GURPS vs. Palladium

Back in the late 1980s, everyone we knew stopped playing AD&D and played GURPS 3rd Edition. Everyone loved how GURPS did everything, and you did not have to learn a new set of rules to play another genre. GURPS killed AD&D for so many of us, and it was then that you began to see AD&D's popularity decline.

And then Rifts happened. A lot of those I knew gave up GURPS 3rd Edition for Rifts. And there was a massive crowd from D&D who found Rifts easier than GURPS, which increased the Palladium game's popularity on that side of the hobby, too. It was a little of both, the massive crowd from D&D that played Rifts drew in a lot of GURPS players, and Rifts became an early '90s juggernaut with a ton of MDC and giant hyper-cannons.

The influence of anime, the Robo-Tech and TNMT games (welcome back Turtles RPG, mine is in the mail), and the cross-genre nature of Rifts meant that many of us with a half-dozen campaign worlds could cross them all over and play Rifts without losing that much, and standardize on the Palladium system. Palladium did amazingly well during the rise and fall of AD&D 2E, and many who played a lot of AD&D 1E did not see much new in 2E, and never upgraded (which should sound familiar today).

Cross-overs of existing, legacy campaign worlds with Rifts were huge and meant you did not need to throw out your beloved characters. You can do cross-overs in GURPS 3rd, too; that is the point! I know.

But Rifts was huge in the 1990s; along with Vampire: The Masquerade, these two games killed AD&D 2nd Edition and GURPS for many of us. By the end of the decade, TSR was bankrupt, and D&D was dead. We even lost interest in gaming for a few years, keeping our games boxed up and unused. College was done, and we moved on.

The Bronze Age of the hobby began with Chainmail, and the Golden Age ended with Rifts.

Rifts was the last major old school game before the modern era began with D&D 3.0.

GURPS 4th was created in the modern, post-2000 era of D&D 3.0 and 3.5, and the games we know today. Palladium did a few post-2000s games, but Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, and Palladium Fantasy were some of my favorite games in the 1990s. They are still d20-based games at heart, plus a great percentage-based skill system, and who cares if one is roll high, and the other is roll-low? It works.

Palladium Fantasy is in the same boat as Rolemaster for me: the "better D&D" made in the 1980s and 1990s that everyone in the know loved more than the mass-market D&D "for kids" game we saw it as, especially with the censorship in 2nd Edition. Everyone I knew loved Rolemaster and Palladium Fantasy far better than D&D. Rolemaster was deep, complicated, and wildly different, but the charts always delivered fun. GURPS was another game that was very different from D&D and also required a lot of relearning.

Palladium Fantasy was close enough to D&D that you knew how to play it by just learning a handful of things, and then you magically knew how to play the game. If you gave people pre-gens, they could figure most of it out from the character sheet. Palladium Fantasy is like "Advanced AD&D" with a lot more thought put into classes, magic system, the world, playable races, backgrounds, and combat systems. Where AD&D felt flat, Palladium Fantasy went into far more detail.

Palladium was the far easier game to switch to, as a result. Even Rifts was not that hard for D&D players. Learning GURPS and Rolemaster were massive undertakings, and with the hobby on the decline in the 1990s, people just wanted something easy and exciting, with great art and a fun premise. If the game was easy to learn, could do cross-over campaigns with all of your games as starting points, and had very reasonably-priced books, it was a winner.

I'm not losing my D&D world; I'm just crossing it over into Rifts. Oh, there is a Palladium Fantasy game, too? Let's use that for our fantasy characters and then toss them into a rift where they can go find power armor and laser rifles, and play alongside cameos from every comic and pop culture reality possible. AD&D doesn't allow us to do this, so Palladium Fantasy is better.

We did not overthink things too much back then, not like today.

Yes, the above conversion also describes GURPS. But in Rifts, the cross-dimensional reality is baked in, and the system is close enough to D&D that everyone can just jump in and play. I could sit D&D players at a Rifts table and have them fluent in the system in 5 minutes. GURPS? Not so easy. We need to go through point buy, and even with pre-gens, the 3d6 system is still very different than a d20 system. In Palladium? Roll a d20, beat a 5, you hit. Beat the AR value? You go past armor. It is a two-layer AC system that is not hard for D&D players to pick up.

We have only gotten "culture and background" in D&D character creation in the last few years, and all three of these other games: GURPS, Palladium, and Rolemaster had them back in the 1980s. In 2050, D&D will get a decent skill system, too. If D&D has one fatal flaw, it is that nostalgia keeps holding it back, and it will never drastically change for the better (or worse, as D&D 4E proved). D&D will never change, and as a game, it is stuck in the past to an extent that playing AD&D is still the best experience you can get. Live by the nostalgia sword, and die by it.

Palladium was free to innovate, and the addition of the SDC system gave everyone that "stamina hit point" system, serving as a "light wound pool" that heals very rapidly before hit points are reduced, and the characters take serious injuries that are far more difficult to recover from. D&D is stuck with "short rests" and the entire hit point pool being the temporary pool, with zero "real" hit points for serious injuries, and characters can pop up, heal instantly, and sleep off shotgun blasts to the face.

