So I decided last year that 2013 was going to be the YEAR OF PALLADIUM! Why? because the d20 games were becoming too much for me. I wanted something different.
I have been collecting Palladium RPGs for over 16 years and every year I at least get a Christmas surprise package to add more books and swag to my collection. Problem is I haven’t played any of their games in years. we had a one shot of Rifts about two years ago, and a stab at Mechanoid Invasion a few years before that.
I wanted to play my Palladium games because I have a huge collection of them, and I wanted my son to learn more about the games and the industry and how it has grown and changed over the years. When he hears people criticizing a mechanic I want him not only to understand why they might feel that way, but also to have his own opinion on that mechanic based on his experiences with the system.
So we have played a few sessions of the MECHANOID INVASION, and a few sessions of PALLADIUM FANTASY, and now I am running HEROES UNLIMITED on Roll20.net, and we are all seeing how limited the games are.
Especially with Heroes; coming from a background with the Marvel Superhero RPG, where characters can literally attempt anything and develop new power stunts as they grow and learn about their powers. Playing a super-hero RPG that tells you to pick a character at the beginning of the campaign and a few skills, then you never get anything new ever for the rest of the game, and most of the classes don’t even get powers even though the powers section takes up a huge portion of the page count…. ugh.
So I am talking with my son about this coming weekend. “What do you want to play, Mechanoids or Fantasy?” I ask him.
He says “Palladium is so restrictive, you can’t build your character, when you pick a class it’s like you are being handed a pregen with no ability to modify anything other than a few skill choices”.
I tell him “I know, that is what Mike is complaining about, that’s why he wants to switch characters. I wanted to you see that, and the clunky combat system and task resolution. Palladium makes great games but they are rigid and outdated and even though the company is still making them, they won’t upgrade to the newer trends in the hobby. Now that you are seeing that maybe we can convert the stuff over to another game system like d20 Anime (B.E.S.M. d20) and play through the settings that way”.
He agrees “we can’t play Heroes cause you are running it online now huh? Maybe we could just play GURPS this weekend”.
That is it! That was it all along!
Here is the perfect chance to move onto another classic system that I own a large amount of (a few dozen at least) and at the same time it solves the problems of Palladium’s settings having terrible rules, AND of GURPS rules not having very defined settings (I know they make them, but my collection is full of the core genre books like time travel, space, supers, horror, magic, vehicles, martial arts, etc).
That is three birds with one stone! its like a bird in each and one in the bush, it’s like having your bird and eating … okay enough with the bird analogy.
My son is a genius!
Lair of the Technolich 