Many role-playing games fall into the trap of deciding what you will do with them. D&D is one of these games, where the entire experience should be played one way. The equipment list is engineered for dungeon crawling; all abilities are focused on dungeon crawling; all classes are rigged to dungeon crawl; all spells are crafted for dungeon crawling; the experience system is built to reward dungeon crawling; and the monsters are even perfectly designed for the dungeon crawl.
As a result, the game feels perfect for dungeon crawling.
But little else.
There was a time when game designers considered the world first, designing systems that encompassed the entirety of a realistic, dynamic world, with no thought of it being a game, and began the design from there. Palladium is one of those games, and its default ability to simulate an entire world in its lingua franca is why we love it. While it can be dungeon crawling, and Palladium can simulate that activity inside this world, the game as a whole does so much more.
Can D&D be used to simulate a medieval jousting tournament? It needs some help, and a set of rules must be written to cover the activity, along with supporting subclasses, feats, and action types to use during the game. D&D needs to design the experience to be fun, to create a minigame around it to feel compelling, to turn the jousting tournament into a rules-supported activity, adding a few hundred more pages to the rules, and creating a fake framework around the microcosm as if it were somehow equal in importance and rules support to dungeon crawling.
D&D is designed around gamification, much like a mobile phone game would include a fishing minigame. You see this gamification in many third-party products, too, where they dive into an autistic level of depth on a sub-activity, trying to elevate it to the level of gamification as dungeoning, and further putting a heavy load on what gamemasters and players are supposed to be able to synthesize as rules and comprehend at the table.
The company will inevitably design an entire book around jousting, the tournament, create a whole series of adventures, and provide rules support for everything from jousting, archery, axe throwing, log rolling, apple pie eating, jesters, and every other festival and carnival activity. All of these will find their way into the character designers and become digital purchases that everyone has to have, but no one needs.
D&D and modern designs always die under their own weight. Thousands of pages of rules, shelves full of books to buy, and the edition just gets so obese and heavy that no one in their right mind can play the system anymore.
Palladium Fantasy handles jousting with just the core book. You don't really need much more than that, and any related carnival activities are simply skill rolls or the referee issuing a ruling on how it should be handled. If this sounds very OSR to you, that is precisely how Palladium games handle everything, and the designs are set up to support rulings over rules. The game gives you plenty of tools to make it happen, and the skill system is the heart of the game.
Want to excel at jousting? Be a knight. Want to be the life of the party? Be a bard or troubador. Want to rub noses with the local movers and shakers? Play a noble. Want to excel at the archery contest? Play a longbowman. Want to be rich? Play a thief and pick the pockets of unsuspecting people, as that wealthy lord holding the turkey leg does not need all of those gold coins in that pouch, now does he?
Some of these classes will be liabilities inside a dungeon, for sure, like the noble, bard, or even the troubador. There are more social classes, designed to better simulate the profession and how it interacts with the world, not a dungeon. The bard in D&D is not a bard anymore; it is this strange abomination useful in dungeon halls, but strangely inadequate everywhere else as the role it professes to be. When is a bard not a bard? The same thing happened to the ranger in the 2024 edition: all their wilderness skills disappeared, and were replaced by more dungeon-focused abilities.
D&D's classes are victims of dungeonification.
Before I go on, I will admit that Rifts is a huge game, but not all of it is needed to play, either. At most, you are using the core book plus a small handful of expansions focused on your interests. While this is possible in D&D, too, many of the books start to bleed in subclass options, and those are included in the character designers, so even if you don't want that subclass from Ravenloft, it will find a way in through D&D Beyond or a character designer somewhere.
Palladium games and their campaigns always model themselves around this core book plus a subset of expansions, and you only pull in what you need for your game. Most of it can be ignored and has nothing to do with the type of game you are running, and could be helpful in a future campaign, so not all of the books you pull in will be used, and most of what is in them can be ignored, for the most part.
