I think one of the biggest problems most gamers have with Rifts is the MegaDamage system. It kind of works, but in reality, at least for me, it sucks. Here are two thoughts I have on it:

1. There's too damn much of it. If megadamage was limited to mecha and major monsters, it would be fine. But when any average headhunter can go buy a set of megadamage armor, it just cheapens the effect. I have no problems with a tank or glitter boy having and dealing megadamage. I think it's just dumb when a guy wearing some plastisteel armor suddenly has it. Same with a pistol that deals megadamage. No reason for it. A rail gun, yes. A pistol you wear in a gunslinger holster? Heck no!

2. Purely for aesthetics, I'd love it if it was more like Savage Worlds!. Give the item a Heavy listing, so it can deal damage to big creatures, without having two sets of hit points. There is no reason to have MDC, SDC, and hit points in the same game. Really. Just give everything one stat. If it's something like a SAMAS suit, give it armor 50 (Heavy), etc.

I agree. I liked the MDC model from the original Robotech, where only military-grade armor was MDC. Even the Zentraedi were Hit Points/SDC at full size, and there were no MD small arms (except for a very expensive and experimental laser rifle that required a huge backpack/power source).

I strongly agree on both counts.

I take the SDC and damage of all mega-damage weapons, multiply by 10 (instead of 100), and use "mega-damage" exactly as you suggested, as a "tag" similar to Savage Worlds' Heavy Armor and Heavy Weapons.

As for reserving mega-damage capacity for huge armored vehicles and huger monsters, well, I don't know. I agree that the ubiquity of mega-damage arms and armor has crossed the treshold of absurdity right in the core rulebook (hell, Kevin Siembieda even broaches the subject right in Sourcebook One) and a lot of the drama of a gunfight goes away when you hit on a 4 in 1d20 and vaporize opponents instantly.

And yet, at the same time, having gangs of armed and armored criminals packing enough punch to level a house with a single shot roaming the streets of the 'Burbs is the sort of crazy over-the-top shit that Rifts is famous for. I sometimes want to heavily restrict the Mega-Damage Capacity but at the same time I'm afraid to rob the game of something that's central to its identity and deceptively important to our enjoyment of it.

Quote from: everloss;659682I agree. I liked the MDC model from the original Robotech, where only military-grade armor was MDC. Even the Zentraedi were Hit Points/SDC at full size, and there were no MD small arms (except for a very expensive and experimental laser rifle that required a huge backpack/power source).

That, right there? This is my real #1 beef with Rifts.

I can accept the supernatural stuff, in fact Rifts (and BTS, which originated the concepts) is one of the games that best explains supernatural stuff. Sure, it's mumbo jumbo, but it's remarkably consistent mumbo jumbo.

But the universal availability of magic, portable, non-deadly-radiation-spewing miniature nuclear reactors that provide infinite energy for a X number of years... yeah, that gets on my nerves. Sure, it's no biggie looking the other way, but wouldn't it be cool if energy/fuel for all the super-tech toys were another resource you had to manage? You could even cut down the repair bills a bit, to compensate.

Quote from: The Butcher;659685But the universal availability of magic, portable, non-deadly-radiation-spewing miniature nuclear reactors that provide infinite energy for a X number of years...

This is your biggest problem with Robotech?

Back on the issue of MDC, yeah, it's a lousy, overused, poorly implemented rule. There are a number of houserules floating around the intertubes, along with several different game systems that handle it better.

Quote from: Bobloblah;659688This is your biggest problem with Robotech?

With Rifts, actually (not a Robotech man).  But yeah, your point stands. I have nothing to say for myself. *hangs head in shame*

Quote from: The Butcher;659689With Rifts, actually

That's even funnier!

We've used the 10:1 MDC to SDC thing as well, works good (IMHO). Some of the classes get ridiculous SDC bonuses that if I were GMing I might think of toning down with that (e.g. juicer +d4x100), but it isn't really a big deal. It would also be fine to have MD weapons be rare and uber I guess, but I think house ruling that, sounds like a lot of effort to get the MD worms back into the can.

Its interesting to look at some of the fiction for Rifts and compare how it looks compared to your usual Rifts game actually, I got Tales of the Chi Town burbs in an Xmas grab bag this year and that for the most part reads as low-powered horror rather than the usual "Cthulhu vs. the SDF-3" type scenario - lots of 'dissatisfied chi town clerk gets package from his dead rogue scholar uncle letting him burn his cheating wife and the guys at his annoying day job' or 'man gets cybereyes from chop-shop, goes mad from visions of cybersnatchers killing the original owner' (that'll teach you for taking Object Reading) or 'indistinguishable-from-human D-bees who've joined the coalition face tough moral dilemma'.
It was quite interesting since it suggested a style for Rifts quite different to the, er, public perception of how its supposed to be played.

