You know, I've come to realise that no matter how long I live, I will never really get fantasy roleplaying.
The reason for this is TIMING.
I was twelve years old when I bought, read and played my first RPG. It was the classic redbook basic D&D set. And I liked the concept, but there was one small problem - I didn't think it was cool.
I hadn't read Tolkien then. The only fantasy I'd ever encountered was being bored to death by Aslan the Big Preachy Asshole Comes over for Tea and Scones with Lucy and Mr Freaking Tumnus. Later, I would discover the Krynn novels and be blown away by just how much sass you can wring out of one kender, but by then I'd moved on from D&D. The moment was lost.
(Bear with me, this is going somewhere)
If a game was going to make me a roleplayer, it had to be about things I really wanted to be. Without that, you just won't get the buzz. What I needed was a game that encapsulated something that would strike me as the coolest idea in the universe, that was everything I was into but just didn't know it yet. And as fate would have it, the very next game I found was exactly that.
It was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This was before the cartoon hit Australia, of course, and I only saw the actual comics for the first time last year. But being an animal….that was it. That was the coolest idea in the universe. And it changed everything.
What I'm getting at, of course, is that me reviewing TMNT is like the Apostle Paul reviewing Christianity. This game hit me upside the head on the road to Damascus, rewrote all the books and made me a roleplayer for life. It made me the roleplayer I am today; heck it's a big, big chunk of the person I am today and the stories I carry in my head. Every kid who saw Star Wars at thirteen has a little bit of in them forever; for me, it's TMNT.
So. As with my Blue Planet review, what we have here is another giant mountain of salt for you to eat while you read this review. Get cracking.
TMNT is a game (or was, it finally went OOP last year) based on the comic of the same name, created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. It later became a cartoon and then a few live-action movies. I saw all of these. Including the one with Vanilla Ice. I bought the damn soundtracks. See? Big, big mountain of salt. Steve was sad pathetic geek-boy who learnt that TMNT rap song off by heart (and tragically, never forgot it).
For those who don't know, the comic tells the tale of a ninjitsu-trained rat named Splinter who finds four turtles that have been exposed to some toxic goop. Said goop allows them and the rat to mutate into anthropomorphoids, whereupon the rat decides to name the turtles after Renaissance artists and train them to be ninja. Thus, he can use them to act out his vengeance against the Shredder, in one of these typical Japanese sagas of blood and honour you seem to read about nearly every week nowadays. It seems well, pretty silly now, but it all made perfect sense at the time.
Although the game provides stats for the Turtles and many of their enemies from the comic - and heaps of great strips and artwork lifted from the comic, and some drawn especially for the book - this isn't so much a game where you will be playing in their universe. This is a game which allows you to create your own TMNT-style comic, where the second T might be replaced with whatever letter you choose. Like the turtles, you will be shadowy vigilante crime fighters in a world that fears and hates you. Unlike the turtles, you will be mutant lions, tigers, bears and….hamsters. Grrr.
Physically, the book is like most Palladium games - soft cover, two columns, pedestrian typeface, no funky formatting, very dense blocks of information, superb black and white line art. Those of you who aren't John Wick will love it.
The book opens with a short description of roleplaying that was very useful to me at the time. Instead of being vague or abstract, it says "right, there's this psycho batguy, and he's going to kill these two janitors. What do you do?" - learn by doing, you could say. After this, we launch into what every Palladium game is built on - gigantic, highly detailed, and variety-packed chargen rules.
The Palladium character begins with you rolling your eight attriutes - IQ, Mental Affinity (MA - Charisma), Mental Endurance (ME - will power and psychic strength), PS (Physical Strength), PP (Physical Prowess), PE (Physical Endurance), PB (Physical Beauty) and Spd (Speed). These are rolled on 3d6; rolls of 16 or over add a further d6 so that when you're powerful, you're even more powerful. Abilities over 16 give lots of little bonuses to other things, which you have to read off a table. It's no worse than (pre 3rd ed) D&D in this regard, especially since these stats don't change during play, so theoretically, you only need to look at the table during chargen. Of course, you'll have to look at it about ten times during chargen, but after that, you're done.
