RIFTS, the Role-playing game
I had played the Palladium Role-playing game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ninjas and Superspies. They all used the Palladium Role-Playing system which consisted of a D20 + Modifiers for Combat and a Percentage System for Skills, so if you had played any Palladium Books game you could play any other Palladium Books game.
As an aside, Kevin Simbieda, who owns Palladium Books, used to do illustrations for Judges Guild back in the 70s.
So what was RIFTS all about? Well, everything. A Rift is a break in Spacetime which opens a gateway, or Rift , to another place, time, or Dimension.
The premise was there had been a nuclear war in which Millions if not Billions of people had died. The release of Psychic energy blasted holes in our spacetime, Rifts to other dimensions which let magical energy flood onto Earth. Atlantis rose from the depths in the Atlantic Ocean and many coastal areas of various countries were flooded. Magicians again cast magic, Psychics used the power of their minds to make war on each other.
Creatures, called D-Bees (Dimensional Beings) came through the Rifts and there was another huge war. This went on for a couple of hundred years until the dregs of Humanity began to pull themselves together into various factions and slowly began to take control of parts of the earth again.
In North America the utterly Human Supremacist and Technologist anti-Magical Coalition formed for the extermination all Magicians and D-Bees. In Germany the also Human Supremacist New German Republic rose using their high technology to try to rid Europe of it's D-Bees, whilst in England, Magic was the prevailing force and various Kingdoms of Faerie, Human and D-Bees formed and jostled to live together.
So your characters went adventuring in this new and strange world. But you could also travel from RIFTS Earth through various Rifts to other Dimensions and worlds. You were literally only limited by your imagination, and whatever your favourite Fantasy/Sci-Fi world was.
The system allowed you to play various fighting types from Cyborgs, to Chemically or Mentally Improved Humans, to Power Armoured Troopers or Magicians of various types or Psionically active people, and even a Dragon hatchling. Each was presented as either a Character Class or Racial Class.
The System
Each Character had eight Attributes to give numbers to their Physical and Mental abilities. If these were high enough then various bonuses were added to Skills and Saving Throws.
Each Character then Chose a Class. The Class gave you some fixed Skills and some Skills you could choose. It also Boosted some of your Attributes. But the Palladium System had Skills that also affected your Hand to Hand Combat, and your Attributes. And your Attributes also affected your Hand to Hand Combat! As you rose in level you Character gained a few more skills and your existing skills improved.
Each Skill had a Base Percentage for Success, and a Per Level increase. So for example if you chose Detect Ambush, it had a 30% plus 5% per level chance of success, at First Level you would have a 35% chance of success, at 2nd level a 40% chance etc.
You Class gave you bonuses to these skills, so you may get the Detect Ambush skill at +10% so your chance at First Level would be 45%.
You could also take a selection of Skills as Secondary Skills, things you weren't trained in but had picked up on the way. These you learned at the Base Skill level with no bonuses. So you could get Detect Ambush at a base of 30% at First level, thereafter it rose by 5% per level.
Each Character Class had a base Hand to Hand Combat Skill from None to Basic to Expert to Martial Arts or Assassin. You could forgo some of you other skills to learn one of the better skills up the chain.
These were different from ordinary skills, at each level they gave you some sort of Combat Bonus be it an Improved Kick, the ability to use paired weapons, more attacks per melee round, bonuses to Hit, Parry or Dodge etc. You could also take skills in Combat in various suits of Power Armour which did the same but only when you were wearing the suit.
Combat was a D20 plus your Strike bonuses vs the defenders D20 plus his Parry or Dodge bonuses. These were different for Melee and Ranged attacks.
There were rules for firing automatic guns in Single Shot, Short or Long bursts or emptying the entire clip in one go.
The Skill System was to roll a D100 less than or equal to your percentage score in the skill.
Overall the game played well as it was only the paperwork creating a character and going up a level that caused any problems. I eventually put my players characters on individual spreadsheets so that when they went a up a level their Scores were updated automatically.
Play was simple and combat ran in rounds. Each round you rolled initiative on a D20 plus your bonuses and all took an action in highest to lowest order. Then you all took a second action in order, then a third etc until you ran out of actions and had to stand there until the next round began.
If you had a Hand to Hand Combat Skill then you could Parry any Melee attack with no penalty. If you didn't then you parried at a disadvantage and lost your next Action. If you wanted to Dodge a melee attack or had to dodge a ranged attack you lost your next Action, unless you were one of the very few characters to get an Automatic Dodge. You can't Parry a ranged Attack. (Though in the Star Wars Universe I guess if there was a Jedi Class, they could parry Laser Blasts! 😀)
Most of this was inherited from their previous games.
