Post originally by Roy Morgan at 2004-04-12 18:34:05
Converted from Phorums BB System

Quoth Rebarbative:

"Er, maybe because Rifts (and Palladium, for that matter) is a throw back to the OLD days of RPGS, where every player character had to have a class and a level? (Incidentally, the author says he uses an experience point system because he finds it "extremely realistic and practical" and then goes on to say he doesn't know how many times he's read in a comic book "only my years of experience enabled me to beat him"..... Bizarre. I never really considered comic books as realistic).

Because the system is broken - having percentile dice for skills, d20's for combat, d6's for hit points and various dice for weapons?

Because if you shoot someone with lots of SDC, you end up doing bruise damage?"

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Change SDC to Hit Points and you've basically just described d20, save for the percentiles for skills. The /newest/ thing out there in gaming, donchaknow! ;-) That having been said, Rifts is actually one of the very few games that could benefit from a d20 conversion, but Siembieda won't allow it (he also won't allow a complete rewrite of the system).

Sadly, the OLD Palladium Fantasy RPG (black cover edition) and TMNT and Other Strangeness are still very good, very playable games, written in the pre-Rifts days with pre-Rifts versions of the Palladium game system. Dinosaurs by comparison to some of the stuff written now, but still damn good games by most standards. They didn't have the problems Rifts did, but often get lumped into the pile with Rifts anyway.

I have to admit, there was a time that I thought Rifts was one of the best game settings ever written (in terms of possibilities rather than of hard facts on the setting. No Blue Planet, this game), saddled with an awkward system. Then most of the later books got written, and I quickly lost any faith in it. I still buy the occasional used book for old times' sake, but I doubt I'll ever play it again without some serious conversions.