Rift between background and rules. (Rifts)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Rifts
Date:	23/04/01 (198 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of background and worlds available

Disadvantages: Bad rules system, very combat heavy

This is an old game, it's been around for a while under a variety of publishers and hasn't changed much. There are about 17 books describing worlds that can be played and thats about the best thing going for this game.
The rules are heavy, lots of tables and number crunching, they also allow for imbalance and tend to steer players towards combat orientated characters with weapon and fight skills and little else. Un fortunately this makes good roleplaying less likely as adventures tend to be combat orientated to fit the characters. A storytelling idea may be to run characters against each other as they will then be less inclined to fight physically and may try to outmaneuvre each other allowing for better roleplay.
Each world book is completely self contained giving you a map of the area that it represents (e.g. the vampire world is the americas, or maybe only the central americas I forget) descriptions of the monsters in the area and the politics (sketchily) a few area descriptions and the like. These books tend to be quite expensive, like £10 a shot and not really worth the money. There doesn't tend to be much in them that teh enterprising storyteller couldn't come up with herself.
I wouldn';t suggest buying the rulebook to Rifts, the best use of this game is proabaly to use teh settings or backgrounds which are sometimes clever ideas, develop them slightly yourself and tie them into another rules system, this isn;t actually that hard to do as the stats provided for rifts charcters are long winded reducing them to other systems, like AD&D where, lets be honest a lot of the stats are ignored by a lot of people a lot of the time.
Not changed enough since early days to be up with the modern front runners.

Summary: