[Games Anatomy] Where No Von Has Gone Before

Abakus, he say:

And you should TOTALLY do Rifts next week. The system's a clusterfuck, but Lord, do I love that game.

I hear and obey! Now, this is going to be a bit of a challenge for me, as RIFTS (which feels like it deserves the capslock) is not a system I've played before, or indeed even read before. This week is going to be more of a 'first encounter' than a deep dissection - I'm going to skim over RIFTS and see if I can lay my hands on what the system's about, because I'm sure I don't know from first-hand experience. I've heard things, though. Strange, terrible things. Things about which I feel a morbid curiosity, as I turn the Games Anatomy scalpel onto this strange, deformed carcass and plunge in elbows-deep, seeking for tasty meats in its food-body.

You can tell I've not had lunch yet, can't you?

SinSynn, have you been infiltrating the nightmares of artists again?

First thing. 375 pages.

And there doesn't seem to be any GM section, or gazetteer section. So it's presumably all rules.

This is either going to be brilliant and inspiring, or the sort of thing that makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Let us see...

Okay, so it starts with a brief, mercifully brief, description of the setting. And it's mental. After a hundred-year technology-induced Golden Age, ley lines go crazy and open up holes in reality - RIFTS, in point of fact - through which pours... everything. Everything anyone's ever told a story about. Everything you might conceivably want to put into an RPG exists somewhere in this post-apocalyptic future-scape, all crammed onto an Earth where travelling a hundred miles might feel like visiting another world. Usual self-aggrandising "How Is RPG Formed?" bit, and an indication of the trajectory characters take from small-scale to large-scale, concept to fledged-out self-insertion fantasy persona. All on one page. So far, so not flabby. What's taking up the other 374?

40 pages of world-setting flab describing nightmarish future America, which is great if you want to run your game there (I can't do the accents, see, so...). I suppose we have to make up the rest of the world's local flavours of nightmarish future, which at least spares me having to wade through forty pages of encyclopaedia entries and character journals. Seriously, RPG developers - tell me a story or better yet, model your world through gameable concepts and examples of technique. Just spare me the fictional encyclopaedia entries!

Developer's Notes! Quite good ones, too, where Mr. Siembieda describes the kind of games he enjoys playing, the kind of stories he associates with them, and his motivations in making RIFTS the way it is. He claims it's about characters first, settings second, villains third and rules a near-invisible fourth. Let's see how well that holds up, eh? Oh... not too well, as it happens. Within two paragraphs he's defending the length of a character creation process which includes 'occupational character class', mental and physical attributes, alignment, occupation, skills, special powers, hit points, background details and which - and I quote - 'means reading a big chunk of the book in order to make those choices', which are described as 'not easy'.

Back up there. Either all that stuff is invisible, in which case the choices are not worth labouring over that much because the character will function broadly as you envisage it regardless, or that stuff is highly visible and important, in which case RIFTS has failed in its stated design goals before a single mechanic has been described. And this is before we get into the closing 'if this is your first time playing the Palladium system' sign-off.

Dude. Mr. Siembieda. I don't know how to break this to you, but this is unlikely to be my first time playing this system. Promising me hours of agonising choices in character generation when I don't know how any of those choices will actually work out, and a first session that is likely to be nothing but chargen without any exciting, dynamic, story-tellery type stuff... does not make me want to play your game. Hell, if I didn't already love RPGs, I wouldn't necessarily want to even try them out. Who the hell wants to sit down and play a game and then spend the first hour filling out forms? Next thing you'll be telling me there's an interview with HR and an hour's competency test!

I like to think this is the same lady from the D20 poster.

Breathe, Von. Breathe. You've had worse. You've waded through more guff than this to get to the gristle of an RPG before...

Okay, so there are six broad headings for classes - Men At Arms (the guy from He-Man? I always thought that was his name, when I was but a chile, y'know), Adventurers and Scholars, Practitioners of Magic, Psychics, something called 'Racial Character Class' and Coalition Soldiers, which seems like a totally warranted distinction from general Men At Arms (maybe it makes more sense if you've either read through the flab at the start or if you're setting your game somewhere where the Coalition exists: nice try Siembieda, but I'm still not doing either for you). Oh, and each one of these, part from the Racial Character Class, which is just for dragons, has between four and eight sub-classes, which I'm guessing are the actual occupations. Oh, and Mr. Siembieda pops up again, informing us that he'll be informing us about 'the back story [his italics] that has always been part of [his] vision for the character, but never shared'.

Do I need to post the grumpy Von face and go off on a diatribe about being spoiled by a superfluity of ultimately meaningless preamble choices again, or shall we just take it as read so I can maybe get on to talking about the actual rules before I die of starvation? Right. Didn't think so. On the other hand, I can play a dragon. That's... potentially awesome, I suppose. And Curis could play a Cyber-Knight, if he wanted to. They're totally a class here.

Right, okay. Looks like we're about to get into some rules.

Now, in some games, some weaker games, you might be expected to run across a general description of the process, you know, what attributes and options there are and how they interact with a basic rules mechanic so you can start making informed choices right off the bat. In RIFTS, the first part of the character generation rules offers us page after page of waffle about the philosophy of the cyborg (to be fair, that's actually kind of interesting, or at least it would be in an essay about cyborgs and identity rather than in the character generation rules for what is still presenting itself as some sort of game), with occasional build options - things like where you can attach weapon systems, and what chassis are available, and how much 'M.D.C.' they add for what price in 'credits'. As we go on, we get into things like alignment restrictions, and penalties to particular skills for choosing particular options, gradually edging out the cumbersome flavour text until they represent the majority of any given page of text.

I try not to use words like 'love' and 'hate' for gaming-related concerns. They're strong words. They belong with strong things, like social justice and creative endeavours and political principles and beautiful human beings, not with trivial things, like how well executed an RPG product is. I really do try.

That said, I hate it when writing, of any sort, starts throwing around terms before it's defined them. I hate it when choices are presented without a context in which to make them. And I really hate it when those choices are embedded in contextual material which, however interesting, fails to help in any way with the actual making of the choice.

So far, RIFTS is going about things in exactly the sort of way that would, if I came across it in an RPG emporium, make me drop the book back on the pile, go home, and compose a bothersome email to Tied to a Kite begging them to release more Backswords and Bucklers supplements. It's becoming increasingly clear that I'm not going to be able to phone this one in in a morning of easy typing over coffee like I usually do. It's also becoming clear to me that I don't like RIFTS, and we haven't even touched on the mechanics yet.

Still, because I love you people nearly as much as I hate poorly organised, bloated, creatively incoherent roleplaying games, I'm not giving up on this saucy monkey yet. I may conceivably devote a few weeks to unpacking RIFTS and trying to work out what, if anything, is going on here. So, let this stand as a modest rant about how to make me not want to play your game... and I'll have a go at actually describing RIFTS once I've found something that passingly resembles a game in all this. There has to be something in here that people can love, surely?