common house rules/errata

[Sureshot]

So far...

A) I ignore "poof" rules:

1) Mages can wear any armour they please, as per the RMB
Reason: Wasn't there before, and the system didn't need the change.

2)-10 Dodge, no bonuses: IGNORED.
Reason: Comparing normal characters (Grunts, headhunters, MIlitary specs) in combat, they are perfectly capable of not dodging attacks successfully as is. I see no reason for a late addition to the rules that seems to make juicers sitting ducks for a CS Grunt.

I use the rules from the RMB.

B) Skills.

1) I add "logical" skills to OCC templates, such as the missing Pilot: Robots & PA from the CS SAMAS pilot.

2) Adding skills
I use the normal skill progression as skills learnt "along the way". If a Player wishes his character to train in and gain a particular skill, outside of this progression, I judge on a case-by-case basis. Some skills (Running, swimming, sewing, WP Blunt) are just plain easier to learn than others (Engineering, Computer Programming, Hacking)

3) Characters from Phase World (if used)
They are literate in the languages they begin with.

Pretty much what DWK said except I would also allow and mages and psychics their full Isp and Ppe instead of rolling it randomly.

[King Chopper]

The few house rules I have deal mostly with player actions than with dice rolls or skills.

1. If you roll a strike of 18, 19 or nat 20 I want to see it. Had a player cheat by rolling, grabbing the dice and calling natural 20 before the dice stopped.

2. If you can’t come to the game call at least 3 hours in advance, don’t just not show up. Now if it’s an emerancy, or for what ever resion you can’t call, let me know what hapend next time.

3. I may be Gm, but I’m still only human, I may make mistakes. If I do, don’t be afraid
To point it out to me, but be polite about it.

4. When I make a call on whatever, don’t argue with me.

5. No gameing till I’ve had my coffee.

[Vrykolas2k]

My main rule when I'm GMing or anyone else is, is that the GM is NOT always right... the books have rules there for a reason. If rules are in conflict, then discuss the problem and make a fair call. I've had GMs who just arbitrarily picked what they wanted and then were not consistent with it, and switched it whenever they wanted.
If I make a mistake as a GM I tell my players to call me on it. I don't mind, and it keeps people from getting shafted.

[Temporalmage]

My main rule when I'm GMing or anyone else is, is that the GM is NOT always right... the books have rules there for a reason. If rules are in conflict, then discuss the problem and make a fair call. I've had GMs who just arbitrarily picked what they wanted and then were not consistent with it, and switched it whenever they wanted.
If I make a mistake as a GM I tell my players to call me on it. I don't mind, and it keeps people from getting shafted.

I agree.

[MADMANMIKE]

..I use the PPE channelling rules, which basically allow a spell caster to cast spells that cost up to 5 PPE per level of experience, per attack. First level, 5PPE and down spells = 1 attack, second level, 10PPE and down, etc.

..Also, in my games MDC to SDC is a 5 to 1 ratio, MDC has an AR of 18vs SDC, but every 10 SDC that beats the AR reduces the AR by one. Also, every 10 Points of damage taken by a persons armor that concievably has a concussion does one SDC point to the person under the armor, regardless of whether or not the armor was damaged (ie, 15SDC rounds hit but don't beat the 18 AR, so the armor is basically unscathed but the wearer takes one point of damage personally).

-Mike >8]

[Zer0 Kay]

My House Rules on "modern" weapons.

Projectile (also applies to all other firearms except where noted)-
-Can't be dodged unless the weapon/shooter can be seen. It is the weapon not the projectile you dodge.
-Are fast, all dodges ore done as straight rolls (no bonuses, unless stated specifically for ranged combat)
-Are loud and move the target in the opposite direction of the impact. Because of theis the attacker may be traced by following the noise and the direction from which the shot came. If an observer is familiar with the firearm being used they can even judge distance if the attacker fires multiple shots.
-Damage caused by a combination of blunt trauma (hydrodynamic shock) and piercing (causing double damage on critical hits.)

