Pros and Cons of a new scale for MDC/SDC as a House Rule

[TanisdeTagu]

I am getting ready to run a Rifts campaign, but I have never liked the 1:100 scale for MDC to SDC/HP. Please note I understand and approve of the reason for MDC just not the scale.

1)What would you see as the Pros of changing the scale from the 1 to 100 to a 1 to 10 scale. Meaning that dealing 1 point of MDC to a character will cause 10 HP/SDC.


2)Cons of such a change. Any adjustments would be needed to any OOC? or other aspect of the Rifts system?


Side Note 1) Its been a long time since playing the Roboteck/Rifts as I have been playing with groups that have preferred D&D/Hackmaster/Hero systems.
Side Note 2) I have been playing the FFG star wars game and they have personal and ship scale damage where 1 ship scale of damage does 10 wounds to a character. The system dose include that unless a personal weapon does more that 10 wounds of damage to a ship scale target there is no damage dealt.

[Grazzik]

First, folks should play whatever they find fun. That said, for the last decade or so, I've played exclusively a 1:10 game. There's few immediate adjustments, like a few odd instances where a weapon or spell may have both SDC and MDC damage levels. It is conceivable that the SDC setting could be higher than the converted MDC setting (e.g. Wilk's Laser Wand). However this is uncommon and I chalk it up to simply a slightly better damage setting. However, you may need to house rule some mechanics - see below.

House rule mods to consider:
* do SDC weapons damage MD armor? (my game, yes)
* does MD armor have AR now? (my game, yes)
* how is AR for layered protection handled, i.e. reinforced pilot compartments in robots?
* use the MDC stats or SDC stats for SN foes if both are listed? (my game, just use MDC stat unless on another world)
* determine if HP damage of silver to creatures like vampires needs adjusting (my game, leave as normal damage to HP)
* Mend the Broken - adjust PPE costs of SDC vs MDC
* keep GI Joe rule? (my game, no)
* when does damage apply to HP for former MDC creatures? (my game, assume 90/10 split SDC/HP)
* do prices for MD gear change? (my game, no as it is considered a superior item)

Pros:
* Makes AKs with cheap ammo and spray rules cool again and peasants with pointy sticks are threats
* less munchkinism
* hiding behind SDC vehicles while under fire can buy you an action or two, which can be a boon for magic users
* megaversal play is easier to handle if players rift to SDC worlds
* melee combat with SN foes viable for more PC types
* More MD gear (like low damage laser pistols or vibro-blades) might be permitted in towns or cities because of less collateral damage

Cons:
* more bookkeeping/number crunching, similar to an all SDC games
* less munchkinism
* with AR, if damage passes through, a 1d4x100 hit from a NG-P7 rifle could mean a bad day for the target, especially if a CRIT
* if SDC damages MDC, you can't hole up in your disabled robot for very long hoping the cavalry will arrive to save you
* combat needs to be structured so players don't get bored trying to fight through waves of SDC battle fodder that would otherwise have been cut down in one large swath with a MD attack

That's what I have without doing a deeper dive. Hope it helps.

[Blackwater Sniper]

I agree with your ratio, it's one I've used for years.

In a MD-world, everyone must have energy weapons to survive.

We had rules that small caliber handguns and rifles couldn't damage armor of certain a type, regardless of how much actual damage was dealt.

I like the visual of kinetic rounds instead of energy (LASERs, plasma, etc).

[TanisdeTagu]

House rule mods to consider:
* do SDC weapons damage MD armor? (my game, yes)
* does MD armor have AR now? (my game, yes)
* how is AR for layered protection handled, i.e. reinforced pilot compartments in robots?
* use the MDC stats or SDC stats for SN foes if both are listed? (my game, just use MDC stat unless on another world)
* determine if HP damage of silver to creatures like vampires needs adjusting (my game, leave as normal damage to HP)
* Mend the Broken - adjust PPE costs of SDC vs MDC
* keep GI Joe rule? (my game, no)
* when does damage apply to HP for former MDC creatures? (my game, assume 90/10 split SDC/HP)
* do prices for MD gear change? (my game, no as it is considered a superior item)

Pros:
* Makes AKs with cheap ammo and spray rules cool again and peasants with pointy sticks are threats
* less munchkinism
* hiding behind SDC vehicles while under fire can buy you an action or two, which can be a boon for magic users
* megaversal play is easier to handle if players rift to SDC worlds
* melee combat with SN foes viable for more PC types
* More MD gear (like low damage laser pistols or vibro-blades) might be permitted in towns or cities because of less collateral damage

Cons:
* more bookkeeping/number crunching, similar to an all SDC games
* less munchkinism
* with AR, if damage passes through, a 1d4x100 hit from a NG-P7 rifle could mean a bad day for the target, especially if a CRIT
* if SDC damages MDC, you can't hole up in your disabled robot for very long hoping the cavalry will arrive to save you
* combat needs to be structured so players don't get bored trying to fight through waves of SDC battle fodder that would otherwise have been cut down in one large swath with a MD attack

That's what I have without doing a deeper dive. Hope it helps.

Sounds like you take is a step farther than I would. i was only going to adjust the scale but not let most SDC weapons do damage. a heavy SDC Machinegun would be enough to do a point of MD per bullet but not something like a AK/M-16.

Did you adjust the hit point/SDC bonus of Juicers or other OCC?

[drewkitty ~..~]

Wearing the Grammar Nazi hat...

Spoiler:

Damage is MD or Structural Damage (SD).
Armor/Structural Capacity is MDC or SDC.
Its Robotech not Roboteck.

*takes hat off*

As to a change from 'MD/MDC 1 to 100 SDC/SD' scale to a 'MD/MDC 1 to 10 SDC/SD'....I see nothing seriously broken with it so long as everything is changed.
--note my comments are to be taken with that SD attacks will still not damage MDC structures.

However, saying that... to keep the magic equal power wise, the PPE cost for MDC/MD spells should be reduced by 50-90%. This is because the change would reduce the MDC/MD by 90% effectiveness, relitive to SDC/SD stats.

[TanisdeTagu]

Response to Grammar Nazi

Spoiler:

Its Robotech not Roboteck.

I am dyslexic, be glad that I only misspelled one word by one letter that the standard spellchecker could not find in it's database.

However, saying that... to keep the magic equal power wise, the PPE cost for MDC/MD spells should be reduced by 50-90%. This is because the change would reduce the MDC/MD by 90% effectiveness, relitive to SDC/SD stats.

Then ISP for psionics that deal damage or provide MD protection/objects, should be reduced by a like amount.

[hup7]

Wearing the Grammar Nazi hat...

... to keep the magic equal power wise, the PPE cost for MDC/MD spells should be reduced by 50-90%. This is because the change would reduce the MDC/MD by 90% effectiveness, relitive to SDC/SD stats.

insert eye-roll emoji.

IMHO, look at why you want to convert, before choosing to do so.

I have run campaigns with 1:100, 1:25 and 1:10. Personally, what I learned is just don't. The time you spend doing conversions, and you will need to do a lot of conversions and justifications, can be better spent. As drewkitty pointed out it will have run-on effects on just about everything including magic, psionics and supernatural strength.

Anyhow have fun, just my opinion.

[Grazzik]

Sounds like you take is a step farther than I would. i was only going to adjust the scale but not let most SDC weapons do damage. a heavy SDC Machinegun would be enough to do a point of MD per bullet but not something like a AK/M-16.

Did you adjust the hit point/SDC bonus of Juicers or other OCC?

Nope. Why rewrite the entire game? If damage says MD/MDC then divide by 10. Keep it as simple as possible. Otherwise, for the most part it stays the same. This goes for magic, psionics etc. Works great in my games, never had any problems and everyone is happy. Sure a juicer now has the same toughness as a second hand suit of Plastic Man armor, but so what? They be tough dudes and dudettes! And can still be taken down with a couple laser shots. A dragon or giant robot is still one tough son of a gun and likely not going to be seriously hurt with an M16 even with a whole truck of ammo. MD railguns can still shoot through walls and do serious damage to SDC structures at 1d4x100 instead of 1d4x1000. Compare that to a long burst (30%) from a M60 with a 100 round belt - damage would be 5d6x5 (RMB pg 244, pg 34). The MD railgun is still almost three times as deadly on average.

hup7 is right - know why you convert... and make sure everyone agrees. The initial decision to opt for the 1:10 MDC damaged by SDC was to prevent PCs tromping through the wilderness in their body armor unafraid of normal threats like bears, mountain lions and peasants with pointy sticks. They would walk into a wilderness village that had no MD capabilities and do whatever they wanted - good or evil - with little physical consequences. Bullets just bouncing off their armor from the aggrieved locals or villains. So after much deliberation, it was agreed to let MDC be damaged by SDC. When you consider in a 1:10 game a long burst (50%) from a M16 does a little more damage than a single shot from a NG33, it just made sense. The AR mechanism was house ruled in. We also house ruled that over AR, 50% of damage passes through and 50% absorbed by armor, otherwise the armor takes it all - this was more to drive the type of gameplay desired. The abundance of SDC weapons also means modern energy weapons and e-clips are less widespread, typically limited to the major factions, justifying their high price.

