« Rayners.Org Forums | Main | View From Our Balcony »
November 05, 2002
I Want to Play/Run Rifts Again (the world at least)
Thanks to a number of threads over at the RPG.net Forums, including Improving Rifts, which eventually led me to the Palladium Rifts forum, I am now all psyched up again for Rifts.
I am not a huge fan of the system though. I can work with it if I have to; I have played in the past, and as hard as it might be to admit it, there is a feel to the rules than can be kind of nice (once you get past chargen at least). They feel very Rifts-ish. Perhaps it is time (once again) for me to declare that I will port the setting to another system so my group and I can play that instead. Then the problem becomes, what system? GURPS? d20 or some bastardization of d20 Modern? Hero? Some system I've never tried or heard of? Or maybe I'll just rework the Palladium system instead of doing a whole setting port.
Any ideas? Suggestions?
Posted by rayners at November 5, 2002 04:33 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt.rayners.org/mt-tb.cgi/76
Comments
Part of the beauty of rifts was the lack of play balancing that gave all the advantage to the player as long as he knew what skills to takeand what OCC's to play. If you play balance the game in d20, it wont have that same feel of charachter power that has always been lacking in beginning d&d charachters. I for one would not enjoy a game that lost that great feeling of invincibility and power. Though the argument could also be made that balancing is exactly what the system needs, the fact is the world was created with the inequalities of a world gone mad and struggling back to sanity as it's theme. It was intended to be unbalanced, rather like Gacy was unbalanced. The d20 system is not really setup to accomodate this skewed world view. I would think twice about this conversion.
Posted by: Duck at March 25, 2003 10:59 AM
Personally, I could give a squat about game balance. I don't like system enforced game balance. Half the fun is compensating for the different power-levels in character. :)
My main complaint is that the Paladium system tends to be a little haphazard, inconsistent, requires way too much book lookups (especially during char-gen), and at times almost arbitrary. I just want something well organized mostly. :)
As with all RPGs, though, the game experience really depends on who you play with. If you game with people who enjoy eploiting systems and finding loopholes, you'll have a different experience than you will with people who like to role-play heavily or come up with obscure character concepts. All the members of my current gaming group enjoy all of those, though to varying degrees. We seem to mix well enough. On the other hand, another group of people may be all for system exploitation and loophole finding, and know that OCC X with skills A, B, and C is totally kick-ass. That tends to lead to a pretty cookie cutter party. If you enjoy that, more power to you, but it's just not my cup of tea. I try not to think in terms of GM advantage vs. Player advantage. I think we have more fun when we're working together.
Anyways, like I said, I do not like artificial/forced game balance, and I know I'm not the only one in my group that doesn't. A guy with 10 years of military training should kick more ass than Joe Engineer right out of college. D20 doesn't model those type of differences too well when you're trying to put a party together.
All I want is a more streamlined system. Nothing more, nothing less. :)
Posted by: David Raynes at March 25, 2003 12:25 PM
Hey, just found your blog and this post, it might be too late, but I'm actually doing a homebrew RIFTS campaign conversion to D20 using these rules: Star Wars D20 D20 Modern D20 Future D20 Apocalypse D&D 3.5e D20 Mecha BESM D20 I'm just grabbing little bits out of the Star Wars D20 (Wound/Vitality instead of HP to reflect SDC/HP).
Basically, I'm going to build all the classes and races from RIFTS core rulebook based on the information found in BESM D20. The mecha will be a mixture of D20 Mecha and D20 Future, basically using most of the rules from Future and adding info from Mecha. The other stuff, as you can guess, has info on futuristic and modern stuff.
Classes will be the basic classes from D20 Modern, then I'll make advanced classes that have certain requirements (OCC Skills, dispositions, races, etc) for the regular OCCs. RCCs will be a bit more difficult since they're more or less racial advancement and I guess you could consider the abilities gained to be based on hit dice. So, if a Dragon Hatchling advances, check his character level to determine total hit dice. If the Dragon Hatchling stays within his racial advancement then he'll only get his racial abilities, size increments, and hit dice as a monster would. PCCs will more or less follow the same rules as regular Psychic classes, though you'll need feats to go into the PCCs.
(sorry, just trying to figure out what I was going to do with everything...) For MDC/SDC stuff, all I was going to do is this, quite simple. Megadamage will affect wound points directly. 1 point per MD point. Since wound points are based directly off of constitution, a character who gets hit with MD will have a tougher time living through it. SDC, of course, hits vitality before it hits wounds. (Vitality = HP, Wounds = SDC). MDC and SDC will be pretty much like above. Anything that is an MDC structure will have a DR of 50/MDC. I think that 100 points is a little much. During my first attempt at modifying MDC, I made it equal 10 SDC instead.
Dogboys are just D20 Modern Meureaus (sp?) with psychic powers and such. They'll get a level adjustment.
Dragon Hatchlings are going to be quite different, but I'm going to convert each type of Dragon from the Conversion Books/Palladium RPG/Dragons & Gods and give level adjustments based on the stats I get from them.
All races but humans: I'm going to count each d6 above/below 3d6 as +/-2 racial adjustments. For each D6 of speed there is +5 feet to the move attribute.