Lasers-
-Are invisible, so can't be visually tracked back to the attacker, unless passing through a mass of particulate matter, like smoke. (someone recently mentioned to me that lasers of MD magnitude will superheat the air and turn it to plasma. There was a special on NOVA about space propulsion... anyway they were using a SDI laser to demonstrate laser propulsion it fired up into the bottom of a disk that had a special reflector. Once it hit this reflector it created plasma and propelled the disk upward. There's two things to note from this special. First, the laser was INVISIBLE to the human eye. Second, the laser was powerful enough that they had to put an ablative pice of armor over it so that if it missed the disk it wouldn't fire into space and possibly knock out a sattellite)
-Are silent, so they can't be audibly tracked back to the attacker.
-Large "caliber" lasers (i.e. vehicle mounted or ATLs) produce an electrical snap as their capacitor discharges, but the noise produced can only be heard in the immediate area of the weapon.
-Are light therefor they can be reflected. However, different frequencies of light can pass through different reflective surfaces (I usually have my players with AL armor pick a number from 1 to 10 before the game when combat starts any VF laser weapons roll a d10 if it isn't the number roll another d10 for how many shots it will take to match freqs.)
-Are really fast, hmmm a laser travels at the speed of uh...light, because of this the target is -10 to dodge. (If there are any arguments about "I can see the light when it's fired." That's right that means the beam is already there.)
-Damage is piercing heat. It will penetrate armor and flesh, but cauterizes wounds causing no blood loss (causing damage and a half on critical hits.) May also want this to stop regenerating creatures from doing so.
-Damage is resonant. Against vehicles the damage is greater because the metal doesn't give as much as flesh the laser superheats the crystaline structure of the material and causes it to burst. Another variation on this could be if it struck something that the beam just happened to be in harmonic frequiency to. (Either way a critical causes 2x damage)

Plasma-
-Is very hot, it's extreme heat leaves behind a "con-trail". The contrail is easy to spot and track back to the attacker.
-Is very bright and relatively slow, and therefore casy to see as it travels toward the target. +4 to dodge if target is at Max or Max-100'.
-Is contained in a magnetic field called a bottle. When the plasma strikes an electronic device that is not shielded against EMP it has a 5% chance of disabling any component in the immediate area, roll until a component shorts or there are no components in the same area to roll for. Also due to the magnetic bottle the plasma may be redirected by sudden large magnetic anomalies (i.e. a Boom gun firing, some sort of magnetic shield that is the same polarity of the bottle, [select guns polarity before game]).
-Is a superheated gas. When the plasma strikes a solid object the bottle collapses, releasing the plasma. When released the plasma will act like a fluid and splash. This creates a small splash radius of about 5'.
-Damage is surface heat. It will not penetrate anything unless it is completely burned away. (Because of this no critical damage is done. ) May also want this to stop creatures from regenerating.

Particle Beams-
-Fire a laser beam nanoseconds before firing the particle beam. This is done to produce an ionized path for the beam that is clear of particulate matter.
-Are not completely cohesive it has a dense core surrounded by a periphery of less dense particles that were traveling slower, or ran into anomalous particulate matter, and get deflected out of the core. Due to this even a near miss up to 5 points off causes one quarter damage.
-Are invisible, so can't be visually tracked back to the attacker, unless the laser passes through a mass of particulate matter, like smoke.
-Are silent, so can't be audibly tracked back to the attacker.
-Large "caliber" PB weapons (i.e. vehicle mounted or PBCs) produce an audible energy pulse as the accelerator magnets fire this can only be heard in the immediate area of the weapon.
-If something is able to deflect the laser before it reaches its target the PB will drastically loose range and damage. One half of the remaining range and damage (i.e. if a weapon's rates are 200' @ 2D6MD and it traveled 150' already it can only travel an additional 25' doing 1D6MD.)
-Even though PB weapons fire a laser, laser resistant armor does not effect the damage.
-Damage is penetration. The weapon does damage by shoving billions of particles through a body at near light speed thereby creating an equal number of micro holes in the target. (Critical hits cause 2X damage.)
-Damage is explosive. Against vehicles the damge is greater because the metal doesn't give as much as flesh the impacts actually cause micro explosions as they split molecules. (Critical hits cause 4X damage.)

