Things About The Rifts RPG From Palladium Games

A photo of my Rifts: Ultimate Edition book.

You may not have noticed, but our weekly G+ Hangout group has been playing Palladium's Rifts RPG. We spent a couple of weeks working out characters and going over our ideas for setting, and then last week we had our first actual session of the campaign.

If it seems like I am making a lot of posts, I am going on a trip to Las Vegas next week (where there will be some gaming that I will be talking about once I get back), and I want to get a little ahead of things.

There seems to be two groups that have come out of the internet as we have been talking about our excitement over getting to play this game. The first group is made up of lapsed Rifts players/GMs, and those who have never played the game, who have taken our enthusiasm as an impetus to pick up the game for the first time, or to replace the books that they had gotten rid of previously. The other group were the people who wanted to complain about the game being "broken" or "outdated." We talked about some of this in the Rifts episode of our Geeky Voices Carry podcast (embedded below).

For some people, just the existence of Rifts, and the fact that we are excited about it, is enough to cause them to want to explain (at length) how we would be so much better off using the Rifts setting with another (modern) ruleset, most likely Savage Worlds. You would think that they would have figured that out by now.

Some of the things that have come out because of our prep and running of the Rifts game:

1. "Combat is difficult." Our group has spent most of our time with OSR stuff, primarily Swords & Wizardry, the OD&D retroclone, so we are used to a fast paced form of combat. We had a lot of problems with some of the other games that we have tried because none of them would be as past-paced as our Swords & Wizardry games. So far, the Rifts RPG has turned out to be the exception to this. Even when you incorporate normal armor, Mega Damage and Mega Damage armor the combat of the game is still pretty fast paced by our standards. We've found combat smooth and easy. Rolling a d20 (with an opposed defensive roll if you choose to make a defensive action) is simple.

2. "Character creation is complicated." This I will agree with. Compared with what we've played in the past, Rifts does take a while to make a character. Normally I'm not a big fan of the front-loaded character generation methods, I have to say that for us it is working out so far. It's nice because it gives the players an idea of the world that they are getting into, and it let's them get a handle on it before play starts. There is a lot to know/learn about the Rifts setting after so many supplements have been put out. Character creation really helps with it. So, yeah, character creation is complicated (more even than I would normally be interested in) but it helps the game.

3. "The system is bloated." This is code for "I don't like the mechanics but its subjective, so I'll phrase it in a way that I won't have to argue." Yes, Rifts uses a d20 roll for combat and saves, and a percentile system for skills. Let me let you in on a little secret: after years of Call of Cthulhu and Runequest I like percentile-based skill systems. They have a nice gradation to them, they're easy to maneuver in play and they are easy to explain to new people. I would go so far as to say that I think all of the games should use percentiles for their skill systems. I also like that all of the d20 rolls in Rifts are roll high. It is so much easier to remember than "this d20 roll is roll high...but this one is roll low..." Bleh. Actually, when I go back to work on my Demon Codex game eventually, I am going to give it a percentile-based skill system. I think it will smooth out some of my issues with how skills work currently.

Watch us play our first session of Rifts:

Basically, people should be gaming to have fun. If you aren't having fun, if you aren't enjoying what you are doing something is wrong. However, that doesn't mean that you get to harsh the buzz of those of us who are having fun. Go out and have some fun yourself. Our fun isn't lessening yours.