pros:  Interesting worlds and unique settings, lots of variety, unique premises, one of the earliest examples of a mana based system in pen and paper games, a common rules set between games

Cons: mechanics are crufty and incoherent, a lot of complexity for little to no benefit, mathematically the "engine" of the system just doesn't work, poor reputation of its creator and publisher hasn't endeared the games to the industry or players,no two reasonable people interpret the rules the same way

I give Palladium a lot of credit because it was new and innovative back in the day and I always wanted to play the games, but the sheer incoherence of them made campaigns too much of a chore and people quit running them like 3 sessions in.

It would benefit a lot from a conversion to a more modern system that places narrative over crunch to make all the crazy disparate options have mechanical parity and cohesion.

I had originally written a lengthy response, but I'll just focus on the thing that pushed me over the edge with Palladium.

I'm a fairly forgiving Roleplayer and wargamer. I could forgive ALL of my gripes if not for the disaster that is RRT and I don't even have a dog in that fight. I had originally planned to back the Kickstarter, but an unexpected bill put the kibosh on that. However, I still followed the KS because I was still ultimately interested in the project and intended to support it once it went to retail, but the way that Palladium has shown an almost callous disregard and disrespect for the people who placed their faith and money in them has turned me off of their product lines forever.

Every once in a while, I think about starting a Robotech 2E game on here and I'll get fairly far into the development cycle, but then I just find myself unable to bring it to fruition because, in my mind, I'm endorsing their business practices by buying their products and trotting them out to display for others. I just can't do that.

Fully half of my professional life, I have been involved in manufacturing in one capacity or another. Delays are expected, and even acceptable, provided you keep the people who are waiting on you in the loop. If, at any point in the past, I had just flatly refused to even acknowledge one of my former bosses' concerns for even a few days, I would have been fired. Instantly. Do not pass 'Go'. Do not collect $200.

Since I can't bring myself to endorse their products, I also cannot bring myself to purchase things either directly, or indirectly, from them.

FYI for anyone who is unaware, there's an announced version of Rifts in the works using Savage Worlds.  It's being developed directly by Pinnacle under license from Palladium so it will hopefully scratch that itch some of us have for a more mechanically balanced game.

As most have mentioned, Palladium's system is either loved or hated which really limits their appeal, especially in this medium where time dilation makes dealing with any mechanical snafus that much harder.  So it's not surprising that there are only a few games for their stuff on here.

So you the have to either deal with the system, try and convert it, or just play something else that gives you the same feel.  The smaller game lines such as Beyond the Supernatural and Ninjas and Superspies pretty much exist as very generic genres that have other/better systems/worlds, ditto if you want to use thier fantasy world.  I've also seen Nightbane done using some common understanding and various super hero systems.

Rifts has always been the big one though, too massive to truly emulate some other way without either a hyper focused limited concept or else tons of work.

I ran a TMNT/Ninjas & Superspies mash-up a few years ago with players who knew nothing about Palladium.  It was great, but the characters were so powerful it became difficult to challenge them in meaningful ways.  They would like to do it again, but I would seriously reduce their skill numbers by 40%, easily.  Allowing them to fail now & then as well as pondering their moves would have truely enhanced that game.  Otherwise, it was insanity -- in a nice way.  One of my favorite gaming campaigns.

Not all Palladium games start the same skills at the same percentages, though most.  Most certainly give better bonuses than others.  Skills in Dead Reign are never 'no worry about failing' at any level.  Heroes Unlimited can fall either way depending on your character and some levels.

Like many in the thread I too have many types of Palladium settings.
One thing the company has done right is their settings. VERY detailed, VERY informative, sometimes to much so.

Their downside is their dinosaur conglomeration of different systems FORCED to work together with bandaid rules that are far from streamlined. Many of their books (I'm looking primarily at RIFTS here) have no organization and many things seems to simply be placed where they will fit rather than somewhere it "makes sense"

Ok, I have heard the rules for Savage Worlds or legally available online for free?