But, with Palladium games, the default experience centers on the character, who they are and what they do, and that gamification revolves around the occupation of the character. The occupation comes first, not the dungeon. This is why the magic systems in the game are so wildly divergent, and how some of them are utterly unsuited for dungeon crawling, and even some of the combat and other classes are more of a liability in a dungeon than they are an asset.
But playing a witch or summoner in domain play, as an asset to a local lord or other ruler? Your occupation will outshine the dungeon-crawling professions and provide a unique and never-before-seen experience inside a role-playing game. Even the bard and troubador will outshine the knight and longbowman in social settings. In more intrigue-focused campaigns, these characters will be indispensable and pull far more of their weight than a combat-focused class or caster.
They were designed with a complete worldview first, not the confines of dungeon halls.
As a result, it feels more difficult in Palladium systems to "know what you are supposed to be doing." This is why those who understand the game seemingly love it far more than anyone can really understand or comprehend. Why love a game that seems disjointed, poorly organized, and written in a seemingly random manner? The answer lies in the game being more of a world simulation than a dungeon simulation. We know the secret. We understand how this game simulates an entire world, not just the minuscule fraction of a percent that is a place we call a dungeon or adventure location.
If you come into Palladium expecting a world-class dungeon-crawling game, you will likely be disappointed. However, there is a perfect subset of classes to play that will provide you with a complete and rich experience in that area. Palladium does dungeon crawling as well as any OSR game, but then again, it does so much more.
You need to play and understand the system to find the secrets of the classes that do well in dungeons, as not every choice will be the best one, and the game does not hold your hand.
People who complain about there being "trap classes" in Palladium are approaching the game with the blinders of seeing the game as a dungeon-first experience. Those "trap classes" excel in areas outside of the dungeon, and all of them have been playtested and enjoyed for years by the designers of the game and their groups.
As a result, when running the game, you need a better idea of "what the focus of the game will be" before you even begin. There is no "default style of play" that involves a dungeon and crawling through it, and in fact, the Shadowdark game does a far better job at providing the best dungeon crawl than D&D does, since it understands the play of the game and drills down on the experience.
If all I want is dungeon crawling, I will pick up Shadowdark and never look at D&D. Too much of what is in D&D currently will waste my time and distract players from what we all came here to play. If dungeon-crawling is what we all love, let's play the game that gives us the purest form of the experience.
This is also why Shadowdark gets weaker when you add too many options; the core book is tightly focused, and the classes in there are the best at what the game tries to do. If you begin watering the game down, the experience gets muddled and doesn't deliver as well as it did when you first played. Trying to turn Shadowdark into D&D is probably why most Shadowdark games fail.
But if I want a game that can handle a complete world? I will choose Palladium games over D&D or 5E-based ones, since the artificial design assumptions turn every challenge and situation into a dungeon, forcing you into that way of thinking, and designing every spell and ability for balanced dungeon play in small corridors and rooms that rarely are larger than 40-feet square.
D&D is still that dungeon-focused game that Shadowdark focuses on like a laser, but it pretends it is everything else, too. The bards and troubadors in Palladium are far more skilled and capable at handling social situations than the bard in D&D, since the D&D bard is designed for a dungeon, with lip service paid to anything existing outside the corridors. The spells, abilities, and focus of the D&D bard are dungeon-first, social later.
To have a successful Palladium game, you will need to figure out what the game will be about first. Will it be dungeon crawling and combat? Will it be more intriguing and social? Will the game focus on a specific activity, like supporting a merchant building trading routes and markets? Will the game focus on nobles, politics, and matters of land and fealty? Will the game focus on magic? Will it be more warfighting between kingdoms or slaying monsters in the borderlands? What will the characters be doing during the game?
You need to know before you begin play in Palladium.
But once you do, the game will deliver a better experience than most other fantasy games, since the classes and choices will far better support what you are trying to do with the game.
