RIFTS: Balance Vs. Niches

[RPGPundit]

RIFTS: "Balance" Vs. "Niches"

I have to wonder how many people who think RIFTS is stupid or hate Palladium's games really hate it, when it comes down to it, because of that issue of "balance". Because that's definitely one of the reasons I LOVE RIFTS; because it beats the shit out of balance until balance is curled up on the curb, pours zippo fluid all over balance and then lights that shit up.

RIFTS doesn't give a shit about balance, and some people think that makes it a shitty game; these are, I suppose, the same people who think that the ideal RPG is the later editions of D&D, where everyone has the same power levels and one class is almost indistinguishable from the others, where the sameness has reached levels where it almost doesn't matter what you play, where some intense mathematical formula has been devised by which any two Level 5 characters will have a precisely 50-50 chance of beating the other in the fight.

This almost always requires taking away as many random elements as possible, so that on top of that, any single die roll won't matter. You certainly can't die from a single roll.
But more importantly, it takes away all genuine coolness.  I mean, there are some awesome-looking creatures in 4e, why doesn't it feel awesome the way RIFTS does? Easy: because at the end of the day you know that in the recent editions of D&D, monsters, classes, and magic items are all just window-dressing for some stats, and those stats will be utterly predictable.

In RIFTS, on the other hand, there are monsters that will motherfucking KILL you. There are classes that get a mecha with more than 700 MDC and another class that starts with nothing but a rusty motorcycle; and its not that one is awesome and the other is lame, that radical difference makes the guy with the rusty motorcycle just as awesome as the guy in the glittering mecha, only for very different reasons.
In RIFTS it matters very much if you get to somewhere that there's a decent black market, or what you can loot from the other guy. You're not just going to get something "balanced" to your level. You might be able to buy or steal a Naruni gun, or an Atlantean rune sword, and you might only be level one!

The point is: in Motherfucking RIFTS absolutely anything can happen, and that's so much more fucking awesome than a game where you know, even as you play, you know at the end of it all that anything can most definitely not happen, and that "everything" is in fact strictly regulated for the purposes of balance.

What I've heard from many is that RIFTS is unplayable because of this imbalance. That's so far from true its laughable. Because RIFTS, and other old school games before it, was based on the principle of  Niche, and not balance.  You can definitely have the mecha pilot, the cyber knight, the mercenary soldier, the techno-wizard and the rogue scholar all together in the same group.  They all have different very specific kinds of awesomeness, that don't get in each other's business.  Some are great at killing things, some are great at knowing things, some at doing stuff, some at doing other kinds of stuff, and some just at looking cool (and if you think that just looking cool is somehow a bad thing, you clearly don't get it).

Its these niches that matter, the niches of total awesomeness. You can't fabricate that shit artificially. If you want that, you have to gleefully murder balance. And trust me, good riddance!  Balance can go fuck itself.

RPGPundit

(May 27, 2010)

[Blackhand]

It's not really the disparity between the classes that infringe on the experience for me.

It's the lack of a tight combat system.  This isn't just about Rifts, but actually the combat rules in every Palladium game.

It might not matter much to you, but to some it does.  I am one of these people, and I think I can speak for everyone in my club.

We use a lot of the Megaverse books, and it's infuriating to see different combat rules in different books.  

I'm talking about the basics of combat, for clarity's sake - such as action pacing, uniform actions/reactions and bonuses across the lines, as they market it as being the same system.

I don't believe every combat action or situation can be seen to by the designers, but I do believe that most can.  The Palladium system can be very rough on you if you've got a mindset that doesn't allow for GM's changing the rules game to game or even action to action due to no rules existing covering basic actions.

What I mean is - two people have run Palladium games in the club in the last six months.  One was Heroes Unlimited 2nd, the other is a PFRPG currently being run.

They were two entirely separate games (mechanically speaking - which they should not be) only loosely connected by using the same character sheet.  Neither GM knew how to conduct the combat, or even the correct way to use certain pieces of gear, like shields and natural armor class.  We had to use the two rulebooks for those games, plus Rifts and Ninjas & Superspies to find all the rules we needed.

