Forums of the Megaverse®

chances are pretty good that every one of your PCs has some kind of MD capacity armor. A single elemental only has so many attacks per melee that are at it's disposal, versus probobly at least 4 per PC. All those attacks DO add up, even if theyre coming from coalition laser rifles that do 2d6MD.

You have to remember that few creatures will fight to the death. Killing/destroying an adversary is not the only way to victory either, and victory on Rifts Earth is often a case of just surviving an encounter. Survival is dependant on wits just as much as MDC armour.

If your players invoke the ire of a major elemental - godlike beings - and are foolish enough to stand and engage in a pointless fight, they deserve little mercy from the GM.

dealing with could involve: driving it off or the smarter thing to do, "Getting a warlock to talk to it, so they don't have to fight it."

This reminds me of a letter I once received, and the response I sent...

"Dear Killer Cyborg,
My players are all playing normal human characters, but I want them to be able to strangle elephants with their bare hands. Should I nerf the stats on elephants, dropping the SDC down to more strangleable levels? Or should I just give the characters larger hands?

Sincerely,
Pachy-Hater in Wisconsin"

Dear Pachy-Hater,
The thing is, the damage capacity levels are there for a reason; it shows how tough the creature being described is supposed to be. If you ignore the stats, then you're ignoring how tough the opponent is supposed to be. Things get out of whack, because if you change the stats on one creature, then every other creature's stats are changed in comparison.
Pogtals, for example, used to be able to eat T-Rexes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Not to mention Second-Breakfast, Brunch, Elevensies, and Tea.
T-Rexes had 1d4x10 MDC. Pogtals have a ginoumous bite that does 6d6 MD.
Punch and a bit, and the T-Rex is dead.
Or rather, was.
Because in New West, T-Rexes got bumped up in power, and now they have something like 1d4x100+100 MDC (or something like that; feel free to correct me if you have the book).
Suddenly, the Pogtal's lunch is tougher than the Pogtal.

That might not seem too bad at first, because Pogtals also like to hunt dragons (presumably hatchlings), and dragon hatchlings are almost as tough as a Pogtal.
But that raises another comparison: dragons vs. dinos.
A dragon vs. a T-Rex used to be no problem.
But these days the dragons are on equal (if not lesser) footing in a straight up fight.

Since these are fictional creatures, you might be thinking that this isn't that bad, but think about it.
What if you DID nerf elephants down to strangleable-sized stats?
Instead of hundreds of SDC, you drop their stats down to tens of SDC.
Now elephants are just as strong as humans, so they're easy to strangle... but the laws of logic and proportion have been defenestrated.
Suddenly, all of human history is different. If you nerf elephants, you have to nerf mammoths, and if you nerf mammoths then humans never had to work as a pack in order to hunt mammoths; we just jogged up and punched or strangled them to death.
Which means that a lot of our early weapon technology doesn't make sense. We didn't really need spears for hunting those mammoths, for example. Mammoth or elephant tusks and hides wouldn't be objects of great value; they'd be stuff anybody with two hands capable of a choking-motion could just go out and get.
Heck, nerfed elephants/mammoths could have (and would have) just been domesticated by early humans. What're they going to do, smash out of their pens? Can't. Nerfed-down strength.
So with domestic pachys, why bother with cows? More meat with less trouble if you're a pachy-rancher.
The ripple effect goes on.
Suddenly, the old west doesn't have cow-boys, it has pachy-boys, for example.
Hannibal marches his pachy army over to Rome, and it's same-old/same-old.
Human history is screwed, just because you wanted to tamper with the natural order of things and let your PCs strangle some elephants.

This, of course, applies to any situation where you want to tamper with stats.
There's always a ripple effect.
Something always gets screwed.
The more powerful the being you're tinkering with, the bigger the ripple.

What if after winning the weaving contest, Arachne just belted Minerva back instead of running off to hang herself?
What if Jacob had wrestled the angel, and gotten the 10-count in the first minute of the bout instead of lasting until sunset? And nobody had really cared, because angels just weren't that big a deal anyway?

What if Johnny had just pimp-slapped the Devil into giving him that golden fiddle?

You can't have epic struggles without epic enemies.
If the enemies you want to throw at your PCs are a bit too epic for the PCs, too bad.
You can't make things more epic by nerfing the opposition.

"Yeah, I beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match!!............... (after he was hobbled, drugged, and hog-tied)...."

Spend some time beefing up your PCs instead. Don't just hand them stuff; make them earn it.
If they earn the weapons, armor, and special tricks/gear required to defeat the enemy, and they earn a victory against the enemy in a fair fight, then you have something epic.

airwalkrr wrote:I'm running through a Rifts campaign where a lot of action is in the New West right now. I am using a lot of material from the New West and Spirit West, but I'm coming up with an issue. I imagine that given the way things are going, at some point the PCs are going to clash with an elemental spirit. They don't exactly respect the land. And besides, I've got stats for a dozen of them. I've got to use at least one right? The problem is, once these things arrive on Rifts Earth they become MD creatures with MD in the tens of thousands. My group has rail guns and power armor and some missiles. They even know where a Coalitiion stockpile of small tactical nuclear weapons are (and if they have the balls they might raid it). But how on earth do you get players to deal with such high amounts of MD? It would take several nukes just to wipe out the easy ones. Do Rifts GMs just commonly reduce the amount of MD the opponents have to make the situation manageable?

Maybe they shouldn't be tangling with elemental spirits at all, but the question is valid for a number of kinds of enemies. Just fighting Coalition 'bots with MDC in the high hundreds is grueling if there are several of them, but if there aren't enough, then they simply don't pose enough of a threat to the PCs.

Lesser or greater? Lesser elementals only have a few hundred MDC and are more manageable.

As for greater elementals...Just...don't. Greater elementals are what you summon to fight a small army with.