My first RPG was Palladium Books RoboTech Macross.  It was confusing a bit, but it worked. 

However, their newest books keep subtly changing their rules.  Things like dodging gunfire is now -10 to your D20 roll, but also requires the shooter to beat a 10 in the first place.  In the old Rifts 1E and RoboTech games you just rolled a d20 + strike bonus and had to beat a 4, and the enemy's dodge + dodge bonus roll to hit them with a gun.

I'm not playing Palladium anymore, but I still buy their products.  Each new rulebook with their combat rules in it just seem to make it harder to play. 

That being said, we did have our own house rules.  We only allowed dodging gunfire/arrows if you were flying, or had something to duck behind like a 55 gallon drum from every cheap action flick you watched because the leading ladies were all playmates or penthouse pets who did a nude scene for no reason.  You know, those barrels that deflect .223 rifle bullets. 

That's the only gun battle rule Palladium needed.

What do you think.  Is Palladium making their newest games crunchier and getting too far away from K.I.S.S.?

Also, out of curiosity what house rules did your table like to use?

I'll be perfectly honest with you...I first learned how to play TMNT (original with all the deviant stuff) and used Robotech for the vehicles rules. When Rifts came out, I don't think our group ever bothered to learn the "newer rules", even if there were any. We stole all the martial arts from Ninjas and Superspies so that became the HTH system. So basically, I have no actual idea how the combat system has changed since around 1990 because it didn't even matter. In my opinion a lot of those alleged changes stem from discussions in the Palladium boards which I haven't looked at in a long while. I got Chaos Earth not long ago and read absolutely zero of the rules section and just perused the history and weapons, etc. At this point if I were to run Rifts again or TMNT, I would ignore everything but the original rules beyond specific OCC stuff and new weapons, spells, whatever.

I think if you go the GURPS route and treat them as pure fluffy sourcebooks these problems cease to exist.

Palladium eventually changed the change to that rule on dodging starting with Rifts Ultimate Edition.

It started out to a much lower proficiency bonus for ranged attacks (basically +1 to start with an aimed attack clarified as requiring two actions and a stable platform; i.e. you couldn't be running around and still make an aimed shot) with no PP bonus applying vs. the target's dodge with only their PP or specific OCC/RCC bonuses applying (i.e. hand to hand training doesn't effect your ability to evade guns) and needing to beat a 4 within 60' or an 8 beyond that to initially hit (with additional penalties if the target was moving quickly or taking evasive action).

Clunky as they can be (though Kevin himself is a very Rulings not Rules guy so the rules are more what you'd call guidelines if you're actually playing with him so in practice the degree of clunk was entirely GM dependent), I'd still take anything Palladium over ANY edition of D&D (TSR or WotC). They were ahead of their time related to the TSR editions and have a whole lot more heart than than any of the WotC era material.

Yeah.  We pretty much just used strike vs parry or dodge.  Simultaneous attack was thrown out (tough characters would abuse it) and we didn't use roll with impact as it slows down the game. 

Our rule was to allow dodging gunshots, but only when you have cover to dodge behind.  If you're in the open, then your new option wasn't a parry or dodge.  You could "run for cover" action that just -5 to hit a moving target.  That was clunky, so we reversed the math.  It's not a penalty to your roll, but is an addition to your target number.  Instead of a -5 to hit a target you need to simply roll a 10 or more.   The math is the same. 

That's more or less what the new rules say anyways.  Punching something that stands still and doesn't fight back is a target number of 5+, or shooting is a 10+ on a roll of 1D20+skill bonus.  It's just that official Palladium ranged combat rules also allowed the defender to dodge, but with a -10 penalty.  At that point I'm ready to burn my book and go back to Rifts 1st edition that didn't have any of this.  You roll a 1d20 to hit, and they roll a 1d20 to dodge.

But, that goes back to old Palladium gunfights that don't have cover, and being in an open desert plain is the same as shootouts in the jungle.  We want cover to matter, but in the easiest way possible.

So, our rules are:

1.  Shooting a guy just standing there is a 5 or more.  But, before that happens you give the defender the option to run for cover, using up an attack/action that turn, changing the number to 10 or more to hit.
2.  Shooting a guy in cover is a 5 or more.  But, you give the defender the option to dodge first, using up an attack/action, and that sets a new target number of 1d20+dodge bonus or more to hit him.

FYI, we also allow a lot of mundane things in the world to be used as cover when facing Mega-damage weapons.  If it can stop a .50 cal bullet, it's cover.  Sandbags, logs, rocks, engine blocks, those Adamantium 55 gallon oil drums from cheap action/exploitation B-movies, ext. 

I've always said that whilst I kinda like and respect Palladium crunch. The actual rules aren't amazing. When Savage Worlds released their version of Robotech I quickly migrated over. The latest Robotech RPG goes way too far in the opposite direction of being a story game. Which I'm not too keen on. Robotech should be a balance of crunch and story. Something where mechanics enhance and work with the role playing. Palladium have never really been great at either but that was okay because their settings were so good. Rifts is a cool setting, Robotech goes without saying and some of the other licenses they managed to pull off were great too. But the games leave much to be desired.

  I think Palladium solved their rules issues with releasing Savage Rifts.   I do think as mentioned you could use the books as fluffy source books (its the main reason I buy the WH40k rpgs, the rules suck bad but the fluff is inspiring) and get a better rule system.  Savage worlds with the Rifts series shows a much better rule system to use to play the game IMO.  I think something like GURPS could do it really well too, but there is a a bunch of work involved in conversion and many people  just dont want to learn or play GURPS. 

   I had a full library of Palladium books over 20 years ago.  I thought the fluff was decent and the art inspiring.   Everyone I know always thought the rules were cumbersome and some were just weird.   I guess the biggest conversion I made regarding house rules was just swapping to Savage Worlds. 

Yeah that's the boat I'm firmly in. I love the fluff from the Palladium books. The system? It's a pass for me. One of the whole points of the Rifts concept is that *anything* could show up in the setting - the problem is that when while Palladium had multiple settings across genres, the core system was all over the place. Hence the big Conversion book, while at the time was cool, the system still had a lot of weirdness in there that forced GM's to do a lot of work to make it work.

Savage Worlds rules makes it vastly easier. And like Palladium, Savage Worlds has a lot of settings and genre-specific books to pull from, and because the system is more unified it is trivially simple to rule on the fly.

That said - I did go in on the latest Titan Robotics Kickstarter from Palladium - purely to get the Savage Worlds rules for it. I LIKE Palladium. I just wish they'd get around to making an official 2.0 version of their rules.