Continuing the discussion from Four-ish cultural artworks to answer Why You Are Like This:
I was on the verification committee for one of the iterations of Murphy’s Rules (SJGames) and ended up catching this one: the way that falling damage and failing to use a parachute correctly damage were calculated by entirely different processes, so that you were significantly better off simply hitting the ground evenat terminal velocity than hitting it after messing up a parachute roll from any height.
Palladium combat rules were a bit of a mess, and it has been a long time since I played, but:
You got actions based on the level of Hand to Hand Combat training you had (None, Basic, Expert, or Martial Arts). Each combat round was divided in… 4?.. and there were actions that took half-round or full-rounds (casting spells and using a full clip from an auto.atic weapon, for example).
Full clip fire added a x10 damage modifier, which meant that basic fully automatic rifles were, on average, the deadliest weapons in the game (a laser rifle might deal 3d6 damage, a plasma missile might do 2d6x10, but that means the laser rifle on full auto would do more damage than the missile. They kept trying to add new weapon types (pulse weapons, burst weapons, micro missiles) but nothing was ever as effective and deadly as a basic weapon with full auto.
Attack rolls were opposed by Dodge or Parry rolls (depending on range and equipment), and then damage was divided into SDC and HP (Structural Damage Capacaity and Hit Points), with SDC being damage you could soak without immediate downsides and HP kinda being like you were taking serious damage now.
There was also MDC (Mega Damage Capacity) to represent tanks, Veritech Fighters,
Zentradei Battlepods, Coalition Cyborgs… anything that would shrug off bullets for ever. 1MDC was approximately 100SDC, but only 1 direction (a tank shell would obliterate a car, but a million SMG bullets wouldn’t harm a Destroid). For Robotech that worked okay… you would use SDC weapons on pilots and MDC weapons when they were in Veritechs or Destroids, but in Rifts it was a lot murkier since some PCs were MDC creatures (cyborgs, dragons, some Juicers, high level psionics) but others were only MDC in armour or power armour suits (Glitterboys, SAMAS pilots, Mages, etc).
Magic was horribly, horribly poorly balanced. It was just super weak. There were 2 types of super-human mods (Mind Over Matter, called “mama boys”, and Juicers) and the Juicers were just enormously better in every way with downside that they only lived 4-6 years, which was irrelevant for 99% of PCs and campaigns.
Skill checks were percentage based from 01 - 98% (always a chance of failure), and the list of skills was long, and your access to skills was defined by your OCC (Occupational Character Class). Generally, the more skills you got, and better, the worse you were at combat, but since the game was so focused on combat you were heavily penalized for playing anything aside from a combat OCC.
And oh gods was there ever power creep. Every source book kept coming out with newer, shinier weapons and armour and OCCs.
And a lot of very casual racism… Rifts Africa is notoriously bad, but Mexico, South America, and China source books were questionable at best…
What you wanted for this was the RPA-100 (I think) from the southern cross book that was a MDC laser that followed machine gun rules rather than automatic weapon/submachinegun rules which is x20 for emptying the entire magazine at one target rather than x10
I don’t recall combat rounds being divided up into 4 with full/half-round actions in the Palladium systems, although again it’s been over 35 years since I played any of them. I remember Golden Heroes breaking its combat rounds into 4 Frames (with 1 Action being 2 Frames), with various characters having 2, 3 or 4 Frames per Round.
The SDC / HP system never really worked on our tables as it wasn’t that logical to us, unlike say how Golden Heroes implemented HTC (Hits-to-Coma) and HTK (Hits-to-Kill). And while the skill list and programs were long and messy, and not always clearly defined, it was fun making a character in some Palladium system genres where skills were more relevant than other features: in our experience such as Ninjas and Superspies as opposed to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Heroes Unlimited. I will say though, that making characters in such systems was great fun, and in some cases more enjoyable than playing the games themselves.
I had to look it up (online, because I don’t own any of my Palladium books any more… I gave them all away when I left for University 20+ years ago).
Any form of HtH training (Basic, Expert, Martial Arts, Assassin, Commando, Praxian, whatever) gives a player 4 Actions per Melee Round. If you have NO HtH training, you only got 1 Action per melee round. Parry was automatic (didn’t cost an action to do), but Dodge did by default cost an action unless you had Automatic Dodge, which meant you could Dodge without cost. There was also an entire mechanic for “Rolling with the Impact” to reduce damage, but I haven’t read up on it.
