ChrisTalbot.com

A little late is better than never, eh? My last little anti-Palladium rant was back on January 31st, and even then, I really only attacked the use of word "system" rather than the Palladium games themselves.

So back to why I think Palladium has shit for brains ... er ... games...

What's the one thing that every single RPG on the market has? Simple enough: Rules for combat.

Combat in RPGs dates back to the original Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, which of course takes much of its rules from Chainmail, which of course is based on several ideas around war games. Like it or lump it, RPGs started with "run the dungeon, kill the monster, steal its loot," and while they've progressed a bit, combat is still a central part of the games themselves.

Using Palladium's Rifts as the example again, I'll just come out and say that the way all Palladium games do combat is a serious problem. It just doesn't function worth a shit without houseruling it to death. For the most part, combat looks a lot like any other game. Iniatives are rolled. Attackers roll to strike. Damage is done.

One interesting thing Palladium tried to do is make combat a little more dynamic. In D&D, the rolls are static. You roll versus the AC. If you get equal or more, bingo! Roll for damage, please. There's no dodging, parrying or what-have-you. This irks some people -- not me, but I'm not everybody.

Palladium has dodge, parry, the ability to roll with punches to take less damage. Neat stuff, I say. It might even work if it wasn't for a couple of concepts in the game that aren't explained enough to actually make sense. Those are "automatic dodge" and "attacks per melee."

Dodging is pretty simple. You roll a d20, add your dodge bonus and try to score higher than the person trying to hit you. By dodging, according to the rules, you automatically lose your next turn (i.e. you just lost an attack per melee). However, some characters have automatic dodge.

Unfortunately, automatic dodge isn't really defined anywhere (if someone can find it for me, go to it and leave a comment). And the phrase itself could mean several different things. "You shoot. I automatically dodge you because I have automatic dodge." Probably not. Just dumb, and no game designer is that dumb. "You attack me. I can automatically roll to dodge." Duh. Everybody can do that. Perhaps the definition that makes the most sense would be: "You attack. I roll to dodge, but it doesn't cost me an attack per melee." That would make sense, but I've never seen that spelled out anywhere.

Attacks per melee is a neat idea. A lot of games have this, but Palladium went way too far. It's not abnormal for a character to have half a dozen or more attacks per melee. The problem is in how those attacks work, though.

So take two characters. One has five attacks per melee and another has two. According to Rifts, they exchange blows equally for the first two attacks. PC #1 attacks, then PC #2, then PC #1, then PC #2 (assuming PC #1 has the highest initiative). Then what happens is whoever has extra attacks just makes them. In this case, PC #1 hits PC #2 three more times in a row.

I don't know about anybody else, but that just screams "broken rule" to me. It just doesn't make sense. Back in my teenage days, when we played TMNT&OS a lot, I tried to fix this. In a way, it kind of worked like what I understand the Hero System phased initiative works like. I tried to even it up so that you weren't make a bunch of attacks at the end. So in this case, PC #1 might attack twice, then PC #2 attacks once, then PC #1 twice, then PC #2 once, then PC #1 once. Try doing that on the fly every single round, though -- because in all Palladium games, you determine a new initiative at the end of every round. Let's just say it didn't work.

So with combat as such an essential part of RPGs, Palladium's games have some severe problems that make combat either not fun, not playable ... or both.