As time passed, more gameplay benefits were noticed. PCs had to do more to earn money to repair or replace equipment more frequently (always a good motivator). The farmer with a shotgun pointed at you was always a threat. Injuries and blood loss became a serious game mechanism. PCs and NPCs alike could pass out from wounds from pass through damage rather than fighting via attrition only to be misted by a single shot from a particle beam rifle once all the armor was gone. Vibro-knife damage on SDC made way more sense. PCs favoring finesse with regular knives and arrows could find chinks in MDC armor to aim for thanks to AR. Since the games had become a little more dangerous for PCs, lucky rolls led to incredible stories of daring do, giving players bigger bragging rights about their PCs.

Some argued that magic and psionics gets nerfed, but the counter argument was by what measure? The fact that there is magic and psionics at all makes the setting special compared to a non-magic game like RECON, Dead Reign, or non-PB games. The 1:10 scale gives MD powers a boost compared to games like PFRPG or BTS. So, in the end it was a non-issue.

To each, their own. However, my experience is that a 1:10 game plays a lot less like big egos swinging big guns, but still preserves the cinematic gonzo flavor of Rifts. Other folks may want something different from their games and that's cool

[Killer Cyborg]

Wearing the Grammar Nazi hat...

Spoiler:

Damage is MD or Structural Damage (SD).
Armor/Structural Capacity is MDC or SDC.
Its Robotech not Roboteck.

*takes hat off*

I entirely understand the compulsion to correct things perceived as incorrect, and I appreciate your putting that kind of compulsive comment in spoilers so people uninterested in that sort of thing can just pass on by.

I'll try to do the same sort of thing in the future, whether or not I've done it in the past.

Well done!

[Quentin Harlech]

Wearing the Grammar Nazi hat...

Spoiler:

Damage is MD or Structural Damage (SD).
Armor/Structural Capacity is MDC or SDC.
Its Robotech not Roboteck.

Actually, the rules (at least in most of the Rifts books) uses S.D.C. for both armor and attacks. It's only mega-damage attacks that drop the "capacity" part when talking about weapons/damage. Since I currently have the book open, Merc-Ops p. 120 under GAW Old Style Firearms is but one example of many, and a particularly good one because they also talk about mega-damage weapons in the same section, thus showing the disparity in terminology between the two.

That said, most of what was said in the second post goes in our games, too. The only major difference is that M.D.C. force fields (which is all force fieldes we've ever encountered) require M.D. weapons to disable as they completely ignore S.D.C. weapons. Physical M.D.C. armor and structures are resistant to them (represented by the x10 multiplier), but not immune.

[Killer Cyborg]

The initial decision to opt for the 1:10 MDC damaged by SDC was to prevent PCs tromping through the wilderness in their body armor unafraid of normal threats like bears, mountain lions and peasants with pointy sticks.

Why is it important for your NPCs to be afraid of bears, mountain lions, and peasants with pointy sticks?

They would walk into a wilderness village that had no MD capabilities and do whatever they wanted - good or evil - with little physical consequences. Bullets just bouncing off their armor from the aggrieved locals or villains.

That's the short term.
What's the long term, though?
And what's the context?

Say the PCs walk into the village, and they just murder everybody there.
WHY? Are they all Diabolic alignment?
Are they all just murdering sociopaths, hell-bent on pointless slaughter?
If so, it seems like maybe some more planning should have been put into the party creation part of the adventure/campaign.

Even still, it sounds like you're just describing the first part of an adventure to me.
The PCs massacre an innocent, helpless village. Everybody is dead.
But why were they alive in the first place? Why weren't they killed BEFORE the PCs showed up?
The RMB establishes that most wilderness communities that survive have some kind of Protector, be it MDC armed and armored individuals, or demons, or supernatural critters, or whatever.
So what happens to the PCs when the Protector comes back home?

Or maybe the community is simply under the protection of a specific nation, kingdom, business, or other power.
Maybe they're miners for Wilk's.
Maybe they're technically within the CS borders, and are CS citizens.
Maybe they're protected by some other kingdom.
Maybe they're protected by the Baalrog they sacrifice people to often enough that it'll be mad somebody killed its food source.

Or maybe they're just a lonely village with no support, BUT they're the hometown of a powerful cyberknight, or have other powerful interested parties that will seek revenge.

The movie "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid" starts off with the gang robbing a train that is absolutely defenseless against them.
But that easy victory sets off a chain of events that ends... well, you know how it ends I assume.

OR maybe the party doesn't want to massacre everybody.
So what DO they want?
Every action has consequences.
Do they want to take over, rule the town?
Cool.
Do they ever take off their armor?
Do they ever eat or drink?
If so, they can be assassinated.

Even a person in MDC EBA with energy weapons isn't invulnerable.
One Called Shot to the visor with a mudball, and they'll be effectively blinded until they can wipe it clear. They can be dogpiled and grappled by a mob, and either have their armor forcibly taken from them, or simply thrown in a pit and buried alive once they're disarmed and tied up.
There's a bunch of ways to kill MDC-armored people.
Even most beings who are naturally MDC can usually be drowned suffocated, or killed, if they're overwhelmed by numbers, or incapacitate by bolas/lassos/whatever, or if they ever sleep.

Actions have consequences, and if there's a wilderness town that's alive without MDC gear, it's probably alive for a REASON or a set of reasons.

As you said, everybody should play how they like, do whatever's fun for them and their group.
I'm just explaining why Mega-Damage has never been a big problem for me when I run; the PCs still never just run around doing whatever they want with utter impunity.

As time passed, more gameplay benefits were noticed. PCs had to do more to earn money to repair or replace equipment more frequently (always a good motivator). The farmer with a shotgun pointed at you was always a threat.

Well, that's always a potential threat. There are a variety of shotgun shells that do Mega-Damage.


I always stuck with the official rules for MDC repairs; they're expensive, and also not commonly available outside of large cities and such.
Death by attrition was a pretty common threat, consequently.

Injuries and blood loss became a serious game mechanism.

This one makes complete sense to me.
One of the problems with Mega-Damage as-written is that there usually isn't much left to heal once it breaches your armor.

Some argued that magic and psionics gets nerfed:

For me, it's more about Juicers and other high-SDC stuff.
A Juicer with 400 SDC goes from being able to soak an extra 4 MD to being able to soak an extra 40 MD!
Keep in mind that basic Juicer Plate has 45 MDC; that basically doubles his Mega-Damage.
And stuff like the Chipwell Warmonger power armor, which (iirc) has something like 4,000 SDC turns from an all-hat-and-no-cattle sort of posturing device with 40 MDC into a 400 MDC monstrosity.
And stuff like a LAW Rockets. There are three kinds: 1d4x10 SDC, 1d6x10 SDC, and 1d6 MD, which cost CR2000-2500 for the SDC, or CR 15,000 for the MD version. Change the ratio, and there are now two version of the same weapon that doe the exact same damage, BUT one of them costs 6x more for no real reason. Which is easily addressed by bumping up the damage of the MD version, or by ignoring it, but all those little changes, fixes, and ignorings adds up to be more work than the reward for me personally.

Every time you change a rule, there are rippling effects, and consequences, so I try to change the rules as little as possible.
Granted, it's impossible to never change ANY rules at all, so it's always just a matter of degree when it comes to how much work you want to do smoothing things out.

[Grazzik]

Always a pleasure to respond to a challenge from you KC. You bring up a lot of good points that demand a more detailed response. Respect!

The initial decision to opt for the 1:10 MDC damaged by SDC was to prevent PCs tromping through the wilderness in their body armor unafraid of normal threats like bears, mountain lions and peasants with pointy sticks.

Why is it important for your NPCs to be afraid of bears, mountain lions, and peasants with pointy sticks?

If the Wilderness is not scary, then the game loses a key storytelling element that is very relatable to players. Since time immemorial, the Wilderness has scared people because it hides things (real and imagined) that are dangerous - lions, tigers, and bears, oh my. It's a goal in my games to make a hero of anyone who has the gumption to step out into that unknown and make a go of it at the risk of their life. It's important, as it creates a world feel where there doesn't have to be a demon or fury beetle behind every tree to be scary, but there is still a reason to not leave food out overnight in the woods as bears are scary as all heck when you run into one at night. Personal experience talking here. After 300 years, Mother Nature has probably had plenty of time to let the animals become resurgent in their natural habitats where humans are an invasive species. Take that away from players and the Wilderness as an NPC in and of itself loses its mystery and potency. It's no different than the effect well maintained street lights have on the urban landscape. If there is nothing to fear, it becomes tame and boring.

