The Golden Age: The 1990s

The 1990s were the Golden Age of role-playing games. This is the era when Magic: The Gathering killed D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade took over the goth subculture and LARP play, and D&D's last best edition reflected the world through the insanely popular novels of AD&D Second Edition. This was the time when Rifts was born and blew up gaming, and all the great Palladium SDC games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blended 90s comics and roleplaying.

Rifts got me into the Palladium games. Since then, I have stuck with the SDC versions of Palladium RPGs and have come to love them all. They are still out of storage and have never really been put away for the last 5 years, sitting in a secondary room, and I am happy to have them out. Rifts, these days, I am avoiding, since I know that it is a considerable investment to rebuild my library, and I don't play it enough to warrant that.

Oh, and I know that some used the Palladium SDC games to "trick" players into playing Rifts, where a GM would promise a superhero or fantasy game, then pull a switcheroo and teleport them all into Rifts. Most of the time, this never worked, and I tend to keep my SDC universes far away from the Rifts multiverse. There does exist a parallel universe where only the SDC universes exist, and this is where my primary fantasy and superhero universes are set.

But let Rifts be Rifts; that is the best way to go. And if you play Rifts, let everyone know before you begin, and don't pull the wool over their eyes. And yes, Rifts was part of the reason why AD&D 2nd Edition died for us. By the end of the decade, the writing was on the wall, and everyone was moving on, much like today.

Rifts was much cooler than D&D, and it still is. Rifts is the final boss of role-playing games.

The 90s were the last best decade of RPGs. The 16-bit consoles were battling for living room supremacy, and we still had VHS tapes and VCRs, CD-ROM music, with the DVD appearing at the decade's end. The Internet was AOL and CompuServe, while computers were Intel 486s hooked to dot-matrix printers.

This was the decade gaming became a powerhouse and cultural influence.

Tabletop roleplaying was dying, but this was one of the best eras to be a gamer in. We had the best versions of every classic game, and others like Champions 4th Edition and GURPS 3rd Edition kept the dream alive. Rolemaster was hot. By the time we get to the year 2000, TSR is bankrupt, Wizards releases D&D 3.0, which is not compatible with AD&D and turns characters into powergaming builds, and we have been on that road ever since. GURPS would go to the 4th Edition, Champions would see two more editions, but the Palladium games are wonderful time capsules looking back into that era.

People complain about the rules, but the rules are not why we play these games. I could roleplay using a ham sandwich for the game's rules. Today, the rules are far too important to the game, and people feel that their enjoyment of a game directly depends on the novelty and powergaming present in the rules. Every level has to "give me something," and I need a lot of choices on my character sheet. I need my build. I need my combos. I need my power synergization.

Here's the problem: the more choices you have, the fewer choices you have.

There will always be an optimal sequence of attacks and best powers in these games, where they could give you 20 choices, but really, you only use one or two every turn.

In contrast, my AD&D 2nd Edition (For Gold & Glory these days) bard did not have spells at level one, and it took three turns to get their combat song going. They had a d6 hit die and could fire a bow as a support class, or swing a shortword in chainmail, but leather armor was the better way to go for encumbrance and a lower STR. They were not front-line fighters. They did not have a complete set of rogue powers. I had to be creative and use my mind to make that class work.

I had more fun with that bard than I had with any bard in D&D 3.5E, Pathfinder, 4E, or 5E. The bard got worse over the years, and it just keeps going downhill. The more powers they pile on the class, the more I have no clue what the heck the 5E version is supposed to be. It isn't even about performances or music anymore; it is just a do-it-all caster class with light melee and a variety of rules tricks.

In contrast, Palladium Fantasy splits the bard into a collection of entertainer OCCs, such as acrobat, actor, bard (spoken word), minstrel (music), stage magician, and juggler/knife thrower. None of them has magic, but these feel better and more focused to me. 

"They are also alter-egos requiring a greater degree of role-playing to be most effective. This will challenge some, and tum off others . It' s up to both Game Master and the players to make their own choices. Just give it your best shot and enjoy." - Adventures on the High Seas, p14.

Are they as powerful as casters and other pure adventuring classes? No, nothing in this game is built on the same power level, but we can make conscious choices to play OCCs that are a challenge, and find ways for them to excel at what they do. Palladium Fantasy's classes are not balanced against each other in all areas! Some are far better at magic and combat than others. Some are highly skill-based, such as entertainers, and will require role-playing and creative use of skills to be effective.

In all Palladium games, the best class at something will be the best class to do it. The game will not go out of its way to artificially balance other classes against it, or sprinkle in options and buffs to keep all choices on the same power level.

The best option to play a 5E-like bard in Palladium Fantasy? Create a music-based superhero in Heroes Unlimited and drop them into the fantasy world. This will work, give you a complete choice of powers, and be 100% compatible. This will also be a lot of fun to play, and will work for many of the "fantasy superhero" character types if you want to go this way.

"Fantasy Heroes 

This is an option similar to the Medieval Heroes setting mentioned previously, but instead of being set within a historical Earth time frame, it is set in a world of fantasy, magic, and legend, such as the one presented in The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, 2nd Edition . In this setting, dragons and magic are very real and the characters mesh easily into it with their super powers, psionics, and other strange abilities. The G.M. can make super abilities available to all inhabitants of this world, or have the player characters belong to one particular race or class of people that demonstrates these powers." 