This approach is true of much of the system really - the chargen is heavily detailed, but after it is done, almost all the information is on your sheet and at your fingertips, if you consider a three-page character sheet "at your finger tips". Get your character done, and you really don't need anything in the book any more. This is because the system, in execution, isn't particularly complex - it's just painfully lacking in a universal mechanic. Actually, it's painfully lacking in a universal anything - it's a bit of a dog's breakfast in there, with different rules for all sorts of things. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Next up in chargen, you roll your animal type, and it is this point that TMNT shines. As I said, Palladium games are built on providing you a STAGGERING amount of character options (and very little else). You play through each class in D&D, or each arcane background in Deadlands, and what else is there to do, you know? I know this doesn't take into account all your fancy ideas about character, but it is still a factor. If it wasn't, why would they keep making all those sourcebooks with new "classes", and new toys for classes?
In Palladium games, you will never run out of options, even just in the main book. That is their one shining gift to the gaming world, something they do better than anybody else.
The table lists over 80 mutant animals to choose from. Now, there's a fair bit of doubling up of stats (a pigeon and a budgie aren't much different), but even with that, there's still a lot of variety here. And of course, there are a lot of cool in-character differences between a pigeon and a budgie. The pigeon's lived a hard life on the street, begging for scraps, while the budgie lived the high life with his fancy ladder and bell and a pretty mirror to smash his face into as many times as he might want.
Of course, balance is a problem here (not with the budgie smashing its face, with the animal tables). When the table has things like lions and tigers on it and you roll hamster, or chicken, you're going to feel a bit hard-done by. The system tries to get around this with a weird but fun "build your own mutant" system based on Biological Energy points (or Bio-E). Every animal type starts with a set amount of Bio-E, and you use these points to buy aspects of your mutation. Looking more like a human costs points - and you have to buy stance, hands, looks and speech separately. Of course, some animals already have say, bipedal stance (like birds), or humanlike hands (like monkeys), so these things cost less for them. You also have to spend Bio-E to get the cool animal abilities you might possess such as natural armour, claws, poison, or the more esoteric stuff.
It was buying this stuff that made TMNT so cool. Having the speed of a cheetah or the scent of a wolf was pretty cool, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. What about being able to turn yourself into a walking smokebomb like a skunk? Or be the ultimate pointy beast of death by being a ninja porcupine? Or subtle things like having the opossum's ability to play dead, or the goat's ability to eat anything? Don't you think a kicking mule would make a cool kung-fu fighter? Wouldn't a monkey's prehensile tail just rock for a cat-burglar?
There's a great Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin is regretfully listing all the things he lacks: "No claws, no fangs, no prehensile tail…sigh..." - it is this childhood desire that this game taps into brilliantly. If you ever felt, as a kid, that you wanted to have the strength of a bear, more than the strength of Superman, then this game has something for you.
The other beauty of this system is that you could never be without a new character concept, because there are just so many animal species out there. Pick one. If it's not in the main book, or the huge number of animal lists they provided in almost every sourcebook, they also provided guidelines for making up the stats yourself. Over the years, with various sourcebooks and cribbing, I made fennecs, koalas, octopi, even insects! I made a coati once, and I still have no idea what a coati is. It really was limitless, and this doesn't even include the countless modifications you can make. In TMNT, you could be just a normal mouse with massive mental powers, or a hummingbird the size of a 747. Show me another game with that much scope, with that much variety, that also manages to specify the effects for every little aspect it covers. I dare you.
Actually, it is because of this that I can never take any game seriously which says "you can be anything you want!". Because if it can't let me be a hummingbird the size of a 747 - AND PROVIDE STATS FOR HOW THAT WOULD WORK - then I'm not impressed. Not impressed at all.
OK, you're probably wondering how you make a hummingbird the size of a 747. See, the other two things you can spend you Bio-E points on are psionic powers and Size Levels. Size Levels range from 1 (mouse) to 20 (Elephant), with humans coming in around 9. Small creatures, you see, have lots of Bio-E, but big creatures have very little or none. If you want to actually get all the cool stuff an elephant has, you have to come down towards human size, or smaller. The system for this is actually very stingy, in that it is extremely difficult to be of a reasonable size, have reasonable human attributes (ie enough to stand and hold a gun) and have enough left for some cool powers. The solution, of course, is to be small - size level 6 (about the size of a big dog) is enough to have no negative modifiers, and so in my games, it became the default.