WRT the peasants, if their pointy sticks weren't a danger, then how could they survive in a world awash in MD? A dozen Kelpie over their lifespan of 300 years could devastate hundreds of villages. Yet, we are to believe there are MDC critters almost everywhere. With the power creep from book to book, there would be no villages. Protectors are resource intensive investments and wilderness villages have very little to spare. A single protector that a village could support - even of Cyberknight pedigree - could not singlehandedly fight off a pack of Melech, a raiding band of mounted Simvan, or even a well trained squad of CS Deadboys. Even a handful of low level protectors could only have so much effect before being overwhelmed. So, in order to have wilderness villages of some form or other, scaling back MDC to 1:10 and getting rid of the "no SDC dmg to MDC" rule gives these peasants a fighting chance if their primary strategy of hiding until trouble passes fails.

I'd also suggest that after 300 years in a 1:100 MD world, anyone and anything (and that probably means most of the Earth native animals) not in MD armor of some kind would be severely diminished at the hands of MD critters from the Rifts. As an analogy, look at what happened in North America from 1723 to 2023 at the hands of humans with what in game terms is SDC technology. The estimated population of the American colonies in ~1720 was about 460k people. They went on over the next 300 years to radically change the continent devastating or domesticating all that was before them, clearing the way for more and more growth and immigration. Now, if the Rifts were highly active for the first 30-40 years, deposits of 10-20K MD creatures a year could be a feasible guesstimate. If the impact of that first generation of MD creatures were to extend over 300 years with a power scale of 100x, prospering and higher lifeforms possibly purposefully bring others to Earth, the idea of any Earth native higher lifeform in the Wilderness would be slim at best.

So yeah, in order to not have to reinvent the Earth's entire biome, I go with 1:10 and make pointy sticks a threat.

They would walk into a wilderness village that had no MD capabilities and do whatever they wanted - good or evil - with little physical consequences. Bullets just bouncing off their armor from the aggrieved locals or villains.

That's the short term.
What's the long term, though?
And what's the context?

Say the PCs walk into the village, and they just murder everybody there.
WHY? Are they all Diabolic alignment?
Are they all just murdering sociopaths, hell-bent on pointless slaughter?
If so, it seems like maybe some more planning should have been put into the party creation part of the adventure/campaign.

Maybe they are murder hobos, but it would be a boring game. Maybe they are wandering heroes, again if villains are no match, it's a boring game. The thread is taking about the merits of the scale of MDC/SDC. Once combat has begun, the motivation doesn't matter. It's the gameplay that is paramount and the 100x differential between MDC and SDC opponents is not fun. As such, by taking away that giant 100x gap, it creates tension for MD empowered players any time they step up to fight and encourages them to find alternative means to conflict resolution. Murder hobos become kidnappers, righteous gunslingers become the scheming A-Team.

Even still, it sounds like you're just describing the first part of an adventure to me.
The PCs massacre an innocent, helpless village. Everybody is dead.
But why were they alive in the first place? Why weren't they killed BEFORE the PCs showed up?
The RMB establishes that most wilderness communities that survive have some kind of Protector, be it MDC armed and armored individuals, or demons, or supernatural critters, or whatever.
So what happens to the PCs when the Protector comes back home?

As mentioned, whether with a protector or through their own gumption, villages would survive. The 1:10 scale just makes it more believable.

Or maybe the community is simply under the protection of a specific nation, kingdom, business, or other power.
Maybe they're miners for Wilk's.
Maybe they're technically within the CS borders, and are CS citizens.
Maybe they're protected by some other kingdom.
Maybe they're protected by the Baalrog they sacrifice people to often enough that it'll be mad somebody killed its food source.

Or maybe they're just a lonely village with no support, BUT they're the hometown of a powerful cyberknight, or have other powerful interested parties that will seek revenge.

All good hooks. Great storylines could come of all of them. Still, doesn't diminish the idea that a 1:10 scale is any less playable than a 1:100 scale.

The movie "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid" starts off with the gang robbing a train that is absolutely defenseless against them.
But that easy victory sets off a chain of events that ends... well, you know how it ends I assume.

OR maybe the party doesn't want to massacre everybody.
So what DO they want?
Every action has consequences.
Do they want to take over, rule the town?
Cool.
Do they ever take off their armor?
Do they ever eat or drink?
If so, they can be assassinated.

Now we are getting to the "well, everyone's gotta shower sometime" argument...
All that does is a) reverse the power dynamic if the SDC opponents can introduce a new MD element or b) level the playing field.

In a), the PCs now are on the receiving end of the 100x differential. The game has gone from a no-lose boring story to a no-win boring story. However, this begs the question why the MD element wasn't brought in earlier. It very well may be that the Protector or an ally of some kind came back to town. Sure, it could lead to a foot race for PCs to get their armor on again or grab their guns, but does the story have to see-saw like that just to get to a few moments of excitement?

In b), all this does is to finally give the SDC opponents a fighting chance against the PCs. The 1:10 scale I use gives the SDC opponents a fighting chance from the get go.

Even a person in MDC EBA with energy weapons isn't invulnerable.
One Called Shot to the visor with a mudball, and they'll be effectively blinded until they can wipe it clear. They can be dogpiled and grappled by a mob, and either have their armor forcibly taken from them, or simply thrown in a pit and buried alive once they're disarmed and tied up.
There's a bunch of ways to kill MDC-armored people.
Even most beings who are naturally MDC can usually be drowned suffocated, or killed, if they're overwhelmed by numbers, or incapacitate by bolas/lassos/whatever, or if they ever sleep.

Yep, the swarm tactic, an encumbrance, or trap can certainly be used to neutralize any MD scale advantage. No argument there.

Actions have consequences, and if there's a wilderness town that's alive without MDC gear, it's probably alive for a REASON or a set of reasons.

Yeah... in a 1:10 game, the reason is that they have pointy sticks that have very real consequences for even people in MDC armor...

As you said, everybody should play how they like, do whatever's fun for them and their group.
I'm just explaining why Mega-Damage has never been a big problem for me when I run; the PCs still never just run around doing whatever they want with utter impunity.

Totally get it. The scenario I used was to point out the advantages I saw in a 1:10 scale with respect to combat. It doesn't come close to describing the impact roleplaying, problem solving, hijinks and story have on an adventure. To each, their own.

As time passed, more gameplay benefits were noticed. PCs had to do more to earn money to repair or replace equipment more frequently (always a good motivator). The farmer with a shotgun pointed at you was always a threat.

Well, that's always a potential threat. There are a variety of shotgun shells that do Mega-Damage.


I always stuck with the official rules for MDC repairs; they're expensive, and also not commonly available outside of large cities and such.
Death by attrition was a pretty common threat, consequently.

Granted there are MD shotgun shells, ramjet rounds, etc. that can turn any farmhand or city rat into a threat. But considering price of a shell to a farmer's income in Rifts, I seriously doubt the farmer has enough to hold off a party of PCs.

Attrition was always there, no doubt. The 1:10 scale simply accelerates that, as you don't have to get into a MD gunfight to damage your armor. A tango with a cougar or an old fashioned knife fight can expand the sources of damage... again motivating PCs to avoid fighting if they can.

Some argued that magic and psionics gets nerfed:

For me, it's more about Juicers and other high-SDC stuff.
A Juicer with 400 SDC goes from being able to soak an extra 4 MD to being able to soak an extra 40 MD!
Keep in mind that basic Juicer Plate has 45 MDC; that basically doubles his Mega-Damage.

They always have to bring up the gosh darned juicers ... well, allow me to address that one.

Assuming a plain old knife does on average 3 SDC, a juicer with 390 SDC (to keep the math simple) can take 130 stabs. A vibroknife at 1:100 does 300 SDC on average, so 2 stabs. A vibroknife at 1:10 does 30 SDC on average, so 13 stabs. Even 2 stabs from a 1:100 vibroknife is hugely impressive to the average normal human, 13 stabs at 1:10 might be seen as superhuman, which juicers are supposed to be. Juicers are solid muscle, so they have that going for them. But you suggest, and quite rightly, that flesh and bone is not the same as some sort of ceramic plate armor. Now, at this juncture, I'd like to posit that the SDC unit we are using is a measure of the destructive force an object can take before it becomes ineffective. Damage applied to a ceramic armor plate, or even a plain old steel plate, leads to anything from deformation to catastrophic failure. The armor doesn't crumble to dust at 45 MDC damage, it simply stops offering protection.

However, force is distributed differently in organic matter leading to side effects like wound channels, knockdown, hydrostatic shock(?), etc. that goes beyond just making a hole. Juicers are designed chemically and, to a certain degree, cybernetically to overcome or simply ignore many of these effects of damage. As such, I don't see the S in SDC as really meaning "structural", because if that were literally the case, Juicers would only have as much SDC as a highly efficient bodybuilder since they are made of mostly the same stuff. Instead, I see SDC as a measure for how much a Juicer or any other object can take before it fails to operate... just like MDC. So, back to the pincushion juicer... can you stab a normal human 129 times with a normal knife, sure. They'd still be dead. The juicer would have the same wounds, just able to maintain their bodily functions enough to survive and get healed. However, keep in mind that after 129 wounds, the blood loss rules really add up! So, in effect, a juicer would be long dead before getting to stab 129. When it comes to a vibroknife using 1:10, the normal human is just as dead. However, the juicer can still take an impressive number of stabs, but the effect of blood loss is lessened as there are fewer wounds. At 1:100, there even fewer wounds, but the juicer is just as dead as a normal human after two stabs anyway. So, I'd argue that the juicer isn't munchkined using 1:10, it simply showcases their superhuman abilities in line with sci-fi fiction.

