In Defense of Rifts

As I stated in a previous entry, I am a gamer geek. I've been playing tabletop Role-Playing Games for nearly half my life now, and been part of the same gaming group for 6 years now. Some of the faces may change, but two original members and myself have been there pretty much consistently, and we've been playing at the same place for over 5 of those years. I cut my teeth on Palladium Books titles, such as Heroes Unlimited.

Palladium is pretty much unheard of outside of gamer circles, and even many in the loop haven't heard of the company. They've had some modest successes, such as owning the licenses for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (though that series is now out of print) and Robotech/Macross RPGs. Their flagship title, however, and the one that really got me into RPGs, is Rifts. Rifts is an RPG built on a truly epic scale. The basic setting is a Post-Apocalyptic Earth, though many books include settings on other planets, and even a space opera setting in a far-flung universe. It contains elements of Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk, just about any setting you can think of.

And really, that's what attracted me to the game. As I often tell people, in Rifts you can make just about anything. You can be a cybernetic ninja, fighting alongside a wizard firing bolts from a magic gun, a medieval knight on a robotic horse, and an alien psychic riding a dinosaur. It may sound like the product of an overactive child's imagination, but that's one of the things I really like about the game. It lets me cut loose with my imagination in ways that I can't with any other game.I can throw in something that would be absolutely ridiculous in any other setting, but as long as I can make it work and the players dig it, it's cool.

It's a sad fact, however, that a lot of my fellow gamers are stigmatized against Rifts. The game has a reputation, probably not entirely unearned, for being a haven for hack and slash power gaming and Munchkinism. There's a number of reasons for this.

First, and probably most important, is Mega-Damage (M.D.). Basically, M.D. is a game rule used in Rifts and a couple other games (like Robotech) to account for damage far in excess of what would be possible in a normal game, without having to deal with large unwieldy numbers. All Palladium games have what's called S.D.C. (Structural Damage Capacity), which is equivalent to Hit Points in other games. Lets say Joe Average on the street has 20 SDC. One point of M.D. is equal to 100 SDC, meaning that even one point of M.D. would completely obliterate poor Joe.

What a lot of people will tell you Rifts is all about

In Rifts, pretty much all the armor and weaponry in the game (including natural armor and weapons of supernatural creatures) is calculated in M.D. So, this means that even a first-level character makes a modern-day Main Battle Tank look like a pea-shooter made of tissue paper by comparison. Obviously, to hack-and-slashers and Munchkins, this is a wet dream. This aspect of the game was even parodied in an April Fools article, by the creator of the game himself, where the fictional Giga-Damage was unveiled, along with new weapons with stats like "Range: The circumference of the Earth, minus 10 feet, so you don't shoot yourself in the back."

Also, there's the matter of game balance. Kevin Siembieda, the creator of Rifts, has gone on record as stating, in his opinion, "balanced" does not mean that every character operates on the same power level. He feels game balance is more an issue of equality of opportunity; that is, in a well-constructed game, every player has a chance to shine and use his character's particular talents. So a character can go out right from the start and get the biggest, most powerful gun and strongest armor he can lay his hands on.

And, there's the issue of Power Creep. It's the one facet of Rifts that's probably gotten as much, if not more, coverage than M.D. In my opinion, at least, the problem isn't as big as people claim. I still make characters using classes and equipment from the first book, and haven't found myself overwhelmed or underpowered. Hell, the Glitter Boy, which is cited as being the single most overpowered item in the game, comes from the first book.

As I said, all the above claims about Rifts are true, if exaggerated. You can play a Rifts game as a strictly hack-and-slash kill-em-all bloodfest. And if that's the kind of game you wanna play, knock yourself out. But you don't have to, and in all my years playing Rifts, I've never run or played a straight-out "shoot everything that moves and blow up everything that doesn't" game. I don't have anything against them, that's just not my style. There's just as much room for role-playing in Rifts as in any other RPG. I think what happens is that the ones who talk about Rifts the loudest are the gun bunny hardware lovers, who go on and on about all the ways to kill someone available in Rifts. And like in any group, it's the loudmouths you hear. And so it's assumed that anyone and everyone playing Rifts must be like that.

We've had power gamers in our group. We've had Muchkins. We've had min-maxers. And ironically (or perhaps not), they were usually the least effective members of our group. Why? Several reasons. One, they were each and to a man focused on making his character as physically powerful as he could. They'd buy the most powerful weapons, get whatever equipment they thought would make them more potent combatants (for an example, see the "I want two arms" story in my post "Space the Rodian"). They focused totally on being hellions in battle, while ignoring the fact that there was way more to the game than encounters. Plus, like any munchkin, if they couldn't kill an enemy in a single blow (one-shotting, we called it), or if they took any damage whatsoever, they'd get huffy and lose any and all battle effectiveness they had. I can't understand why a guy who spent months of game and real time building and designing his character so that he had M.D. numbering in the thousands would then raise a fit over taking 5 points of damage. Wasn't that the whole point, so that you wouldn't have to worry about a few measly points?

Most of all, they fell into a very common trap. They looked only at the numbers when it came to their equipment. Take the afore-mentioned Glitter Boy for example. A Glitter Boy is a suit of Power Armor (sort of a halfway step between an exoskeleton like Iron Man and Mecha like found in Robotech or Battletech) designed to be the most powerful single-person assault vehicle on Earth. It gets its name from its laser-resistant armor, which is highly-polished and glitters in the sun. As far as stats go, it has more armor and its rail gun can do more damage than any other piece of equipment in the game usable by a single character. It was built using late 21st Century technology (from right before the Great Cataclysm that transformed the Earth into the game's Post-Apocalyptic setting), and is so durable and powerful that some of those original suits, handed down from parent to child, are still being used 300 years later.

If a battle in Rifts were nothing more than two groups standing in front of each other and firing away like some Revolutionary War battle, the Glitter Boy would win, hands down. If it were just a matter of rolling dice and writing down the results, the battle would be over before it was started. Some Rifts groups have stated that they won't even allow Glitter Boys in their party for that reason. Other groups state that no one in their group will play a Glitter Boy because they're useless. How can both these statements be true? It all depends on how you're playing the game.

Along with it's strengths, Glitter Boys have a lot of weaknesses. Compared to other suits of power armor, they're ponderously slow. While their rail gun (called a Boom Gun) is massively powerful, it's also the only weapon the suit has. If it gets destroyed, the Glitter Boy pilot has no other way to fight than hand-to-hand combat, which the Glitter Boy is not suited for at all. Plus, the Boom Gun gets it's name because the shells it fires are electromagnetically accelerated to such a rate that they surpass MACH 2 before leaving the barrel. The resultant sonic boom is so loud that anyone within 150' (including the Glitter Boy's companions) is deafened for several minutes afterward. And worst of all, the gun has such a massive kick that the suit has to drive pylons 10' into the ground and fire recoil-suppressing thrusters every time it fires to keep the suit (and pilot) from being thrown to the ground. This means that while firing, the suit is completely immobile, a big fat target. And since the suit is so notorious, both in game and out, it's likely to be the prime target of the opposing side. That's not even to mention the fact that there's only a few places on Rifts Earth that can reload or repair a Glitter Boy.

From my copy of the Limited Gold Edition of the main book

There's a lot more I could go into, but basically it all boils down to this. Rifts doesn't have to be about who's got the biggest gun or who can soak up the most damage. Like any role-playing game, it can have just as much battle, intrigue, storyline, etc. that you want it to have. So, if you get a chance to play Rifts, don't turn it down out of hand because you "don't like power gaming." Give it a try. You might find you like it.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights