Rifts General

>>51006065
My current group is:
*Blue Velvet: A Glitter Boy pilot who stole her ride from an ex-boyfriend and dresses like Tank Girl.
*Jon Ostervarian: A d'norr Ley Line Walker with a gambling addiction and a high-class lifestyle.
*Flammenwerfer: A Flame Wind Dragon Hatchling who was adopted by Blue and Jon; personality is something like a ruthless child, but has a strange talent for tracking people.
*Moth Junior: An altara Techno-Wizard. She's the clone-daughter of a previous party member, a Juicer who burnt out. Pretty much everyone was surprised when her corpse sprouted a cocoon and a whole new person.
*Ulysses Caldwell: A human Burster torn between his philosophy of pacifism and his burning desire to level the Coalition and piss on its embers.
*Ghost: A dog boy Crazy who just joined the party; she's easy-going and laid back until the implants take over--then she's a very bad dog.
*Thunderbird McNugget: A hawrk-ohl Mind Melter. Her real name is basically unpronounceable, so she took a name that she thinks sounds imposing. She's so scary no one has ever bothered correcting her. Has four arms and wings because of Splugorth bio-fuckery.

The party's Cyber-Knight, Sir Josiah Marbury, left the group before the holidays because his player moved away to go to grad school. We also started the group with a human mutant MARS Vagabond, Sunny, but his player had to drop out for personal reasons. Which is especially a shame, since I loved getting to see vagabonds finally come into their own.

>>51006065
Man, I love me some Savage Rifts. I've been into the setting since 1993 or so, back when there were only like half a dozen books for the game. I probably spent more on Rifts books before I went to college than I did on my first car. The system has always been a nearly unplayable mess, but I used to love just rolling up characters and playing around with the huge variety of races and classes, up until I realized how many of those options were traps or were just clearly-superior versions of existing stuff.

Over the years, I've tried running Rifts with BESM, d20, and Cortex Plus, but I had never even considered Savage Worlds even though I love the system. Getting in on the Kickstarter is one of the best purchases I've made in recent years, and my limited-edition hardcovers just came in this last week. I can't wait to see what they do with the line.

>>51006214
>then she's a very bad dog.
I lol'd.

I want to run Rifts but the reputation it holds in my circles is such that nobody wants to play.

Savage Rifts looks good. I didn't back the KS but I'll probably buy the books in the store when they come out.

>>51006366
The reputation is a bit earned, sad to say. I've been playing since the 90s, and the system has always been kind of a flaming dumpster fire. Combined with the way Palladium regularly goes out of its way to shit on fans, it's not exactly an easy sell. Savage Rifts, however, is all the best stuff from the setting, polished up and with a spanking new engine installed. It's looking like Kickstarter stuff will be completely fulfilled before the end of January, so preorders will start going out then.

>>51006447
I just don't like that all the SavRifts stuff is scattered across like, 5 books.

Again we need a bookshelf collection to play the damned game.

>>51007293
It's three books--a player book, a GM book, and a monster book. And it's still less material to cover than Palladium, which has material for Rifts scattered across like 60+ books at this point. You're being more than a little hyperbolic here.

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I've only casually played Rifts as a kid, and it was the only tabletop game I played growing up so I had nothing to compare it to. Is anybody here familiar with the Palladium system? What about it leaves people with such a sour taste in their mouths, and can it be fixed with house rules?

>>51007614
It's a 30-year-old system that's never had a major rules update or consolidation, bolted onto a game setting where power levels range from "hobo with a shotgun" to "literal deity." It's got slow-ass combat resolution, literally hundreds of skills scattered across dozens of books, and a front-loaded class-based system where leveling up hardly ever happens but also hardly matters because you get so little at each new level compared to what you get at character creation. The alignment system is even dumber than D&D's, there are scads of random tables, and attribute distribution makes no damn sense at all. Add to that core rulebooks that have sloppy copy-and-paste jobs from other games made by the same company, rules that contradict each other within pages, and no actual guidelines on how to juggle all of it, and you have an extremely wonky old-school mess.

Palladium's system wasn't too bad compared to everything else that was out in the mid-80s. By the time Rifts came along in 1991, it was already showing the strain of doing all that, plus the Mega Damage subsystem tacked onto it. In the present of 2017, however, it's just shameful that there's never been a real second edition, a fully errata'ed edition, or any sort of actual cleanup of the system.