And stuff like the Chipwell Warmonger power armor, which (iirc) has something like 4,000 SDC turns from an all-hat-and-no-cattle sort of posturing device with 40 MDC into a 400 MDC monstrosity.

Simple, just knock off a zero in the name of reasonableness. Oh My Gosh!!!! ... that was sooo hard to do. [insert sarcastic emoji here... too tired to look for it] Seriously, how hard is that to do?

And stuff like a LAW Rockets. There are three kinds: 1d4x10 SDC, 1d6x10 SDC, and 1d6 MD, which cost CR2000-2500 for the SDC, or CR 15,000 for the MD version. Change the ratio, and there are now two version of the same weapon that doe the exact same damage, BUT one of them costs 6x more for no real reason. Which is easily addressed by bumping up the damage of the MD version, or by ignoring it, but all those little changes, fixes, and ignorings adds up to be more work than the reward for me personally.

So, just add a zero if it makes sense. OMG it is not hard to do. There is practically no work and all reward with a simple change like that. Players shouldn't be looking up stats anyway as they should be busy interacting with NPCs trying to sell them dud rockets for top credit.

Every time you change a rule, there are rippling effects, and consequences, so I try to change the rules as little as possible.
Granted, it's impossible to never change ANY rules at all, so it's always just a matter of degree when it comes to how much work you want to do smoothing things out.

Sure there may be a few ripples that I log in my house rules, but unless one is a rules lawyer slavishly bound to the details in the books, it's nothing a little adding a zero here or taking one from there won't fix. Hardly as difficult as doing taxes. Anyway, my gameplay focuses on the story and the closer it can get to being relatable for the players, the more I'm willing as GM to smooth some of rough edges for them.

[Killer Cyborg]

Always a pleasure to respond to a challenge from you KC. You bring up a lot of good points that demand a more detailed response. Respect!

Thanks!

The initial decision to opt for the 1:10 MDC damaged by SDC was to prevent PCs tromping through the wilderness in their body armor unafraid of normal threats like bears, mountain lions and peasants with pointy sticks.

Why is it important for your NPCs to be afraid of bears, mountain lions, and peasants with pointy sticks?

If the Wilderness is not scary, then the game loses a key storytelling element that is very relatable to players. Since time immemorial, the Wilderness has scared people because it hides things (real and imagined) that are dangerous - lions, tigers, and bears, oh my. It's a goal in my games to make a hero of anyone who has the gumption to step out into that unknown and make a go of it at the risk of their life. It's important, as it creates a world feel where there doesn't have to be a demon or fury beetle behind every tree to be scary, but there is still a reason to not leave food out overnight in the woods as bears are scary as all heck when you run into one at night. Personal experience talking here. After 300 years, Mother Nature has probably had plenty of time to let the animals become resurgent in their natural habitats where humans are an invasive species. Take that away from players and the Wilderness as an NPC in and of itself loses its mystery and potency. It's no different than the effect well maintained street lights have on the urban landscape. If there is nothing to fear, it becomes tame and boring.

Agreed, BUT it's not like there aren't any mega-damage threats lurking in the wilderness.
Personally, I like playing in a world where your character can be walking through the woods, then get pounced on by a huge beast, knocked to the ground, and... Oh, thank God! It's just a grizzly. I'll play dead until he gets bored and leaves.


Meanwhile, there's any number of other nasties out there which could still pose a serious threat.
Wait! What's that ahead?
Oh, it's just a bunny rabbit.
Or IS It just a bunny rabbit?
Could be a dragon. Could be a mutant animal about to use psychic powers to immobilize you. Could be a vorpal bunny from another dimension, ready to bite your head off.
Maybe you should throw your holy handgrenade... but should you waste it?


One of the things I dislike that Rifts does is to try to make a radical new world... where everything is still basically the same.
The RMB had dinosaurs statted where a T-Rex had 1d4x10 MDC, which is actually pretty generous considering I rather doubt 7.62mm rifle rounds would just bounce off them. I'd have made them high SDC critters.
But dinosaurs are a BIG threat to normal humans who don't have armor and weapons that makes them the equivalent of a main battle tank, so people felt like that was Too Weak, and Palladium upped the threat proportionately, making T-Rexes the same rough threat level to a MDC-geared human as a real T-Rex would be to a SDC PC.
And of course in Rifts Canada, the writer got annoyed that MDC characters weren't threatened by bears, so decided that some Grizzlies are just inexplicably Mega-Damage.

But the net effect--for me--comes off like playing one of those video games where the enemies scale with you, so at level 1 you're fighting an Orc Robber who's a tough encounter, and at level 100 you're fighting an Orc Robber who is a tough encounter.
You know how superhero stories like to have a bullied main character, who confronts the bullies once he has powers, but then goes on to fight real supervillains?
I like those better than where the main character gets super powers, and the bullies get super powers, so they just keep fighting the same enemies on a different power level.

But Also...
Rifts wasn't originally designed where characters would wear their bulky MDC body armor all the time.
SB1 8
Yes, characters without MDC armor are vulnerable to instant destruction if hit by a mega-damage weapon. However, one can not wear body armor or sit inside a robot for weeks. It is simply too uncomfortable and dirty to do so. Characters must come out of their armor for some periods of time on a regular basis. Also, some armor, power armor, and robots are not suitable for stealth and must be shed if one wants to prowl around unnoticed.

Followed by (among other things) a note about how a good GM doesn't just up and slaughter the PCs without giving them a chance.

I get the impression that the early setting of Rifts was intended to kind of be like Robotech, where you have characters wandering around unarmored a lot of the time, but then they spot smoke on the horizon or other signs of trouble, the music cues, and they gear up in MDC armor for battle.
Not that many people play that way, but it's certainly possible.

WRT the peasants, if their pointy sticks weren't a danger, then how could they survive in a world awash in MD? A dozen Kelpie over their lifespan of 300 years could devastate hundreds of villages.

You're technically correct, BUT consider this: pointy sticks are a danger to certain supernatural critters, even if they're not much danger to a Mega-Damage bandit. One of the things they tragically got away from after the RMB (specifically, when the Conversion Book hit) is the idea that many/most supernatural have some kind of weakness: wood, energy, sunlight, mirrors, fire, cold, etc.
My model for the standard Rifts village tends to be M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. Twists aside, the movie opens up set in a rather primitive technology wilderness community surrounded by strange monsters in the woods, BUT the locals have learned enough about the creatures to keep them from being a threat to the village itself. The creatures have a fear of certain colors, and the village keeps a perimeter marked by this color to keep the creatures out, that kind of thing.
Humans have often survived in areas with real-world predators they stand little chance against, simply by learning how to minimize the dangers of these animals (as well as because animals don't tend to kill many more humans than they can eat, and also I suspect because humans don't taste very good).

Take Kelpies, for example.
COULD a Kelpie wipe out an entire village?
Sure.
But they pretty much only have two patterns of attack: lurking in water, ready to jump out and drag somebody under,
and turning into a horse, luring somebody to ride it, then running off into the water to drown them.
If there's a village near a Kelpie lair, I expect everybody would learn to be super-careful when they were near water--especially when near the Kelpie lair--and to not ride strange horses.
Also, keep in mind that Kelpies have an Intelligence of 2-12, for an average of 7. That's a real-world IQ of 70, so most of them wouldn't exactly be all that tough to out-smart in various ways.
As long as the village breeds faster than the kelpie (and other dangers) kill them, the village can survive 300 years.

Meanwhile, the existence of the Kelpie would to an extent protect the village. Kelpies hate all life forms, especially humans and elves.
So if a group of nomadic bandits are traveling in the direction of the village, some of them might fall prey to the Kelpie along the way.
They might even decide, after one or two of them are killed, to head off in a different direction.

Yet, we are to believe there are MDC critters almost everywhere.

Nah, not exactly.
RUE P. 19, from Erin Tarn:
I have had city folk question how it can be with all the fabled towns, tribes, clans, D-Bees and monsters they hear about, that one doesn't stumble over one hiding behind every tree. It doesn't work that way. The wildlife hides from intruders like us, the innocent animals run to avoid becoming hunted, and the predators watch from a nervous distance at least until they are ready to strike. People hear there may be hundred, thousands, even tens of thousands of a particular species, but they forget that number is spread across vast expanses of land, or that perhaps as few as one or two or a dozen may live in any given area. A predator like a mountain lion, for example, will consider one particular area that might cover 100 or 200 square miles as its domain or hunting ground and only it and its made prowl it (along with other species of predators). That's a large area that city dwellers can't adequately picture, and such a range is tiny compared to the sweeping wilderness that covers our land.

