Rifts

Palladium's Rifts has a rabid, almost maniacal following among a bizarre cross-section of gamer geeks. The others absolutely hate it, and shun Rifts gamers like people with taste avoid Nickelback. It's a punk-rock salad bar of gaming ideas, none of which make a fart of sense, but which blend into a chocolate whirl of chaos so awesome most people can't help but throw devil horns in the air and start moshing. It's got everything, and if it doesn't, you probably don't have the right books yet. You want to be a psychic cowboy who kills his enemies with mind bullets? It's there. You want to be a wizard who throws liquid death out of a boombox? I can find you rules for it. You want to be a rock star who pilots the Power Rangers' Megazord? You're thinking too small. Give me something hard.

Rifts has about three hundred thousand rules supplements available, each detailing several dozen races and occupations for characters appropriate to a given region of the Rifts world. The basic concept behind the game is that Earth is suddenly torn asunder by a shattering web of magical rifts, and from these ley lines pour incredible amounts of untapped mystical energy, and entire races of extradimensional beings from parallel ("dee-bee") Earths. This means that everything from Conan the Barbarian to Fin Fang Foom, down to (literally) the Robotech anime and Voltron started walking the Earth and started establishing their own nation-states.

Every one of these regions has its own (sometimes several) books. Most serious collectors have been forced to make additions to their house to store them all. The designers of Rifts long ago forgot about any semblance of game balance, and if you read even the core rulebook for a second you'll notice just how wildly inconsistent the range of character power is. Every book seems to feel the need to top the last in terms of abusive, broken abilities or destructive armaments. The entire game is like a literary nuclear arms race between the Palladium game designers to see who can think up the most whacked-out galaxy-shattering O.C.C. -- and since there aren't really any limits to imagination, it's all about as mature as a bunch of five-year-olds playing tag.

"Nuh uh! I've got no tag-back shields times, like, a billion!"

You do not want to be the poor dumb son of a bitch who gets talked into running a game of Rifts if you're a pussy. Hardcore fans will walk all over you, and casual fans will just make dragon juicers until the veteran players tell them what to do. If you actually care about things like balance, a coherent narrative structure, and games that last ten minutes before degenerating into city-wrecking melees when the glitter boy decides to shoot Odin in the face with a high-yield bunker-penetrating missile "to get the jump on him," then prepare to start sucking down Maalox in six-packs to stem the tide of ulcers you're about to get.

You need to have brass balls to run that game. Be willing to engage in the exact same pissing contest and have no mercy. Rifts GMs need to establish alpha dominance early or it gets out of control fast. Most games I've seen fold within four weeks, because no matter how awesome your character is, the very nature of Rifts is that there's always a bigger fish. So either the DM gets tired of the players running roughshod over his game, or the players get tired of rolling up new characters when the DM starts cracking down so he can finally tell a goddamn story.

The part I always like explaining about Rifts is its concept of "Damage Codes." See, in Palladium Fantasy, most average guys swinging a sword will do around 1 to 8 S.D.C. (which is short for Structural Damage Code). But in relation to buildings, vehicles, and various extraplanar beings, there needed to be another class of weapon necessary to cause meaningful damage. After all, you attack a Bradley tank with a broadsword, how many hit points does the thing have before you've worn it down?

Enter M.D.C. (Mega Damage), a classification above and beyond normal damage. Each point of M.D.C. is roughly, but not exactly equal to 100 S.D.C., to the point where it's hardly a relevant equation. Even if you managed to whack that tank with your sword about ten thousand times and do its S.D.C. equivalent in M.D.C., it still doesn't exactly work. And even if you had armor with 1,000 S.D.C., if that Glitter Boy hit you with a particle laser for 4 M.D.C., you'll still be a pile of grease, and so would anything behind you in the Hyborean Age for about two miles.

The constantly-escalating power level of Rifts results in the fact that nearly everything is based in M.D.C., so even your average schmuck in low-grade armor in Rifts has the approximate durability of an aircraft carrier. For frame of reference, if I were to put on some average Coalition environmental armor and someone were to hit me with the Batmobile, back up, and run over me several times, the best you could say is that you've annoyed me and gotten my suit muddy. In fact, to even scuff my armor you'd have to drop enough explosive ordnance on my ass to shock and awe Saddam Hussein.

That's the level of destruction that occurs when Rifts characters fistfight. Imagine what happens when they get mad.

Then there are the maddening array of rules that mitigate damage before it's inflicted. There's some kind of maneuver called roll-with-impact, a move that lets you over-sell a hit like one of the bridge crew on Star Trek when the Enterprise gets his with a photon torpedo. Somehow the act of doing a Kirk shoulder-roll reduces the damage you take. Attempting to explain when and how this act is performed requires careful years of study, flowcharts, a laser pointer, and an eightball of cocaine.

Then there's dodging and parrying, something even more complicated that causes 4 out of 5 arguments between Rifts players and GMs. Almost anything can be dodged or parried, if you're willing to sacrifice an attack to do so (and a lot of the great character O.C.C.s can have...what, 6 or more a round?). And that's not even getting into auto-dodges and auto-parries, which you always get, even in the most mind-bogglingly ridiculous circumstances. These rules have driven more game masters to gibbering madness than Highlander 2: The Quickening, and it's easy to understand why if you've ever played a game of Rifts in your life.

Can a character auto-dodge if he's not aware of an attack coming? Hell, I don't know. Can you attempt to dodge a projectile fired from a rail gun at point-blank range? Can you auto-dodge lasers, which are in fact moving at the speed of light? I think so. Is it possible to auto-parry a swarm of bees? I'd like to try and parry that semi-truck barehanded; it's trying to run me over so that counts as a hand-to-hand attack, right? I should get to apply my assassin martial arts mods.

Just be prepared to listen to about two weeks of surprisingly well-reasoned appeals and motions to dismiss your previous damage rolls, because Rifts is tailor made for players to whine about how their character shouldn't be dead. I've found that the only marginally-successful GMs to run Rifts savagely curtailed player shenanigans from the offset by limiting the number of sourcebooks allowed to about four, and explicitly banning a list of O.C.C.s about as long as your arm. He actually had a two-page leaflet prepared of things the players couldn't do, like "No Mind Melters" and "No Titan Juicers." (For those of you who don't know, Juicers are warriors of the future who become Hulk-like freaks capable of untold devastation and atrocity by injecting themselves with a hilarious amount of steroids, combat stimulants, and very often, the blood of mythical creatures. They have a life span about as long as an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, give or take.)

I'd write more, but I understand this review has caused the entire Rifts fan community to put out a fatwa on me, with orders to kill on sight. I need to retreat to a secure location and hope they don't bring any juicers.