We walked in darkness, we killed in shadow….we were only four feet tall.
Except, of course, when we were hummingbirds the size of 747s. By the way, in case you haven't noticed, I really like saying 'hummingbirds the size of 747s'. It just gives you this really funky mental image. Anyway.
Like I said, the Bio-E system gave you great flexibility, but in truth, it still didn't solve the balance problem. Crocs just had far more cool stuff than mice, even if they were super psionic mice. Psionic powers were quite powerful however, because they took such a huge bite out of your chargen points. They were probably too powerful, in fact, as once purchased, they could be used whenever you wanted, as many times as you wanted, with only a saving throw having any chance of stopping you. Still, given their cost, it wasn't unreasonable - it just led to messy games, having to account for this much power.
Which is also true for a lot of other things in this game - decent idea, just comes off very messy in play, unless you're prepared to run at a snail's pace.
So we've got our animal and we've spent our Bio-E. Now we come to the other whopping big part of chargen - skills. TMNT determined these through your randomly rolled background, which covered where you came from and why you mutated. You could be either a birth aberration, the result of an accident, or the product of a deliberate experiment. From there, maybe you were a successful experiment and you were fully integrated with humans, or maybe you were a freakish mess and dumped into the streets, or maybe you escaped from your cage with a need for revenge. Backgrounds determined your view of humanity, as well as how much equipment you could pull together, and of course, what sort of skills you were likely to have learned. You could be anything from a Harvard graduate with a PhD and suitcases full of money, to a contract super-assassin gone AWOL, taking some gear with you, or a bestial loner with only the most basic survival skills (but plenty of attribute bonuses to go with it) and only a toothpick to call your own.
And of course, you had at least 30% chance of finding a master who takes you under his wing and teaches you the ways of ninjitsu. There must be millions of these guys out there, I guess, just sitting around, watching Jeopardy, waiting for a group of rag-tag loners needs to be moulded into a hammer of righteous justice. Maybe there's some sort of classified ads section in the paper for this.: "Wizened ninja master seeks single white teenage mutants for training, wisdom and fun times on the couch. Share all bills"
Anyway. Skills use a roll-under percentile system, and are split into "Scholastic" (really professional) and "Secondary" - things you can just "pick up". Scholastic skills were grouped into types, and there were also programs on top of this. For example, a character with a military background might be instructed to take the military program, which would include instructions such as take three skills from the Weapon Proficiency group, and two from the Physical group, and four from the Espionage group, plus Drive Tank (from the Vehicle Skills group). Or whatever. The three layers of variation allowed a fair bit of variety, but anyone with the Medical Doctor program was the same kind of doctor as anyone else with that program. They'd even have the same skill in medicine, assuming they were on the same level.
Yes, TMNT used the D&D model of experience points and increasing levels. I really don't like levels, personally, although that may be because of how much they sucked in TMNT. To this day, I don't even like using experience points. But that's just me and my sick little perversions.
In TMNT, you get XP for plot-moving sort of stuff - saving the innocent, using your skills inventively, taking risks, smacking down relatively hard bad guys (no points for smacking down things weaker than yourself, or generally selfish behaviour - nice touch). Add them all up and if its high enough, you jump a level. The progression was the same D&D exponential curve idea - each level requiring around twice as many points as its precursor.
Now, the annoying thing was, that each skill was defined like this: Starting Skill = X%, y% per level. That's right - every skill started on a different amount, and increased by a different amount per level. Driving a car is easy, but you don't learn a lot doing it, so it would be 90% 3%/lvl, whereas Prowling (their very cool name for move silently/invisibly) you learn well from experience, so it was something like 46% 8%/lvl. Yes, it makes a warped kind of sense. Is said sense worth this kind of annoying, penny-pinching detail? What, are you nuts?