With the power creep from book to book, there would be no villages.

Keep in mind, we're almost never told any numbers when it comes to monster populations. Big scary monsters might be common in the books, but that doesn't mean they're all that common in the setting.

Protectors are resource intensive investments and wilderness villages have very little to spare. A single protector that a village could support - even of Cyberknight pedigree - could not singlehandedly fight off a pack of Melech, a raiding band of mounted Simvan, or even a well trained squad of CS Deadboys. Even a handful of low level protectors could only have so much effect before being overwhelmed. So, in order to have wilderness villages of some form or other, scaling back MDC to 1:10 and getting rid of the "no SDC dmg to MDC" rule gives these peasants a fighting chance if their primary strategy of hiding until trouble passes fails.

That depends on a lot of factors, actually.
Rifts 137
The majority of these feudal kingdoms are ruled by, or appoint, or employ, a protector or group of protectors, much like the knights of old. The protector(s) is always a powerful warrior, frequently armed with power armor or giant robot vehicle. Men of arms seem to be the norm among these champions, but they can be mages, psychics, mutants, and even monsters.

We have zero official information on how much maintenance is required for mega-damage gear when not being used, when being lightly used, or for that matter when being used regularly but not receiving any damage. People tend to to two different ways, either assuming that high-tech super-futuristic Rifts gear requires the same levels of maintenance modern stuff does, or (like me) they assume that common wear & tear is SDC damage, and MDC gear is basically unaffected.
E-Clips hold a charge indefinitely as far as I can tell, and MDC alloys likely don't rust (as they're non ferrous) or corrode (they're often ceramic and plastic).
If the threats requiring the champion aren't very common, they might never need to use more than one suit of armor, one rifle, and one e-clip.
If threats are a daily or weekly occurrence, on the other hand, yeah, things could get expensive. Then it comes up to how good the village is at trade, how much loot is gained from each victory, and other factors.
But if you have a community with a decent way to generate electricty, e-clips could be recharged for free.
A decent forge or even blacksmith could handle rail gun rounds.

Mages, psychics, mutants, and monsters, on the other hand, don't necessarily ever need any of that stuff.

A band of Simvan are intelligent creatures who can be negotiated with. What do they want? Probably not to just slaughter and eat an entire village. Raiders are basically parasites; they come to rob producers of their produce. If they kill the farmers/ranchers/etc., then the raiders themselves might well starve. At the least, they're less likely to live comfortably.
Also keep in mind that the "protector" of an area might well be a group.
Simvan raiders coming to a village? That just sounds like Rifts Magnificent Seven time to me.


The Coalition?
Well, again, what do they want? If it's a human community, they're likely to protect it more than anything else.
If it's a magic/psychic community, they have mega-damage available from their spells/powers.
If it's a community of Elves or something, that's a problem. Might be time for everybody to flee farther from CS territory, if their champion(s) isn't up for the job.
Ya gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

I'd also suggest that after 300 years in a 1:100 MD world, anyone and anything (and that probably means most of the Earth native animals) not in MD armor of some kind would be severely diminished at the hands of MD critters from the Rifts. As an analogy, look at what happened in North America from 1723 to 2023 at the hands of humans with what in game terms is SDC technology. The estimated population of the American colonies in ~1720 was about 460k people. They went on over the next 300 years to radically change the continent devastating or domesticating all that was before them, clearing the way for more and more growth and immigration. Now, if the Rifts were highly active for the first 30-40 years, deposits of 10-20K MD creatures a year could be a feasible guesstimate. If the impact of that first generation of MD creatures were to extend over 300 years with a power scale of 100x, prospering and higher lifeforms possibly purposefully bring others to Earth, the idea of any Earth native higher lifeform in the Wilderness would be slim at best.

Nah.
We have no numbers on the numbers of MD stuff that came through Rifts.
Ecologies have natural balancing factors:
-predators fight off other predators. It's not like every monster came through a Rift and started picking just on native SDC life; that pack of Simvan might get wiped out by a Neuron Beast. That Neuron Beast might get killed by a dragon. That dragon might get wiped out by Xiticix.
-Predators that kill faster than their prey can breed tend to starve to death. If a pack of supernatural beasties kill everything in their territory, they'll have to find new territory, and their new territory is probably claimed by another supernatural beastie or is NOT claimed because there's some other threat that keeps them out. Or there are natural barriers that keep the predator population from roaming as freely as they like.
Cannibalism can sometimes happen, with the predators turning on each other.
If the species lives long enough to bread future generations, the ones with less appetite and which require less food are going to the the ones that have the best survival chances, and that lowered appetite will let future prey populations grow.
-Prey animals often survive not by being able to fight predators effectively, but simply by being able to run, hide, and breed. A village of nothing but SDC humans could live safe from MD threats indefinitely, if no threats can find them, or if the threats kill them slower than they breed, or if the community has a nomadic route where they can move from place to place safely.

Nature tends to find a balance.

They would walk into a wilderness village that had no MD capabilities and do whatever they wanted - good or evil - with little physical consequences. Bullets just bouncing off their armor from the aggrieved locals or villains.

That's the short term.
What's the long term, though?
And what's the context?

Say the PCs walk into the village, and they just murder everybody there.
WHY? Are they all Diabolic alignment?
Are they all just murdering sociopaths, hell-bent on pointless slaughter?
If so, it seems like maybe some more planning should have been put into the party creation part of the adventure/campaign.

Maybe they are murder hobos, but it would be a boring game. Maybe they are wandering heroes, again if villains are no match, it's a boring game. The thread is taking about the merits of the scale of MDC/SDC. Once combat has begun, the motivation doesn't matter. It's the gameplay that is paramount and the 100x differential between MDC and SDC opponents is not fun. As such, by taking away that giant 100x gap, it creates tension for MD empowered players any time they step up to fight and encourages them to find alternative means to conflict resolution. Murder hobos become kidnappers, righteous gunslingers become the scheming A-Team.

As you say, massacres are boring. So why would you make THAT the adventure in the first place?
Why run a game that's just a pitched battle between Mega-Damage PCs and an unprepared SDC community, with no survivors?
Seems like the GM is the problem there.


As for the 1:100 ratio not being fun, I disagree entirely.
I love the challenge of having, for example, a pack of SDC Vagabonds who are setting out to ambush and kill 1d4 CS soldiers.
I like having the physical odds against my character, and using my imagination and intellect to even the odds.
What fun would The Terminator have been if Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor's guns did 1/10th damage to the Terminator's robotic endoskeleton, so the only challenge was just shooting it enough times instead of playing a Cat & Mouse with it until they could use improvised explosives and a hydrolic press to defeat the thing...?

Now we are getting to the "well, everyone's gotta shower sometime" argument...
All that does is a) reverse the power dynamic if the SDC opponents can introduce a new MD element or b) level the playing field.

I don't know that it's really reversing the power dynamic, so much as simply acknowledging that no power is absolute. There are consequences to every action, and people who make enough people mad tend to see repercussions, either from more powerful people or from assassinations.
Just a fact of life.

In a), the PCs now are on the receiving end of the 100x differential. The game has gone from a no-lose boring story to a no-win boring story. However, this begs the question why the MD element wasn't brought in earlier. It very well may be that the Protector or an ally of some kind came back to town. Sure, it could lead to a foot race for PCs to get their armor on again or grab their guns, but does the story have to see-saw like that just to get to a few moments of excitement?

I don't think I said anything about the PCs fighting a pitched battle against anybody 100x more powerful than they are.
I mean, even if they royally tick off The Coalition, that doesn't mean they have to stand there going toe-to-toe against an entire army.
Butch & Sundance didn't end with the bankers getting them; they RAN.
The Rebellion in Star Wars abandoned Hoth instead of fighting, and they went on the offensive when they had a good plan that evened the odds a bit.

In b), all this does is to finally give the SDC opponents a fighting chance against the PCs. The 1:10 scale I use gives the SDC opponents a fighting chance from the get go.

To me, though, "they all stood there shooting each other" is much less interesting than "the psycho PCs won the battle, but then faced consequences for their actions."
I don't see Rifts as a FPS game so much as a cross between chess, CYOA, improv class, and a good movie.

And I wouldn't like having to deal with all the ripple effects from changing a rule that major, all the unintended consequences and adjustments.

Granted there are MD shotgun shells, ramjet rounds, etc. that can turn any farmhand or city rat into a threat. But considering price of a shell to a farmer's income in Rifts, I seriously doubt the farmer has enough to hold off a party of PCs.

Nah, I agree, but it's not always about direct death.
Let's say there's a farmer with a double-barrel shotgun pointed at you. You don't know what's it's loaded with. If it's rocksalt or buckshot, it'll do nothing.
If he's got two plasma shells in there, though, that's 6d6 MD you're looking at.
It won't kill you unless you're in Plastic Man or something, and rolls max damage and/or gets a crit.
But it'll damage your armor, which will cost up to CR 700 to repair for every point of damage he does (unless the GM hands out free repairs), so you're looking at CR 4,200-25,200 damage to your wallet.
CR 4,800-28,800 if you're in power armor.
CR 24,000-144,000 if you're in a robot vehicle.
Plus travel time to the nearest repair shop, and if you're out in a wilderness village that could be hours, days, or weeks.

