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House Rules The following house rules have been instituted in my games. The system is good but often someone too bloodthirsty can go through a party because of some bad die rolls. And that is funny for no one in the short term. Villains and PCs both get the benefit of those rules. 1 Rule In combat rolling a 1 on an attack, parry or dodge roll means the attacker looses all remaining action for the round, only allowing him to Roll with Punch or Impact. WHEN one fumbles is important since it can be life-threatening (start of round) or just annoying (end of the round). 2 to 4 Rule In combat rolling a 2-4 on an attack roll means the attacker missed his attack, no matter how much bonus he has. Command Command Score (CS) is a skill used to give command to NPCs and see how well they react to the order. CS is based by adding MA, ME, PS & PB plus level. Medals and other honors can increase or decrease a PC's CS. Campaign medals usually grant a 2-5% bonus. CS is extremely volatile and some NPCs can have DM-appointed penalties. For example, when Capt "Psycho" Pat ordered the massacre in Lagos, his CS increased with the Giovanni and Zentraedi but dropped with UN Spacy. Mecha Hand to Hand Over the course of many games, we have come to find that mecha hand-to-hand was not exactly exciting. To that end we instituted the following rule. After many playtest, we found that this accurately represented damage done by a mecha (so a Monster would usually crush most lightly armored vehicles. It also meant that mecha engaging in hand to hand could inflict damage similar to some range weapons. Oddly enough, the net effect of this was to allow us to create a series of melee oriented mecha and have those perform extremely well. Try running a Mecha Su-Dai (Return of the Masters) fight with those rules and people are going down.
*: Zentraedi also benefitted from these modifiers up to x5. It also made tree-armed zentraedi real menaces. To find out what the damage is, find the original weapon's damage in one of the books (Palladium Fantasy is great for that!), then apply the multiplier to the total damage. The "Zent-tree" raiders would indeed terrorize lightly defended settlements and even threaten sectors when in very large numbers. Missile charts The missile chart of Rifts' Coalition War Campaign is to be used for all missiles. This makes a mecha like Macross II's spartan an absolute terror on the field and a primary target. Parrying Blasts and Missiles You will notice that many of the new mecha on this site have shields or forearm shields. There is a good reason. The Southern Cross RPG allowed Mecha to use their shield to parry. One day someone who was about to get shot down asked "I want to put my arms in front of my mech to defend myself." Reasonable request. After much thought, it was decided that the PC could do it, but that all damage would be taken by his arms, to which he agreed. From that point on parrying blasts, shots and missile became a common occurence. This led to a number of interesting and very "manga-esque" situation where the PCs returned home with an arm missing. Shooting Incoming Missiles In Macross II, Marduk forces have more missiles than they know what to do with. The Tactical battle pods has a payload of about 50. Effectively it can shoot down one PC per round. This led to a number of interesting and very "manga-esque" situation where the PCs would try to destroy ship-to-ship missile volleys.
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