characters could be turned on by mold (for example).
I hope thats not realistic. Please no one disabuse me of this

Quote from: Atomic Scotsman;384773Well . . .I don't know about random insanity tables.

When's the last time you got hit in the head and woke up with a powerful fear of hamsters?

But that's WHY its Win!

RPGPundit