Paladium?

[diablopath]

My friend is talking about this game constantly, and he seems to be in love with it.

Have any of you folks played it?
Thoughts on it?

[roboninja]

I have played many of the iterations: RIFTS, Heroes Unlimited, Palladium Fantasy, etc. I rather enjoyed it, but will readily admit it is a fairly loose system. I did like how easy it was to migrate characters from one milieu to the next.

[spcialk]

I did RIFTS as well. I loved the 6 sided die focus (Think starwars rpg did too), not to mention super mega awesome beam powers! Do it.

[J Arcane]

If you can find a copy of the old 1e Palladium RPG, it's not a half bad old school D&D variant, if a little disorganized and cryptic at times. TMNT also was pretty nifty, as were some of the sourcebooks.

Stay the fuck away from the rest of the games though. The current version of the Palladium system is a gigantic clusterfuck unparalleled in the word of TRPGs by any but the most hackeriffic fan works, and really just not worth the effort to try and make sense of. Rifts is probably the worst culprit, taking the system itself to it's absolute worst, while pairing it with a setting that consists mostly of a combination of disguised Nazi fetishism and juvenile power fantasy haphazardly glued together in a fashion that really offers nothing genuinely gameable without rewriting half the damn setting. Stay away, far away.

[zarathstra]

I've found that Palladium's worlds are incredibly interesting...but the system is incredibly unbalanced and complicated. As a player character in RIFTS, you can start as anything from a Skyknight to a Frontier Sheriff...or a Glitterboy in giant power armor.

[Karak]

System and world amazing and awesome
Rules-the worst horrible cluster of mini maxed overpowered broken fucking power broker shit you have ever seen.
Just utterly broken.

[Virtual Machine]

Palladium's system has always blown. DP9's Silhouette rules have always been much more simple and elegant for scale issues, and character creation using one of Palladium's "books" was a nightmare. The company has NEVER had any kind of sensible layout. Their books are like rich text documents with artwork pasted in.

I've done the Rifts thing, Ninja Turtles, and Robotech. None of them ever ended well. I'd kill for a decent Robotech RPG.

[rifter]

So, I have played Pallaidum, and I prefer D&D, myself.

The Palladium SYSTEM that is my favorite, is NightSpawn/Nightbane. I love the world of Rifts... though, I admit the system is kind of messed up, like the rest of the people have said. :-)

[QueQueg]

I had more fun reading the Rifts materials than playing the game. The system just sucks, like it was designed by a bunch of college kids in a dorm room (which for all I know, it was.)

[ShivaX]

The problem I always ran into with any Palladium game past the original fantasy one was that the system was so poor at handling the numbers. And god there were numbers beyond reason.

Once you hit a certain level you never missed, armor was worthless (barring MDC stuff) and nothing could hit you. All the numbers became downright crazy. From Rifts all I remember is Juicers having such insane numbers to start with they we're basically immortal. On the flip side Wizards were so weak they couldn't do anything (since most of their spells did SDC which means they did nothing to anything in Rifts). This is all by memory from when the books originally came out and only perusing them a few times, but its pretty much how I remember it.

No balance, insanely easy to power game, but generally cool concepts behind it all.

[Chaos Machine]

ya but as a juicer wasnt your max lifespan like 3 years? kinda like going out in a blaze of overpowered glory

[ShivaX]

ya but as a juicer wasnt your max lifespan like 3 years? kinda like going out in a blaze of overpowered glory

You say that like it matters to a powergamer. If you ran a really huge and long campaign it might be a factor, but for most players you'd never have to worry about it and you'd just get to be a god-like character.

[TrackZero]

If you can find a copy of the old 1e Palladium RPG, it's not a half bad old school D&D variant, if a little disorganized and cryptic at times.

To be fair, so was AD&D 1st ed at that time. ;)

[TrackZero]

My fav Palladium setting is Beyond the Supernatural. Which, ironically, is the most down to earth of the games. Also some of the most fun times playing a "normal" person I've had.

[TrackZero]

You say that like it matters to a powergamer. If you ran a really huge and long campaign it might be a factor, but for most players you'd never have to worry about it and you'd just get to be a god-like character.

Juicers are anything but godlike. There's a lot of side effects and issues around playing that class for any length of time. And hell, they're still SDC. If you didn't read through The Juicer Uprising, it's worth checking out.

If you want a godlike character to start, they're got classes for that, literally. ;)

[ShivaX]

Juicers are anything but godlike. There's a lot of side effects and issues around playing that class for any length of time. And hell, they're still SDC. If you didn't read through The Juicer Uprising, it's worth checking out.

If you want a godlike character to start, they're got classes for that, literally. ;)

Like I said I only looked at the books a few times and that as literally when they came out (like within a month or two of it). They were SDC but I seem to recall people being able to slap on armor and get around that pretty easily.

The biggest issue with Palladium was that it all came down to if you could get your numbers high enough you could never miss and never be hit. The most balanced of them were Beyond the Supernatural and the original roleplaying game. Mostly because they tended to keep the bonuses and stats reasonable.

[Panthera]

I've always been fascinated by these books, but I doubt I'd ever actually try a game.

[Cit Phil Cit]

I own pretty much everything Palladium ever made up until a certain point: mostly about the time 3.0 D&D came out. I believe, the New West or something was within the last 4 books I bought.

The original Palladium Fantasy was interesting. TMNT/Hero's Unlimited/Ninjas and Superspies were decent modern games (if exclude firearms), Rifts was a great idea but failed, Robotech was a great adaption, BTS and Nightspawn were good one-shot games.

I thing the Three Galaxies/Phase World was an awesome setting and the best thing associated with Rifts - I really enjoyed anything Carella wrote, (even if it did most of the power creep) he did lots of source and world books.

If you want awesome modern combat, I will always highly recommend Cyberpunk 2020 it has spectacular modern combat, from civilian to military (Maximum Metal sourcebook). With cyberware, etc. Some of the material is dated but it's a strong stylized setting.

[Cit Phil Cit]

Juicers are anything but godlike. There's a lot of side effects and issues around playing that class for any length of time. And hell, they're still SDC. If you didn't read through The Juicer Uprising, it's worth checking out.

If you want a godlike character to start, they're got classes for that, literally. ;)

You would be referencing the Demi-god RCC with the additional benefit of an OCC as well? My friend played a demi-god Veritech pilot.

Good times! my favorite character I ever played was a Rogue Scholar without super-powers. he drove a hummer, before hummers were cool - like the mid 90s when we played.

[Chill]

Damnit. Always miss the Palladium threads. I'll also pronounce my own love for Palladium, and especially RIFTS. I own a couple dozen Rifts books and still read them from time to time.

Good times! my favorite character I ever played was a Rogue Scholar without super-powers. he drove a hummer, before hummers were cool - like the mid 90s when we played.

Man, sounds like you were in my group. I played a rogue scholar while my friend played a gun-bunny merc. Quite the pair we were.

Though, my favorite character was a Techno-Wizard. Excellent character with really unique skills, but totally not overpowered. They were basically a magic casting class, but were only effective putting their energy into making magically powered technology. Loved that glider that used the ley lines.

Heh, never realized it, but that was a very steampunk inspired class.