Monday, January 31, 2005
On Palladium, Part Three
Is it a game system or just a game? Let's face it. Who gives a shit? While it bugs me that Palladium pushes its various disjointed mechanics on the gamer community and calls them a system, whether or not a game is actually part of an overall game system doesn't make it good or bad. After all, GURPS is a game system, and I just found it to be too much number-crunching to be fun. Dungeons & Dragons 3E has so many rules that don't work together that the so-called d20 System is hardly a system. But it's damn fun, even if it's stupidly complicated at times (attack of opportunity, anyone?).
Perhaps it's unfair to Palladium to base the rest of my argument on the mechanics as they are laid out in Rifts, seeing as Rifts is the most disjointed of all the Palladium games, but it's what I have on-hand and it represents a good heaping handful of the Palladium mechanics. Basically, it tries to use just about everything and fails.
As many of my players know, the thing I hate most about roleplaying games is character creation. I don't mean coming up with an idea for a character, writing a history, choosing a name and determining his (or her) personality. What I'm referring to is the mechanical aspect of character creation. I hate doing it. I loathe it. I despise it. I think character creation should be the simplest thing in a roleplaying game so that you can let your imagine guide you the rest of the way and just damn well get playing. This is what I love about Vampire: The Masquerade (and the rest of the White Wolf World of Darkness games). Mechanical character creation takes five minutes if you know what you're doing. The concentration is on turning these simple-looking stats into an interesting personality.
Overly-complicated and time-consuming character creation processes turn me right off. This is partly why I stopped playing GURPS, as well as a good chunk of the reason why I think Hero System is probably not for me. If it takes more than, say, half an hour to do all the mechanics for a game, I don't want it. If I need an Excel spreadsheet just to figure out all the mechanical nuances, keep the game away from me.
While Palladium games' character creation isn't nearly as complicated as GURPS, it's very time-consuming, and hardly intuitive. To make matters worse, it's not only time-consuming, but it's boring as watching paint dry. Opening up my Rifts book, I note there are eight attributes -- Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.), Mental Endurance (M.E.), Mental Affinity (M.A.), Physical Strength (P.S.), Physical Prowess (P.P.), Physical Endurance (P.E.), Physical Beauty (P.B.) and Speed (Spd.). They're rolled randomly, but they can be affected later by choosing various different skills, which I'll get to in a minute.
As bizarre as it is, there are three different types of hit points in Palladium. There's Hit Point (H.P.), Structural Damage Capacity (S.D.C.) and Mega-Damage Capacity (M.D.C.). Some characters only have one of these, while others might have all three in some ways. Most tend to have one or two, though. Normal creatures tend to have H.P. and S.D.C., while supernatural creatures have M.D.C. Think of these as being normal damage (H.P. and S.D.C.) versus uber-damage (M.D.C., in which each point of M.D.C. actually equals 100 H.P. or S.D.C.). Stupid, definitely.
Assuming the character you're building has no magic nor psionics, which are a pain in the ass as it is, what you need to do afterwards is determine your race (human, elf, dwarf, or one of the other thousand other races), Occupational Character Class (O.C.C.) and/or Racial Character Class (R.C.C.). That's right. It's not enough to just have race and class. The game is so unintuitive that the author had to include a special class type based on a race. Not everything mixes and matches very easily, and the extraordinary diversity of power levels between character types is baffling. In the core book alone, you can make what is probably the most useless character class ever shown in a Palladium game -- the Vagrant O.C.C., which has no armour, a few crappy weapons, a bit of money and a bag full of junk. One shot from an M.D.C. weapon, which are the most common weapons in the game, and this dude is toast. Compare him to the Glitter Boy O.C.C., which is a character that wears powered armour and totes around a gun bigger than the armour itself. Where does balance fit into the equation?
Throw in Potential Psychic Energy (P.P.E.) points, and constructing a character has already taken some time.
But wait! It gets worse! Now we move on to skills. By taking physical skills, you can up your character's physical attributes, number of attacks per melee round and other things based on your character's physical strength and endurance. Then there are knowledge-based skills, all of which are assigned a percentile rating. This rating is calculated based on the skill's base rating, the character's I.Q. and the level of the character, not to mention the odd skill that affects another skill's rating.
Each character has class and secondary skills. Characters get a certain number of automatic skills based on their O.C.C./R.C.C. as well as a few they can choose themselves. The skills get so nitty-gritty that the author felt it was necessary that Basic Math be listed amongst the skills.
Now, there are also melee combat skills and weapon proficiencies, but by this point, my brain starts to beg to be relieved from the hell of Palladium character creation. Although I haven't built too many Palladium characters recently, I did run Rawl through a character creation session several months ago for a Rifts campaign I was thinking of running. I think it took us the better part of two hours -- and Rawl had indeed played Palladium games before.
