I was reading the lamentably sparse postings on Websnark the other day when I saw this entry about how Palladium games is in big trouble. As in, if they don’t get some cash to pay their debts in a hurry they may be out of business.
I should clarify a bit here. Palladium games makes an eponymous fantasy role-playing game and back in the 80s/90s had licenses to Robotech and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which were both really big at the time. (As an aside, you might be tempted to think that a TMNT role-playing game would be really lame but in fact it was quite a lot of fun for one-off adventures and character creation was a hoot as you weren’t limited to turtles, you could be a mutant of pretty much any animal.) Palladium also had a superhero game, a horror-themed game and a pretty popular game which touched on some Alias-type themes long before Sydney Bristow was ever a gleam in J.J. Abrams’ eye called Ninjas and Superspies.
As the license agreement time began to expire, Palladium introduced the Rifts game which promised “Megaverse” settings where magic and technology were combined in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where there were portals (the titular Rifts as it were) that granted players access to other dimensions. Ideally this meant that players could put their characters into pretty much any setting as you could simply write it off as a Riftworld. This more or less drew all the original Palladium games under one umbrella since they could claim that the TMNT setting was a particular Riftworld and so on. Plus Palladium games used a company-standard system so in theory all games were compatible with each other.
Now, Palladium games weren’t my first foray into role-playing. In fact my friends and I used to play a diceless variant of Dungeons and Dragons during recess (yes, we were total geeks waaaay back) and the first actual game system I owned was Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes. After that I think I picked up some Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition books before finding Robotech. Robotech was our preferred game for quite some time because for one thing we were total Robotech nerds and for another it felt like a more advanced game than DC Heroes in terms of mechanics. It sounds stupid to say it out loud now, but at the time the fact that it used more than just a couple of ten-sided dice (which were essentially used as percentage dice) made it seem like a more “mature” game.
Robotech begat some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, we dabbled with Ninjas and Superspies a bit and got accustomed to the Palladium system enough that by the time Rifts was announced we were pretty hyped to check it out when it was released.
The problem with Rifts, in the end, is that it does neither of the two things that I feel a good role-playing game should strive for: It isn’t a really solid universal system nor is the setting detailed and unique enough to really act as the primary draw. If you recall this is my same general beef with Dungeons and Dragons although I at least concede that D&D is good in that it is the sort of baseline standard for role-playing gaming in general so it’s perfect for putting together a one-off adventure or as a starting point for a group of players who may be relative strangers since if you collect 100 role-playing gamers I’d put money down that 99 of those are familiar with D&D and at least 95 of them have played it at least once. Which is generally enough to get a game going.
Rifts’ problem is that it doesn’t even have that standard of familiarity going for it so in order to play and enjoy Rifts you have to put up with or modify the game mechanics or you may just really like the general direction the game designers decide to take the setting. I suppose there are people who like the Palladuim system and I admit that in my younger days I thought it was pretty cool but in retrospect I note that my Palladium campaigns tended to have a lot of pretty generic combat partially because I was unimaginative but also because generic combat is pretty much the only really fleshed-out part of the system.
These days I prefer a system more like Hero where the game mechanics are enjoyable even if the party never even finds any combat to get into. If nothing else I prefer a game like Shadowrun where the combat is among the weaker points of the system and the skill checks or character creation is better. Combat in role-playing games is easy since as the GM you can pretty much guide it whichever way you want anyhow (“Oh, these guys just got an order to disengage—miraculously saving your lives”).
But Rifts had some interesting ideas. Clever character classes like Juicers and Glitter Boys were inspired and the attempt to include a mechanism for combining Big Robots with spellcasting fantasy characters and modern combat type archetypes was admirably ambitious if nothing else. I think that generally speaking I would prefer to try to implement something like this in a GURPS-style system instead but you can’t casually disregard the inspiration they provided.
I guess part of what casued the company to have trouble was a poor licensing decision to grant the Rifts license to a developer making a game for the (snicker) N-Gage. Now I’ve heard the game is good, which may well be true. But no one cares because the N-Gage was a horrible platform from the very beginning. It wasn’t some big secret either. I think it must have been Nokia and Palladium that were the only people who though the N-Gage wasn’t DOA before it even shipped. And once the reports came back after the E3 where it debuted in all its battery-covering-cartridge glory, it was all but settled that the thing was going to tank.
My point is that I don’t think that poorly managed companies should be rewarded for their mistakes just because they have done some interesting things in the past and I don’t think I’ll be helping with the drive to help keep them afloat. However, I don’t like to see game companies die. I still sorta hope they pull through just because of that, but I have little hope.
Pity.
Quick Note
So the Sharks made it 3-1 despite making it way more tense in the third period than was strictly necessary. One thing people keep forgetting in their exaltation of Patrick Marleau’s hat trick (not that it isn’t worthy of praise) is Patrick Rissmiller’s initial goal. If there was ever a dude who earned a goal, it was that guy. He pushed for that to happen about three times on that shift, working hard, forechecking, staying with the puck and not giving up. It wasn’t as pretty as the Bernier to Marleau dish, but it was more impressive from a strictly work ethic perspective.
Also, after looking like they might pull the upset for a moment it seems likely that Edmonton won’t be able to hang on against Detroit anymore. Since Colorado all but has its series in the bag that means that Detroit will likely play the Avs in Round 2 leaving the Sharks (assuming they can finish the Predators off, which they certainly should—I’m predicting they do it in six back at the Tank) to play the winner of the Anaheim/Calgary series. At this point it’s probably closer than most people thought between those two teams but I’m pulling for Anaheim because playing them in Round 2 would make for an easier series and the Sharks would get home ice advantage.