Of course, as well as writing this stuff down, there was all the bonuses to your attributes to record. Physical skills were a haven for the munchkin in this regard. Simply by taking swimming, body building, climbing and running, you'd acquire massively overpowering bonuses to PS, PP, PE and Spd. Fun for the players, a nightmare for the GM. And this doesn't even count the bonuses from fighting skills like Boxing, Wrestling, Fencing and five distinct types of martial arts. The martial arts were even worse because not only did they give a bonus to start off with, they gave you a new and different bonus every level. They did give you some cool abilities as well, like jump kicks and death blows, but it was again, a bugger to GM.
The end result of all this unconstrained maxing is best summed up by the fact that we used to use tally marks on our character sheets while filling them in. Things like bonus to strike, or dodge or various other combat aspects, would get modifiers and addenda coming from attributes, from animal powers, from skills, from martial arts and probably a few other places, so it made a lot more sense just to keep a running tally than to rub out the number each time it went up or down.
Actually, this being a Palladium game, it never went down.
OK. So we've got our animal powers and our skills. We've tallied up our 6 to strike (hand to hand, we use our Weapon Proficiency bonuses to calculate for weapons, so that's a few more figures to calculate separately, one for each weapon), our 3 to Parry and our 11 to Dodge. We then turn over to your standard Palladium equipment section and immediately wet our pants with excitement, as it reads like a page straight from Guns and Ammo. Not only is it bristling with uzis and ingrams and .45s, it has a picture of each gun and a listing of cost, bullets, damage, along with length, weight, design principles and country of origin. Told you it was from Guns and Ammo.
There's no real attempt to balance the weapons, which is realistic I suppose. A machine gun will blow a 6d6 hole in you, a .45 will do 3d6. This sounds like a lot, but it's not. Remember all those bonuses from phsycial skills and animal abilities that we had to tally up? They also have a tendency to add to your SDC - your Structural Damage Capacity, which sits on top of your hitpoints to measure just how damage your body frame can take before it falls apart, at which point you lose hit points as you actually start to die. Objects also have SDC. Players always seemed - judging by how much damage they could take - to have rather a lot more SDC than most objects, including doors, brick walls, bank vaults and bomb shelters. This is a system where two guys can stand ten feet apart and fire sub-machine guns at each other for a few minutes and have neither of them die. If you have a problem with this, it may be because you are older than fifteen years of age.
If you are such a person, just relax - it is nothing to be ashamed of or confused about. Yes, those little scooters are in fact stupid, and no, nobody really knows who let the dogs out.
The guns are slightly balanced in that the machine guns cost a lot more than the hand guns - although annoyingly there were quite a few bigger, more costly weapons that actually did much less damage than cheaper, smaller ones, so you can imagine how often we picked those to use. Hand to hand weapons suffered a different problem - many of them lacked a definitive price range, because there was scope for quality and workmanship - but no guidelines on how that worked. Given that Palladium is the king of the shopping list, this was an annoyance that could have been fixed with less pedantry.
Ancient weapons were generally horribly outclassed against big guns, even if you had massive bonuses to hand-to-hand damage. Although katanas did 3d6, which wasn't too bad, but nobody would almost ever bother toaking a bo-staff. Although this was balanced slightly, as with the guns, by having lots of pictures showing just how way cool and hurty these ancient Japanese things were.
There's also a page in there of ancient medieval weapons which seems to have fallen out of the Palladium fantasy game. It's totally out of left field, and I can't imagine anyone ever using it. When was the last time you saw a vigilante pull out his voulge or guipillon flail?
So, anyway. We pour over Palladium's usual selection of weapons and then their even bigger selection of equipment. This includes just about everything, from industrial metal dissolver to flashlights to shoes and shirts. Then there's explosives, ammo, vehicles, high tech surveillance stuff, electronic countermeasures, computer hardware, survival equipment and a teeeny tiny section on armour, which once you take out the moronic ancient styles (again, you ever see a vigilante wearing chain mail?) leaves you with a short list of riot wear, half of which were almost indistinguishable from each other. Realistic, but a bit annoying in a combat game like this.
But of course, TMNT heroes don't need armour. We've got our weapons. We've figured out all the tiny little bonuses from them and added them to our other bonuses. Now we can finally go and KILL THINGS!