[Zer0 Kay]

My main rule when I'm GMing or anyone else is, is that the GM is NOT always right... the books have rules there for a reason. If rules are in conflict, then discuss the problem and make a fair call. I've had GMs who just arbitrarily picked what they wanted and then were not consistent with it, and switched it whenever they wanted.
If I make a mistake as a GM I tell my players to call me on it. I don't mind, and it keeps people from getting shafted.

There called guide lines. I'm not gonna call a GM on something simple or something that he is consistant with. But if it was one way for one person and another way for someone else then hell yeah I come down on him like sploogies on an unarmed village.

[Ice Dragon]

o) Ignor the -10 rule for dodge of energy/laser fire

o) Mages can cast spells inside environmental body armor

o) I use the P.P.E. channeling rules for magical combat (see Rifter 21)

o) Player characters have two additional actions/attacks per melee

o) Rerole any single "1" for attributes during character creation.

o) Stick to the Main Book Rules.

[PigLickJF]

a) PPE channeling (Rifter 21) mentioned twice - a summarization would be nice, as I mentioned, we've only got the main book for now.

MADMANMIKE gave the basic summary on the first page, I think. Basically, a mage can "channel" up to 5 PPE per melee attack per level with which to cast a spell. So, a first level mage could cast a <=5PPE spell in one attack, 6-10 PPE spell in two attacks, etc. A 4th level mage could cast a <=20 PPE spell in one attack, 21-40 PPE spell in two attacks, etc.

PigLick

[G]

ok, here goes, things not yet mentioned:
-decide if you want any AP rules
-decide on how pulse & burst weapons work (everything more or less got changed to single shot, however weapons like the standard JA12 do 1d6*10+10md for a laser pulse to 4000'. - power creep at work, you might want to limit this or not your choice)
-decide if attacking PCs is allowed in your game
-decide if you want tanks, artillery, and carpet bombing to be underpowered and underused as they are in the books if not you might want to make them realistic & give them a whole lot more md & mdc
-decide what percentage of normal people are psychic.. is it the same as PCs? If so then you have roughly 30% -15% minor,10% major,5% (my call here) occ of all humans being psychic
-decide on which mini missiles are guided or unguided
-consider using AI's to protect robots & PA from theft per rifter 2
-if you dont drop the prices, then you may want to add some sort of protection for hand guns as well.
-decide on how to deal with blast radius damage (right now you can deal enough damage to scratch the main body and the area of effect can blow arms, legs & head off)
-you might want to use the HU version of telepathy so psychics can actually read minds (hehe)
-decide of the CS is good/grey/evil, and if you want to play them as inteligently.

quick thoughts on stuff already mentioned:
-BTW: drop the mdc ratio to 10sd (so you kill a tree not the forest), I use that to justify reducing the cost of the big stuff by 10, since its 10x less potent.
-magic attacks per melee options:
1-HU magic chart
2-use normal attacks (possibe justifaction, if necessary: trained in magic basic/advanced/martial arts HTH instead of normal)
3-PPE channeling rules

There's more on my website, I have a section on the rules I use, in addition to what I do for what everyone mentioned above which I havent included in what you need to think about. I use a few other things, like dropping the roll for dodges (which I found on the internet sometime ago). There are prolly some more complaints rolling around that I didnt think of immediately.

[Zer0 Kay]

quick thoughts on stuff already mentioned:
-BTW: drop the mdc ratio to 10sd (so you kill a tree not the forest), I use that to justify reducing the cost of the big stuff by 10, since its 10x less potent.
-magic attacks per melee options:
1-HU magic chart
2-use normal attacks (possibe justifaction, if necessary: trained in magic basic/advanced/martial arts HTH instead of normal)

If you reduce MD to a 10 sd ratio then anyone can damage md. If you can do 100sd in a single strike then you can do md. so if you can do 10 sd with your mod then you can damage md with a battle axe and strength bonus.

