Made characters for Rifts tonight, a game I haven't played in probably 20 years. (Ok, that's wrong, I played a pre-gen character at a bachelor party about 5 years ago.)
There were literally 30 books on the table to work from. Almost the entire Palladium collection.
Three of the people knew this material like the back of their hands. I was the most experienced out of the other three, and I was pretty much overwhelmed.
Here's the rage inducing part. Rifts is a terribly written game. From top to bottom, it's laid out like shit, its rules are contradictory and poorly explained and it's the most godawful amount of book keeping I've done in a while. And that's before you even sit down to play. It makes Fantasy Flight RPGs look downright streamlined.
And some of these guys have nothing but contempt for Fantasy Flight RPGs. They bitch a blue streak about it whenever we play. I'm not especially attached to the core rules system, but it happens to be the only system out there in which I enjoy 40k. But Rifts? Oh, Rifts is awesome. Despite being the epitome of a bad rules system, with just an asinine character creation system that doesn't help you....they love it. Because it's the game they played in high school. Kind of demonstrating to me that, it's not really about the rules. It's about how much time you've put in with the rules that dictates what you think is playable or not. It can be the worst rule set out there, but if it's a theme you like and you've played it enough it's what you're going to go back to (They're also big fans of Hackmaster and know it almost carnally.)
That's the sad part of getting older. You get so much more set in your ways, where you cling to the things you know and after a while start to actively reject trying to learn new stuff. I pretty much did it tonight when I had an half page of scribblings that I needed to add back to my character sheet, before picking gear or magic or any of that shit. My numbers were wrong anyways because I'd forgotten Rifts hands out stat bonuses left and right during CC and you derive your important stats as the last thing. I was cranky as shit because of it.
I gave my Rifts book to one of these guys when I was 15, after reading it cover to cover multiple times and going "Yeah, there's no way in hell I'm ever going to run this." Cool universe, atrociously old school rules. Little did I know that choice would come back to mock me, the original book included, tonight.
What I truly came to realize is, no one likes playing a game in which they don't understand the rules. Being surrounded by other people, who are absolutely maxing out their options (one person basically just made a game tonight of coming up with the most broken OP characters and baiting the GM into banning them) just makes it worse. It kind of robs you of the desire to even learn independently. I can totally understand why people react like that to Fantasy Flight games now, because it certainly sucks being in a rules and content heavy game without knowing what to do. It's just kind of the hypocrisy of taste that kills me.
Author
Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3783254 times)