Editing RIFTS (section)

==Criticisms==
*Every now and then the fluff makes you feel like you stopped reading the book and started smoking a joint rolled from one of the pages. Some material is really weird. Like vampires with feet on their arms and hands on their legs. There's a mix of awesome, dumb, and awesome-dumb throughout.
*There is ''no'' balance between Races or Character Classes. '''NONE'''. You can literally have one player playing a demigod and another a hobo, with ''all'' the power disparity that implies. However, the GM is expected to have the final say in what's allowed or not, and to keep things balanced.
*The system is notorious for constantly one-upping itself. Every source book seems dedicated to making the weapons in the last source book look like a bunch of kitten launchers. It's not really a linear progression so much as up-and-down, but considering the books your players are most likely to pull out it's reputation for escalation is not unwarranted. 
*It's very [[grimdark]]. Not as much as 40k- there's both good factions and hope around, some heroes would fit in well with [[Noblebright]] settings- but pretty much every continent has it's own extinction level threat or two, and the biggest power block on the planet by far is the Splugorth of Atlantis, who's leader Splynncryth is the answer to the question of "what if Cthulhu was a capitalist?". Having a continent-sized nation of interdimensional slave trading monsters under an eldritch abomination sounds like about as bad as things can get, but at least they don't want to rule everything (just raid it for live stock occasionally), and their presence discourages even ''worse'' eldritch abominations and supernatural hordes from descending on the planet en mass. They still descend upon the planet of course, just with more subtlety so they don't have to take the armies of Atlantis straight off.
*MOAR MEGADAMAGE! An infamous feature of the Palladium engine is the idea of Mega-Damage. Essentially [[Damage Reduction]] on steroids, it was originally designed for ''Robotech'' to reflect the idea of how conventional weapons are almost always useless against the gear of alien invaders, but the new/prototype weapons of the heroes work just fine. The gist of it is that every point of Mega-Damage(MDC) equals a hundred points of normal Structural Damage/Hitpoints(SDC). In short, traditional guns don't scratch an MDC being/mecha unless they go straight to anti-tank weaponry, while an MDC attack can wreck a tank in only a few shots/blows and generally turns normal Human bodies to paste in one. Rifts takes this and fucking ''runs'' with it. Even basic arms and armor inflict/take Mega-Damage, with the books explicitly stating that a man in body armor and carrying a laser rifle packs the toughness and firepower of a modern Main Battle Tank. Then Rifts stacks power armor, giant robots, and tanks on top of that, plus monsters and even ''playable races'' tough enough to be a threat to all of those. 
*"I just spent 10 hours making a character. Oh, shit it's 4AM. When are we going to play? Never? OK then."
*TRADEMARK ALL THE THINGS!
*While it is about complex as DnD 3.5, the layout makes it seem more complicated than it actually is.
*There is a Savage Worlds edition now, in case you want a modern ruleset.