Anybody playing Rifts, either Palladium or Savage versions?

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>>49657920
Bump

>>49657920
Techno-Wizardry.

>>49658445
Damn, you cut the Gordian Knot.

They could not possibly have chosen a worse system to reboot Rifts than Savage Worlds. I mean, it's hard to pick a system worse than Savage Worlds in the first place. In terms of generic systems there are FAR better options: GURPS, Cortex, and FATE, to name a few.

Savage Worlds takes a decent core mechanic and lumps on a shitty wild die that is arbitrarily assigned because "muh plot" and fills the character with bennies that require the player to know all of their uses to use effectively. Not to mention, Benny effectiveness is heavily dependent on session length, so if you don't play the recommended 4 to 6 hours the game becomes wildly unbalanced.

The game is full of garbage trap options like in 3.5, the chargen is basically minmaxing Flaws like in GURPS except worse, shotguns are brokenly powerful giving a flat +2 to hit which in this system is basically only missing on a 1. They also do broken-ass damage because of exploding dice. The exploding dice also turn combat into a slogfest occasionally punctuated by someone actually dying; usually from a fucking ridiculous amount of damage.

I played Savage Worlds for a good three years now. Never will play it again, it is an arsed system that is half narrative bullshit, half autistic wargame, and entirely terrible.

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>>49658579
Nice pasta, faggot.

>>49657920
Magic, because of the ability to get a quick refill of your power points at a ley line.

>>49658579
Go fuck yourself. Savage Worlds is a good system but I'll admit it's not the universal system it pretends to be. If you stick to "low powered" settings, it's the best there is. If you try to apply it to "high powered" settings like superheroes or Rifts, then yes it falls apart.

>>49658579
I hate to burst your little bubblebrain, but an 'official' Rifts suppliment/rewrite for GURPS will never happen. Steve Jackson and Kevin Sembeida hate each other with a passion that rivals a 40k players hardon for Ultramarines.

>>49660065
Oh lord I've got to hear this. Any idea WHY they hate each other?

>>49660079
Probably sued each other for copyright in the 80s or some stupid shit like that.

>>49660113
Copyright over what?

If we're going to be guessing here, my own guess would be the classic nerd beef of being absolutely, positively certain that games should be a certain way, and developing a game that deviates from that way is objectively WRONG.

Having played games made by Jackson and Siembieda, it's easy to see they have two very different approaches to game design. And like classic nerds, they can't just fucking set that aside for the sake of politeness and maybe having a beer with each other. They've got to write extensive essays on why the other guy is OBJECTIVELY WRONG.

>>49660144
That's probable too, they're both arrogant ubergeeks.

>>49660172
Doesn't surprise me at all and makes me glad that generation of ubergeekdom is literally dying out.

>>49659938

> savage worlds
> good system

Pick one. Savage Worlds is a shitty system that tries too hard to reinvent the wheel. The exploding die and raise mechanics make any form of encounter balance/planning impossible. A rank 1 novice can one-shot a dragon with lucky die rolls using his fist. The system boasts that bennies are used for "cool things" like players changing narrative or pulling off impossible stunts, but players just hoard them for use as extra hit points. The chase system (any iteration of it) is an absolute shit storm of retardation. The 3-wound limit is just plain bad game design. The community is full of sad 40-something-year-old zealots who foam at the mouth at any notion of house ruling the assy mechanics. Shotguns are utterly broken and despite having the same average damage as a rifle, end up dealing twice as much because of exploding dice. The entire game works on a fucktarded tabletop scale so you either have to use miniatures for EVERY combat or have fun doing extra math every time you want to figure out range penalties.

It's like the worst parts of FATE and GURPS put together, with none of the upsides. Don't play it. Leave it in the trash where it belongs.

>>49660065

GURPS is terrible, and the RIFTS setting is pretty autistic as well, so they would belong together, but honestly I don't give a fuck either way.

>>49660211
Virt!

>>49660211
>Pick one. Savage Worlds is a shitty system that tries too hard to reinvent the wheel.

I hate to sound like a hipster, but that's only because you don't "get it."

>The exploding die and raise mechanics make any form of encounter balance/planning impossible.

This takes an enormous weight of a GM's shoulders who doesn't want to agonize too much about designing a "balanced" encounter. As long as he can accept the fact that a "big bad" will probably be taken out in one or two rounds, he is free to just throw a handful of "mooks" with maybe a "lieutenant" or "boss" at the PCs and know that the PCs will ALWAYS have to be on their toes in case one of the bad guys gets a damn good roll. And the more baddies you toss at them, the higher chance one of them is going to get a fantastic roll.

