The Business: So What Is Palladium Good At?

For all that I bag on Palladium Books, it would be unfair to not acknowledge what Palladium is good at.

The first part I've mentioned before: they still know how to sell their premises. Covers like this are always going to draw good attention.

That's the sort of cover that gets a prospective player to pick up an copy and start flipping through it.

Then we get between the covers and we start looking at the interior artwork,. Depending on the product line you get somewhere between "fun" and "things that sell books by themselves". Even with past examples of "inspiration", that remains the case and it's no surprise that the interior art alone makes fans of various products.

See what I mean?

Artwork of guns and gear are just as evocative, prompting people to want to pick them and use them at the table. Fantasy does this with its magic circles and wards, and all sorts of vehicles, animals, and monsters get the same reactions from those flipping through the pages or looking them up online. Very few in the business do art direction, be it cover or interiors, better than Palladium- and certainly not with the year-on-year consistency that Palladium demonstrates.

But when it comes down to doing something other than gawk at art, Palladium has a character generation process that works well enough most of the time.

It's mostly intuitive. Roll stats, pick class, pick skills/powers/gear, pick Alignment, fill out a character sheet (or make your own), done.

Several of those steps are tedious, sometimes counter-intuitive, and Instrumental Play makes some choices just plain bad. It reads, and feels, like a rough draft because it likely still is; a few more passes with changes around the edges would be enough to go from "Good Enough" to "Great!"

That's what Palladium is fantastic at doing: selling prospects on a fantasy, then getting them to make a virtual action figure with a pile of accessories before partipating in a more formalized version of Cowboys & Indians. As all Palladium products have Opposition Forces use the same rules as what players use for their mans, it's not at all hard to see a Palladium game as a proto-form of what we see in this Gundam Build Fighters clip.

Three hapless Grunts vs. OPAF Occupation. They lose.

And, like it or not, a lot of grown adults have no problems playing Cowboys & Indians for the rest of their lives.

Tomorrow we'll talk about how we can take this half-assed product and make it into a proper hobby game series.