My Life As A Gamer: Your Games Perish For A Lack of Knowledge

RIFTS is hobbled by Palladium's poor technical writing and lazy game design.

This causes unnecessary friction for the users, who have to waste a lot of time resolving contradictions and filling in blanks in the ruleset. It also means that there is a lot of unneeded friction between players because what is done at one table is not the same across the board.

This matters to a Braunstein campaign because the Referee has to ride herd on every participating Game Master to ensure conformity across the campaign, when a competently made ruleset put down in a proper technical manual--that's what a rulebook is--doesn't have this problem. This is the big advantage that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition has over RIFTS.

Let's start at the micro level of an individual character.

You have a standard Coalition Grunt. How far can he march in a day? You don't know; the rules don't tell you. How far can he move in a combat round? Same. You have to work out a likely measure yourself, deriving it from the Grunt's scores in Physical Strength, Physical Endurance, and Speed against Encumbrance and (for combat) Actions Per Round.

Put a platoon of Grunts in one of those Armored Personnel Carriers. You can figure out Miles Per Day, but it's a base number that doesn't account for terrain or road conditions- two things that Coalition vehicles have to deal with as a rountine matter. As for movement within combat, that's even more math and it depends on the driver's statistics- including Actions Per Round.

How about that air support? SAMAS armors and Sky Cycle pilots have impressive speeds listed, so you can figure out strategic movement rates and from that tactical rates, which matters when those Grunts call in air support and the Game Master needs to tell the Grunts what the Estimated Time of Arrival is for that air support (and tell the players what that means in terms of rounds).

Those Grunts need logistical support? While there is sufficient rules to address injury and recovery, what about their gear? If they can't just swap out depleated power cells for charged ones, or damaged armors for fresh ones, then the players need to know what to do to go about recharging and repairing and how to do that. The rules are silent about this..

Grunts rountinely encounter civilians. This means that non-combat encounters are a thing, as the Grunts will want to know about local predators (animal and otherwise) to secure the area. What is the procedure for parley encounters? There is none. No reaction roll, but you can piece one together thanks to Physical Beauty and Mental Affinity (Charisma) being attributes, and Intelligence as well as Language skills mean that you can piece a procedure together.

These are all areas that are left blank. Different people will have different answers to filling these voids, which introduces two orders of unnecessary friction. The first is the friction between different Game Masters within the campaign, forcing the Referee to ride herd. The second is the friction of bringing new players on board, as the full ruleset is not properly documented in a commercially available user manual but instead has to be pieced together with rulings, wikis, errata, etc. all of which act as Quit Moments for the propsective player.

These seem trivial. Not when we go to the level of Domain Play where the Patrons are.

You're Emperor Prosek. You need the Coalition States Military to exert your Will To Power. Logistics now become critically important. How deep is your recruiting pool? How fast can you turn recruits into viable soldiers? How much will it cost to maintain them--food, housing, medical care, munitions, etc.--especially in the field or on campaign.

There is nothing about this. Not one damned thing.

The Coalition is an industrial power. Where does it get raw resources? How do they transport those resources to be refined and consumed to manufacture products? How does it recruit and train the specialists needed to build and maintain this logistical train and infrastructure? Sweet fuck-all information about any of this.

The Coalition has an Intelligence establishment. How does it recruit and train its agents and assets? Are there rival agencies? What are their official remits, and do they operate beyond those remittances? More than nothing to go on, but man is that threadbare.

Scale this up a bit more. Let's go over to Atlantis and see Lord Splynn's operations. Remember that, while a player on Earth he's operating on the full cosmological scope and scale; he's a godlike being dealing mostly with rival powers, and sees men like Prosek as annoyances to manage.

Atlantis is a magic-using state. What generates PPE? (This, thankfully, is answered.) Can this be manipulated, and if so how? What expends PPE other than spell-casting and ritual magic? What magic-using manufactures are there, what are their supply trains, costs, and times to delivery? (This includes slaves, as Atlantis is a slave state.) All of the military, economic, and intelligence affairs also matter here. Threadbare information and no procedures.

Then there's Center, another--greater--rival to Atlantis in the Three Galaxies which reminds me of The World of Synnibarr. Same things apply.

These are things that players wanting to deal as Patrons in the Domain Game need to know. Things take time and material resources to execute even for literal gods. It is not acceptable to even give the appearance of this level of play being possible if you don't provide the gameplay procedures and information resources necessary to execute it.

While end-users may not care, game designers and publishers are incompetent when they dismiss this as irrelevant. They directly damage their business by doing so. Games are products, meant to be bought and used no different than television sets or leaf blowers- if it's not "Plug in and Play", it is not ready for market.

So after complaining about this for a few days, it's time to start talking about plugging holes and that pivot comes tomorrow.