In short, for me it has nothing to do with how Rifts or even Palladium in general has you create characters.  You can roleplay being awesome if you're a Wilderness Scout and you're buddy has a Glitter Boy.

However, cast Shield on yourself in an S.D.C. world.  Natural Armor 4.  Your enemies need a 4 to hit, and per the rules if you beat the Armor Rating it goes to your physical S.D.C. anyway. One could ask what the use of casting this spell at all is.

Palladium really needs to tighten up it's language and make everything work faster and more clearly.  Instead, we end up making everything a philosophical discussion about RaW vs RaI.

[The Butcher]

What I've heard from many is that RIFTS is unplayable because of this imbalance. That's so far from true its laughable. Because RIFTS, and other old school games before it, was based on the principle of  Niche, and not balance.  You can definitely have the mecha pilot, the cyber knight, the mercenary soldier, the techno-wizard and the rogue scholar all together in the same group.  They all have different very specific kinds of awesomeness, that don't get in each other's business.  Some are great at killing things, some are great at knowing things, some at doing stuff, some at doing other kinds of stuff, and some just at looking cool (and if you think that just looking cool is somehow a bad thing, you clearly don't get it).

Its these niches that matter, the niches of total awesomeness. You can't fabricate that shit artificially. If you want that, you have to gleefully murder balance. And trust me, good riddance!  Balance can go fuck itself.

Word.

This is, in fact, why I've given up on trying to convert Rifts to different systems. Most "generic" systems are too caught up with the idea of balance, vis-a-vis point-buy character generation systems, to allow for the heterogeneity of player characters that, to me, is one of the game's unique strengths. The "imbalance" is a huge part of the flavor in Rifts, and my experience with conversions suggests that doing away with it will throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Also Palladium's house system is no masterwork engine, but it's certainly not "unplayable" as some people make it out to be. My one beef with it is character generation, especially the skill system.

[Ian Warner]

I don't think I've ever given a shit about balance.

Fairness maybe but that is not the same thing.

[Spinachcat]

RIFTS is very fun and very cool - especially with a GM who has players who trust him to interpret the rules.

I sympathize with Blackhand. Palladium is a hodge-podge of rules and a GM needs to houserule / edit / tailor what is in the books to what he wants in his game.  If the players aren't on board with that, the campaign is toast.

But then again, that's not much different than AD&D 1e. I have played 1e RAW and it sucks ass with all the player bitching.  Like Palladium, 1e has a devoted following in spite of the RAW.

Sadly, Pundit's praise of Palladium falls apart with his laughable lack of understanding of D&D 4e. Which will soon most likely be followed with his even greater lack of understanding of 5e.

[warp9]

I have to wonder how many people who think RIFTS is stupid or hate Palladium's games really hate it, when it comes down to it, because of that issue of "balance".

My own dislike of RIFTS has to do with the clunky rules, rather than the balance issues.

But, I can definitely agree with you about your dislike of having a cookie-cutter approach where the characters are all pretty much the same. . . .

In fact, your opening post made me think of HERO/Champions. When I started playing in the early 80s, things were much more open (at least the games I saw and played in were much more open). You had points to spend on whatever you wanted, and could get more points from taking disadvantages, and you could take huge amounts of disadvantages if you wanted to (although you'd get less and less points as you added on similar types of disads. For example, your first two psych limitations were full points, the third and fourth psych lims were half points, and your fifth and sixth psych lims gave you 1/4 the listed points). Thus, you could take all sorts of disadvantages, and build a character who was a psychotic cripple, with little or no defenses, but a single massive, world-crushing, attack.

As time went on, HERO/Champions GMs tended to adopt rules to micro-manage what the characters did with their points (making sure that the characters didn't have attacks which were too powerful, or armor that made them too hard to damage, or a level of agility which made them too hard to hit). This sort of thing leads to a game where the PCs are fairly similar, and makes it easy for the GM to put up a challenge for these cookie-cutter PCs. However, I prefer the concept of letting the PCs spend their points as they wish.

