dreicunan wrote:Colonel_Tetsuya wrote:Kev's ego is... legendary. I've experienced it once myself (had a spirited ... discussion once at GenCon),
Would you mind sharing the details of that discussion? You've piqued my curiosity.
It wsn't super exciting or anything. Just two nerds getting passionate about a subject, but lets say Kev's ....
he doesn't take it well when flaws in his work are pointed out to him. This particular discussion was about the need for a cleaned up and simplified edition of Palladium's rules (and was a number of years back; this was before i really sat down and deeply examined the terrible flaws in the Rifts setting, as well, im sure THAT conversation would have been interesting).
His answer to any criticism of the rules (particularly given how utterly unplayable they are if you try to play them RAW) is to just "change what you want" - and i couldnt for the life of me get him to understand that while that was often the way of the 80s and 90s, thats not acceptable in a modern game. He also basically had no answer/rebuttal for the fact that he basically never plays his own system as when he runs games it doesn't resemble the published works at all, and didn't see that as an issue.
People dont want unworking rules, they want a polished (or at least working and internally consistent) system. It was similar to talking to a brick wall. The concept just didn't even penetrate. "Well they can just change it" or some variation was repeated .. lots. (And before anyone argues that Palladium's system "works" - does anyone here believe that? As written? I think we all know better; as a different but related example, though, head over to say, Paizo's forum. There are no 40 page threads about Boxing and whether the attack applies to all attacks or not. Pathfinder might be pure cheese-covered ROLLplaying munchkin-bait, but its internally consistent and clear).
I gave up after about 10 minutes and we moved on to other topics for a few minutes before i drifted off to elsewhere. Ive had other conversations with him (run into him at 4-5 other conventions) but none were more than 10-ish minutes and none got nearly as heated/passionate as that one.
As much criticism as i give Kevin and his business and personal (writing) practices, i dont hate the guy, and i dont want to make it seem like he's some evil overlord. He's not. Hes just.. behind the times. He's passionate as all hell, and he's not a bad guy to sit down and have a beer with. But id never want to work for him without some pretty strict ground rules - like a lot of creatives (hell, even me) he's got a firm idea of what he thinks is good/working/His Thing and if you dont agree
you're wrong. - Unless you're one of the few people that they can just click with and work with (Like Eric W).
Ive met CJ a few times, too, and heard a few of the ... i wont call them horror stories, because they aren't that, but Kevin's biggest enemy when it comes to other writers is.. Kevin. Just look at the number of people that have produced some REALLY good books for Palladium - all of whom are now long gone with acrimonious departures.
There's a saying (ill paraphrase to remove the profanity) -
If you run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk. If you run into jerks all day, YOU'RE the jerk.
It applies here.
The issue isn't that all of these people were bad or somehow failed... the only common thread is Kevin.
But, again, i dont want to take that into a diatribe and say Kevin's a bad person for it or anything. He's created something none of us have (most of us, at least, and a few of us may write RPG material semi-professionally but have nothing on the scale of Palladium under our belts) - he's just.. hard to work with. Its not uncommon.
Hes created something we all love, or that inspired us, or continues to inspire us to be fans even though we aren't happy (in a lot of cases) with the state of the game.
Its why i stick around despite the .... issues with the Website staff.... and try to help (including going so far as to work on said revamp of the rules and, when it is finished (i wont even try to put a date on it, summertime is so busy for all my other gigs..), i intend to offer it to Kevin for nothing more than authors credit. 99% chance he wont even look at it and/or will turn it down, but ill offer it all the same.
Because id really like to see Palladium go through a resurgence. (Even if i have absolutely nothing to do with it) I dont want Kevin having to go paycheck to paycheck from Social Security when he retires - i think he deserves better.
Well, that wandered.
Ill stand by my statements, though:
Most of the "difference in vision" between the two was Kevin's ego/control issues getting in the way, as if you examine most of CJs work, other than Phase World (which is an entirely different setting) and South America 2, its pretty well in-line with what Kevin was doing at the time.
SA1 is a lot like North America. Big wilderness, a few large kingdoms, a lot of small ones. Lots of fill-it-in-yourself.
Underseas is pretty vanilla-sauce, as it goes (introduced some sea-going enemies that stuck around) - New Navy is nothing special (their gear is strictly average, even for at the time, which didn't make sense because it was supposed to be Pre-Rifts stuff which we've been told this entire time is way better), Tritonia, same thing... sea-creature PCs (Dolphins, etc) were weird but workable and certainly not out of place with Rifts at the time.
Mercenaries doesn't add much to power creep OR change the setting of NA at all, really. Its got a lot of useful gear in it, and some great NPCs (that was really CJs strong suit, IMO - interesting pro and antagonist NPCs, over-arching stories). The Naruni Enterprises stuff isn't actually all that powerful compared to other stuff (the NE-10 isn't any better than an NG-P7, and could be considered worse since you need special ammo for it) and the drawback (you get shot on sight by the CS and the ammo is hard to find) makes up for it.
Phase World & Sourcebook we can safely ignore as they are dimension books and it is entirely appropriate for the setting to feel different.
His contributions to Japan were fairly limited (and that book was AWFUL).
Pantheons was... a pretty good book, really. Ive never seen the needs for stats for things like Gods and all that, but as a collection of such, its perfectly playable and not really all that out of line, and the Demi-God and Godling aren't really all that OP as long as you pair them with the correct campaign power level. Demi-God really isnt that powerful at all, actually, depending on the power chosen (you might just be really strong and be an MDC creature, which you could get by being... like a dozen other races too).
Juicer Uprising is probably one of THE best books put out for Rifts - ever. While it is also the most "problematic" in terms of "Power Creep" of all of CJs work (JA-12, some of the other weapons and armor in this book are quite a bit tougher than stuff in print for NA at the time, though VERY shortly after CWC and New West leveled the playing field - close enough, in fact, that those books were almost assuredly in deep production or already complete when JU was released) it has some of the best fluff/RP-assisting lore ever released for the Rifts setting.
Before reading that book i could never imagine wanting to play a Juicer, could never get my head around even playing a character that had basically comitted suicide - but that book was EXTREMELY well written and included a TON of background on how to get into the head of a Juicer and the new Juicer variants were all pretty solid and not really overpowered. (And it introduced a Juicer type that allowed a player not to be forced into retiring their character after a year or two of gaming sessions - the Dragon Blood Drinker - if the GM was OK with it). And it certainly re-enforced the 'mad max" feel of Rifts Earth NA that was part of Kev's original inspiration.
But in terms of power creep? I think its misattributed in a lot of cases. It was just happening naturally. A lot of the worst early examples of "power creep" were 100% Kevin.
Im loving the Foes list; it's the only thing keeping me from tearing out my eyes from the dumb.