So you gotta ask yourself, is it worth it?

And if you get into another fight along the way to the repair shop? That missing MDC might mean the difference between life and death.
(although with the GI-Joe Rule that's less likely, of course, but who plays with that rule?)

Attrition was always there, no doubt. The 1:10 scale simply accelerates that, as you don't have to get into a MD gunfight to damage your armor. A tango with a cougar or an old fashioned knife fight can expand the sources of damage... again motivating PCs to avoid fighting if they can.

Attrition was always deadly enough that accelerating it would mostly have been TPKs for my old group.


As it was, it took nearly a year for people to start to understand that winning a battle and only losing 25% of your armor was a basically loss if you've got another three fights like that between you and a repair shop.

Some argued that magic and psionics gets nerfed:

For me, it's more about Juicers and other high-SDC stuff.
A Juicer with 400 SDC goes from being able to soak an extra 4 MD to being able to soak an extra 40 MD!
Keep in mind that basic Juicer Plate has 45 MDC; that basically doubles his Mega-Damage.

They always have to bring up the gosh darned juicers ... well, allow me to address that one.

Assuming a plain old knife does on average 3 SDC, a juicer with 390 SDC (to keep the math simple) can take 130 stabs. A vibroknife at 1:100 does 300 SDC on average, so 2 stabs. A vibroknife at 1:10 does 30 SDC on average, so 13 stabs. Even 2 stabs from a 1:100 vibroknife is hugely impressive to the average normal human, 13 stabs at 1:10 might be seen as superhuman, which juicers are supposed to be. Juicers are solid muscle, so they have that going for them. But you suggest, and quite rightly, that flesh and bone is not the same as some sort of ceramic plate armor. Now, at this juncture, I'd like to posit that the SDC unit we are using is a measure of the destructive force an object can take before it becomes ineffective. Damage applied to a ceramic armor plate, or even a plain old steel plate, leads to anything from deformation to catastrophic failure. The armor doesn't crumble to dust at 45 MDC damage, it simply stops offering protection.

However, force is distributed differently in organic matter leading to side effects like wound channels, knockdown, hydrostatic shock(?), etc. that goes beyond just making a hole. Juicers are designed chemically and, to a certain degree, cybernetically to overcome or simply ignore many of these effects of damage. As such, I don't see the S in SDC as really meaning "structural", because if that were literally the case, Juicers would only have as much SDC as a highly efficient bodybuilder since they are made of mostly the same stuff. Instead, I see SDC as a measure for how much a Juicer or any other object can take before it fails to operate... just like MDC. So, back to the pincushion juicer... can you stab a normal human 129 times with a normal knife, sure. They'd still be dead. The juicer would have the same wounds, just able to maintain their bodily functions enough to survive and get healed. However, keep in mind that after 129 wounds, the blood loss rules really add up! So, in effect, a juicer would be long dead before getting to stab 129. When it comes to a vibroknife using 1:10, the normal human is just as dead. However, the juicer can still take an impressive number of stabs, but the effect of blood loss is lessened as there are fewer wounds. At 1:100, there even fewer wounds, but the juicer is just as dead as a normal human after two stabs anyway. So, I'd argue that the juicer isn't munchkined using 1:10, it simply showcases their superhuman abilities in line with sci-fi fiction.[/quote]

Mercenaries 95
The main gun from a modern tank does 3d4 MD. At 1:10 ratio, a Juicer with 300 SDC could take up to 10 hits.
The armor of a 20th Century Tank offers 10-20 MDC. At 1:10 ratio, that's 100-200 SDC.

A stick of dynamite does 5d6 MDC, an average of 17.5 SDC. A Juicer with 300 SDC could withstand 17 sticks of dynamite.

I mean, don't get me wrong; if you find it plausible enough to swallow based on everything you said, that's fine.
Rifts is ultimately pretty absurd no matter how we break it down, because their damage numbers and damage capacity numbers are all pretty arbitrary, not a science.

But it'd rub ME the wrong way.

And stuff like a LAW Rockets. There are three kinds: 1d4x10 SDC, 1d6x10 SDC, and 1d6 MD, which cost CR2000-2500 for the SDC, or CR 15,000 for the MD version. Change the ratio, and there are now two version of the same weapon that do the exact same damage, BUT one of them costs 6x more for no real reason. Which is easily addressed by bumping up the damage of the MD version, or by ignoring it, but all those little changes, fixes, and ignorings adds up to be more work than the reward for me personally.

So, just add a zero if it makes sense. OMG it is not hard to do. There is practically no work and all reward with a simple change like that. Players shouldn't be looking up stats anyway as they should be busy interacting with NPCs trying to sell them dud rockets for top credit.

It's not hard work, but it's still a LOT of work, because of all the areas where this comes into play.
Rifts has enough bogging down in rule decisions as it is; I don't want to add more, especially when I'd have to remember each time how I ruled last time, or make a note of every change.

Every time you change a rule, there are rippling effects, and consequences, so I try to change the rules as little as possible.
Granted, it's impossible to never change ANY rules at all, so it's always just a matter of degree when it comes to how much work you want to do smoothing things out.

Sure there may be a few ripples that I log in my house rules, but unless one is a rules lawyer slavishly bound to the details in the books, it's nothing a little adding a zero here or taking one from there won't fix. Hardly as difficult as doing taxes. Anyway, my gameplay focuses on the story and the closer it can get to being relatable for the players, the more I'm willing as GM to smooth some of rough edges for them.

The rules are the physics of the game universe; I try to keep them as consistent as possible.
:shrug:

[!REAPER!]

After fighting against the system for so long I have decided to just use FFG Warhammer 40k games for RIFTS. I feel it falls between Savage RIFTS and Palladium on the scale. I can also have stories involving Body Fixers included in the game which is nice considering they didn't make as much sense with people being vaporized typically. My RIFTS is far more in line with Killer Cyborgs as to the original setting and such. I can use all the great tables from the RMB as well. That is also what was always a great disappointment to me when RIFTS CB1 came out and there were no descriptions of weaknesses to everyday things. The Quick Roll charts at the back of RMB were great for that.

[Grazzik]

Agreed, BUT it's not like there aren't any mega-damage threats lurking in the wilderness.
Personally, I like playing in a world where your character can be walking through the woods, then get pounced on by a huge beast, knocked to the ground, and... Oh, thank God! It's just a grizzly. I'll play dead until he gets bored and leaves.


Meanwhile, there's any number of other nasties out there which could still pose a serious threat.
Wait! What's that ahead?
Oh, it's just a bunny rabbit.
Or IS It just a bunny rabbit?
Could be a dragon. Could be a mutant animal about to use psychic powers to immobilize you. Could be a vorpal bunny from another dimension, ready to bite your head off.
Maybe you should throw your holy handgrenade... but should you waste it?


One of the things I dislike that Rifts does is to try to make a radical new world... where everything is still basically the same.
The RMB had dinosaurs statted where a T-Rex had 1d4x10 MDC, which is actually pretty generous considering I rather doubt 7.62mm rifle rounds would just bounce off them. I'd have made them high SDC critters.
But dinosaurs are a BIG threat to normal humans who don't have armor and weapons that makes them the equivalent of a main battle tank, so people felt like that was Too Weak, and Palladium upped the threat proportionately, making T-Rexes the same rough threat level to a MDC-geared human as a real T-Rex would be to a SDC PC.
And of course in Rifts Canada, the writer got annoyed that MDC characters weren't threatened by bears, so decided that some Grizzlies are just inexplicably Mega-Damage.

But the net effect--for me--comes off like playing one of those video games where the enemies scale with you, so at level 1 you're fighting an Orc Robber who's a tough encounter, and at level 100 you're fighting an Orc Robber who is a tough encounter.
You know how superhero stories like to have a bullied main character, who confronts the bullies once he has powers, but then goes on to fight real supervillains?
I like those better than where the main character gets super powers, and the bullies get super powers, so they just keep fighting the same enemies on a different power level.

But Also...
Rifts wasn't originally designed where characters would wear their bulky MDC body armor all the time.
SB1 8
Yes, characters without MDC armor are vulnerable to instant destruction if hit by a mega-damage weapon. However, one can not wear body armor or sit inside a robot for weeks. It is simply too uncomfortable and dirty to do so. Characters must come out of their armor for some periods of time on a regular basis. Also, some armor, power armor, and robots are not suitable for stealth and must be shed if one wants to prowl around unnoticed.

Followed by (among other things) a note about how a good GM doesn't just up and slaughter the PCs without giving them a chance.

