Looking for a RIFTs game.
So, I've been thinking about starting up something-something Palladium for a while now and I've popped into this thread a couple of times and maybe I'm up for GM'ing a game of Rifts. Maybe.
I have A Serious Question, though, before I start thinking up cool junk.
What is it about Rifts you love? In my experience, Rifts players (and, to a lesser extent, Palladium-system players) are into one of things: Gonzo Fluff, or Gear Porn.
Gonzo Fluff enthusiasts are there for the KAPOW! and the ZOWIE! The whole giant wackadoodle world filled with wackadoodle things and just want to rampage across the world running into immortal tentacle mecha and four-armed philosopher yeti and sentient vampire trees and just DO COOL JUNK and the rules can whatever while they do it.
The Gear Porn people are there for the sweet, sweet crunchy numbers. They want to scroll through the books and spend every single credit they have in the single most efficient way possible and manipulate the ragged reed-basket of a rule-set to generate as large a bonus to [THING] as possible. And they tend to be very concerned that the rules are being followed very closely.
(and there is a third type, I guess, who are specifically into Lord Kev's oddly pervasive military-worship fascist slant, but they tend to fall into the second category anyway)
These approaches are equally fine. I have fit a little into each, in my time. Part of the fun of Palladium is its very strange sense of specificity. It's for the first group that the Savage Species version was created, and that's great, but you lose a lot of the game's absurd retro charm when you clean it up too much. It really works best when it doesn't really work at all.
However, too much of the second approach and you create a game that A of all, doesn't work very well on PbP and B of all, starts a kind of arms race that generates too many disparate elements for a GM to reasonably keep track of and tips the gonzo over that fine line from asset to liability.
Does that make sense?
If so, my question for you is:
What do you want to DO? What kind of game do you want to play? Like, would you be happy making your standard 19-page character sheet full of Very Particular Things and Very Accurate Numbers and then not worrying too too much about the rules unless it's fun? If we're halfway into a (heavily houseruled) fight and I forget that you have [Very Niche Ability] that is triggered by [Very Specific Thing], can we bring it up without being a jerk about it and just rolling with it? Can you be okay with a party of nonsensically unbalanced power-differentiation and then everyone just kind of low-key agreeing to keep the game on an even keel? Are you okay with just hand-waving almost everything once combat starts and just winging it as best as we can? Are you okay with most of the rules being opt-in (if you have a fun thing you want to roll for, because it's equally fun if you succeed or fail, awesome! But if you're the Building Things Guy and your Building Things Skill is, like 18% and you want to just Build the Dammed Thing, then that's cool too)?
Like, the most fun part of Palladium is character creation, yeah? It's very front-loaded that way. So, what if we did chargen by the book, and then, say, a solid 75% Rule of Cool afterward? And Rule of Cool not being just an excuse to power-game the life out of everything?
Would a game like that work for you?
I really like Palladium. And I really like Rifts. But a large number of its devotees are a type of player that I generally don't have fun playing alongside (especially on PbP). No disrespect to those players, I wish them the best of luck finding a game that suits them, but if I were to start something up, I'd want to make sure we could get along.
If all of this sounds like your jam, then let me know and I'll start shaking the idea tree and see what falls out.
