Palladium Revamped

 What is Says on the Tin.

Amazingly, people will disagree, but the Palladium game engine is a hot mess. They make excellent settings - credit where it's due, but the game engine itself is the second worst rip I've ever seen of a D&D engine - the worst reserved for the one that's a rip of D&D and Palladium. A big part of it though, is how it waffles between being a d% system and a d20 system.  So, let's break this down.

1. Skills
Skills need to stop being a d% system. First and foremost, make it an additive system that provides a strict + to a d20 skill check (why? Because combat runs on a d20 skill check, that's why. Keep it uniform). The fact all skills go up as you level is fine - we liked Star Wars Saga, and had pushed for that when Pathfinder was discussing 1e. So, here's how we'd do it.

Your OCC / RCC / MOC gives a list of skills. You pick which ones are tagged. All skills from your OCC/RCC/MOC go up +1/2 every level, and your tagged skills go up +1 per level. Each skill is keyed to an attribute - not hard and fast, but sort of as a 'baseline'.

2. Attributes
The chosen list is fine. The dice rolls for it are fine. The bonuses for it are not, they're all over the place.  Some are % checks, some are +s, and that makes it all sorts of weird. Set them to fixed +s.  You want to do an action, have the player roll 1d20+Attribute+Skill vs a DC. Yes, this is what 3.5, Pathfinder, and D&D 5e do. It isn't a bad system.  It's simple and elegant and everyone groks how it works.

While you're at it, add social skills to the list of skills, and move the reaction %s from the attributes over to Skills, so they're all in one place.  Again, simplify.

3. OCC/RCC/MOC
This is the big one.
First and foremost, any attribute requirements that would go into these get thrown out the window. Secondly, separate race from class, because good lords that gets to be annoying. If you want to go 'you need to be this race to play this class', then sure, go for that, but to say that the race can only play these classes and no other is a horrible game mechanic. Why can't some Glitterboy Pilot be rescued by Dee Bees and before he retires teaches their kid how to pilot the damn thing?

This was even worse in Nightspawn (I refuse to call it Nightbane). Your character had a few racial classes, and couldn't take any human based class, even though they'd been human for a solid chunk of years.  Ditch the idea of RCC. Let the player pick their race, then their class, like a normal person would.

4. Balance
Here's the thing for the people complaining about Rifts a lot.  No, the classes and races don't need to be balanced.  At all.  This is, in fact, something I won't say they got wrong. Does one character have MDC skin and another need power armour to compete?  So be it.  I've no beef with that. If it fits the setting, I'm not going to be the one to complain about lopsided game balance. However...

5. MDC / SDC
I don't hate MDC. It's clunky and needs fixing, certainly, but it's not horrible. What it does need, however, is scaling.  If you're getting weapons which do 2d6 x 10 MDC or 2d6 x 100 MDC, your scaling needs work.

Hit Points and SDC being separate?  Good.  One's ablative, the other's critical.
Hit Points and MDC being merged?  Bad.  Keep the two separate.

Break SDC/MDC down.

SDC:  Standard Damage Capacity.  1:1
Personal    5:1, High Tech Armour / Power Suits
Armour    10:1, Power Armour / Glitterboy.
Vehicle    50:1, Tanks, APCs, other Ground Vehicles.
Mecha    100:1, Veritech, Destroids, kaiju-busters.
Ship       500:1, Large-Scale Ships. Aircraft Carriers, Battleships, etc.
Capital    1000:1, Corvette / Capital class Starships.  SDF-1 from Robotech.
Station    5000:1, Space Stations, the Death Star, the Borg Cube, etc.

Why such a scale?  Because if you've got an HMG, you can put holes in a vehicle. Not easy, but possible.  This idea that you can't hurt a tank (or APC) with human-scale weapons is ... wrong. It isn't easy, but possible.  So, shift vehicles down from MDC by about half way, and put power up to about double human scale, and you've got a nice, medium ground where you can have a clash between the two.  Then your tanks and such can do a bit of damage to mecha, and while mecha still own, but aren't ripping apart the Starship Enterprise anytime soon.

Funny enough, another game a long time ago had to deal with big numbers. Interstellar Elite Combat.  Rather than doing things like this, you literally had:  hit points:  125k.  And you had some weapons do damage like "1d6 squared x 10" or something odd like that.  Yep, you needed a calculator to figure out damage.