I love Palladium.  Their games were all we played in school, and it was great. 

But.

Anybody who has read a Palladium game rulebook knows they're a bit janky and could use a cleanup. 

So, why not discuss just that?  What would you do?

1.  Create a second Strike bonus only used for ranged combat, and call it Aim bonus.  If you want to punch somebody or hit them with a sword, use your strike bonus.  If you want to shoot an arrow or fire a gun at something, use your Aim bonus. 

A high Physical Prowess attribute gives you a bonus to strike, parry, and dodge.  It doesn't give a bonus to Aim. 

Note: this doesn't change the existing game rules.  It already works like this, but splitting Strike bonus into Strike and Aim helps clarify when a bonus applies

2.   Remove Simultaneous Attacks.  This combat option gets abused as it prevents the other guy from defending himself.  A tough PC can always defeat a weaker opponent by just spam Simultaneous Attacks and win by taking a beating. 

If you want to hit back, just wait until it's your turn in the Initiative order. 

3.  Gunfight Cover Rules.  Or lack of.  The game rules for gun battles have changed as newer rulebooks came out.  Dodging gunfire was a thing, but now isn't, but then is possible with massive penalty?   It's all confusing. 

So, my rule is a stationary target is a 5 or more to hit, a moving target is an 8 or more.  The target can roll a Dodge to avoid hits by bullets, but this requires cover to dodge behind, or be super-powered agile, or flying.  If you're out in the open and being shot at, all you can do to protect yourself is run as an action, raising the requirement to hit you from 5 to 8, but no dodge allowed. 

I do understand that MDC worlds might make finding cover to hide behind more difficult when a typical laser rifle can destroy a rock or tree in one shot, but the solution might be to nerf MDC to be only x10 the rate of normal damage, not x100. 

4.   This is minor, but gun burst sizes need an adjustment.  A short burst uses 25% of a magazine up, not %20.  This makes the math better when mixing a short burst and long burst.  A magazine is 4 short bursts, 2 long bursts, or a "mag dump", aka 25%, 50%, or 100% of your mag is used. 

5.  Multiple actions used by one attack.  The Mag Dump, the Jump Kick, etc.  They all use two attacks to perform.  How does that work in the initiative order?   When it comes back to you again, are you skipped over?  Can you do a dodge before that? 

When making an attack option that requires two attacks get used, you use up your current action, and your last action.  IE.  I have 5 attacks per melee round.  I win Initiative and go first, so I jump kick an enemy. I now have 3 actions left, but the initiative order remains the same. 

6.  Dodging work against ALL attacks made against you until it's your turn again.  But, roll each dodge separately.   Why separately?   We're human.  We sometimes forget, so to avoid this just roll each time.  It's still just one action until it is your turn again.

Dial the core combat system back to Mechanoid Invasion Book 3.  Make things like dodging bullets at -10 a genre rule.  Cut back on the hit pont bloat.  No SDC for people or possibly only as a genre rule.  Super powered attacks should always be better than firearms.

Another gun combat cover rule could be to just give cover an armor rating. 

Stationary person out in the open is a 5 to hit
Moving person out in the open is an 8 to hit
Person in light cover has an armor rating of 11
Person in medium cover is armor rating 14 to hit
Person in heavy cover is armor rating 17 to hit

Light cover is things that often don't stop bullets, but you cannot see the guy.  Bushes, small trees, tall grass, 55 gallon drum that's empty, car door, interior walls and doors made of wood and plaster. 

Medium cover will stop bullets.  Big trees, rocks, dirt berm, brick walls, car engine block.

Heavy cover are military style bunkers, foxholes designed to protect you. 

I think the rules from Palladium Fantasy 1st edition are pretty good. Basically just D&D with active parries/dodges. Then you get to Robotech and TMNT and there are more options, but pretty much the same. Ninjas and Superspies runs perfectly fine as-is, for instance. It wasn't until Rifts books started adding all sorts of stupid shit that it got out of control. If you eliminate MDC, autododges and stuff like the missile rules which are brain-dead, that would help a ton.

Use all the setting material, and port it to an actually good game system.

As someone who got my TTRPG start with Palladium games as well as the longest lasting campaign I've ever been a part of, I wish you luck.  That said I think you've got your work cut out for you.  I don't see any way of salvaging the mess that is Palladium's mid 80s dnd clone with forty years worth of hastily stuck on postit notes worth of tweaks.   It needs a ground up revising IMO... and I say that as someone who also tried 20+ years ago to get the pee out of the Palladium rules pool. 

Quote from: Brad on February 07, 2024, 10:45:25 AM
I think the rules from Palladium Fantasy 1st edition are pretty good. Basically just D&D with active parries/dodges. Then you get to Robotech and TMNT and there are more options, but pretty much the same. Ninjas and Superspies runs perfectly fine as-is, for instance. It wasn't until Rifts books started adding all sorts of stupid shit that it got out of control. If you eliminate MDC, autododges and stuff like the missile rules which are brain-dead, that would help a ton.

That is sort of what I am going for with the Dodging bullets requires Cover rule.  You can't dodge when out in the open, but you can go back to Strike vs Dodge when using cover.

