My Life As A Gamer: Filling In The Holes In RIFTS (Part Two)

Palladium never made its games with Patron or Domain Play in mind, despite being derived from D&D, and the lack of rules and procedures that D&D takes for granted shows that the rot many decry now set in decades ago when those in the '70s that either did not like or lacked familiarity with wargaming didn't grok the importance of such systems so they deemed them irrelevant and tossed them out.

Palladium also never got away from its amateur sensibilities. Today we call how Palladium does things "making players pay to beta-test, and then ignoring the feedback" (i.e. "acting like Blizzard's World of Warcraft team does"), and this has become the norm in tabletop gaming by now which is one of many reasons for why Palladium endures.

As yesterday's post shows, you can tease out just enough existing information to create viable gameplay procedures to address common issues in Braunstein play. This is not desirable.

And now I will continue to show you why.

Returning again to our poor Coalition Grunt, only this time you're not looking at things from his perspective as a playable character. You're looking at him as one of your many subordinates, for you are his superior officer.

You're in a bandit suppression campaign along the Magic Zone. You're in command of a company of Coalition personnel, and your job is to eliminate a bandit gang making raids from the zone into Coalition-held territory to protect the settlers there engaging in the necessary work of feeding the population and providing industry with raw resources.

You have at your disposal four platoons of infantry plus attached support elements.

This is a wargame scenario. Palladium--failed Robotech tie-in notwithstanding--is not set up for this out of the box.

But, in your ear, you hear the whispers of Jeffro Johnson say "Hey, just apply some basic concepts from Chainmail." Now you don't have 40 individual men to control and roll for, but four units--one per platoon--with their Lieutenants informing things like Morale and so on. You don't have four SAMAS armor, or Sky Cycles, but one stack of four or two stacks of two. You get the idea.

Whomever runs the bandits does the same for their side. Any serious individuals--giant robots, monsters, powerful mages/psychics/etc.--can stand alone. Thing usually ignored like the blast radius of a missile warhead now have direct impact on play in an obvious manner. Now what could easily have taken longer than the dueling gunlines on the 40K table next to you can be handled before they finish Turn One.

The hole is Mass Combat. The fix is to group similar characters together into a unit, assign a Morale score (and bonus to checks with a suitable leader), and presume that they act as such; the size of the unit is their HP and each hit in excess of a unit's SDC/MDC takes out one or more unit members.

Yes, that's scuffed, but it's a good baseline and you can tinker with it from there until it does more than Just Work.

You'll now find that Magic Spells and Psychic Powers that heretofore seemed useless will gain new appreciation because you'll see obvious utility. Keeping track of, and accounting for, Morale now makes threats like the Mechanoids palpable in the minds of players.

Oh, and if you're looking over at Splicers--and its "Terminator Meets Guyver explicit war scenario--something like this is required because sooner or later you're going to be in a Mass Combat scenario.

This can be applied for Fleet Combat in the Three Galaxies also.

Now you will find, yet again, why the Tolkeen War was fucking stupid- and that is before accounting for magic. That I will do tomorrow.