- Heroes Unlimited GM Guide, page 70.

And Heroes Unlimited allows for superhero fantasy games? Well, there you go. This book even mentions giving paladins light blast and karmic powers, and these powers aren't artificially limited by stamina or energy systems, so you can light-blast away and smile as you are divine enough to resist anything thrown your way. This sounds a lot like what they tried and failed to do in D&D 4E, and it sounds a lot more fun here.

Create a fantasy superheroes world, give it a He-Man sounding name like Grimrune, have everyone create a random fantasy superhero, steal monsters from Palladium Fantasy, and play! Make sure to place this world on the SDC or MDC ley lines so you can fold it into the megaverse later.

Similarly, some of my Ninjas & Superspies characters feel more compelling to play than any modern spy game characters I can create today. Sure, everyone is stuck in 1985, but to be honest, who would not want to be stuck in 1985? This was the peak of the 1980s. Any character designed with these rules was a nightmare to get started, but in play, they were easy and straightforward. Once you have been through the system a few times, you know how it went.

For us, the 1980s were Aftermath, Car Wars, Star Frontiers, Space Opera, and a few other games.

In the 1990s, AD&D 2nd Edition got us back into fantasy. Rifts captured my science fiction imagination. Vampire did the dark and brooding. Battletech was in here, too, along with Warhammer. While everyone wants to wax nostalgically about the 1980s, the 1990s were the golden years of roleplaying for us, and all the best games came out during this time, along with the highly evolved editions of our favorites.

In the mid-1990s, we watched our hobby shops shrink their role-playing sections in favor of table space for Magic: The Gathering. The owners of stores we talked to said nobody was buying these games anymore, and they had to shrink shelf space to fit in a few more tables, and the profit margins were far better for the cards. This was the beginning of the end of TSR and most of the hobby, and even today, the card side of the hobby is still far larger than the D&D side.

You could make the argument that buying D&D was a waste of time and money for Wizards, and they could have been far more dominant and larger had they kept their focus on the card games and other transformative gaming experiences. This is what they did well, and version after version of Wizards D&D shows they have not cracked the code, nor made it a profit-maker.

Even today, Magic thrives while D&D struggles and takes too much support to run a game, with VTTs, character creation tools, versioned books, and a DM, and hours of prep time needed to run each game. The Sigil VTT was a colossal waste and highlighted the massive amount of support D&D needs to "run one game" correctly. A card game? No prep, no DM, no setup, just a table and a deck. The games play fast, and you are onto the next. Everyone needs cards, so the profits are far higher.

Where card games are like airplanes and can land anywhere there is an airport, tabletop role-playing games are trains that need rails and infrastructure all the way to their destination.

Wizards supporting D&D is like Apple supporting old computer hardware, like dot-matrix printers. If the goal is "playing a game around a table," then eliminate the barriers to play and maximize profits. Let the OSR handle D&D, and move on to games that support fast play with minimal support needed. I am not against tabletop roleplaying, Wizards, or D&D; I recognize the model is all wrong for what the company wants the thing to do.

D&D will never be a billion-dollar brand since it requires too much support to get playing. What Wizards bought was expectations, and those consumer expectations are holding them back. They feel like the American car company in the 1970s, shipping gas-guzzling cars with fins and wood paneling. The trouble is, this is what their fans expect, and they are stuck trying to please them when the OSR does a far better job for far less money and support.

With Wizard's "brand" in quick-playing, no-DM-needed, fast, fun, player-on-player experiences. All you need is a table to play. In comparison, the D&D brand needs a few tons of scaffolding and days of preparation to get started.

Yes, they have been at it for 25 years, but D&D never fit the successful mold of what they do best.

And here we are in the age of smartphones and tablets, and transformative experiences abound in the mobile market. Even AR games and other technologies can innovate without needing to support the D&D model, which clearly drags these new ideas down, since people expect the traditional support model for the game.

In an alternate universe where Wizards never made the vanity D&D acquisition, where would Wizards be with this 25 years? They would have replaced D&D with a stronger, card-based, zero-prep game that defined fantasy gaming. You are beginning to see those types of designs in Daggerheart, but that still isn't a design that scales as well as an actual card game.

The 1990s were a strange time, marked by a seismic shift in gaming.

And a moment when gaming got trapped by nostalgia and never really moved on.

I am moving my Palladium SDC books to a most-played shelf tonight and getting them out to enjoy. This is one of the last, great, original role-playing games of the 1990s (and early 2000s), and it is still going strong today. They have new books coming out, a reprinting of the classic TNMT game, and new books in the pipeline for Rifts and a few of their other series.

Some games go so well together, not played, but played alongside each other. If I am back playing Second Edition with For Gold & Glory, then the Palladium SDC games are another potent dose of 1990s nostalgia and an excellent gam in their own right. They are an acquired taste, but thoroughly amazing and well put together.

The Palladium games are my guilty pleasure, and while people may call them disorganized and broken, they are every bit as good as any music or pop culture that came from the 1990s. They bring me back to those days, and that is all I need them to do.