::: spoiler There are probably as many takes on this as there are Palladium gamers, but here's mine (spoiler):

Palladium's rules discourage the types of ~~problem-solving~~ conflict resolution that games like D&D require, but they do so (and this is important) without explicitly saying so.

There are plenty of alternative systems that go out of their way to de-emphasize the things that make D&D what it is. Some of them are even fun, worthy games in the niche they represent. But many of them (especially the more fashionable ones) are extremely preachy about it. By contrast, Palladium presents itself in very much the same way as D&D (you play heroes who fight bad guys, etc.) while using different game mechanics.

Most of the hate Palladium gets from RPG reviewers online arises from this. The reviewers who are into min-max-crunch can't understand why Palladium hasn't streamlined its combat rules, balanced its classes, and otherwise tried to do everything that D&D has tried to do with its endless revisions. The reviewers who like fluff want to be preached at about "immersive storytelling" (and, though they'd be loathe to admit it, how playing that game instead of D&D will get them laid). Because Palladium fails to give either side what they want, it gets smeared as slow and clunky by min-max-crunch nerds, and as neck-beardy and cringe-inducing by vampire-fetish drama geeks.

To really get what sets Palladium apart, in my opinion, requires looking at the table for rewarding experience. Most of what's on there is about making plans, solving problems, and putting others before yourself. There's even an explicit reward for "Avoiding unnecessary violence."

By itself, that's not that unusual; lots of games (other than D&D) emphasize non-violence. The real difference is in Palladium's treatment of the very thing that those experience rules discourage, dedicating a massive portion of its rules to an extremely fine-grained bullet-time treatment of combat. Min-max-crunch nerds hate this, and the Palladium system by extension, because it makes combat less fun. Vampire-fetish drama geeks hate it because it doesn't provide detailed systems for the non-combat things they want to focus on.

But that is exactly the point. Combat is meant to be less fun than sneaking around, using wits and skills, and solving problems in less-obvious ways than kicking in the door. That being said, combat remains the focus of the mechanical rules, because to shift focus off violence would not only be counter-productively preachy, it would also encourage a min-max mindset with regard to whatever the rules shifted to emphasize instead.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the pre-2000 Megaverse, which can no longer be supported by Palladium Books because it included the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Mutants in Orbit is the only RIFTS book that still references TMNT and hasn't been updated, so it makes a certain amount of sense to say that orbit is the only canon place where the Megaverse retains a connection to Turtle Prime's future. This is convenient because the other big license Palladium can no longer support (Robotech) also has a lot going on there; the debris field from the Ghost Ship adventure works well as The Graveyard from Mutants in Orbit, and the destruction of Dolza's fleet by the SDF-1 could have created all sorts of dimensional havoc in Earth orbit.

Anyway, if you’ve played any of these old games or are interested in learning about them, drop a simple post here.

Palladium Books formally announced the loss of the licensing rights to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in issue 9 of The Rifter and had to sell off or destroy their entire stock of Ninja Turtles book by the end of that year. Nine years later, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle "canon" was solidified by the TV Movie Turtles Forever, which establishes that the universe of the gritty black-and-white original comics (which is part of, or at least very close to, the Palladium Megaverse as it existed through 1999) is "Turtle Prime," a sort of hub from which extends an entire Turtle-verse,** containing ALL iterations of TMNT.

Back in 2000, Palladium published the first major update (as opposed to expansion) of RIFTS earth, the Seige on Tolkeen series, changing the aesthetics and landscape detailed in the original core book considerably. In 2005, they published RIFTS Ulitmate Edition, and eventually republished the early RIFTS books to expunge any mention of TMNT.

So is Turtle Prime still connected to the Megaverse? Most of the RIFTS books that mentioned TMNT have been republished, but the one exception I know of is Mutants in Orbit, which details near outer space for both the After the Bomb universe (the canon future of Palladium TMNT aka Turtle Prime), and the RIFTS universe before Tolkeen's destruction.