[RPGPundit]

Also Palladium's house system is no masterwork engine, but it's certainly not "unplayable" as some people make it out to be. My one beef with it is character generation, especially the skill system.

The skill system is the one thing I dislike about Palladium's character creation too.  It enormously slows down an otherwise very fast character-creation process.  
Have you seen my alternate skill system for palladium, stickied in this very subforum?

I've used it in my current campaign, to great success.

RPGPundit

[Cranewings]

Rifts, like all palladium games, takes some maturity. You have to make characters everyone can be comfortable with and it helps to know a little something about what you are doing.

One time I played in a Rifts game with a guy that was allowed to pick super abilities: so he got sonic speed and intangibility. He would run into tanks, materialize, drop a bomb, and bug out. We had tons of salvage as long as we were willing to scrap the fragged people out.

It was cute, but it got old for me after about 20 seconds. Another time a guy made a sonic speed zanji shinjinken ryu sword fighter with something like 9 attacks.

You combo this crap from all their splat books together and you can make some really stupid garbage. Characters don't change much after first level: you won't ever make up the power gap. Then the rest of them game is just GM acrobatics, trying to find things for the other characters to do without just powering them up and making the whole thing stupid.

If you look at the NPC books, almost ALL of the characters are very sub optimal. Martial artists with only a few physical skills, no boxing. Forcefield guys with low PE. They make sense. They are neat. They are obviously what's intended.

But nothing makes you play it that way and there is always some asshole that says that his "character concept" is some broken set of bullshit, twice as good as what anyone else has.

Anyway, yeah, it takes a lot of maturity to have fun with it.

[The Butcher]

Have you seen my alternate skill system for palladium, stickied in this very subforum?

Your fix is a great start, I like the "skills categories as skills" idea and giving all skills 30% +4%/level is pretty damn straightforward. Nonetheless, I've considered going even further, and maybe even "d20-fy" the skill system by using a d20 roll-high system (vs. difficulty scale/target number) and point allocation (with OCC/RCC bonuses converted on a 5-to-1 basis, e.g. +15% becomes +3).

And of course, doing away with subcategories is a must, e.g. one Radio skill instead of Radio: Basic, Radio: Scrambler, Radio: ECM, etc.; one Computer skill instead of Computer Operation, Computer Programming and Computer Hacking; etc.

I'll give it some thought and if it ever gets actual play, I might post it.

[RPGPundit]

Your fix is a great start, I like the "skills categories as skills" idea and giving all skills 30% +4%/level is pretty damn straightforward. Nonetheless, I've considered going even further, and maybe even "d20-fy" the skill system by using a d20 roll-high system (vs. difficulty scale/target number) and point allocation (with OCC/RCC bonuses converted on a 5-to-1 basis, e.g. +15% becomes +3).

And of course, doing away with subcategories is a must, e.g. one Radio skill instead of Radio: Basic, Radio: Scrambler, Radio: ECM, etc.; one Computer skill instead of Computer Operation, Computer Programming and Computer Hacking; etc.

I'll give it some thought and if it ever gets actual play, I might post it.

Sounds good, I'd like to see where you go with it.

RPGPundit

[warp9]

Thus, you could take all sorts of disadvantages, and build a character who was a psychotic cripple, with little or no defenses, but a single massive, world-crushing, attack.

I should probably extend what I've said above a bit. I want  to make clear that I'm not suggesting that people really build a bunch of psychotic cripples with world-crushing attacks. It is just that making sure that all the characters have attacks, defenses, etc, which are on about the same level (IMO) makes for a more boring game.

[James Gillen]

I refer to my RPG.net review of RIFTS for my opinions on the subject.  (Basically, it's not so much 'lack of balance' that's the problem but how these things work in a game.)

And HEY, warp9!!!  

JG

[warp9]

and hey, warp9!!!  :d

jg

hey jg!!!