Best magic rules I ever saw in Palladium was from the first ed. Palladium Fantasy RPG. Try to find them and it gives you the ability to cast more spells depending on level and increase the the spell strength depending on level, not the same as x damage per level. I think spell strength was a negative to your opponents saving throws, it's been a while.

Can I use a life line, Regis? I can call a friend and get you those if you'd like if they aren't already somewhere on this site.

[MADMANMIKE]

..I addressed this in another thread a few months ago. Everyone misread that rule...

..At forth level, a Wizard gained the ability to cast 2 spells per melee. That's the most they could ever cast. Period. What everyone misread was the number of spells per day that could be cast. At first level it was a paltry 2, but increased each level to 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21 and at fifteenth level, 23.

..Now in Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Heroes Unlimited Revised, spells per day was 8 plus two at levels three, six, nine and twelve, and the spells per melee were two at level one and on additional at levels 3, 6, 9 and 12.

..That's the one everyone loved...

..Only 10 bucks for a piece of history....

-Mike >8]

[GaredBattlespike]

#1) Don't have P.P.E. Channelling rules due to lack of funds for Rifter Subscription..... Still, I have seen the article and would use it in a limited way (see # 2)
#2) Spell Casters may wear any armor; However, if they follow the new prohibition, then they may use Channelling!!!!!
#3) I prefer a 5 or 10:1 ratio of S.D.C. to M.D.C. for regular M.D.C. world effects, but when taking M.D.C. tech (like a Glitter Boy) to an S.D.C. world (like Nightbane) I prefer to multiply the listed M.D.C. of armor and damage by 5 otherwise you have an ultra-tech [i] energy weapon (Wilk's laser pistols) that does less damage than most S.D.C. tech revolvers !
#4) When I run I always give maximum P.P.E. and I.S.P. only to start.
#5) I allow use of the sorcerous proficiencies from Nightbane WB 4 TtGD
#6) I also require Linked Familiars to be made with the TtGD rules
#7) I restrict a group that is starting to all be from the same area (North America : East or West) unless a special campaign idea overrides this.

Side Idea: I am thinking of running a campaign with same-planet-travel along with transdimensional travel (world-to-world hopping) as a campaign of Lazlo-sponsered exploration: The Lazlo Explorer Corps - thnik Rifts standard meets Stargate SG-1 ! What do you think?

Thanks,

GaredBattlespike

[G]

If you reduce MD to a 10 sd ratio then anyone can damage md. If you can do 100sd in a single strike then you can do md. so if you can do 10 sd with your mod then you can damage md with a battle axe and strength bonus.

Personally I would rather toss the md system, its simplier to say that a tank has 1000sdc and can't be damaged by small arms..(which HU did) than try to confuse everyone with the problematic mdc system. With problems (that HU did not have) like:
-how much mdc to give to a tank with a few feet of armor vs. a samas with a few inches
or
-how much damage & range a handgun has compared to something the size of a cannon.

Unfortunately, it is too much trouble to rework the entire system and not worth the effort. Besides what would I end up with? everything converted to sdc or a lot of house rules that only I use...So I just use it as it is, or make it so your e-pistol does 10x the damage of a normal gun, but doesnt mow down an entire forest.

If you use the 10x conversion, you can simply say that sd does not damage mdc. It would make sense since a 100mdc pair of armor would have the same protection as the tank with in HU with 1000sdc. I don't do this myself because I prefer a smaller gap between sdc & mdc. It gives the game a grittier feel IMHO.. people are more willing to take off their armor.

I suppose I should add that to my list:
-due to the sdc/mdc ratio anyone taking off armor risks instant death from any weapon that does md.

