Running Rifts for the first time in years

[Beelzebub1111]

Today marks the first day of a 3-4 week Rifts adventure, starting with uncovering a Mindwerks cult and finishing with Archie 3-OZ. This is serving as both a D&D break for the party and a GM warmup before I run my 5e conversion of The Temple of Elemental Evil.

I am a bit rusty GMing the game, but luckily the players are new to the system so they won't catch any slip-ups.

I would like to do a campaign journal for this as a writing excersize to keep my creativity flowing

And one question, is it a natural 4 or less that misses in melee, or total of 4 or less?

[Mutazoia]

{{scrubbed}}

[Beelzebub1111]

Rifts is great, setting is awesome. Rulebook is written slightly confusingly, but otherwise simple enough. I will never understand the hate

[CharonsHelper]

{{Scrubbed}}

[Telok]

Because the setting makes no sense and the rules are a hot mess?

Other than some sillyness in the skills and the occasional odd sdc/mdc edge cases the rules work at least as well as any version of AD&D and often better. Settings, as always, are what you make of them.

[Mutazoia]

Other than some sillyness in the skills and the occasional odd sdc/mdc edge cases the rules work at least as well as any version of AD&D and often better. Settings, as always, are what you make of them.

The Palladium system, where your pre-req's have pre-req's. You want to pilot a mech, better have computer operation...you want computer operation, you better have typing...you want typing, better have literacy...

Then there's the above mentioned sdc/mdc debacle. If having two different damage codes were not bad enough, depending on which splats you play with, you might as well just forget one or the other.

And speaking of Splats...don't you just love how every book that came out, trumped the one that came before it? I'm a Glitterboy, no now I'm a vampire, no now I'm a dragon, no now I'm a demi-god... Please stop the insanity.....

[raygun goth]

I have thoughts on Rifts. More specifically, thoughts on dialing back the gonzo a little bit and relying more on the horror and dark fantasy stuff.

Rifts Thoughts/Coalition

My first thought, looking through the books and the art, is that it's been 50 years since the end; even with no intervention, it would be impossible to tell humans were even here in 200 years, so. Going with the 50 year mark.

Suppose “The Coalition” is the remnants of the unified,international armed forces that were in use at the time of the war,assuming the war still goes on as planned. The Event, of course,altered the purpose and needs of the Coalition forces, requiring them to buckle down onto a single point of distribution – South Side Chicago, with the University and Hyde Park in sight, is a region midway between much of Illinois' military industrial complex. A better choice may have been Arlington, but Chicago was declared a clean zone with very little event-related activity, and was already well-equipped with a working urban center.

For the last fifty years, the Coalition army has been fighting a losing war. Any time an event occurs, something comes out that completely changes the way the battlefield works. Cut off from international trade, there's very little, if any, way to resupply or develop new weapons. Everything the Coalition has is something they started with, or something they looted from some other military complex. To fix their weapons, they need other weapons – without the ability to acquire rare-earth metals, heavy industry is a festering corpse.

Things started out well – distribution was going to the four corners of the North American continent, contact was established with ham radio systems, and things seemed to be going alright. Eventually,though, the constant fighting with d-bees and whatever the hell else kept emerging from the events took their toll, and stations were lost one by one until only the Chi-town distribution center remained. The remnants buckled in and prepared themselves for a long night.

The average human life span is back down to a pre-industrial 30-40 years. This isn't just because of poor nutrition and medical care –it's also exacerbated by the fact that the wildlife can sometimes breathe acidic gas. The Coalition works hard trying to keep itself fed and mobilized – they're still fighting the same war they started fighting in, and they're convinced not only of their mission,but that the end is coming any day now. Just one more victory is all they need.

Dog boys are mutants, or d-bees. If they're even “boys.” My thoughts are that they shouldn't have discernible breeds and they shouldn't be people proportioned – there's no more AKC telling you what a breed even is. It should just be a military generic dog. You remember Blood from Boy and His Dog? Imagine empathic/telepathic dogs with weird tumors on their heads. It prevents dog boys from taking away human gear (since the military already has gear for K-9 units that wouldn't fit a human anyway) but doesn't remove their role(magic hounds), and prevents the Coalition from needing huge, highly modern, perfectly functioning genetics laboratories. What kind of dog is that? A border Coalie. Ha.

Prosek killed his father because he believed in the Truth of war.

In real life, right now, we are fighting a war in which our soldiers have had their kids join the military and come fight alongside them in the same war. Same thought, different time frame.These people have been fighting a losing war for fifty years –they're angry, pragmatic, and generally ruthless. They're desperate,and desperate people do dumb things. They've turned the army into their culture. Their children are grunts or officers, just as their parents. Prosek's father, the General, was the last person alive inthe Coalition who even remembered what the world before the war was like, and Prosek bumped him off for the coveted general position, because the General could not see the Truth. Because the General still saw enemies of the Coalition as human beings.

The skull stuff.

At some point, grunts picked up the name “dead boy.” The term came from “dead men walkin',” a popular farewell/catcall when units left to go out to fight on the front lines. The joke used to go that the events were such meat grinders that anybody who came back alive from their tours really did die, and it was the ghost who came back – you can see it on their faces. So soldiers started painting skulls on their gear. Started calling themselves dead boys. The name stuck.