There is a sampler set of rules titled the Savage Worlds Test Drive which are basic quick start rules to give people a feel for how the game works without including all the various options.

Every autumn I get a lingering feeling for playing a TMNT game, or maybe a beyond the supernatural game. I don't really know why. I hate running the combat mechanics. There are loads of inconsistencies between different chapters of the same book. A list of house rules to make everything jive right must be made. That list is a couple of pages usually, and something always crops up in the middle of a session. But when I see the books lying around, I get a warm fuzzy feeling. I think I have "battered gamer syndrome". Palladium hurts me because it loves me........

In reply to TheDunwichHorror (msg # 19):

I know exactly how you feel. The number of times I start planning a TMNT game, or a Heroes Unlimited game in my head and I'm just filled with warm, fuzzy nostalgia. I love them all so much. Despite their foolish, arbitrary, patch-work, half-genius, half-insanity.

Battered Gamer is right.

I can make Palladium games work, as I understand the system's strengths and weaknesses. The trick is - as others have said - getting players who all agree to a theme and power level.

The bigger issue I have is that most of my usual players don't play in the system anymore, and getting new people into it is a pain in the neck.

In what way is bringing new players in a pain in the neck?
This message was last edited by the user at 22:21, Fri 29 Jan 2016.

Most of them are accustomed to considerably more streamlined systems. The Palladium rules are considerably more clunky.

I should clarify: I'm not talking about wholly new-to-RPG players. I'm talking about people who haven't played Palladium before.

Ah, sure, makes sense

Ahhh Dunwich ...  Decades ago our group played the stuffing out of TMNT.  We traveled cross country, NY to CA -- then later we played the kids of the originals.  Those were the days of yore.  We did our rules streamlining too & we enjoyed the **ll out of that system, pushed the envelope.  Palladium can be done, invoking GM fiat, benevolent dictatorship, rules twisting & such to do so.  Once you get player buy-in, our games quickly went krazy & chaotic.  I'ld do it again, someday.  Too busy with other stuff now.

So should I abandon the game I have learned and loved since the mid 80s but have a hard time finding GM's to run games for Heroes Unlimited and Dead Reign?  Is there a system that is easy to learn, flexible, and allows settings such as those previously mentioned without massive personal work?

You don't have to abandon anything. But the less popular the system you want to play, the harder it is to get a game going in it.

I have that problem all the time. I tend to like smaller, older, or less popular games/systems. And so when I have a great idea for a game using one of them, it can be a struggle to find players.

Just pick up a more contemporary, easy to implement system for the "guts" of the game and use the old book for the setting and lore, best of both worlds.

Off the top of my head, Savage Worlds with the 2e Supers Companion, M&M 3e, possibly Marvel Heroic Roleplaying?  could all do it, with the first being very simple, the second more crunchy, and the third is probably close to SW in terms of complexity.

For zombies... I know there's systems like AFMBE but I'm not sure which ones are simple to learn quickly.

Yeah, I do that fairly regularly and I recommend it.  Every so often I run into some problems, "Wait, you're telling me that 5th edition D&D, the world of Dungeons and Dragons, set in the high-magic Forgotten Realms, the world of archmages, now only allows 3 main magic items per person because somehow it's become the world of Dark Sun?  WTF, mate?  And, wait, wait, you're also telling me that in this low-magic environment there are multiple classes with full spell and caster progression who are the only ones who get to be uber magic users because no matter how much money someone else has they can never try to buy off the immense gulf that separates them?"

I've found that Pathfinder pretty much allows for anything you'd ever want to play, though.  Sometimes you do have to make some thematic changes.  You want to play Cyclops (Scott Summers, Marvel universe)?  http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2nyxp?Fire-themed-mage And then roleplay that all those fire blasts are coming from his eyes.  A lot of Marvel characters can only be built as higher level D&D/3.P characters -- you can't make Rogue as a level 1 character.  Whatever floats your boat, though.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:44, Sat 30 Jan 2016.

