Canal Virus maybe? <"Let me see... what to do, what to do...">

Patrick Chester
"...could you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

Lousy system. Lousy writing. Poor integration of other material. Bad research for said sourcebooks. A "universal system" that's anything but, with the rules in each book contradicting the rules in every other book. Commas where there shouldn't be commas. No commas where there should be commas.

HoL is the world's best beer and pretzels game. Heck, that was the whole point.
-Eliot "Broken English. Fun to write. Need subject?" Lefebvre
-=()=-
We're only given a little time in our lives to waste. Make the most of it.
Electronic Transcendence Productions
Producer of, um, stuff for an unspecified time-period.
Thoughts of the moment, and such

Ah, Hol. That which brings us the Church & Munch, the Harbinger of the Void, the Chart Chart, and the most disturbing weapon ever devised, Kitty Kitty Bang Bang.

Make sure you pick up the "Buttery Wholesomeness" supplement, too. It's worth it for the character generation system alone. ;)

--truss.
The Harbinger's safety has two settings... "off" and "off."

What about Macho Women With Guns? I actually tried to GM a campaign of that. Lasted about half a session.

-Nightmare Butterfly
Renegade Nuns on Wheels: best character class _ever_

What about it? ;>
-Eliot "It's a little disturbing when you're looking at some of your friends in a class and realize, if between the four of you you had one gun, ten dollars, and a car in the room, you'd be living a HoL adventure" Lefebvre
-=()=-
We're only given a little time in our lives to waste. Make the most of it.
Electronic Transcendence Productions
Producer of, um, stuff for an unspecified time-period.
Thoughts of the moment, and such

Don't forget It Came From the Late Show. Or Orkworld. Or Rune. And I want to get All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog

Ah, I still like Rifts, for precisely the reason that I have yet to see a decent game of it played, but have seen many different adaptations of it played with great twinkery and joy.

-Craig "I am not a twink!" Perko
(Really, I'm just unthoughtful...)

Now I'm flashing back to a HoL campaign where I played a would-be kung-fu master named Long Fat Dong.

(And, to make this reference holistic, said HoL campaign was a side trip for a Rifts campaign.)

My thoughts on Rifts:
The whole Palladium system sucks, and hard... except for Heroes Unlimited, which actually works (and, since it was one of the first games using the system, that does make sense). The world of Rifts is an interesting one, and I feel it does a much better job of mixing magic and technology than, say, Shadowrun. (And it does a better job at being post-apocalyptic, too.)

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog

I MUCH prefer Shadowrun. Interesting story there, as I sort of came to it Sideways. You see, I',m a big fan of a game called Mekton... and Its current incarnation Mekton Z. However, never could find anyone who even heard of it, let alone play it. That eventually got me into another FASA Project, Battletech, and THAT was where I heard about SR, and said Cool...

Then still was never able to find anyone to play with till I got online and big into the PBEM RPG scene

___________________

Vaughn doesn't know I exist. I guess this explains why the rest of reality keeps ignoring me as well. >_<

>Sorry Sean, but I disagree. Palladium is ok, in its own way... As
>long as Mega Damage is not involved. ANY project that used the MDC
>concept eventually became nothing more than My gun is better than
>yours.

That whole SDC/MDC tripe is one of the less kludgy things that make the Palladium system such a hack job.

Kevin Simbieda is very, very good at certain things, but the problem is that he doesn't know what he's good at, and what he's not so good at. Heroes Unlimited is, IMNSHO, the best implementation of the system, and the best product Palladium puts out. It works very, very well for a supers system, and one of the few supers systems that isn't permanently brain-damaged.

Shadowrun isn't a bad setting, but all the horrific kludges, like Essence, that exist for game balance make it nigh-impossible to mesh fantasy-SR effectively with cyberpunk-SR. While I loathe the Palladium system, I like to buy Rifts sourcebooks and convert them to GURPS, as it intertwines magic and technology extremely well. GURPS Technomancer is also a setting that merges magic with technology superbly; GURPS Cthulhupunk is a setting that kludges its way through it. (Thematically, cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror mesh well, but the presentation of the setting in Cthulhupunk makes it tough to mix the supernatural with high technology... although, considering the whole point of Lovecraftian horror, that does make a degree of sense.)

-- Sean --
... still wondering how one gets into writing RPGs for a living...
http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog

It's mecha. That's the point. "My gun is bigger than your gun." "My funnels last longer than your funnels." "My transform is cooler than your transform." "My synch rate is higher than your synch rate." Et cetera.

>... still wondering how one gets into writing RPGs for a
>living...

If I remember correctly, Siembada published crappy books to small audiences until he got enough money to publish (ostensibly) less-crappy books to bigger audiences, and so on from there. (At one point I was doing heavy research on Palladium, convinced that there must be something to salvage. And there is: the art from the Robotech books, and a few other mecha. That is all.)
-Eliot "Not commenting too extensively, especially since he's about to embark on the System Design Quest himself" Lefebvre
-=()=-
We're only given a little time in our lives to waste. Make the most of it.
Electronic Transcendence Productions
Producer of, um, stuff for an unspecified time-period.
Thoughts of the moment, and such

-Craig

Heh. You make funny. Eliot go laugh-laugh. He likey. ;>
-Eliot "That's, um, not a cloak of invisibility, it's just a cloak" Lefebvre
-=()=-
We're only given a little time in our lives to waste. Make the most of it.
Electronic Transcendence Productions
Producer of, um, stuff for an unspecified time-period.
Thoughts of the moment, and such