So at Level 1, since every player would have at least Basic training, you got 4 actions per round. Firing on Full Auto took all your actions, but 3d6x10 is still better than 3d6x4, unless you missed…
Have read over the rules (briefly), it has again become obvious the system was built specifically for melee combat, and mostly for martial-arts-style fights. “Long range attacks” get automatic initiative in the core rules! Which for TMNT and Other Strangeness, sure, fine… but in Rifts!? Everyone is using a railgun or better…
Anyway. I knew there was something about 4 actions per round, and that the combat system is really… bad. It’s bad. It’s not designed to do what it supposed to do, but it might work okay as a 1-v-1 system? It seems to be built with that specifically (and exclusively) in mind. But it has been 20-odd years… or longer… since I’ve tried it. Maybe it’s better than i think.
I do love in the scans I was glancing through that Combat Rules start on page 339. Up to that point: World overview, Occupational Character Classes, Racial Character Classes, Spells, Psionic Abilities, regional OCCs (the Coalition Troops are separated from the rest of the OCCs), a discussion of Magic, a brief reworking of the Magic system to make it slightly less awful (casting Level 1-5 Spells now only takes a single combat action in the “improved” rules, apparently?)…
Anyway. Yes. 4 Actions per round.
4 attacks was rare, depending on the specific Palladium system. In most of them, players could take one of the four Hand-to-Hand styles, which mostly gave them 2 attacks per(15 second) round, although in many early versions HTH Assassin only gave them one attack. Virtually every character found a way to get the Boxing skill, which gave them another attack. And yes, every HTH style gave an automatic parry - meaning you didn’t need to soend an attack to parry a blow - and roll with punch feature to reduce damage. Extra attacks and extra automatic features were available at higher levels, but 1st level characters had at most three hand-to-hand attacks.
Ninjas and Superspies took that and went wild with it. Most of the character classes could select an explicit martial art style, far beyond the HTH styles, such as Aikido, Jujutsu, various forms of Karate and Kung Fu. Most styles gave only 2 attacks per round at 1st level but a lot gave 3 and a couple gave 4 - Tae Kwon Do, and one if the Kung Fu styles I think (Fong Ngan, maybe). Then add one from Boxing for up to 5 per round. A lot of these styles offered other bonuses, including automatic dodge and automatic holds, locks and throws as well, plus all the weapon proficiencies and weird and wonderful Mastery abilities to add physical, mental and spiritual powers. Overkill, definitely, but lots of fun defining your character’s fighting prowess.
That was all melee though, or maybe some thrown/bow weapons. Firearm attacks were more limited if I recall.
Then you got the Triad Assassin martial art in the Mystic China book which had a weapon kata for 9mm pistols
One of my PCs picked up a book that had a whole stack of different Hand-to-Hand styles… I remember Aikido specifically because I was training in it at the time. I think they figured out a few of them were more-broken than the others, although I don’t specifically recall which.
I will say that we played a lot of Rifts. Every Friday for years while in High School. Mostly the group trundled around North America in the leadup to the Coalition War with Tolkeen (sp? I think that was the place) and Free Quebec. They spent a little time in Texas (“Lone Star”) during the Juicer Uprisings, and a short foray into Mexico (“The Vampire Kingdoms”) before marching through South America (oooh, I remember that Cordoba was the capital of another human-centric empire, but I forget the name) before a Rift took them to Germany for a short war with the Gargoyle Empire on behalf of Triax and… as memory serves… assisting the remnants of the US Navy in a giant submersible aircraft carrier.
In there somewhere was a brief excursion to Wormwood, the living planet (my PCs didn’t care for the setting, too alien), a couple jaunts through the Three Galaxies (I kept wanting to play a Battle Mage because it seemed like it would almost be a good combat mage… but none of my friends wanted to run campaigns), and some time spent in low orbit through the “Mutants in Orbit” ruleset.
We stopped playing shortly after the release of “Coalition War Machine,” and before they did the 6-part invasion of Tolkeen (which is probably for the best… I have suspicions that my group wouldn’t have handled it very well… we were young and foolish, me more than the others probably). I think I still picked up one or two books afterwards… I think the last one I picked up myself was “New West”?
Anyway. I stumbled on this gem while looking at “Robotech II: The Sentinels” (the first RPG book I bought myself) on Wikipedia:
The complex combat rules have been characterized as “excruciatingly detailed.”
Yes. Yes they are.
Add in that the original Games Workshop Judge Dredd had a percentile skill for Initiative, and each combat round was split into 10 phases. Your number of actions was the 10’s of your initiative, and most PCs started in the 30s (IIRC) and therefore going on phase 2, 5, 8 (or something similar).
Which was great, except one of the starting adventures had them thrown into an encounter with Dredd and McGruder, both with Initiatives in the 90s, and therefore acting on
1,2,3,4,5
Taking a little break on 6 ..
7,8,9,10.
Each round.