>A rank 1 novice can one-shot a dragon with lucky die rolls using his fist.

And that is fucking AWESOME and you don't "get it." In Savage Worlds you don't rely on the classic "epic boss battle" that lasts literally 3 or 4 real-life hours. You design the adventure so just GETTING TO the boss is fucking hard in of itself and drains all the PCs of their fate points before they're even able to engage the boss.

>The system boasts that bennies are used for "cool things" like players changing narrative or pulling off impossible stunts, but players just hoard them for use as extra hit points.

So? If that's how players choose to use them, that's their prerogative.

>>49660314
That copypasta sure sounds like him, doesn't it? Maybe a bit less vitriolic and with less elf torture.

>>49660338
>The chase system (any iteration of it) is an absolute shit storm of retardation.

That we can agree on. But the chase system isn't even in the core rulebook, it's a set of optional extra rules you have to go out of your way to find and download on their website.

>The 3-wound limit is just plain bad game design.

Why?


>The community is full of sad 40-something-year-old zealots who foam at the mouth at any notion of house ruling the assy mechanics.

What?

>Shotguns are utterly broken and despite having the same average damage as a rifle, end up dealing twice as much because of exploding dice.

That much we can actually agree on. I make sure to nerf shotguns for each of my games.

>The entire game works on a fucktarded tabletop scale so you either have to use miniatures for EVERY combat or have fun doing extra math every time you want to figure out range penalties.

Newsflash: Players like maps and miniatures for some odd reason. Savage Worlds caters to that.

>>49660364

Miniatures are shit, though. Theater of the mind is objectively better.

>>49661055

You would think so but over all the games I've ever GM'd, players generally, autistically appreciate maps where they can see exactly who is positioned where with all the intervening obstacles. I can't explain it, but there it is.

>>49660364
Chase rules are in core (at least DEE), what are you on about?

>>49657920
In Palladium rifts it depends on how your GM handles ley lines.
If ley lines are as common as they're supposed to be (or even more common), then magic can be obscenely powerful.
If ley lines aren't common and the GM lets you abuse called shot rules, power armor + high tech guns will be the best.

>>49661169

Please provide a page number as I'm too drunk at the moment to go over it myself.

>>49661192
Can you wait 3 hours? I can't get the PDF from Pinnacle's site on my phone.

>>49661286
No. Because at that point I'll be sober, I'll check the table of contents and index of my copy of the Savage World's Deluxe copy I have in my hand, find absolutely no instance of chase rules, and declare that you're talking out of your ass.

I don't recall ANY chase rules in the published book of Savage Worlds Deluxe. And you do, for some reason, even though you don't have it within arm's reach. I think you are WRONG, my friend.

>>49661344
Deluxe Explorer's Edition, not normal Deluxe.

>>49661466
Okay, I'm just sober enough to boot up my copy of the Deluxe edition and do a CTRL+F for "chase".

Yes you are correct: The chase rules are shit.

But I see no reason why you can't just ignore them much like changing the shotgun rules around.

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>>49660079

Possibly because KS sues anyone who tries to make fan conversions - GURPS ones were quite popular, but RIFTS now has (or had, because nobody really cares anymore) a reputation as The System You Do Not Dare Convert because of how quick KS was with legal notices.

I could easily see KS going to SJ in a butthurt fury.

Speaking of which, have a GURPS conversion of the main classes.

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>>49664283
>this guy again
Wow, you're still alive, huh? And still mad, I see!

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>>49661170
Good answer to OP's question.

Rifts is so open-ended that the forces in play can be incredibly different between campaigns or GMs. And which books are allowed.

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>>49664283
Fucking Hell, GURPS. Your statblocks make my eyes bleed. I'd support even Kevin suing you just for that.

>>49657920
Just finished running the fifth session of my Savage Rifts game on Monday. It's been a hell of a lot of fun. The characters are a mercenary company working out of Merctown, and the game is set in 100 PA (so the beginning of the original game timeline, a decade before the war against Tolkeen).

They started the first session heading out to a little town in MIssouri to guard a caravan bringing supplies to Merctown, stumbled across a Coalition unit field-testing skelebots, and jacked them up on general principle. On the way back, the town they had to travel through had been taken over by the Grim Reapers, and they got to fight a murder wraith and some cultists. The party's ley line walker is best friends with the party's juicer, and he became somewhat obsessed about the idea of using necromancy to help her live forever. She finally talked him out of it by revealing that she was an altara, which no one in the group knew because she always wore her big juicer sunglasses everywhere, and that when she died, she would produce a new clone with all of her memories.