Chi-Town is basically a camp at this point – a military camp where everyone is absolutely certain this situation is only temporary, no matter how much evidence mounts to the contrary. It's a fascist sort of nervousness, where propaganda films are constantly replayed, remade, and watched, and dissenting opinions are silenced with bullying and peer pressure. No one wants to think that the last stand for the old world is a failure, or that any battle can be lost.The issue is that there's no particular enemy – there's no opposing army, no clean label that can be applied to the other side, so the Coalition labels mages, d-bees, and monsters all the same. They call them insurgents, and the byline is that the United States is suffering under the grips of a foreign military. Anything and anyone not the Coalition forces is potentially the enemy.

Vehicles can't be repaired completely. Systems are randomly cutting out, fuel is at a premium, and rare earth metals are literally impossible to get. Computers are dying. Power is almost impossible to keep running. Times are getting more desperate, feeding the civilians is becoming more difficult, and the Coalition is getting meaner. Yeah, civilians. Everyone's on lockdown. Curfews are common and the whole place is under martial law.

These are your bad guys - desperate, organized, but human. Deeply flawed and completely unreasonable, not because they have to be in order to make the plot work, but because they have turned the ideal, propagandized version of the US Armed Forces into a Platonic ideal and have begun to transform it into a religion. They will come to your village and proselytize with guns and fear.

Federation of Magic

Rare Earth materials are downright impossible to get; with international shipping down and nobody able to immediately recover it, oil refineries are unable to get new crude and nobody can get new oil – which means nobody can get new coal or uranium or neodymium. Anything left that needs rare Earth materials can only have them cut down from bigger pieces, since melting most of them down ruins the properties for which they're used in the first place. You can fix a hoverbike with a hoverbus, but you can't fix a hoverbike with the parts from a roomba.

No rare Earth materials means no new or repaired solar panels, no nuclear power, no recharging laser cells, none of it. What post-industrial technology exists is it, and when they wind down, the lights go out. Forever. It's Rifts Earth, and the chances of anybody being able to sustain an industry long enough to start churning out new power armor requires an infrastructure that isn't interrupted every couple of days by a cyborg dragon demon with psychic powers wanting to get cozy with your radio tower.

The Federation of Magic is easy – all it takes is a bunch of mages and d-bees who don't want to be messed with and they shack up in a few towns and set up a supply chain. Then a couple of towns start disagreeing on how they should go about things, whether they should act like they are at war with their neighbors or not, considering their only real neighbor is convinced it is at war with them.

Towns and Settlements

Most places are city states. We're back to pre-industrial agrarian societies here, and the most important facet of making it from day to day is making sure your crops aren't set on fire by a demon zombie samurai covered in parasitic worms that shoot lightning. People will take what they can get when they can get it, and cooperation is the preferred method of dealing with outsiders - if you feed, clothe, and wash someone, they will do one of two things - get out of your hair as fast as possible and go on their way (in which case, when they come back around, hopefully they'll come through again, with news, salvage, or money to spend), or they'll move in, and you need all the help you can get, even if the guy's blue and has an arm growing out of his crotch. It's hard to tell who's an alien, who's a d-bee, or who's been mutated by magic. Everyone who can pick up a hammer is a handyman, and anyone who can haul their own weight is a farmer.

-----------------------------

There's also the other direction, where everything is just a badly animated gonzo 80s cartoon. I was going to run it this way once upon a time, and use Cartoon Action Hour as the system.

[Anonymouswizard]

Because the setting makes no sense and the rules are a hot mess?

When had that stopped anyone from playing D&D.

Honestly, Rifts is one of those settings that has always interested me in a 'bat**** insane' way, but I've never been able to bring myself to read the system. I can't even untangle the class descriptions, and I'm a guy who loves crunchy systems. Maybe I should pick up the Savage Worlds version.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: Please remember not to insult folks choice of game or preferences. If they're asking if a system is good, it's cool to weigh in. If they're just asking for help, either help or find something else to do.

[LibraryOgre]

Ad res, I would say that the 4 or less includes bonuses.

Per page 35 of the RMB:


If the result is a four or less (counting bonuses), then the attacker misses. Any roll above a four (4) hits the opponent. But, if the roll is a five (5) or better, and less than the opponent's Armor Rating (A.R.), then damage may be done only to the S.D.C. of the opponent's armor (see A.R./Artificial Body Armor).

Emphasis added. So, a 1-4 total always misses; if you have a +4 to hit, you don't auto-miss BTB. This is also reiterated on page 40 in talking about Robot Combat, but there is a caveat... if attempting a called shot, the minimum to hit a called target is 12; at 5-11, you hit the main body, instead of the called target.

[Telwar]

When had that stopped anyone from playing D&D.

Heh, that's true.


Honestly, Rifts is one of those settings that has always interested me in a 'bat**** insane' way, but I've never been able to bring myself to read the system. I can't even untangle the class descriptions, and I'm a guy who loves crunchy systems. Maybe I should pick up the Savage Worlds version.

