The Unbearable Riftness Of Being

Back at the beginning of the year we did an all too brief Rifts game for a couple of months. It was fun, goofy and full of big stuff. I made some mistakes as GM during the game. I probably should have reigned in the players a bit, maybe even nudged them into some other directions. I would probably come up with more options, should we decide to play Rifts again sometime.

The interesting thing is that, whenever we start towards a new game playing Rifts again is always among the suggestions. I'm pretty sure that this means that we will end up there again.

At Gen Con I visited the Palladium Books booth and picked up the latest of the Rifts books, the latest part of their Minion War event. It is more of the same: weapons, spells, weird magic items and a couple of O.C.C.s to liven up your games. The thing is, and I say this every time I pick up something new for Rifts, the real problem with the game is that every time you pick up a new book for it (even if you're just reading through it in a store) you want to run Rifts. I'm not sure that this is something that consistently happens with other game lines for me. Half of our group has shiny new Player's Handbooks, but we're talking about playing Call of Cthulhu instead of D&D 5e.

What is it about this game that provokes such enthusiasm?

We played the game as written. We've spent enough time playing OSR stuff over the last couple of years that all of the weird sub-systems didn't really bother us. I'm not really one who sees obsolescence in rules, so I don't really care that these rules were put together in the 80s, or that other rules have come along since then. I think the Rifts rules work well, and once play starts they are a lot less complex than people give them credit for online. Are they perfect? No, but I don't expect that out of a game's rules. It was fun, and that's really what I want out of a game.

Will we play Rifts again some time? Probably. The interest is always there. As I read more of the Minion War material I want to play a game where the player's characters are right there, on the front line, fighting the good fight against the forces of Hells (of course Rifts has dueling Hells, because Rifts!) that are trying to grind Rifts Earth under their heels. The characters have to hold the line and close up a Hell Pit that the infernal forces of Dyval are trying to open up, allowing more of their armies onto Rifts Earh. Hell, yeah!

And I think that is where the appeal lies for Rifts. So many games hint at things, or show what could happen in their games, but with Rifts you get art that says things like "Want to arm wrestle a devil in order to win a handgun that can shoot holes in the moon? We want you to do that too. Look at this piece of art that shows you just how you can do that with Rifts. Enjoy." You see old school games with a push of "Metal! Demons! Carnage!" and there is Rifts, just ahead, waving at them to come and join it out on the edge.

For me, Rifts is the Jack Kirby of gaming. There's a lot of infectious enthusiasm, and it may not always make sense, but by the time you finish flipping through a book you are nodding your head and smiling and thinking "Hell, yeah. I can do this." And Rifts is whispering to you, "Come and put on giant suits of powered armor and fight demons with us. Travel to strange worlds where everyone are giants who live for thousands of years. Be a centaur who fights crime on a cosmic scale." And you look down and whisper "yes..."

There were a couple of sessions after this, but for one reason or another we didn't record them. These are actually proving to be some of the most popular of the "actual play" videos in my YouTube stream. The episode of Masks of Narylthotep and a couple of the Cyberpunk games are the only ones that are more popular.

We Have Been Playing Rifts

For a few months now, the weekly Google Hangout group has been playing the Rifts RPG from Palladium Games. We've been having fun. We started on Rifts Earth, moved to Phase World and now the characters are on the 21st century Earth. They aren't sure which 21st century Earth, however.

This does present challenges. There's a Hatchling Dragon and a Imperial Guardsman in the group, both powerful mega-damage characters. There's an Atlantean Ley Line Walker with some hefty spells. There's a Technomancer and a Rogue Scholar. Really, the last two are probably best suited for moving to "modern day" Earth. There is nothing saying that I can't introduce mega-damage creatures into the mix. This actually might be a good way to introduce the Minion War stuff that I have been interested in bringing into the campaign because I think this would make for a good challenge for the characters. I haven't decided yet. I'll give them a week or two to get the lay of the land in their new home before I start pulling any rugs out from under them.

In case you're interested, here are the videos of our sessions so far:

I am trying to make the make more of a sandbox for the characters, as you can see in the last couple of sessions that has led to a bit of paralysis on the part of the players, but we will get over that hump. I am thinking some Mega-Heroes from Heroes Unlimited, or maybe a couple of Godlings who are "undercover" on the Earth of the 21st century as super-heroes before deciding how hellish we may go.

The game has been fun. It has been a lot of fun for me to just be able to throw anything at the characters, and know that they will more than likely survive it (even at first level). I want big, and this will be the game that will give it to us, I think.

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.