The mechanics of character creation should be the simplest part of a roleplaying game. Palladium has failed miserably at this.
Perhaps it's unfair to Palladium to base the rest of my argument on the mechanics as they are laid out in Rifts, seeing as Rifts is the most disjointed of all the Palladium games, but it's what I have on-hand and it represents a good heaping handful of the Palladium mechanics. Basically, it tries to use just about everything and fails.
As many of my players know, the thing I hate most about roleplaying games is character creation. I don't mean coming up with an idea for a character, writing a history, choosing a name and determining his (or her) personality. What I'm referring to is the mechanical aspect of character creation. I hate doing it. I loathe it. I despise it. I think character creation should be the simplest thing in a roleplaying game so that you can let your imagine guide you the rest of the way and just damn well get playing. This is what I love about Vampire: The Masquerade (and the rest of the White Wolf World of Darkness games). Mechanical character creation takes five minutes if you know what you're doing. The concentration is on turning these simple-looking stats into an interesting personality.
Overly-complicated and time-consuming character creation processes turn me right off. This is partly why I stopped playing GURPS, as well as a good chunk of the reason why I think Hero System is probably not for me. If it takes more than, say, half an hour to do all the mechanics for a game, I don't want it. If I need an Excel spreadsheet just to figure out all the mechanical nuances, keep the game away from me.
While Palladium games' character creation isn't nearly as complicated as GURPS, it's very time-consuming, and hardly intuitive. To make matters worse, it's not only time-consuming, but it's boring as watching paint dry. Opening up my Rifts book, I note there are eight attributes -- Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.), Mental Endurance (M.E.), Mental Affinity (M.A.), Physical Strength (P.S.), Physical Prowess (P.P.), Physical Endurance (P.E.), Physical Beauty (P.B.) and Speed (Spd.). They're rolled randomly, but they can be affected later by choosing various different skills, which I'll get to in a minute.
As bizarre as it is, there are three different types of hit points in Palladium. There's Hit Point (H.P.), Structural Damage Capacity (S.D.C.) and Mega-Damage Capacity (M.D.C.). Some characters only have one of these, while others might have all three in some ways. Most tend to have one or two, though. Normal creatures tend to have H.P. and S.D.C., while supernatural creatures have M.D.C. Think of these as being normal damage (H.P. and S.D.C.) versus uber-damage (M.D.C., in which each point of M.D.C. actually equals 100 H.P. or S.D.C.). Stupid, definitely.
Assuming the character you're building has no magic nor psionics, which are a pain in the ass as it is, what you need to do afterwards is determine your race (human, elf, dwarf, or one of the other thousand other races), Occupational Character Class (O.C.C.) and/or Racial Character Class (R.C.C.). That's right. It's not enough to just have race and class. The game is so unintuitive that the author had to include a special class type based on a race. Not everything mixes and matches very easily, and the extraordinary diversity of power levels between character types is baffling. In the core book alone, you can make what is probably the most useless character class ever shown in a Palladium game -- the Vagrant O.C.C., which has no armour, a few crappy weapons, a bit of money and a bag full of junk. One shot from an M.D.C. weapon, which are the most common weapons in the game, and this dude is toast. Compare him to the Glitter Boy O.C.C., which is a character that wears powered armour and totes around a gun bigger than the armour itself. Where does balance fit into the equation?
Throw in Potential Psychic Energy (P.P.E.) points, and constructing a character has already taken some time.
But wait! It gets worse! Now we move on to skills. By taking physical skills, you can up your character's physical attributes, number of attacks per melee round and other things based on your character's physical strength and endurance. Then there are knowledge-based skills, all of which are assigned a percentile rating. This rating is calculated based on the skill's base rating, the character's I.Q. and the level of the character, not to mention the odd skill that affects another skill's rating.
Each character has class and secondary skills. Characters get a certain number of automatic skills based on their O.C.C./R.C.C. as well as a few they can choose themselves. The skills get so nitty-gritty that the author felt it was necessary that Basic Math be listed amongst the skills.
Now, there are also melee combat skills and weapon proficiencies, but by this point, my brain starts to beg to be relieved from the hell of Palladium character creation. Although I haven't built too many Palladium characters recently, I did run Rawl through a character creation session several months ago for a Rifts campaign I was thinking of running. I think it took us the better part of two hours -- and Rawl had indeed played Palladium games before.
The mechanics of character creation should be the simplest part of a roleplaying game. Palladium has failed miserably at this.
// posted by Chris @ 4:31 PM 
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