[grandmaster z0b]

I also tone down MDC from 1:100 to 1:10, and give everything an Armour Rating [AR], if an SDC weapon rolls above AR then it damages the armor, if an MDC weapon rolls above AR then it penetrates and does damage to the person inside (energy weapons only do half damage as much of the heat is distributed through the armor, solid shells and vibro blades do full damage and explosions do full damage to the armor half to the person inside but can still be reduced by rolling with fall). I generally give half armor an AR from 12-16 and EBA an AR of 18-20, Power Armor 21-25 and Robots and Vehicles 24-30. If a shot is over the AR of Robots or Vehicles I generally just roll on the optional damage tables from the conversion book, rather than saying it still hits the pilot.

Another good house rule is double the damage of all Power Armors and most heavy weapons (except the Glitter Boys main gun) and triple the damage of all Robots.

I also have a completely different system for bursts but I'm still ironing that out so I will post it some other time. It's pretty much a big excel table that tells you how many shots from a burst hit depending on the difference between your "to hit" roll and the opponents defence roll.

I was quite worried about all the work but it was actually really easy to implement and has made very little difference to game play except to make it a lot faster and slightly more dangerous and exciting.

[Zer0 Kay]

F: We use the rules for Aimed shots, etc as presented in the Game Master Guide.

5+ to hit (up to 60ft) is the BASE to Strike.

With additional Mods (Added to the 5+)

3+ if over 60ft
4+ if small
4+ if moving
additional 3+ if going 40mph or faster.
3+ partial cover with upper body showing
4+ partial cover if only one side of body showing
5+ cover bonus when practically hidden (In this case must use a called shot)
5+ called shot for main locations (head, arm, leg, railgun, backpack,etc)
8+ called shot for small locations (neck, hands, feet, knees,etc)
11+ called shot for very small targets (fingers, eyes, sensors,etc)

If you miss a called shot to a target behind cover, it hits the cover.

Example: Small target moving 1000 feet away at 50mph.
5+ (base) 3+ (long range) 4+ (small) 4+ (moving) 3+ (moving over 40mph) Trying to target head 5+ (called shot)

Total needed to hit 24!!

Using Advanced Laser Sights 3+ to hit, with a well balanced weapon that gives it another 2+ (Wilks Rifle perhaps) Level aim bonus of 4+ (lev5 sounds good), plus 2+ for called(also lev5 mod)

Actual number needed to hit is a 13.

Person Dodging needs at least a 19 because of the -6 to dodge for it being a long ranged energy blast. IF they know they are being shot at.

Dodging Ranged Hits.

This is based on the -10 and -6 for long rule.

Ballistic -9 if less than 60 ft distance, -5 if further than 60 ft
Energy -10 if less than 60, -6 if further than 60
Railguns -12 if less than 60, -8 if further than 60

You keep all personal bonuses.
Can not dodge if do not know your being shot at!

OK I like the shooting mods however the dodging mods are all wrong. You should have a better chance to dodge the closer the shooter is because you can see where he is pointing the weapon. You do not dodge the round/beam etcetera. I'd especially like to see you dodge a laser...you can move at the speed of light? The further the person is away the less you can see the weapons muzzle. If the bonus to dodge at >60 ft is due to the attackers likelyhood of hitting you that should already be accounted for in the to strike roll. It shouldn't be a double wammy, unless your trying to extend combat? Also the numbers to dodge should be only from what actually affects the dodger. The long range should have already been taken into effect. This arguement from a different angle. Greater than 60 so if the shooter is at oh 100 yrds where you can clearly see him he hasn't attacked yet he faces you but your not sure if he even has a gun out, do you dodge? He pulls something shiney out, do you dodge? OK so lets say you decided to dodge you move to one side slip to another and roll. He waits through all this sillyness and then you stand up, BLAM. Think Remo Williams up close you can see where the gun is pointed and if you can read the opponent or his reflexes you move just before he pulls the trigger.

[PigLickJF]

So from a revisionist standpoint, feel free to highlight any editing or continuity errors to the post...we've got the space, might as well get them together.

Heh, man, people have been doing that on these boards for years, and there's still no shortage of new mateial, lol.

PigLick