Geeky Voices Carry: The Rifts Episode

For almost two years now, I have been the GM of a weekly online gaming group that (mostly) livestreams its weekly sessions through YouTube. We started playing Swords & Wizardry, and it became a way to introduce my friend +solange simondsen to tabletop role-playing games. People have come and go, we have run playtests and trials and one-shots of various games, but we are still going after all of this time. A few months back, after going through some gaming books I pitched a Rifts game to the group. Most of them had never played the game or anything else from Palladium Games, but after sharing some of the fantastic artwork from Rifts books that could be found on the internet, the group was sold.

Now, a few months back +Stacy Dellorfano suggested that we should do a podcast in the vein of our "pre-game" conversations before we would start broadcasting our games. We talked back and forth and along with +David Rollins and +Josh Thompson we decided to start a bi-weekly podcast. Except for the holidays, we managed to keep to that schedule pretty much for seven episodes now.

We our 7th episode we decided to use it to talk about Rifts, our upcoming campaign, and our excitement about the upcoming campaign. True, we did find a few flaws with the game. mostly in the layout/presentation of the book and the lack of "she" or gender neutral pronouns. Outside of that, however the game has sucked us in. Listen to everyone talk about their characters, the game itself and how it is received by others out there in the scary world of the internet.

You can watch the YouTube video version:

Or the audio/podcast version over at PodOmatic:



 Both will play from this window. Let us know what you think about Rifts in the comments here, or on YouTube. I get that people don't like Rifts and think that the rules are "broken," but we're okay with the rules and don't need to be argued out of using them. If you want to post something like that, find any of the many places on the internet where people hate Rifts and Palladium Games. They aren't hard to find. This is a Palladium-Positive zone.

Oh What Things You Find In Your RPG Books

I am preparing for a Rifts campaign that the Hangout Group will starting in a few weeks. That means hauling out bunches of my Palladium Games books off the shelves and reading through them, some for the first time in years. While I was still in Cleveland, I managed to pick up a couple of signed books (Heroes Unlimited 2nd Edition and After The Bomb) and I've posted pictures of the signed pages on my Google+ account (which you can find a link to in the sidebar of this blog).

This is the front page of my signed Heroes Unlimited book:

It is pretty cool to have. I think that I started with Palladium stuff a bit later in life than a lot of the other fans of the games. My entry was finding a copy of Ninjas and Superspies at my (then) local gaming store in Lafayette, Indiana. I was hooked. I picked up Heroes Unlimited Revised next (it has just come out at the time), and over the years I have picked up and played a number of Palladium's games. Even when I had pretty much given up class and level-based games for systems like GURPS and Call of Cthulhu, Palladium games would still call at me. I've run a number of Heroes Unlimited games over the years, and I've said for a very long time that Ninjas and Superspies had my favorite handling of the martial arts in RPGs. The hours and hours of enjoyment that I have received from these games are incredibly out of proportion to the costs of them. I've long said that Palladium Games give the most bang for your gaming buck. Period.

One day I'll pick up the last couple of Heroes Unlimited books that I don't have. This game line will probably always be one of my favorites.

I know that it is fashionable, in certain parts of the internet, to bash Palladium Games but I've never felt that way about the games. The excitement and enthusiasm of Kevin Siembieda, Erik Wujcik, C.J. Carella and all of the other Palladium creators and artists just sing to me when I open up the pages of a Palladium game. It may be corny, but I really don't care. I have had lots of fun with these games, and I will continue to have fun with them for a very long time. That fun is the point of gaming, to me, and trumps all of the "concerns" that some may have about the system.

Any way, one of the points of this post was a discovery that I made just an hour ago. Yesterday, a post from +Joe England over on G+ made me mention that I thought TMNT needed nekomimis in it (if you don't know what one is, you might not want to Google it...just saying). About an hour ago I picked up my After The Bomb book to stat out some nekomimi with Palladium's Mutant Animal rules. I knew that my copy of the book was autographed, too, but I had forgotten who had all signed it.

When I saw that signature by Erik Wujcik it tugged a bit at my heart strings (yes, I do in fact have some). Erik was such a creative dynamo and driving force in tabletop gaming that it is hard to find an area of gaming that has not been touched by him. Even today, his diceless game lives on in new forms from Precis Intermedia and Rite Publishing. Yeah, I know. some people will be upset by my including Lords of Olympus. Those people can deal with it.

Hopefully Erik knows the impact that he has had on so many people in this hobby and knows that he is missed.

In a few weeks I am  to start running a Rifts game, and it will be kickass. One of the reasons for that is Erik Wujcik.