One big difference between Palladium and D20 lies in the combat tables. Palladium has a few books with quite a few different fighting styles. D20 has a few charts for good/bad/moderate (as a generalization) to hit bonus table. I'm going to try my best to convert the martial arts tables to D20 in as faithful a way as I can. Each Martial Art will be an advanced class with a 10 level table that gives the different abilities. They will each have their own combat modifiers based on when new attacks are available and to hit bonuses and such. I think this will do a good job in representing Palladium Martial artists.
Of course, to qualify for martial arts and such, you'll need to select certain feats, skills, etc. and they'll all be requirements.
If you'd like to be kept abreast of the info, please email me at clwoodardatgmaildotcom and I'll let you know how things are fairing. I don't have much but ideas right now, but I'll be working on it over the next couple of months.
Posted by: Excalibur at August 8, 2005 11:40 PM
Hey, just found your blog and this post, it might be too late, but I'm actually doing a homebrew RIFTS campaign conversion to D20 using these rules: Star Wars D20 D20 Modern D20 Future D20 Apocalypse D&D 3.5e D20 Mecha BESM D20 I'm just grabbing little bits out of the Star Wars D20 (Wound/Vitality instead of HP to reflect SDC/HP).
Basically, I'm going to build all the classes and races from RIFTS core rulebook based on the information found in BESM D20. The mecha will be a mixture of D20 Mecha and D20 Future, basically using most of the rules from Future and adding info from Mecha. The other stuff, as you can guess, has info on futuristic and modern stuff.
Classes will be the basic classes from D20 Modern, then I'll make advanced classes that have certain requirements (OCC Skills, dispositions, races, etc) for the regular OCCs. RCCs will be a bit more difficult since they're more or less racial advancement and I guess you could consider the abilities gained to be based on hit dice. So, if a Dragon Hatchling advances, check his character level to determine total hit dice. If the Dragon Hatchling stays within his racial advancement then he'll only get his racial abilities, size increments, and hit dice as a monster would. PCCs will more or less follow the same rules as regular Psychic classes, though you'll need feats to go into the PCCs.
(sorry, just trying to figure out what I was going to do with everything...) For MDC/SDC stuff, all I was going to do is this, quite simple. Megadamage will affect wound points directly. 1 point per MD point. Since wound points are based directly off of constitution, a character who gets hit with MD will have a tougher time living through it. SDC, of course, hits vitality before it hits wounds. (Vitality = HP, Wounds = SDC). MDC and SDC will be pretty much like above. Anything that is an MDC structure will have a DR of 50/MDC. I think that 100 points is a little much. During my first attempt at modifying MDC, I made it equal 10 SDC instead.
Dogboys are just D20 Modern Meureaus (sp?) with psychic powers and such. They'll get a level adjustment.
Dragon Hatchlings are going to be quite different, but I'm going to convert each type of Dragon from the Conversion Books/Palladium RPG/Dragons & Gods and give level adjustments based on the stats I get from them.
All races but humans: I'm going to count each d6 above/below 3d6 as +/-2 racial adjustments. For each D6 of speed there is +5 feet to the move attribute.
One big difference between Palladium and D20 lies in the combat tables. Palladium has a few books with quite a few different fighting styles. D20 has a few charts for good/bad/moderate (as a generalization) to hit bonus table. I'm going to try my best to convert the martial arts tables to D20 in as faithful a way as I can. Each Martial Art will be an advanced class with a 10 level table that gives the different abilities. They will each have their own combat modifiers based on when new attacks are available and to hit bonuses and such. I think this will do a good job in representing Palladium Martial artists.
Of course, to qualify for martial arts and such, you'll need to select certain feats, skills, etc. and they'll all be requirements.
If you'd like to be kept abreast of the info, please email me at clwoodardatgmaildotcom and I'll let you know how things are fairing. I don't have much but ideas right now, but I'll be working on it over the next couple of months.
Posted by: Excalibur at August 8, 2005 11:41 PM
I have been playing a combination of D&D3.5 & D20 Rifts for about 3-4 months now & its great. I just can't under stand why people get so upset about it. Its a game people, get a life & get over it.
I managed to sorce some old Star Frontier Adventures & they really convert well. Do consider. Cheers Si
Posted by: Simon at March 16, 2006 08:49 PM
I have a predictable solution:
The Palladium System is already almost d20, so most of it won't require that much of a conversion. I'm actually kind of a fan of Rifts myself.
The problem with Rifts for ME is MDC. MDC weaponry automatically kills unarmored people, and really- I think they got the mechanic on this wrong. It was supposed to measure penetration. The solution is to convert MDC weaponry in d20 to damage resistance: DR:100/MDC Weaponry
In fact, I'd even scale it downwards and say DR:50/MDC weaponry. That way certain SDC powers/weapons (like say a rocket launcher or a conventional explosive) would have a chance at scratching an MDC structure- but ony a little bit.
The rest of the hard work is pretty much done- use the existing d20 skill system. You could hack at the classes a bit abd even introduce prestige classes. If you added enough new stuff, and changed the name, you could have a whole new futuristic fantasy game.
Posted by: Peter at November 6, 2002 03:46 AM