Rifts

I've just finished my South Wing campaign. I'll post the paths for each episode once I've put in some page references for the Monster Manual. It was quite the learning experience, and now I'm wiser I'd like to design something better.

At an open table game you need a tool for bringing lots of random players in at any moment. So I want to run a world like Planescape or Rifts. Portals make bringing in new people (especially homebrew weirdos) very easy.

So I had a look at Rifts.

I've played Rifts. I've got the original book and a lot of splats. I got into Palladium games through buying TMNT & Other Strangeness, thinking it was going to be a graphic novel (shrink wrap's a bitch). I bought a lot of splats for that too. I think the main thing was that I liked the worlds, the system never really figured in. I barely asked for skill checks, skipped over fights, mostly roleplaying really. Not a big surprise that when Werewolf came out I jumped straight into White Wolf's system and never looked back.

Now that I played a designed game like 5th edition - I'm having a wholly new reaction to the Palladium system.

• How the hell am I supposed to ask for skill checks? There's so many of the buggers. And each new splat adds more. It completely breaks any use of skill checks to control the pace of the story or player's turns.
• Each paragraph is Sigmund-Freud-style long. To one extent you're getting rule clarifications. But on the other you're putting fatigue on the reader, so they skip stuff and get it wrong anyway.
• I'm wholly a convert to just having one damned experience table. Seeing so many again just made me wonder how I'd be able to get all players on an equal footing so no one at the table feels rubbish. I remember once rolling a character from the Rifts Atlantis splat and my mate rolled a gromek juicer and thought he'd hit the jackpot. Then I showed him that I had mega-damage skin and a truck load of magic and psychic powers. He was so salty.

The Palladium System isn't about balance. I get it. I think it's fine it spawns lots of books, because DMs and GMs need ideas. It's fun that you can roll a candle wizard.

But it really is The Hobbit, An Unexpected Threequel of roleplaying games. It desperately needs editing. I'm happy there's been news that someone's giving it a go.