Palladium First Edition and GURPS are 100% "meaty hit points" with no stamina pool that takes damage first, leading to more deadly and realistic games. In the second edition of Palladium Fantasy, they adopted SDC for "soft hit points" to make the game more heroic, and align with all the other game's rules. I say "align" since nothing in Palladium perfectly aligns; it is all custom-fitted for crossovers, and MDC kills anything anyway.

Again, back in those days, we houseruled a lot and made a bunch of stuff up. Nothing had to be "perfect" like it is today. The book and rules got you in the ballpark, and you houseruled the rest.

GURPS is a simulation game in comparison. The combat, once you learn it, is some of the best fantasy combat in gaming, and the characters are clearly head-and-shoulders above all these games. But to understand it, everyone needed books and a lot of time. For a hobby on the decline, and Magic: The Gathering stealing players from our groups, nobody wanted our players to buy and learn something too different than what they knew.

Back then, the Palladium System was like Dungeon Crawl Classics is today. A system built for fun, easy to get into, and similar enough to what you know that you could not understand what you are doing, and sit at a convention table for the game, and have fun. The big difference is that Rifts has great cross-campaign support, giant freaking robots, lasers, and hordes of interesting bad guys.

While Palladium Fantasy and Rifts can easily replace any D&D or 5E game, they can't really replace GURPS. For me, GURPS hits differently and gives me some of the best character-focused systems in gaming, where every choice matters. GURPS also feels more grounded for me, where Rifts and its MDC feel like everyone is walking around with anti-vehicular weapons.

But truthfully, Rifts and its MDC (mega-damage) system are far more survivable than Car Wars, and we played Car Wars for years and never complained about it. In Car Wars, my character is a 6DP ant moving at a snail's pace around a freeway of vehicles armed with weapons that do multiple dice of damage, and would scratch the paint if they ran my character over. In Rifts, they hand out MDC armor everywhere, and it is not that hard to get a ton of MDC armor in a normal-looking suit. You never take it off, and your standard weapons are now worthless, but that is beside the point. It is science fiction, and pea-shooters should not touch space marine-style armor.

Rifts says to utilize SDC situations and environments, and it is good advice. Treat MDC weapons and armor like rare military gear, and run a mostly SDC world in the cities and settlements. Demons and dimensional beings are MDC creatures, so there is a fundamental imbalance in the power levels the game tries to navigate.

But a part of me likes the contrast. If you roll with magic and dimensional beings, it is like hanging around the Avengers, and everyone is flinging MDC powers around you and at you, so armor up. You have no choice, but these are your friends, and they need you alive when they are hurling bolts of magic that could tear through steel, and fighting the same.

Suppose you roll on the other side, as in the human-only fortresses of the Coalition's megacities. In that case, I can picture a world where only SDC weapons and armors are present, even among the police forces, since police body armor and weapons can be stolen, and the MDC-geared military can be called in for more serious threats. You could play a strict SDC campaign for years on the Chi-Town streets and never see an MDC weapon or creature. The Coalition military is the MDC force, so high-powered play options are there, too.

Rifts is like Car Wars if the cars were the characters, and they only had 1 DP of interior hit points once damage got through. It is dehumanizing and terrifying, but this is what modern tank crews deal with on every battlefield. If any damage gets through the tank's armor, good luck with that. Rifts assumes "every soldier becomes a tank," and this natural progression of warfare continues. Once any damage gets through, that is it, game over.

Still, even in light MDC armor, if a car going 100 mph hits you, your armor will be fine; the person inside will resemble a milkshake. Common sense still applies. In a mech-like MDC battlesuit? The car will wrap around your ankle, and you will shake it off like you just stepped in something.

Sure, outside of those "personal tank suits," regular guns still work, and that is one of the challenges running Rifts. But, I can't say it is unrealistic for science fiction, given the way weapons are becoming, and the march of technology makes every gun more and more lethal.

GURPS still does the "massive damage by high-tech weapons" thing, and high-tech armor is butter against weapons with high armor divisors. So, you are still just as dead if a 12d6 weapon hits you with no armor on in GURPS. Rifts just shorthand resolves the whole thing, tells you to roll 1d6 MD instead of 12d6, and one point of damage is death. In both games, science fiction tends to go "off the rails" compared to a more balanced role-playing game like Star Frontiers.

Most science fiction combat tends to be on the one-hit-kill side of things in gaming. GURPS can be like that in fantasy.

But going back to the comparison, it takes a reasonable amount of time and effort to learn GURPS this much to get to a point where this sort of science fiction combat is possible. With Rifts, I could throw D&D players into a mech battle without them knowing much more than 5+ on a d20, and they can play instantly. This is why Rifts killed a lot of interest in GURPS, at least in our groups back in the 1990s.

GURPS gave devoted players a much deeper sense of satisfaction, of course.

But Rifts was the far easier game to both play and get started with, given the core 1994 book was only $25 and was all you needed to play.

But truthfully, all of these games of the 1990s are things I love. This is when my brother and I had the most fun gaming, and the games were amazing.