I also allows you to pin down an enemy.  You shoot, he dodges, and then you shoot, he dodges, ect.  That enemy is stuck dodging.  They're pinned.

You are right.  i don't want a lot of situational rules.  Keep the roll the same when fighting hand to hand or fighting with guns.

The basis of Palladium combat is an opposed roll of 1D20 vs 1D20.  That is how gun combat should work.

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 07, 2024, 10:56:36 AM
Use all the setting material, and port it to an actually good game system.

  Which is what I did when I got the Savage Worlds version of Rifts.  Savage worlds has its little things I do not love, but it does rifts a good deal better than palladium did.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 07, 2024, 03:12:13 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 07, 2024, 10:56:36 AM
Use all the setting material, and port it to an actually good game system.

  Which is what I did when I got the Savage Worlds version of Rifts.  Savage worlds has its little things I do not love, but it does rifts a good deal better than palladium did.

And I found Savage Worlds a bit hard to get into.  It's not for me.  I have the core SWADE game, but it's not a favorite of mine.

I also found the SW Rifts books to be split up too much.  It's like they took the core book of Rifts and made three Savage Worlds books out of it.  Not a fan.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 07, 2024, 07:46:52 PM
And I found Savage Worlds a bit hard to get into.  It's not for me.  I have the core SWADE game, but it's not a favorite of mine.

I also found the SW Rifts books to be split up too much.  It's like they took the core book of Rifts and made three Savage Worlds books out of it.  Not a fan.

So you're referring specifically to Rifts then?  I was going to suggest if you were talking about Palladium Fantasy to just pick an OSR flavor you like and back convert the monsters over instead of trying to fix the core PB rules.   If you like crunchy systems, you might want to wait for Starfinder 2nd edition to come out and possibly use that instead.  I believe the preview/beta is being released at Gencon this year.

Just remember not to convert it to D&D3/3.5 style D20 and post it on their forums because I think they still have the warning stickied there from almost 20 years ago. 

I was playing around with a silly version of a retread earlier and this thread inspired me to write a more serious version.  You'll note that kicks never do more damage than guns.

https://www.therpgsite.com/design-development-and-gameplay/a-rough-riff-may-cause-rifts/

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 07, 2024, 07:46:52 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 07, 2024, 03:12:13 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 07, 2024, 10:56:36 AM
Use all the setting material, and port it to an actually good game system.

  Which is what I did when I got the Savage Worlds version of Rifts.  Savage worlds has its little things I do not love, but it does rifts a good deal better than palladium did.

And I found Savage Worlds a bit hard to get into.  It's not for me.  I have the core SWADE game, but it's not a favorite of mine.

I also found the SW Rifts books to be split up too much.  It's like they took the core book of Rifts and made three Savage Worlds books out of it.  Not a fan.

  Reading SW I did not like it.  I finally ran a game with it...and I was shocked at how much better it played and how much the players enjoyed it.  I was on a tear when I got the Rifts set, so I got the box set and several of the world books.  I think you only need the player manual though to play it, and if you enjoy SW and play a while with it...you can make a conversion that does not need any of the rifts books IMO.

I like the Palladium and Rifts setting. I enjoy Savage Worlds Rifts, and I salivate at the mouth thinking of a proper Savage Worlds Palladium. So I would just ditch the system. There are plenty of things (especially, early, D&D-adjacent  things) that will do the job. In a certain sense, the game isn't fixable. Realistically, a dagger won't steadily degrade plate armor, and a .22 won't really chip away at a Kevlar vest in a way proportional to a Magnum. It's too easy to hit things, and too hard to parry them. Giving SDC to humans was always a mistake, a mistake made more glaring by building Hit Points with level but not SDC.

Palladium 1e, despite its faults, may be the best iteration of the system, followed by TMNT revised.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 09, 2024, 05:58:57 PM
I like the Palladium and Rifts setting. I enjoy Savage Worlds Rifts, and I salivate at the mouth thinking of a proper Savage Worlds Palladium. So I would just ditch the system. There are plenty of things (especially, early, D&D-adjacent  things) that will do the job. In a certain sense, the game isn't fixable. Realistically, a dagger won't steadily degrade plate armor, and a .22 won't really chip away at a Kevlar vest in a way proportional to a Magnum. It's too easy to hit things, and too hard to parry them. Giving SDC to humans was always a mistake, a mistake made more glaring by building Hit Points with level but not SDC.

Palladium 1e, despite its faults, may be the best iteration of the system, followed by TMNT revised.

You're not wrong.

I think a lot of the issues with their combat system is feature creep.  Worse, feature creep done game by game, each time a bit differently, and not a consistent one either.

Really, I can sum up the changes that I would make in just two.

1.  Dodging bullets.  You can do so, but you need cover.  Then it goes back to opposed rolls of strike vs dodge.
2.  When dodging, or when performing a double attack action the action used up is from the end of your turn.  I.E.  I have 5 attacks, and I lose initiative.  Bad guy shoots at me, I dodge behind something.  Second guy shoots at me, but I am already dodging, so I don't use up another action (side note, its a new pair of strike vs dodge rolls because we often forget things like our last dodge roll mere seconds before).  Then it is my turn to attack back, but I only have 4 attacks.

There, that is what I would do as a minimum.