I get the impression that the early setting of Rifts was intended to kind of be like Robotech, where you have characters wandering around unarmored a lot of the time, but then they spot smoke on the horizon or other signs of trouble, the music cues, and they gear up in MDC armor for battle.
Not that many people play that way, but it's certainly possible.

a) I think the human-animal interaction in the woods is a gamestyle thing, so we're going to have diffent opinions on that. Yes, shapechanging is a mindbender when that bunny or squirrel keeps showing up.

b) I agree on the whole dinosaur thing. With a 1:10 conversion scale that 1d4x10 MD dino is 1d4x100 SDC. Since the equivalent MD armor would also be the same, that group is happy. Yet, the folks who want to hunt dinos with a regular .50 BMG are also happy. In a 1:100 MDC game, I can see why someone would maybe want a mega-bear since regular bears are not a concern, but in a 1:10 they are simply big mutant bears that take up more ammo. I'm on the fence about that one, since in a 1:10 game, regular bears have their place. And don't think I'm obsessed with bears - they are a good example anything SDC that was arbitrarily made MDC. I'm in agreement re how matching the same opponents to a PC's progression is unoriginal.

c) I get the intent re taking off armor and its place as a story element. However, with the proliferation of MDC fabrics in Rifts and Chaos Earth, players have the option to dress in normal looking clothes with no movement penalties, but still engage in MD combat even in places like cities where previously MDC armor wasn't allowed. This is one aspect where I've seen treating MDC as simply 10x SDC feel more realistic, rather than 100x. Again, it's a subjective gameplay call.

You're technically correct, BUT consider this: pointy sticks are a danger to certain supernatural critters, even if they're not much danger to a Mega-Damage bandit. One of the things they tragically got away from after the RMB (specifically, when the Conversion Book hit) is the idea that many/most supernatural have some kind of weakness: wood, energy, sunlight, mirrors, fire, cold, etc.
My model for the standard Rifts village tends to be M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. Twists aside, the movie opens up set in a rather primitive technology wilderness community surrounded by strange monsters in the woods, BUT the locals have learned enough about the creatures to keep them from being a threat to the village itself. The creatures have a fear of certain colors, and the village keeps a perimeter marked by this color to keep the creatures out, that kind of thing.
Humans have often survived in areas with real-world predators they stand little chance against, simply by learning how to minimize the dangers of these animals (as well as because animals don't tend to kill many more humans than they can eat, and also I suspect because humans don't taste very good).

I grant you the weaknesses are something that has been missing. It's a long standing trope that elemental iron and such can disrupt magic or harm SN/CoM, but I don't see rules of that nature consistently applied in Rifts. I think CE tried to bring it back in, but not sure it stuck.

Take Kelpies, for example...

Okay, I just used Kelpies as an example of a MD critter, not expecting to cover all the details. I agree that specific critter might not decimate all N America, but I think you see the intent - that squishy SDC are at a notable disadvantage against MDC predators. Yet, perhaps it really comes down to some of the next few points...

Yet, we are to believe there are MDC critters almost everywhere.

Nah, not exactly.
RUE P. 19, from Erin Tarn:
...

Some good points there... the Wilderness is huge. I read the Tarn excerpts with a bit of salt, but in this case it is on point. However, some descriptions of monsters are written to feel like they are in large numbers throughout a given range. I guess at the end of the day it comes down to the GM moderating what world feel they are going for with their campaign.

With the power creep from book to book, there would be no villages.

Keep in mind, we're almost never told any numbers when it comes to monster populations. Big scary monsters might be common in the books, but that doesn't mean they're all that common in the setting.

Good point. It is important to seperate the encounter frequency experienced by an adventurer party looking for trouble and that experienced by some peasant in a backwater village. One thing that might be helpful for GMs is some official guidance on encounter frequency. I know that they kinda do it for the autobahn and encounters really are dependent on mode of transportation, but it would be useful at times.

Protectors are resource intensive investments and wilderness villages have very little to spare...

That depends on a lot of factors, actually.
Rifts 137
The majority of these feudal kingdoms are ruled by, or appoint, or employ, a protector or group of protectors, much like the knights of old. The protector(s) is always a powerful warrior, frequently armed with power armor or giant robot vehicle. Men of arms seem to be the norm among these champions, but they can be mages, psychics, mutants, and even monsters.

We have zero official information on how much maintenance is required for mega-damage gear when not being used, when being lightly used, or for that matter when being used regularly but not receiving any damage. People tend to to two different ways, either assuming that high-tech super-futuristic Rifts gear requires the same levels of maintenance modern stuff does, or (like me) they assume that common wear & tear is SDC damage, and MDC gear is basically unaffected.
E-Clips hold a charge indefinitely as far as I can tell, and MDC alloys likely don't rust (as they're non ferrous) or corrode (they're often ceramic and plastic).
If the threats requiring the champion aren't very common, they might never need to use more than one suit of armor, one rifle, and one e-clip.
If threats are a daily or weekly occurrence, on the other hand, yeah, things could get expensive. Then it comes up to how good the village is at trade, how much loot is gained from each victory, and other factors.
But if you have a community with a decent way to generate electricty, e-clips could be recharged for free.
A decent forge or even blacksmith could handle rail gun rounds.

Mages, psychics, mutants, and monsters, on the other hand, don't necessarily ever need any of that stuff.

A band of Simvan are intelligent creatures who can be negotiated with. What do they want? Probably not to just slaughter and eat an entire village. Raiders are basically parasites; they come to rob producers of their produce. If they kill the farmers/ranchers/etc., then the raiders themselves might well starve. At the least, they're less likely to live comfortably.
Also keep in mind that the "protector" of an area might well be a group.
Simvan raiders coming to a village? That just sounds like Rifts Magnificent Seven time to me.


The Coalition?
Well, again, what do they want? If it's a human community, they're likely to protect it more than anything else.
If it's a magic/psychic community, they have mega-damage available from their spells/powers.
If it's a community of Elves or something, that's a problem. Might be time for everybody to flee farther from CS territory, if their champion(s) isn't up for the job.
Ya gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

Honestly, I draw a lot of inspiration from movies like the Magnificent Seven Whether it is a spaghetti western, Kurosawa flick, or the like, the stories tend to stay focused on the main characters in the moment. Episodic, almost claustrophobic in a way. I'm not one for campaigns that are grand space operas.

So all the above could be a factor in a given adventure, but again, when fireballs start flying or lasers start lasering, a 1:10 scale works better for me as there is less likelihood of an insta-kill. It also means that minor NPCs might play a pivotal role in combat... the image of a CS trooper ignoring the cowering farmer as they focus on the Juicer across the way, only to be taken down by the farmer with a rusty sickle...

I'd also suggest that after 300 years in a 1:100 MD world, anyone and anything (and that probably means most of the Earth native animals) not in MD armor of some kind would be severely diminished at the hands of MD critters from the Rifts...

Nah.
We have no numbers on the numbers of MD stuff that came through Rifts.
Ecologies have natural balancing factors:
-predators fight off other predators. It's not like every monster came through a Rift and started picking just on native SDC life; that pack of Simvan might get wiped out by a Neuron Beast. That Neuron Beast might get killed by a dragon. That dragon might get wiped out by Xiticix.
-Predators that kill faster than their prey can breed tend to starve to death. If a pack of supernatural beasties kill everything in their territory, they'll have to find new territory, and their new territory is probably claimed by another supernatural beastie or is NOT claimed because there's some other threat that keeps them out. Or there are natural barriers that keep the predator population from roaming as freely as they like.
Cannibalism can sometimes happen, with the predators turning on each other.
If the species lives long enough to bread future generations, the ones with less appetite and which require less food are going to the the ones that have the best survival chances, and that lowered appetite will let future prey populations grow.
-Prey animals often survive not by being able to fight predators effectively, but simply by being able to run, hide, and breed. A village of nothing but SDC humans could live safe from MD threats indefinitely, if no threats can find them, or if the threats kill them slower than they breed, or if the community has a nomadic route where they can move from place to place safely.

Nature tends to find a balance.

Fair enough. An equalibrium would be reached eventually, but is that 110 PA? Earlier? Later? As you say we have no data to go on. My gut feeling though is that in a 1:100 world, life in the wilds would be very difficult and the chance of wandering PCs coming across a wilderness village would be too small for the types of adventure stories I like to tell.

Maybe they are murder hobos, but it would be a boring game. Maybe they are wandering heroes, again if villains are no match, it's a boring game. The thread is taking about the merits of the scale of MDC/SDC. Once combat has begun, the motivation doesn't matter...

As you say, massacres are boring. So why would you make THAT the adventure in the first place?
Why run a game that's just a pitched battle between Mega-Damage PCs and an unprepared SDC community, with no survivors?
Seems like the GM is the problem there.


As for the 1:100 ratio not being fun, I disagree entirely.
I love the challenge of having, for example, a pack of SDC Vagabonds who are setting out to ambush and kill 1d4 CS soldiers.
I like having the physical odds against my character, and using my imagination and intellect to even the odds.
What fun would The Terminator have been if Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor's guns did 1/10th damage to the Terminator's robotic endoskeleton, so the only challenge was just shooting it enough times instead of playing a Cat & Mouse with it until they could use improvised explosives and a hydrolic press to defeat the thing...?

