My Life As A Gamer: One Simple Trick To Making RIFTS Manageable

Let's talk about another tabletop RPG that's got a long history (by now), and a dedicated audience of core users. Let's talk Palladium's RIFTS.

RIFTS is one of those tabletop RPGs that promise a wide and diverse array of playable characters, explorable environments, and gameworthy scenarios. It's a lot to take in, and one of the rookie mistakes players make is to just run it cold and stupid like you can--successfully--do with D&D. That way lies disaster. Let me put down one proven practice that is key to running any tabletop RPG with the open scope and scale that RIFTS allows: Define your campaign space.

Using our example game to illustrate, the simplest thing to do is to run a campaign set in Coalition State territory. You're using a subset of North America, so that immediately cuts out most of the planet and everything beyond it, and depending on what kinds of characters you want to play you're going to cut out even more of that map because it's unlikely that you need more than that. Reducing that vast space down to something you can manage easily is on you to do, so do it; once you do that, deciding on what races, classes, etc. to allow players to use becomes just as easy.

Your Coalition game focuses on grunts in the Army? Not pilots. Not officers. Not Intelligence. Just standard infantry. You need the main book, some stuff out of Coalition War Campaign, and maybe--and I do mean "maybe"--the stuff covering where they're operating and who they're up against like the upcoming Bestiary and DBs of North America. If there's a book covering a key region or location, maybe that too; this includes articles from the Rifter. Are you obligated to use all of that stuff from supplementary material? No, but the more information you have to work with, the better your campaign will be; what you choose to exclude is as important as what you choose to include.

Yes, that's the trick. You have to learn what not to use, to exclude, and be upfront about that to the players.