House Rules: You're Better Off Trusting the GM to Handle the Details

If there is something that many people complain about, it's that the rules of a given game don't reflect how it feels to do something that is a thing in the real world. It can be car chases, knife fights, shootouts, surgery, injury and recovery, whatever- someone, somewhere, is complaining about it (and often online somewhere). They may even have valid points to make, and make them properly. However, what comes next is madness of the Sisyphean sort: an attempt to improve the mechanics to make it work as they think it should.

Stop. You can't even approach it with rules and mechanics without getting so built up that you might as well use it as code in a videogame (which is where the best approximations in gaming are, and we know how short those fall). Going that route is folly, and inefficient.

There is a better alternative. Instead, focus upon two questions: "Did I hit him enough to do the thing?" and "Did the thing do what I want?" This translates into Attack and Effect checks, and Palladium's rules are good enough to handle those two questions. What you want to do, when it comes to the details, is to use that liminal area as the conceptual space where the Game Master applies what he knows of how things really work (or, for unreal stuff, the closest analogues) and makes rulings from there.

So, let's talk about something that happens a lot: a Coalition soldier wants to shoot someone with his laser rifle.

Laser weapons, quite frankly, are not firearms no matter how much they may look like them (or how the rules treat them so). The big differences are a total absence of recoil (because there is no controlled explosion, and the following kinetic reactions, involved) and no projectile involved; the rifleman can point his weapon at the target, press the trigger, and instantaneously damage the target with a micro-second length of laser light so powerful as to flash-fry the target. (Because that's how lasers do damage: they burn the target at the point of impact.) The target gets burned, and suffers the consequences of being burned where the laser hit. (Anything that throws a projectile--firearms, plasma casters, etc.--has some form of travel time; the further the shooter is from the target, the more this matters in practice.)

Much as the "-10 to dodge lasers" rule is hated, it's a valid concept (if a botched execution) for that reason; it's a mechanical attempt to make that fact of "no projectile travel time to target" something that layman players can readily appreciate. I wouldn't be that blunt, but I'd gladly make a similar attempt (probably at the Proficiency and Tool Stat ends; the idea of "burst fire" for lasers is absurd, for starters). Go on, dodge a flashlight; that's what you're claiming to do when you argue against something like that -10 rule.

This also means that a shootout with lasers is a series of flashes (assuming, of course, that the weapons are even in the visible light spectrum), but not a silent series; the power necessary to be viable as weapons is also the power necessary to instantly ionize the atmosphere along the path it travels. This will be a sharp, audible crack not unlike the crack of a whip; to get "suppressed" or "silent", you need to tone the intensity to what real world weaponized lasers are (and do as they do; lase the target, burning it over time, until you burn your way to a kill).

So, in rule terms you still have Attack and Damage rolls. The GM, knowing how lasers function (because he's been reading up on them), rules that without superhuman senses (or outright supernatural ones) you can't dodge or parry a laser attack unless you're able to perceive the attacker's pointing the weapon at you somehow. (See him aim at you, get a sensor warning, etc.)- and then, the best you can do is pro-active/pre-emptive defense due to instantaneous travel time. (If he's on the ball, he'll also reduce the damage within an atmosphere due to bean attenuation, so lasers will have "effective ranges" meaning "distance within which targets burn as intended".) These rulings will account for situational details as required, and better than a massive tome of mechanics and rules can do. This principle applies to other things, like martial arts and dog fights and and hacking contests and so on.

I want you to stop letting the rules master you, and instead you be the master of the rules; they are tools, so treat them as such, to use or not as you see fit.

Putting It Together: Crossing The Streams

RIFTS is a tabletop role-playing game that professes the capacity to play whatever you can imagine. While the reality of this is less than the imagery created by the advertising copy, this is not false; it just takes some work to make it viable at the able. With that in mind, let us take a moment to talk about doing that.

There is a difference between "crossing the streams" (a campaign that melds two or more archetypical campaign models together) and a kitchen sink game where anything goes no matter the sensibility of it. We want the former, and not the latter, so we are not sloughing off the necessary work that running a campaign entails. Instead, we are changing what the workload is and the order of operations.

No, no handy media example this week. Now I'm making you do your own research. Hop to it, and get used to doing it; that's what it takes to make the pre-game work of a GM into something useful at the table.

Putting It Together: The Space Campaign

As I noted previously, campaigns in space require a bit of additional focus to make them sufficient in scope and scale to handle at the table. This is why I'm using Knights of Sidonia as an example. In this case, you have a space-faring campaign centered around a generation ship and the militia tasked with guarding it against the ship's alien opposition. (You want more? Watch the series.)

In RIFTS, this is easily done. One focusing on the solar system can work from Mutants In Orbit (you can do the orbital end of Mobile Suit Gundam and its successors easily) or Scrapers, and elsewhere using the Phase World books (selectively, of course). If you decide to use the Aliens Unlimited sourcebooks for Heroes Unlimited for additional material, you will go far. Yes, you will have to brew your own content, but there is so much archetypical examples to work with that doing it won't be hard.

Putting It Together: The Wild West Campaign

Like last week, I'm embedding a video that popularly displays one way to show folks what RIFTS means. This week, it's the New West, and we're using Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" as the video example. It has martial arts, cowboys, gunslinging, The Frontier, The Code of the West, and anachronistic technology- just like the New West. Just missing obvious super-powers or equal technology. As with last week, I'm asking you to take it in and start to think of how you would make this into a RIFTS campaign at your table.

Nope, no hand-holding. No conversions. Nothing but me serving up the materials. Make your own entertainment.

(As for the anime Knights of Sidonia, next week.)