** If this sounds familiar, it's because Marvel totally ripped off the idea for Into the Spiderverse. But that is perhaps fitting, as Spiderman-adjacent comics (Daredevil specifically) spawned the entire Marvel "Iron Age" that TMNT was developed for in the first place, and was rejected from as "too weird." Because they went out on their own, they developed and licensed their own original RPG to get added distribution in hobby stores. That, in turn, gave them the nerdy "street cred" that made TMNT seem edgy and cool to little kids, and that popularity turned TMNT into the entertainment juggernaut it remains to this day.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the current no-ninja-turtles-allowed version of After the Bomb, Splicers, Rifts: Chaos Earth and/or Systems Failure. Each of these games involves some sort of end-of-the-world scenario that can't be part of RIFTS for some reason.

If you’ve played any of those games or are interested in learning about them, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the current version of Palladium Fantasy, which is both a game and a setting in the same vein as "normal" D&D.

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the current version of Heroes Unlimited, Palladium's four-color-comic-book-superhero game.

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

RIFTS? Never heard of it...

(Just kidding. Sound off here with a post if RIFTS is your jam, you filthy casuals...)

For those who don't know, RIFTS was the game that was such a hit in the 90's that it kept Palladium on life support for the next twenty-five D&D-dominated years, and was even optioned for a movie (and then discarded into development hell as a cashed-in bargaining chip in their strategy to get a better price for the rights to the Transformers franchise. But still, a Hollywood movie! That's never worked out horribly for the RPG in the past except for every single other time it's happened...)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in Dead Reign, Palladium's unique take on the zombie apocalypse.

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in Mystic China, Ninjas & Superspies, and Beyond the Supernatural. I'm not creating threads for the latter two games because Mystic China is an RPG masterpiece that no fan of the Megaverse should remain unfamiliar with.

If you’ve played any of those games or are interested in learning about them, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in Amber Diceless, which was the creation of a long-time Palladium Books contributor, the late, great Erick Wujcik. Although it does not use the Palladium rules, its nature and theme are highly germaine to the Megaverse concept, and can be run seamlessly over the top of just about any TTRPG.

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the The Primal Order, the first printing of which included rules that Palladium Books claimed it owned in a lawsuit back in the 90's.**

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

It looked like this:

** inadvertently leading to the creation of a hobby gaming company so rich that, when the publisher of the world's largest TTRPG went out of business about a decade later, they simply bought it, hired top talent to revise it, and published it under an intentionally perpetual and non-deauthorizable Open Gaming License so that anybody who had a mind to could publish material for it, FOREVER. Today, just about everybody plays or has played that game or one of its offshoots, and only a few grognards even remember Palladium.

Back in the day (and even now), Palladium Books was known in the industry as a difficult company. In particular, they had a reputation for being extremely litigious and protective of their copyrights. On one occasion, they sued a then-obscure game publisher for The Primal Order, a neat little roleplaying game about gods and religions that included conversion rules for Palladium's own game system. Despite the fact that game rules are not, in fact, subject to copyright at all, the expensive settlement of this lawsuit nearly forced that publisher into bankruptcy, forcing its owner to switch his efforts into putting out a new game that could make lots and lots of money. Palladium won the battle and received its pound of flesh, but the publisher, owner, and new game were Wizards of the Coast, Peter Adkison, and Magic: The Gathering. The rest, as they say, is (obscure) history (for nerds).

So why Krugatch? The Krugatch are a made-up faction of alien-lovers, splintered from the Invid-beaten remnants of the made-up EBSIS communist super-state, in a game based on an anime that had nothing to do with Macross but got squashed together with it to create Robotech, an intellectual property that Palladium is no longer allowed to publish. Does Palladium Books "own" Krugatch? Capitalist boot-lickers would say "yes, of course, intellectual property, blah blah blah."

But this is the Federated frontier; out here, Krugatch has no owner.

So this (and future Krugatch threads) are for ribs and rants against Palladium Books from we who still love and play their games anyway, regardless of who has what licensing deal, who's allowed to publish what about which intellectual property, and all that other bourgeois hogwash that gets in the way of creativity and fun.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the Nightspawn, which is still supported by Palladium Books, but is now called Nightbane...

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in later versions of games based on Macross and Robotech, including the Robotech RPG Tactics tactical miniatures game, none of which are any longer supported by Palladium Books.

If you’ve played one of these game or are interested in learning about them, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in the Robotech original game, which is no longer supported by Palladium Books.

If you’ve played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.

This is the sound-off thread for anyone interested in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, which is no longer supported by Palladium Books.

If you've played the game or are interested in learning about it, drop a simple post here.