In reply to Sittingbull (msg # 26):

Maybe you don't need to abandon it, so much as change the way you search for other players and GMs.  For instance, my knowledge of Palladium is limited.  Like many others, I know Rifts is a Palladium setting/game.  I know Ninjas and Superspies (but only because my GM was cadging tidbits from those rules to enhance his fantasy game).  I know Robotech.  And I know their Fantasy setting.

But if you tell me you want to play Heroes Unlimited, I've got no idea (or didn't, until now) that it ran on the Palladium system.  Before you give up hope on those settings, you might try hunting for people by listing the setting, and adding that it's a Palladium game, for those who might be interested in the setting but, like me, didn't know it was running a system they already know, rather than being an entirely new system to be picked up and learned.

First, for those of us old farts who still love it, the clunkiness of the Palladium system is more of a feature that a bug.  Because combat is an agonizing slog in bullet-time, fun-oriented groups learn fast that it's better to avoid fights when possible.  The way the system rewards experience comes as close to recommending this as it can without spilling the beans in a way that would harm future supplement sales.  The cartoonish power level guarantees that players who fail to grasp this and cling to the munchkin-style haste to start fights (engendered by D&D) do not survive for long.  The best games in the Megaverse are those that steer clear of crunch to focus on the chewy bits.

Second, a big reason why it's hard to find new players is because Palladium Books was (and, in many ways, still is) shockingly old-fashioned.  Siembada was so paranoid about his copyrights that he didn't publish PDFs until very recently.  It took a Kickstarter-rescue of the company itself to finally convince him that maybe this new-fangled Internet business isn't a secret conspiracy by alien insects to enslave and destroy humanity (I'm only half-kidding there; Systems Failure made a whole game of exactly that premise).  Because there's still no legal way to access the rules online for free (even hoary old GURPS has a free Lite version), new players just stick to more modern rules.  A lot of the books are also so old now that they're out-of-step with certain Millenial manners, which certainly doesn't help.  Players who aren't put-off by that are, unfortunately, also more likely to be unpleasantly traditional, with all the obstinate neck-beard fragility that implies.

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Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
If this sounds bitter, it's because my last attempt at an online Rifts game fell apart due to the first prospective player really wanting to play a square-jawed Christian soldier-bro who, in defiance of the machinations of effete scientist-types, heroically impregnates rescued damsels-in-distress to repopulate the planet (i.e., basically Immortan Joe via Michael Bay).  He got all sulky and quit after I suggested, in the interest of attracting more that just him as a player, some tweaks to make that concept less rape-y and red-pill-diculous.

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I'm hopeful that the Savage Worlds conversion will help to finally modernize Rifts and to bring the company's RPG canon to a younger and wider audience.  If they don't, there's always the possibility that the imminent reboot of TORG eats Rifts' lunch as some best-served-cold payback for squeezing the Infiniverse out of the gonzo-SciFi RPG market back in the 90's...

Spoiler text is really hard to read on mobile.

The thing that really is starting to annoy me about palladium is how they change rules or wordings to skills or such in later printings and dont mention it (that I know of).

Many companies change wordings of skills; to reflect feedback. They usually don't mention it either; because they assume (whether rightly or wrongly) that everyone will be using the same version of the game.

Palladium is not a company I have any experience with personally; but that just doesn't seem like an issue unique to them.

One of the problems that I've noticed is that when the supplement comes out that is the most current rules.

THEN they publish a "Ultimate Edition" shortly after and it has altered stats. Unless you are constantly updating ALL your books you get weapons and armor with several different stats.

Considering how many World, Dimension, and Source books they have I find it near impossible to keep up.


To that end I've simply taken to using the Rifts books as source material but not for mechanics anymore. When I was 18, no problem keeping up. Now with a family, 2 kids, living in the middle of nowhere, with the ability to play a sit down once every 2 months (at best) it is an expense I can not justify