Day 20 of #RPGaDay brings up the word "NOBLE."
And that brings up sharp recollections of "Why ViscountEric doesn't like Rifts anymore..."
Let's start in the near past. I pledged for the original
Rifts for Savage Worlds Kickstarter. Nothing crazy just the pdf and hard copy of the Tomorrow Legion Player's Guide. I figured I like Savage Worlds, warts and all, and I tend to appreciate Rifts, with all its warts, blemishes, and pre-cancerous skin tags. Upon receipt of the PDF and all the other cool stuff that came along, Savage Rifts was always on the back burner of something I wanted to run.
Heck, I even wrote out a mini-campaign using old war comics as the basis fro the plot, leading into a fun East Coast campaign that dabbled with A.R.C.H.I.E., Atlantis, and a bit of a Logan's Run feel mixed in for fun.
Yet, at the last local game convention, my hardcopy of Savage Rifts and the small collection of Rifts books, went into the charity auction, a victim of a mini-gamer purge.
Why? I blame my Cyber-Knight.
Circa 1991 or '92, at least one of us in our high school group bit the bullet and purchased the original Rifts rulebook. We rolled up the regular retinue of characters, and if I remember right, our friend Charles ran a scenario introducing... the Mechanoids....
It's safe to say that we encountered the Mechanoids near an abandoned farm and the regular Rifts slugfest occurred.
Except I was playing a cyber-knight, good guy, MDC armor, psychic sword. As we neared the traditional farmer's barn, I had my first moment of calm in the fight and decided to dash through the barn to make sure (a) there wasn't something we could use in the fight and (b) make sure no civilians were in the area.
Low and behold, both my hunches were right. The neighboring community was hiding an MDC weapon to protect them in the barn and that same community was huddling next to it because when stuff got real, they gathered their senses at the last minute.
I spent the rest of the combat fighting off the Mechanoids, and keeping the barn from collapsing on the very delicate SDC civilians.
In the end I remember Charles doling out xp at the end of the session, coming to me, and essentially saying, "You get max role-playing credit. You were the only one to do something heroic and in character."
Therein lies the greatest flaw with Rifts. It's not the system. It's not MDC vs SDC. It's not the power creep. It's essentially players wanting a four hour long Voltron episode, except just fighting. It honestly feels worse than traditional hack'n'slash dungeon crawls with D&D.
And I hoped with Savage Worlds, I'd see more characters like my Cyber-Knight, wanting to help people/their group/even themselves. But as I saw the actual plays videos, as I saw the write-ups, as I listened to the podcast, I kept seeing cheesy character building segment, COMBAT, segue-way into next cheesy character building segment, followed by more COMBAT! The game simply degrades to collateral damage the RPG.
I know, I know, I'm the antithesis of any Rifts player you ever saw in your FLGS, but the world looks fun enough to play some low level, boots on the ground, but not all Rogue Scholar type gaming.
In the context of another game, I think I want Rebels vs Stormtroopers, rather than Star Destroyers.
I haven't given up hope entirely yet. I still have the pdf of the SW book and all of the other downloadable, plus Rifts books go through the local con auction scene pretty cheap (and if they aren't, Palladium still has some crazy affordable prices.).
I might need to introduce Rifts as a cool Post-Apocalyptic setting without the key elements like Glitter Boys and Baby Dragons that make Rifts the game everyone can love and despise at the same time.
