To begin with, I must congradulate the writers at Palladium for the beautifully detailed world that the have designed for us. I have never been so fascinated by a game world before. The detail that has been lavished into the setting of RIFTS Earth is truly impressive, and for that I commend Palladium.

All is not well, however, with the game engine. Simply put, the mechanics used for the RIFTS game system are severely flawed. It took me awhile to reach this conclusion, but I find it difficult to play a session of RIFTS without becoming bogged down in even the most basic of game mechanics.

There are several reasons that I can cite for these problems.....

Player Character Imbalance

One of the first problems that a player will notice is that there are huge differences in power between certain character classes. While most game systems try to maintain a fair distribution of abilities among the different character types, RIFTS seems to favor a few class types with amazing amounts of power.

While this may seem great at first, as you can build really powerful characters, it also limits you to a select few types of characters. What chance does a normal human street punk have against cyborgs, dragons, giants, etc. that have tons of natural armor and firepower to spare. Some players will argue that you just have to be clever in how you deal with such threats, but cleverness can only do so much when your opponents are regularly 10 times more powerful than you.

Others might argue that normal human adventurers shouldn't face such threats in the course of the game. However, in RIFTS there are too many such huge threats to avoid. If the GM has to limit the characters to foes they have a reasonable chance of defeating, then a good portion of the RIFTS universe is left unused.

The Magic System

Magic is supposed to be one of the most feared forces to be reckoned with in RIFTS, and yet many of the spells lack the offensive punch of a good laser rifle. While some of the spells are quite useful (Carpet of Adhesion is a particular favourite), most of the offensive spells do a piddly amount of damage when compared to most of the laser, ion, plasma and particle beam weapons used by the average mercenary. Some spells, like Eyes of the Eagle, are redundant to have, since a pair of binoculars will do the job just as well.

This leaves spellcasters at somewhat of a disadvantage, and they must rely on technology to keep them from getting burnt to a crisp by their foes. Magic in RIFTS is turned more into a hobby than a full-time profession.

If you want to find ways of remedying magic in your RIFTS campaign, visit King CJ's Page for some good suggestions on how to make magic work.

The Weapon Damage

Combat in RIFTS can be really quick or exceedingly long. The burst fire rules for energy weapons can make short work of most foes in one hit. While this can be fun at first, it becomes frustrating when you keep loosing characters to a single hail of laser fire. The damage that gets dished out quickly becomes ridiculous, with only heavily armoured characters capable of withstanding even a single blast.

While this does promote realism within the game, it reduces game play in the sense that you will constantly be rolling up new characters. Losing characters is all a part of role-playing, but when you continually loose characters through little or no fault of your own, it tends to dull your enthusiasm for the game.

It would seem that the most obvious solution to this problem would be to eliminate burst-fire from the game, allowing single shots only. This only reverses the problem, in that combat takes forever for even the simplest battles. Since most foes are heavily armoured, it takes a too many shots to take them down. We once spent three gaming sessions trying to resolve a battle with a small band of 20-30 mercenaries. In most game systems, such a battle would take a whole evening.

Still under construction.....(08/06/98)