Monday, January 31, 2005
On Palladium, Part Two
It took me a few days to get around to this, but now it starts. To kick things off, the first thing I have to say that bugs me about Palladium in general is the insistence by head honcho Kevin Siembieda that Palladium is a game system. This is something I disagree with.
There are probably different definitions of what a game system is, and mine might be somewhat different than others. Palladium, however, doesn't fit the bill. At its most basic definition, a game system is a set of game mechanics that can work for anything and are used throughout a product line, making everything within that product line compatible. Steve Jackson Games' GURPS is the best example. Like it or love it, GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) products are compatible. The mechanics don't change. There are just modular components. You could take a GURPS Fantasy elf wizard, throw it into GURPS Cyberpunk, and it would work. You would need the GURPS core book (books, now that GURPS 4E is out and SJG has gone the route of dual core books) and the other two books, but you wouldn't need to do any fiddling to get them to work together. They're compatible.
GURPS probably has its share of mechanical mix-ups that make a few things less than fully compatible, but for the most part, you can swap characters in and out of any setting with zero difficulty. That's mechanically speaking, of course. Throwing an elf wizard into the American Wild West ... well, you're on own figuring out how they get there and whether an elf wizard should be riding along with a bunch of gun-totin' cowboys.
Hero System is another game that is typically considered to be a game system rather than just a game. I don't know a lot about Hero, but I've been learning a bit from both Logan and Rich. By the sounds of it, Hero fits my definition of game system. It sounds like there might be a few inconsistencies because the game is a toolkit to build your own game worlds and campaigns, but it still sounds mostly universal.
Palladium doesn't work this way. It's almost there, but not quite. Each Palladium game uses a similar mechanic, although there are such vast modifications for specific settings that you'd need to sit down and do some work to port a Rifts character into, say, Palladium Fantasy. It could be done, but it's that work that makes it, in my mind, not a system.
This would also fit into other games that are called systems. Unisystem from Eden Studios sounds like Palladium, in a way. The only Eden game I have is All Flesh Must Be Eaten, so it's difficult to make comparisons, but as I understand it, there are two different versions of the Unisystem -- the regular one and the cinematic one. I think they're mostly compatible, but there are some tweaks that set them apart slightly. Whether these tweaks render them incompatible, I honestly don't know, though.
There are probably different definitions of what a game system is, and mine might be somewhat different than others. Palladium, however, doesn't fit the bill. At its most basic definition, a game system is a set of game mechanics that can work for anything and are used throughout a product line, making everything within that product line compatible. Steve Jackson Games' GURPS is the best example. Like it or love it, GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) products are compatible. The mechanics don't change. There are just modular components. You could take a GURPS Fantasy elf wizard, throw it into GURPS Cyberpunk, and it would work. You would need the GURPS core book (books, now that GURPS 4E is out and SJG has gone the route of dual core books) and the other two books, but you wouldn't need to do any fiddling to get them to work together. They're compatible.
GURPS probably has its share of mechanical mix-ups that make a few things less than fully compatible, but for the most part, you can swap characters in and out of any setting with zero difficulty. That's mechanically speaking, of course. Throwing an elf wizard into the American Wild West ... well, you're on own figuring out how they get there and whether an elf wizard should be riding along with a bunch of gun-totin' cowboys.
Hero System is another game that is typically considered to be a game system rather than just a game. I don't know a lot about Hero, but I've been learning a bit from both Logan and Rich. By the sounds of it, Hero fits my definition of game system. It sounds like there might be a few inconsistencies because the game is a toolkit to build your own game worlds and campaigns, but it still sounds mostly universal.
Palladium doesn't work this way. It's almost there, but not quite. Each Palladium game uses a similar mechanic, although there are such vast modifications for specific settings that you'd need to sit down and do some work to port a Rifts character into, say, Palladium Fantasy. It could be done, but it's that work that makes it, in my mind, not a system.
This would also fit into other games that are called systems. Unisystem from Eden Studios sounds like Palladium, in a way. The only Eden game I have is All Flesh Must Be Eaten, so it's difficult to make comparisons, but as I understand it, there are two different versions of the Unisystem -- the regular one and the cinematic one. I think they're mostly compatible, but there are some tweaks that set them apart slightly. Whether these tweaks render them incompatible, I honestly don't know, though.
// posted by Chris @ 11:41 AM 
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