The Business: A Palladium That Survives Through The 21st Century (Part 1)

(Following from yesterday's post)

Palladium's future comes from embracing the roots of the hobby that Kevin refused to accept: wargaming. While I'm all fine with just taking Palladium's IP and porting it all over to AD&D1e, I will presume that Palladium's existing audience is not. Therefore, in good faith, I will outline how to go from a thing staring extinction in the face vs. superior videogame alternatives to a product that can offer a compelling experience separate from, distinct from, AND SUPERIOR TO, videogames.

This series can be read to include all tabletop hobby game publishers still yoked to Cargo Cult norms of Conventional Play- and thus facing the same existential threat. Palladium, therefore, stands in for all of you hapless and doomed fools. Magic-Users By The Water sees the writing on the wall; that's why they're transitioning Current Edition to a videogame. You will either follow that lead, or you will follow mine, if you want to survive.

A Regularization

Palladium's mess of a mechanical design works fine for Kevin's Silver Age Comicbook slugfests, his take on Cowboys & Indians without the schoolyard arguing and shit-flinging.

It doesn't even try to be something you can make a wargame around. That is where we start.

Strip away all the cruft and start asking some questions. (Note for the anklebiters: some of these are already answered, but they're buried where too many of you don't even know to look.)

• Time interval per game turn? Time per interval at the strategic level of play? (In AD&D1e terms: Per Round, Per Turn, Per Day)
• What can an ordinary man, in average condition, do in that time? (i.e. How far can he move? Can he still act; if so, with what limits?)
• Core gameplay loop?
• Damage And Healing
• Timekeeping Requirements
• Record Keeping Requirements
• Scalability

Palladium's combat system is built around man-to-man slugfests.

RIFTS Ultimate Edition (pg. 341) makes this explicit, and Kevin tells the reader to split combats up to as many one-on-one slugfests as possible for ease of management. This does not work as a wargame.

It begins breaking down as soon as people stop throwing punches or swinging swords and start throwing rocks and loosing arrows. Manuever isn't even considered, range is an afterthought, despite these being imple, basic, and key components to Ancient and low-tech warfare. We're talking before the Bronze Age Collapse. God forbid there be a mix of melee and ranged combat, uneven combatant totals, mixed scales of combats or any other such complications.

A lack of hard-coded measurements, and a lack of a procedure by which to make use of them, leads (as proven by decades of experience reported to forums, Usenet, Reddit, etc.) to LOLsorandom arbitration and thus to the Neckbeardia video topics that come from Storygaming- because that's where this lack of rigor ends up EVERY. SINGLE. TIME!

Remember, we're competing with XCOM, Xenonaughts, Jagged Alliance, Wasteland, the first two Fallout games- not other tabletop products. The tabletop ruleset has to move as fast as those games can, so a lot of the fiddly bits are getting cut off and tossed aside.

So let's hammer a few down.

A Well-Regulated Ruleset

We base our measurements on the stats for an average man. He has scores of 10 across the board. We'll call him "John". His performance will become the baseline in this interation of our design.

We're starting at the bottom, with the Combat Round. For the sake of backwards compatibility, it's still 15 seconds, but we're changing a lot to speed up play.

1. Initiative is by side. Each party to the fight rolls, with the highest bonus applicable being added; highest roll wins and goes first, with their entire side acting before others can react. This is a default condition. Certain exceptions obvious the need to roll, or trump the result of a role.
2. One action per round. Movement is a phase unto itself. More than that is a Special Ability.
3. There is no auto-win for Natural 20s or auto-fails for Natural 1s. This ensures that there are going to be wholly unfair fights, which the weaker side should run from if they want to live.
4. Damage is now Save Or Die. (Technically "Save Or Suck", but in mass combat it usually means death.) Armor (et. al.) grants bonuses to the roll, and certain attack forms apply penalties; this can make passing or failing the save impossible and is intended.
5. Movement is regularized by Type (Race, Vehicle, etc.). Other factors can alter that base rating, but it is rare and qualifies as a Special Ability.
6. Positioning matters; being on the flank, behind, above, etc. can negate certain defenses (e.g. shields, high Physical Prowess modifiers) and being Beyond Visual Range vs. a target that doesn't even know you're there is a Surprise Attack (no defense attempts allowed at all, all active defenses negated).
7. Morale: It's barely there in the game, but it's a specific form of Saving Throw (vs. Horror Factor). This gets fleshed out, formalized, and put where people will see it.

"But that's-"

Shut up. This lack of rigorous game design has already inflicted one completely fucktarded Because Narrative shitpile due to insitutional incompetence.

And there's over a score of wargame scenarios in published material, all of them regional or global in scope and scale that easily and readily influence each other on RIFTS Earth ALONE. Add in other theaters of action and you have over one hundred just in published material, and not including those from other product lines or from defunct ones.

That illogical result would have been avoided had the game possessed the proper rules and procedures necessary for players to play out the eargame scenario proposed.

This is what we're aiming to avoid: having some outsider to your table (the publisher) dictate to you what has to go down at your table- and yes, this is AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN a thing.

No, this stops. Now that we have an outline, we can start piecing things together.