Quote from: danbuter;6596691. There's too damn much of it.

In the main book, it's implied that the military (Coalition, NGR, Northern Gun) and random mercenaries have access to MDC weapons and armor. 99% of the people living in the wilderness (and even large cities) are stuck with knives and the odd SDC hunting rifle. This is why one MDC monster attacking a village is such a huge deal: it's literally invulnerable. In subsequent books, every fucking rube has an MDC rifle or railgun, and EVERY MONSTER is MDC. This escalates to the point where most of the OCCs are MDC; normal humans don't even exist. Coupled with the insanely ridiculously overpopulated wastelands (again, not what the main book implies), there's an arms race that gets really stupid. MDC itself isn't the problem, it's that subsequent books lost sight of the original intent.

If you stick with the notion that 1) MDC weapons are rare and 2) the population is small (almost non-existent with few exceptions for places like Chi-town or Lazlo), megadamage isn't a huge deal.

I ran a really good one off that took place in the 'Burbs and the lower levels of Chi-Town where the players were all part of a gang.  No RCC's allowed, no Juicers, no Borgs, not even a crazy in the mix.  And no MDC weapons, since those were scanned for and confiscated with extreme prejudice.

Dead Boys, however, were in common circulation (this was before the Coalition Splatbook came out), and while they were generally helpful and conscientious, if something started that threatened the population you could expect them to escalate to MDC as quickly as needed (NOT by default though, after all, they have those SDC settings on their rifles...)

There was a huge argument in the gang when the leader found a C-4 in a trash bin.. people thought he was insane for keeping it around when it clearly threatened all of them, sort of like how real people would react to someone showing up with a missile launcher.

I think that 1:100 MDC can work, in that kind of situation, and I definitely agree with Brad's take on things.  If I were going to run a Rifts game I'd probably just eliminate all the later stuff and start fresh from the main book.

As a note, and in retrospect, I recall that I did allow one borg, but he wound up having all his components made out of SDC materials, something like AR14.  And he was registered with the Dead Boys and had a tracker (that the cyber-doc made  removable so he could wear it or not).  The player was very good natured about it, and his back story was that he'd served as a line grunt and been 'retired' with a mind wipe (hence his low starting level (3)).

that's much how my group used to play Rifts.

All PCs were SDC, RCCs were allowed, but only if it was SDC and not completely stupid.

I don't think I ever played in a game of Rifts where anyone used a giant robot. We didn't fight demon lords or dragons. Those games were mostly about post-apocalyptic survival, with the occasional awesome thing thrown in. I recall one time pitting the PCs against a Titan combat robot because they screwed up and got caught somewhere where they shouldn't be, and they ran for their lives. And Titan's suuuuuuuck, as far as mecha go. So yeah, keeping power levels at the level of the RMB is my preferred style of play.

Now, when we played Phase World, on the other hand, the rule was that SDC beings weren't allowed. There wasn't much point to have one in Phase World. That was just gonzo space piracy, with very little story (we rotated GMs every session), and lots of big guns, big aliens, and big magic.

H&H and Mekton Zeta before it used Kills, which are sort of like megadamage in that it's damage that only ship-class stuff deals and a single point is enough to vaporize a human.  

But only ships and mecha even have access to that kind of power, because, well, we're talking some serious power level here.  The closest a human-sized character in any of the H&H material gets are in the not-Daleks I wrote up for the blog, and even they can only do 1 Kill.  

I find the idea of a Kill-resistant armor at human scale pretty much ridiculous, and even most normal modern and even futuristic smaller scale vehicles shouldn't even be measured in Kills.

It is one of the silliest things about Rifts that we have people running around with pocket pistols that can vaporize a whole room full of people in full body armor (unless said armor is made of a completely unnamed unobtanium of course) and attack capital ships.  Shit, technically a 1d4 MDC pistol could take on modern tanks.  And win.

Every time I've either run or played Rifts, someone was in either a Glitter Boy suit or a SAMAS suit. Mainly because both are awesome.

Yeah, the sidearms that can blow up tanks is silly. I really can't see how Palladium let them slip through, unless they had just given up on the whole issue.

It would be great if Kevin had used the "Ultimate" reboot to go through and fix all of this stuff. Big missed opportunity, in my book.

One of the first things I did when I got back into Palladium stuff was to import Mekton Zeta's scaling scheme, with the numbers adjusted to fit and some hard caps imposed.  While horde-sized balls of riflemen mowing down starships flies with Starcraft 2, this is a RPG and some semblance of verisimlitude must prevail.

It's one of those things that makes it unique, but I agree that the splat really overdid it.

And that would be one of the things that makes it hard to repair.  You'd either have to come up with a conversion scale based on publication date, or junk a boatload of stats.

That's actually what makes converting the system appealing to me.  The opportunity to fix it...