When they got back to Merctown, they wound up accidentally outing her to a Splugorth agent, who sent assassins in after her. The group fought off the assassins and challenged the Splugorth spy and his buddies to a match in the arena. They wound up demolishing part of the arena by accident, which got the city's ruler mad at them. He banned them from the arena for life and had them declared "persons of mass destruction," but offered to let them stay in the city if they could root out the local Splugorth cell and make sure they weren't a threat to Merctown.

By this point, the party juicer is in last call, and all she wants is to die free so that her "sister" can have a better life. She begs the group to agree, and they head off into the wilderness to find the hidden Splugorth forward base.
(to be continued)

>>49669554
When they get there, they assault the place head-on, fighting wave after wave of minions and slave warriors in a mass battle. They manage to breach the outer defenses and penetrate to the inner control chambers of the pyramid built on the area's ley line nexus.

Inside, they confront a Splugorth slaver, a bunch of altara warrior women, and some kittani in power armor. There's a pitched battle in the heart of the pyramid while the magitechnicians inside are powering up a Rift-based weapon. Unable to breach the slaver's personal force field, the juicer bum-rushes him into the magical reactor at the center of the pyramid, carrying both of them into it in a blaze of glory.

The rest of the party carries her body outside as the pyramid implodes, desperately trying to revive her, but she's dead. A few moments later, her corpse glows and forms a crystalline cocoon around itself. Remembering her instructions, they take her back to their vehicle and camp out for two days, until her "sister" emerges, greeting them all like old friends. They bury the juicer in the woods with her favorite sword as a grave marker and begin the long trek back to Merctown.

Next session is going to start with them getting back to the city and finally looking for some real work.

>>49669603
The party!

Ulysses Caldwell, human burster. His town got burned down by the Coalition, and he's looking for payback. Ulysses is a pacifist and prefers to avoid fighting at all because he knows how uncontrollable his powers can become, but if you wrong him, he'll reduce you to ash.

Blue Velvet, human glitter boy pilot. Blue stole her suit from an ex-boyfriend who was a huge asshole, and other glitter boy pilots are technically bound to let him know where she is if they meet her, even if they don't like him very much. In the meantime, she's enjoying playing the hero in her hot-pink mech suit.

Flammenwerffer, hatchling dragon. Blue found him in the woods, and he sort of imprinted on her. Flammen's human form is that of a teenaged human boy with red hair, and he's learning all sorts of bad lessons from his friends. He's bad with money, thinks he's invulnerable, and pays back slights with setting people on fire.

Saru, human mutant MARS vagabond. An actual Japanese ninja who was brought to North America by a Rift. Calls himself "Sun Wukong, the Monkey King" even though his clan named him Saru. Most of his friends call him Sunny. Knows "mystic ninja tricks" (psionics) and is a trained infiltrator and martial artist.

Josiah Marbury, human cyber-knight. An elderly hero who retired a decade ago but finally got fed up with being stuck in the cyber-knight temple and has returned to the world to look for a good death. His skills have atrophied along with his muscles, but his willpower is as strong as ever--and a cyber-knight's true power lies in his will.

(to be continued)

>>49669707
Jon Ostervarian, d'norr ley line walker. Jon is a powerful wizard with a problem--he's got a gambling addiction. While it won him a pretty sweet suit of combat mage armor back home in the Federation of Magic, it also got him noticed by the wrong people. Now he's selling his magic in Merctown, trying to get ahead at the casino between jobs. Considers himself Flammenwerffer's adopted father, but isn't in a relationship of any kind with Blue. (He isn't attracted to humans.)

Moth, altara juicer. Moth's clone batch were originally designed to be technicians for a secret base deep in North America, but once the base was finished so were her sisters. Moth ran rather than submit meekly to death, and she chose juicer conversion to change her appearance and kill her magical potential, both of which made it easier for the Splugorth to track her. All Moth wanted was the chance to die free and give birth to a new altara who wouldn't have to suffer the way she had. She got her wish.

Moth Junior, altara techno-wizard. Moth's own clone! She was born at the end of the last session and was able to explain some of Moth's backstory a little better. Since her player is leaving town for a couple of months for work, Moth Junior is going back to school for a while to brush up on her skills, but will be returning to the group later on.

>>49669603
Good stuff. It really doesn't takr much work to make very cool characters in Savage Rifts. They're just built awesome.