The BIG change was a thing called Mega Damage. As a normal Human you had Hit Points and S.D.C. (Structural Damage Capacity). S.D.C. represented physical damage that wasn't that serious, bruising and small cuts. Hit Points were serious damage that could lead to Death. Non Living things also had S.D.C., so you could break open a chest by destroying its S.D.C.
Mega Damage (M.D.) or Mega Damage Capacity (M.D.C.) was a step change, in the High Technology and Magic world of RIFTS Superior Armour was created that was impervious to normal S.D weapons and high tech Weapons and Magic was created that could almost ignore S.D.C protection.
One Mega Damage point was worth 100 Structural Damage points. And furthermore Structural Damage could not affect a Mega Damage Capacity item.
So you adventured in an M.D.C. Suit of Armour shooting with M.D. Weapons and as soon as your armour was depleted, you rushed off to get a new suit as a standard Human only had a very few Hit points and under a hundred S.D.C.
Along with this was the abandonment of the Armour Rating system for Mega Damage. In the previous games if an attack roll beat your armour rating, you took the damage to your S.D.C and Hit Points, if it didn't your armour did until it lost all it's S.D.C. and was destroyed. Obviously if this happened with Mega Damage you could be killed instantly, so Mega Damage Capacity armour always took the damage until it's M.D.C. was depleted. Then you could be killed by a single point of Mega Damage. You generally didn't stick around when this happened.
Of course you could change this ratio if you wanted to. I regularly change the ratio when I take my players through Rifts to other dimensions.
Sadly, there were plenty of ambiguities in the rules system. It seemed to have been hastily thrown together. Combat was explained in the Combat section which was at the end of the Skill Section. The list of Skills that could not be taken as secondary Skills was hidden in a paragraph just before the Skills section. Saving throws appeared in the Hand to Hand Combat section. Etc... Clearly there were skills missing, the Burst fire system became lethal when used on Mega Damage weapons, and the Combat System had so many holes in it. Finally, some Character Classes were so much more powerful than others. But we just house-ruled our way past these things and carried on.
Many, Many ( More than 30 ) sourcebooks were released. One set allowed conversion of characters from the other Palladium game books, others detailed the other countries and regions of RIFTS Earth. And finally there was a series that detailed other dimensions and how they fitted with RIFTS Earth.
Sadly, after a while they just became a new set of Character Classes, More Weapons and Armour, and new and Bigger Robot Suits till you thought you were playing some sort of Mech Warrior game.
Also, being British, I was appalled at the RIFTS England book. Whilst there was a lot of good stuff in it, it did trample quite heavily on our King Arthur legends and was clearly written pre-google Maps and with not lot of knowledge of the British Mystical tales and Legends and Locations.
However as with all RPGs you can use and delete what you like. I have used a good deal of the Mystic England book, but not King Arr'thuu, Mrrlyn and the Knights of New Camelot.
However none of this stopped us playing RIFTS. My rulebook, a softback, became so dog-eared and the covers were splaying open so I had to rebind it as a hardback to keep it in shape.
And even that is getting worn now.
In 2005, Palladium Books issued the RIFTS Ultimate Edition.
Nothing had changed in the basic System, both Combat and Skill mechanics.
However certain improvements were made. More Skills, Psionics and Magic were added.
The Character Classes were redesigned and bits were clarified in them. They got more Skills. e.g. Military Etiquette, if you had it you would know how the Military behaved, How to Salute, to Whom and when. Character classes were slightly streamlined in that they had their speciality bits, their Skills and their Equipment listed. They also bolstered the weaker ones and pulled back some of the stronger ones.
The combat system was slightly modified in that it now explained the difference between a shot, a called shot and an aimed shot and how many attacks per melee round each took (An Aimed Called shot takes 3). Also they quietly dropped mention of burst fire for Energy Weapons.
It's still a closed Percentage system for Skills, converting it to a D20 + Bonuses and Target Numbers system would have been better, but then they would have had to reprint all the Sourcebooks!
So the Ultimate RIFTS book isn't a re-write, just a knocking into place and tinkering with the system to make it work better. There are some bits I don't use, the new Techno-Wizard rules for making Magical Technology for one. It is so complex so I just stick to the original one that is much simpler.
I would recommend RIFTS to people who like Sci-Fi with Fantasy games like Shadowrun or Space 1889 etc. Or those who love the anachronistic sight of high tech Power Armour in a Fantasy setting. You can go almost anywhere in RIFTS. I like taking my players into the 2000AD universes (Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog etc.), Worlds from various novels and even the Trigan Empire from the Look & Learn comic from my youth.
Yes, you have to think and house rule bits and pieces, and as a GM you need to decide what you will allow and what you will sweep into a corner and forget about. But once that is done you will have fun.
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