My thing with Rifts is that the version the author plays has significantly diverged from the written version, and refuses to publish an update to even maybe modernize it a little. And the written version is like an entertainingly bad version of AD&D that actively runs away from mechanical balance, shrieking that it's a false god and get behind me, Balance! But the setting is so freaking crazy-awesome that it almost makes up for it.

Honestly, I might give the Savage Worlds version a look.

[raygun goth]

Honestly, I might give the Savage Worlds version a look.

It's damn good. I was really pleased with it. It cleans things up and makes things much easier to deal with.

[Vknight]

I mean RIFTs is a hot mess of a game written by a person that thinks they have done no wrong and have no need to update the game or system, in any fashion.
Everything is broken and certain choices are just needed and always outway others.

Heck a True Atlantean, Glitterboi is the best choice if the Gm will not let you play certain types of dragons.

The setting is so overclogged with things that you can't move 10ft without hitting a new world ending apocalypse.

Heck my youtube channel has a series on RIFTs you should check it out.

The thing is there is nothing wrong with taking ideas from or otherwise scalping bits from RIFTs but attempting to run it wholehog is probably not the best idea or use of your time.

[sktarq]

The thing I found about Rifts. It is the most unforgiving and twitchy of games in terms GM skill (a great GM will lead to amazing games an okay GM will crash and burn)

Best advice is to keep a very firm lid on your splatbooks. Probably max out at 6 total.

Also be very active in the character generation so that the party melds well and you and the players understand how each character can be fun and useful (because the various OCC's are wildly divergent in this regard)

Don't drink during the game. Tiny screw ups can cycle into bigger problems extra fast in the Palladium rule sets-Its a matter of constant vigilance. (and a magic X-ray eye would be handy but not required)

Most of this advice is of course totally too late so instead just *Best of Luck*

[Beelzebub1111]

Well despite the naysaing on here, the game went over well. All the players are new to the system so we just used the Ultimate Edition book for OCCs. My players rolled a Dogboy (Ended up being a bloodhound, Wild Born, raised by a mercenary camp. He is a good boy), a Crazy (Part of the same mercenary company and opted into a Human Plus initiative to give himself an edge. For all his anger issues, he's become the de-facto face of the party), and a Combat Cyborg (Insists that he is a robot "Mk 2025b" everyone calls him Mark. He wanted to become a robot, so he pretends to be going through protocols and sequences and so on. to which the party replies "Shut up, Mark. You have a human brain" when he goes overboard.)

Our story began outside of a walled settlement in a deforested area of northeastern Kentucky. The city was surrounded by refugees from the forest mostly D-Bees, but including some humans and faeries. Apparantly they have been driven from their homes by an aggressive band of Brodkil. The players went inside the town seeing it inhabited by reptilian species, they are none too friendly running and hiding when they show up, but were given audience with the mayor. A sssssnake obsessed velociraptor-man hires them to do something about the refugies outside the town, )oh and maybe the brodkil if you have time). Their best lead is to head east to a nearby commune of humans. On the way the players run into a lone brodkil talking to itself, saying things like "No, the deserve to die. I'll kill 'em! I'll KILL THEM ALL". The Crazy gets it in his head to introduce himself as friendly, but the brodkil stands up, revealing MOM implants, turns to him and shouts "I'LL PROVE IT! BY ENDING THIS ONE!" and throwing a ball of fire at him. After the battle the demon immolates itself leaving a crispy husk with white hot studs in its head. As far as the players know MOM implants just flat out aren't capable of psionics of that magnitude, raising further questions. The dog boy does manage to track where the demon came from, but loses the scent in a creek. Using good intuition and abilities they follow the river to a small plot of farmland, and a road leading to the commune they heard about before. It appears that they are worshipers of two angels, that their minister claims to receive messages from. After a conversation with some Simvan who have stopped by for a drink while searching for a Rhino-Buffalo, they ask one of the locals about how the angels contact them, and they are told that they speak through the gifts granted to the minister. What gifts? "Why," she says to the crazy "The same gifts that adorn you" pointing at his MOM implants. The session ends with them being invited to listen to a sermon the next morning.



When had that stopped anyone from playing D&D.

Honestly, Rifts is one of those settings that has always interested me in a 'bat**** insane' way, but I've never been able to bring myself to read the system. I can't even untangle the class descriptions, and I'm a guy who loves crunchy systems.
Rifts is a system where you need someone who knows the rules to teach you. Picking up the book and trying to learn that was is very difficult. And you peace together an understanding over time. I wasn't even aware that you could make called shots in hand to hand. Thanks Mark.

Next session is tonight. Hope it goes over as well as the first one.

[TerrickTerran]

I've always enjoyed Rifts and while I know several people have issues with Kevin, he's always been great to myself and my partner so I'll never speak ill of the man or his game.

[Grac]

With palladium being a very... awkward attempt to redo adnd, I've been thinking about an attempt to bx-ify it. Especially with a hard page limit of 64, and reworking the classes to be not all over the place, well it would be a fun project and make for a much tighter, and actually playable game.