Aurelius Vorn:
Mechanically, it works, but I'm not sure if it retains so much of the flavour. Too early to tell, I suspect, but I found the Savage Rifts conversion stripped a lot of the gonzo feel from the setting
It's inevitable when you're using a general system. Though I found SW Rifts to capture the action-movie feel the original aspires to a lot better--MDC numbers are bought down, extras are something the system badly needed, and subsystems like chases and dramatic tasks just fit a lot better than Palladium. Plus, Juicers feel much closer to their "live fast, die wide" design, whereas in the original, it would never kick in unless you had lots of timeskips. Original Rifts was my first ever RPG and I have a massive degree of nostalgia, but it's really not a good system!
Jak Tesla:
But put back in a great deal of sense (at the cost of some really weird playtesting results - Bursters became absolute beasts).
That said, this one's interesting but I don't think we've gotten all that far with it yet. One thing to look out for is how much impact raises and exploding dice can have, over and above the results expected on the old D100.
Yes, exploding dice aren't something I'm a fan of--it's very rare in practice for damage dice to go totally crazy, but it can happen, usually at weird moments. That was my gripe with Savage Rifts--combat between big things with big weapons alternates between "slapfight" and "instant death", and I find it works a lot better if you put a cap of 30 on toughness + armour. It was something I wanted to address here, and not have numbers go totally out of control.
I love the FFG Rogue Trader RPG in terms of atmosphere and worldbuilding, but I've steadily been more and more put off by the way the skill system works, and the way you're expected to constantly try and scrape up every +10 you can to be even semi-reliable at what should be a character's specialty. And then you get adventures that casually throw around -20 or worse penalties to skills that struggle to clear 50% without hyper-specialisation.
Also, no response from Morton. I'll NPC him tomorrow, and press on.