Finding some system that lets us play a coherent game of Rifts has long been a dream of me and some of my players. Hero is the obvious choice and will do it, but you have to have players that can accept a 300 point differential in character values and that's ... unlikely.
GURPS can probably do it too but that means a lot of time spent with GURPS vehicles and I did enough of that in the 90's. It is fun to hear people argue about what's realistic when trying to turn Rifts into something that fits into a formula though...
Mutants and Masterminds I am almost certain will do it but I haven't tried, and I think the power levels might make it tricky. Perhaps another day...
The best answer is to stop trying to fix it and just embrace the madness - it may have the DM pulling his hair out at times but once again it leads to awesome player justifications for why that horrible thing that just happened couldn't actually possibly happen "because it's not rrr...rrrr...rrr...this system sucks!"
If you can't just ride the wave man ... well ... I've been having dreams about converting it to ICONS. Yeah, yeah, it's a little weird, but I think that the less detailed take of ICONS might be just the approach that handles the ridiculous levels of relative power without making the squishies feel overshadowed. You just assume that normal weapons are completely ineffective against everything in the Rifts universe and start with a rough conversion of something like weapons get half their dice as a power level and 1 level of Invulnerabilty per 100 MDC - like I said it's a rough idea right now. It keeps popping into my head though, demanding some kind of escape. Maybe if I just start with the main rulebook ...
 |
| Not so different is it? |
RIFTS makes my mind hurt and my soul ache.
ReplyDeleteJust kidding.
I have no soul.
If I had to pick a system to play/run RIFTS other than RIFTS (which would probably be the only way I would consider playing RIFTS), I think I'd go for Champions/HERO System for I was concerned about detail and completeness or M&M 3E for easy of play.
Good luck you crazy rascal you.
I've wrestled with this same problem -- I have a sort of nostalgic love for and fascination with RIFTS, but can no longer overlook that clunky horror of a system --- I don't think it can even be house-ruled into usability. I did a conversion into BESM 2nd edition, a system that I don't love but that can handle a wide range of wackiness, and found that with the right players and vision, it could be done. Mecha and crazy magic could all be approximated pretty well, and you could even simulate a reasonable, functional version of MDC (if you cared to). It cranked the complexity down a bit, but made it a hell of a lot faster and more exciting than trying to make palladium work. I don't know HERO at all, but I like the idea of a M&M conversion --- could probably preserve more of the crunch than BESM.
ReplyDeleteMaybe someday the intellectual property will move on and someone will fix that damn thing.
Hi Arch - yeah it's a strange fascination I've never been able to shake. I have to say had not really considered Tri-Stat but that would be a possibility, probably in Silver Age Sentinels form. I need to re-read that rulebook again...
ReplyDelete