It's not the adventure, it's simply a straw model example that explains why I've found 1:10 to be more interesting and fun than 1:100. More power to you if you prefer 1:100 or even Gigadamage We've had some neat moments of success as an archer hits a CS trooper in the small gaps between plates, but a game of attrition against SN, combat cyborgs or robots often takes too long to play out, so usually I though in a time element that forces players to get creative, fast.

Now we are getting to the "well, everyone's gotta shower sometime" argument...
All that does is a) reverse the power dynamic if the SDC opponents can introduce a new MD element or b) level the playing field.

I don't know that it's really reversing the power dynamic, so much as simply acknowledging that no power is absolute. There are consequences to every action, and people who make enough people mad tend to see repercussions, either from more powerful people or from assassinations.
Just a fact of life.

In a), the PCs now are on the receiving end of the 100x differential...

I don't think I said anything about the PCs fighting a pitched battle against anybody 100x more powerful than they are.
I mean, even if they royally tick off The Coalition, that doesn't mean they have to stand there going toe-to-toe against an entire army.
Butch & Sundance didn't end with the bankers getting them; they RAN.
The Rebellion in Star Wars abandoned Hoth instead of fighting, and they went on the offensive when they had a good plan that evened the odds a bit.

Just working through a very basic straw model to examine potential scenarios where I think 1:100 is too lobsided, ie. MD PCs strong, SDC opponents weak. MD PCs go SDC by taking off armor, SDC opponents pull out hidden MD guns. PCs scramble. Running is definitely one way of handling this scenario. And I agreed that traps, encumberances, etc. are all options other than inflicting damage. But when MD is being inflicted, I like to give the underdogs (PCs or opponents) a sliver of a chance of surviving a hit or two.

In b), all this does is to finally give the SDC opponents a fighting chance against the PCs. The 1:10 scale I use gives the SDC opponents a fighting chance from the get go.

To me, though, "they all stood there shooting each other" is much less interesting than "the psycho PCs won the battle, but then faced consequences for their actions."
I don't see Rifts as a FPS game so much as a cross between chess, CYOA, improv class, and a good movie.

And I wouldn't like having to deal with all the ripple effects from changing a rule that major, all the unintended consequences and adjustments.

Agreed, I was simply using the simplest straw model to make a point as to why 1:10 works better in the games I play. As you point out, so much more goes into the game, no doubt. If the game gets too much like FPS, I usually switch play mode to a montage description with players working through key opponents in order to move the story along and to have PCs focus on doing cool stuff rather than just plowing through waves of shuffling zombies, wave after wave.

Granted there are MD shotgun shells, ramjet rounds, etc. that can turn any farmhand or city rat into a threat. But considering price of a shell to a farmer's income in Rifts, I seriously doubt the farmer has enough to hold off a party of PCs.

Nah, I agree, but it's not always about direct death.
Let's say there's a farmer with a double-barrel shotgun pointed at you. You don't know what's it's loaded with. If it's rocksalt or buckshot, it'll do nothing.
If he's got two plasma shells in there, though, that's 6d6 MD you're looking at.
It won't kill you unless you're in Plastic Man or something, and rolls max damage and/or gets a crit.
But it'll damage your armor, which will cost up to CR 700 to repair for every point of damage he does (unless the GM hands out free repairs), so you're looking at CR 4,200-25,200 damage to your wallet.
CR 4,800-28,800 if you're in power armor.
CR 24,000-144,000 if you're in a robot vehicle.
Plus travel time to the nearest repair shop, and if you're out in a wilderness village that could be hours, days, or weeks.

So you gotta ask yourself, is it worth it?

And if you get into another fight along the way to the repair shop? That missing MDC might mean the difference between life and death.
(although with the GI-Joe Rule that's less likely, of course, but who plays with that rule?)

Ugh, GI Joe rule. We agree on that.

I see where you are going with this. It's the uncertainty and consequences of making a bad call and thinkng forward. However, given how expensive armor repairs are, by using AR rules and allowing PCs to possibly pass thru damage on targets using SDC weapons, they could reap armor parts to patch their own (if they have the skills).

The price though is that the AR rules can work against them too. By nerfing MDC to 1:10, this prevents instant vaporization to a certain degree. So, for opponents, they can be incapacitated rather than killed and PCs can be gravely wounded requiring medical attention.

Attrition was always there, no doubt. The 1:10 scale simply accelerates that...

Attrition was always deadly enough that accelerating it would mostly have been TPKs for my old group.


As it was, it took nearly a year for people to start to understand that winning a battle and only losing 25% of your armor was a basically loss if you've got another three fights like that between you and a repair shop.

I agree with you on that one. My games just chip away at the armor. Again, this is a sytle thing and I can't fault you on your way.

They always have to bring up the gosh darned juicers ... well, allow me to address that one...

Mercenaries 95
The main gun from a modern tank does 3d4 MD. At 1:10 ratio, a Juicer with 300 SDC could take up to 10 hits.
The armor of a 20th Century Tank offers 10-20 MDC. At 1:10 ratio, that's 100-200 SDC.

Tanks?!? If there is one thing PB is worse at than scaling damage, it's how tanks are seriously nerfed! You quote the book correctly, but when it comes to ancient tanks I usually go with the stats in Dead Reign (Core pg 126) or HU GMG (pg 218/219) where they are up to 1500 SDC for the M1A1 and the 120mm inflicts 2d4x100 SDC, though I assume there is some improvement on AR, speed, and targeting bonuses over the next 70 years. But, using the M48A3 as a baseline since it is both in HU and Mercs, up-armored tanks on Merc pg 97 @ 1:10 are 2.4x the armor than original SDC tanks. So an up-armored M1A1 would presumably be 360 MDC @ 1:10. Now, the Mercs M48A3 fires 90mm HEAT for 5d6 MD (5d6x10 @ 1:10) compared to the DR M1A1 120mm's 2d4x100. This where the GM call comes in to say whether the tank cannon's damage a) stays at 1:100 or b) is reduced to 1:10 making the difference between sources for SDC/MDC stats for tank rounds almost meaningless. As I don't play tank combat often or they are used for effect, I go with what feels right in the moment.

A stick of dynamite does 5d6 MDC, an average of 17.5 SDC. A Juicer with 300 SDC could withstand 17 sticks of dynamite.

This is where the KS rule of "use common sense" kicks in.

I mean, don't get me wrong; if you find it plausible enough to swallow based on everything you said, that's fine.
Rifts is ultimately pretty absurd no matter how we break it down, because their damage numbers and damage capacity numbers are all pretty arbitrary, not a science.

But it'd rub ME the wrong way.

there is practically no science here... only awesome science friction... eh, I mean fiction!

So, just add a zero if it makes sense...

It's not hard work, but it's still a LOT of work, because of all the areas where this comes into play.
Rifts has enough bogging down in rule decisions as it is; I don't want to add more, especially when I'd have to remember each time how I ruled last time, or make a note of every change.

I deal with it as it comes up. If I get it wrong, so be it, there's always tomorrow to get it right.

Sure there may be a few ripples that I log in my house rules...

The rules are the physics of the game universe; I try to keep them as consistent as possible.
:shrug:

As do I for the most part... the key is being consistent with the rule set you choose to play with... and that everyone is having fun.

[Grazzik]

I can use all the great tables from the RMB as well. That is also what was always a great disappointment to me when RIFTS CB1 came out and there were no descriptions of weaknesses to everyday things. The Quick Roll charts at the back of RMB were great for that.

Those charts are very useful

Any thoughts on the vulnerabilities in CE Creatures of Chaos?

[!REAPER!]

I can use all the great tables from the RMB as well. That is also what was always a great disappointment to me when RIFTS CB1 came out and there were no descriptions of weaknesses to everyday things. The Quick Roll charts at the back of RMB were great for that.

Those charts are very useful

Any thoughts on the vulnerabilities in CE Creatures of Chaos?

I just skimmed through the book to refresh myself on the contents. Yes, I wish that the CB1 and other monsters in other RIFTS books had been given interesting vulnerabilities. So many monsters just have the standard M.D. weapons "weakness". I would have liked to see more creatures who could only be harmed like Vampires were in Vampire Kingdoms 1st. You could swat them down with a Boom Gun but they hopped back up. Unless of course you used the special Anti-Vampire rounds.

[Zer0 Kay]

Con: a zweihander, flamberge or other great sword doing 3d6 plus PS bonus can now damage a tank. A full mag burst from a Glock G18 can now damage a tank.

either make infantry armor and weapons SDC or actually make the MDC stuff rare. Make it like THIS is the reason the CS exists, everyone else sucks. Its why magic armor is rare and mages are actually DANGEROUS. Make it a crime to own MDC weapons or armor, one that the CS will hunt you down for because if it spreads then they loose their dominance. Low MDC vehicles are allowed and some super expensive single MD equipment can be purchased. Only MD armor allows G.I. Joe rule so civilian single MD armor is worth something like Kevlar Vests.