Quote from: Nerzenjäger;787586Fantastic. I like how you rounded it off with a question, playing with their expectations.

Thank you, one thing I would really suggest is to carefully consider what books you want to use, and what OCCs and RCCs are open to the players. There is no internal balance for the game and so it really falls on the GM and Players to regulate the scale. I mean if you really wanted to you could run a Power Rangers styled game with each player as a Cosmo-Knight from Phase World battling the evil Splugorth for control of Atlantis. I also would not advise this for your first game.

If you pared things down to just the Midwest you can tell a very compelling story with the Coalition, the Free States and outlying towns. Especially if you use a bit of nuance with the Coalition so they don't come off as just Future Nazis but ordinary people that sacrificed everything to survive and don't realize the monsters they have become for it.

Rifts brings back good memories to me ! the 1st ed Corebook was pure gonzo post apo high tech future with a lot of guns !

Vampire Kingdoms was a totaly over the top idea : Mexico full of vampires !

Atlantis is a very beautiful book.

NGR and Triax is full of cool robot and power armor designs from Kevin Long.

Undersea, Japan, Mercenaries, Juicer Uprising and Coalition War Campaigns are full of awesome pics from Vince Martin (I wish he stayed working for Palladium) !

And finally, Phase World is an anwesome setting which can be use for a lifetime of RPG gaming (and also features terrific pics from Vince Martin) !

Quote from: yabaziou;787659Atlantis is a very beautiful book.

Of the various Rifts books Atlantis was my favorite. There was a definite power creep in most of the books but Atlantis seemed to mesh well with the core setting, and explained the cover of the main book to boot.

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;787530Human Sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

Hehe, best quote ever!

Much like Peano arithmetics and the Tao, no description of Rifts can do it justice. I like to call this the Siembieda Incompleteness Theorem.

My usual elevator pitch goes something like this:

"Rifts is a game where the post-WWIII Earth becomes a transdimensional nexus and gets invaded by beings from every imaginable world. It's a game where a dragon, a mecha pilot, a wizard and a hobo might team up to fight the vampire lords of Mexico, alien slavers from Atlantis, the cyborg barbarian tribes of Russia or the ever-popular jackbooted, skull-helmeted human supremacists of the Coalition States."

Not a jewel of brevity, and as I said it hardly does the game justice. But there you go.

Quote from: The Butcher;787675Much like Peano arithmetics and the Tao, no description of Rifts can do it justice. I like to call this the Siembieda Incompleteness Theorem.
.

Full disclosure here, I'm not a fan of the rules engine or a lot of the setting pieces. Because a lot of the material is compartmentalized though, it's easy to pick and choose the parts you want to use.

RIFTS: Where the peashooter laser pistol can raze a small village, but if you want to kick a vampire's ass, you better bring your super-soaker and the water balloons.

RIFTS: The only place where someone covered in magical tatoos that can stop a nuclear missile, can hang out with:
A Russian cyborg cat,
Someone mainlining more drugs then the last 10 Tour de France winners,
A wizard crackling with mystic powers (with 10 pages worth of spells to prove it), and
A guy. Just a guy. No, he doesn't even have a laser rifle! Just.a.guy.

And it's totally normal.

Quote from: Certified;787642Thank you, one thing I would really suggest is to carefully consider what books you want to use, and what OCCs and RCCs are open to the players. There is no internal balance for the game and so it really falls on the GM and Players to regulate the scale.

This I am informed about; I don't give much of a damn about balance, the scenario will have to provide challenges to all types of characters. For rules and options I will probably stick with the classic rulebook (no RUE here) and a world book on the region the characters are starting in. Seems the most natural to me.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;787753This I am informed about; I don't give much of a damn about balance, the scenario will have to provide challenges to all types of characters. For rules and options I will probably stick with the classic rulebook (no RUE here) and a world book on the region the characters are starting in. Seems the most natural to me.

I GM'd Rifts for almost 15 years. Never had an issue with party balance. There were some occasions were I had a campaign idea that some OCCs and Races wouldn't work, but in a balls out game? Players could be anything. The longest running game I ran had all kinds of characters and the one that lasted the longest (5th level, if I remember correctly) was a Vagabond. He only died because another player killed him with a bad throw of a grenade.

I still think people who shit on Rifts for balance issues are probably really terrible GMs that I wouldn't want to play in a game with. It's really not that hard to run an adventure with a dragon hatchling, a glitterboy, a juicer, a mutant badger, a vagabond, and a techno-wizard. Really, you just don't have to be a douche bag.

It also helps to not have douche bag players, but once again, that comes down to a GM issue.

Running Rifts definitely strengthened me as a GM/DM for later games. Especially when making rulings on the fly and coming up with adventures when the players either went in a different (figurative) direction or blew up whatever Big Bad I was going to use.

Hell, if there were a clinic on dungeon mastering, I would train everyone on running Rifts. If you can do that without sucking, you'll be awesome at running any game.

Quote from: everloss;787905I still think people who shit on Rifts for balance issues are probably really terrible GMs that I wouldn't want to play in a game with. It's really not that hard to run an adventure with a dragon hatchling, a glitterboy, a juicer, a mutant badger, a vagabond, and a techno-wizard. Really, you just don't have to be a douche bag.

Having read Rifts thoroughly over the years, I'm sensing truth to this statement. Maybe I'm just the type to not worry too much, but I just can't see what the big, supposed problem with running the game is (in all fairness though: I might be finding out soon).
The character generation is somewhat of a mess from an organisational pov, but the game itself is ridiculously simple.

I think it was Sett who said, that it is easier for the uninitiated to understand Rifts in context of its predecessor Palladium Fantasy 1E -- which is a much better organised book by all accounts. This could be very true, for even though I bought Palladium 1E much later than my first copy of Rifts, I started to understand the latter better after perusal of the former.

Quote from: everloss;787907... or blew up whatever Big Bad I was going to use...

An event that is no surprise in a great RIFTS game.

Not to say that it couldn't handle other types of play. But "heroic hooligans shooting up the multiverse" is something that suits RIFTS perfectly, and was the main point of RIFTS for my group.

I think that when people look at a game like Rifts, after being used to playing other games by other companies, they can't handle the chaos. So many games are preoccupied with "balance" between character classes, magic and martial feats, obsessed with equality, etc that they see Rifts and just think, "nope." Because they think they're going to have to spend more time "fixing" the game in the false belief that it's "broken," simply because it is so far out of their comfort zone.


I like playing Pathfinder, but I can see that if I had played Pathfinder before ever playing Rifts, I would probably hate Rifts. I've been running LotFP for a few years now and I've found shades of that Rifts chaos in it. Probably one of the reasons I like it so much.

Oh well my attempt at a long pitch for the game:

200 years after the end of the world, creatures of magic and aliens from other dimensions live side-by-side with humans upon the reshaped Earth. PCs can be normal humans, wizards, mutants, dragons, cyborgs, even creatures from other dimensions (pull out your favourite character from some other RPG and use the Conversion Book). Your group could be fighting for survival in the wilderness, exploring demon-infested ruins looking for treasure, allying with the fascists that are humanities' current best hope, helping save a small town from bandits, going for a trip through the Rifts to a different planet completely, or getting dragged into the battle against / between the cosmic evils that threaten the planet -the Splugorth, the Four Horseman, the Mechanoids, the Vampire Intelligences.