To quote Ork!, you am kill like this: roll 1d20, add your mods, get over a four to hit. Your opponent can dodge by rolling higher than your attack (plus his mods to dodge, which are usually many), but this takes an action. Every player has at least two actions per round, most starting characters will have four or five. Thus they can afford to dodge a lot, and those with martial training can also parry without losing an action. So rounds are extremely long affairs as players dodge or parry a lot until their foes run out of actions, and then they wail upon them with their big-ass guns or katanas.
It should be a simple system - just roll a d20, opponents can roll one back. But there's so many damn modifiers and so many damn actions and so much damn damage flying around it can get complex very quickly. Especially for the poor GM. But then again, big, slow, complex fights where people fire machine guns a lot and blow the crap out of everything without getting very hurt themselves is exactly what this system aims to create. It may not always be much fun, but it sure is damn well seriously freaking violent, and isn't that all that matters?
One final strange thing about combat is the way natural armour works. If you have a natural armour of 4 (as a normal person does) and you are wearing a riot jacket with an armour rating of 10, then any roll between 4 and 10 hits the armour and does damage to the armour. However, if you have a natural armour of 10, say because you are rhinoceros and your skin is very hard, then hits from 6-10 are considered just like hits from 1-4 - a miss. Beating the ten means you found a fleshy spot. So you can fire bullets at a tortoise's shell for days and never make a dent, while a riot jacket burns up after two hits.
You might find this insane. Then again, we've already established this is a world containing hummingbirds the size of 747s, so claims of insanity are shaky, at best.
So. We've statted up, we've kitted up, we've killed things and we've got experience and cash for it and now we're gone back to start all over again on the next level. And so it goes on. So what else is there left in the book?
Well, there's the aforementioned stats on the Turtles and the like, and some GM information. Both of these are useful, with the latter containing some helpful advice on matching campaigns to player tastes, plus one of those cool "player dialogue" example pieces which always made Palladium games fun to read. Then we have five adventures. While there's some good hooks here, most of these aren't really full adventures - they're little more than just a set up, a way for the players to figure out how to get from the set-up to the evil lair, followed by incredibly long character stats for the bad guys. Strangely enough, this was more than enough for me when I was playing this. The lack of detail only inspired me to fill it all in with my own stories.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened to those times, when I could sort of just GM on air like that, when we gamed every single day and I never batted an eyelid about prep time or finding ideas. I no longer remember what that felt like. I think we must have been playing something else.
Which of course, is the whole point here. For three years, I lived TMNT like a waking dream, not really seeing where my ideas ended and the actual game began. I remember only one long suffusion of combat and dice and stupid ideas and my players never, ever getting hurt. No real plot, just a hell of a lot of sourcebooks to give us places to go and people to be - and other people to kill, and toys to kill them with. And all this was in another world, the fractured world of puberty, and the games we played then, the way we roleplayed - it's lost forever in that time. It's got a lot of ties to what we're doing now, of course, but with our adult sophistications, we can't ever really get it back.
Looking at a game like TMNT, now, ten years on, as the gamer I am now, and talking to gamers like most of you, I can't call TMNT a good game. But I can't call it a bad game either. It is just too alien to me now. It belongs in another world, and in this world, my world, the world or RPGNet reviewers and their readers, I can't really evaluate it. Nor can I evaluate for those kids back in the other world, because I just don't live there any more.
Does it meet its goals? Pretty much. It provides you with a playable system that maximises the ninja combat rush and the variety of really kewl character options, and as such it's a probably something a lot of young gamers would love. But does it make some bad, silly calls along the way, cluttering and confusing the game unnecessarily and making it just too damn twinky? Yes. These things I can tell you. But is this is a good game? Does it, in the final analysis, come together as kewl or fall short as weak? This I simply cannot tell you.
All I can do is stare at the book in front of me, and ask myself just what the hell was it with me and this game? Why did I find it so mind-bendingly wonderful? Why did I play it for so very long, and so very different way than I seem to play now? What can't I see now, that I could see then? How did roleplaying and me change so much in just ten years? And what the hell have I lost in the process?
I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know, however, that I like the idea of hummingbirds the size of 747s. And I guess that's enough.
Style 4 (Great art, good organisation)
Substance 2 (Playable but too messy)
PS If you enjoyed this review, you may find other reviews by me collected conveniently at http://www.geocities.com/catstesha/rpg.html. Thank you.
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