Can Someone Explain the Basics of Palladium/TMNT?

[Retreater]

I bit off more than I can chew and agreed to present Palladium's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness RPG (recently reprinted) on a podcast next week. It was my first RPG, and I remember being confused by it when I was 10 years old. I didn't think I would be confused with almost 40 additional years of gaming experience under my belt. I was wrong.

Can anyone give me a basic overview of how this system (the Palladium Megaverse in general) is supposed to work? Like, I don't understand combat, skill checks, or anything.

Thanks!

 

[jdrakeh]

If skills checks are as they appear in all other Palladium products (I am not exaggerating), you have the right to be confused. Because the rules never explicitly tell you how to make a skill check. Some people have you roll equal to or less than a skill's % rating. Some people just have you roll less than that rating. Everybody does it a little bit different because, again, the rules never explicitly spell it out. And then, of course, some skills aren't structured like that at all (mostly combat skills).

 

[Voadam]

Here is my memory from playing a bunch of Palladium games, including TMNT, in the 80s and 90s.

Combat is at base like AD&D with add ons. Roll a d20 roll high to hit. I think anything above a 5 hits, but armor provides a higher target, if you hit above that armor target you hit them, if not the armor takes the damage (but has a certain amount of SDC (structural damage capacity) that it can take then it stops protecting you. If they hit there are active defenses you can take depending on your combat skills, dodge, parry, and roll with punches. Each defense is a d20 roll and if you beat the attack the defense kicks in with dodge and parry avoiding damage, roll with punch reducing bludgeoning by half I believe. You have hit points which is your physical endurance attribute (constitution equivalent) plus 1d6 per level. In everything but Palladium Fantasy 1e you also have SDC that are a type of hit points used first.

Character creation is involved. There are normal D&D like stats to start with some bonuses for high scores. There are Occupational Character Classes that give a framework of stuff and some choices. I can't remember if TMNT has that or a bunch of random backgrounds with more freeform choices.

There are combat styles like ninjitsu which depending on specific ones give different bonuses at different levels, some combat styles are more attack focused with attack bonuses and extra attacks, some are more defense focused with things like auto parry (unlimited parrying in a round) and defense maneuver bonuses, a lot are not balanced against each other.

There are some things you take that give bonuses in weird places like stats and SDC or specific combat maneuvers, so taking running increases endurance or something like that. Special notice to boxing which among other increases gives you a flat extra melee attack even when using other fighting styles.

Then there are skills which are percentiles with a small random advancement per level (something like a d6 increase per level) and a short description of what they cover but no real description of how to use them in actual play.

Different backgrounds in TMNT give different base stuff and choices of skill type things to choose, a more educated person can take a lot of stuff and build themselves up a lot depending on what they take, less education focused ones actually get short changed a bit in that they can't take as many buffing little extra stacking things like boxing and running.

TMNT also has a minigame of mutant animal creation building where you can basically be a tradeoff of a spectrum of human to animal features built from a human baseline, so point building whether you are almost entirely human looking with hands and bipedal and human size, or saving some points on being a little smaller or non human looks or semi or non usable hand or bipedal stance to use those points to get animal features or even psionic powers or spending points to be bigger. So you could be small bird looking person with flight capable wings (the sample crow hero), or little bears with terrifying psionics (sample villains). It breaks down a bit if you start as a big animal, if you want to be a mutant elephant the spectrum is big with no animal features other than looks and no human features, down to human baseline, down to small with some elephant and human features. Features allowable are determined by the specific animal base, so no mixing elephant tusk natural weapons with bird wings on the same character.

Advancement is like AD&D xp advancement charts but instead of xp for money or defeating monsters there is a chart of things that give specific xp awards like clever ideas in play.

 

[Mannahnin]

Here is my memory from playing a bunch of Palladium games, including TMNT, in the 80s and 90s.

Great job! I never played that much, so I was going to have to dig out the book to answer nearly that well.

Definitely one of the things that jumped out from memory was how certain skills could add to your ability scores or other capabilities (like that bonus attack for being trained in Boxing). So unlike AD&D your stats weren't "fixed" (barring later magic), but could increase in part depending on what skills you took.

I also remember that the game has basically the same nine AD&D alignments, just named with adjectives and explained a little differently.

 

[aramis erak]

5 kinds of character damage track:
Hit Points: usually, GM option to do lasting injuries when any marked, dead when all gone.
Personal SDC (pSDC): a second kind of damage track, no effects until depleted, then all further damage is to HP. Not present in some early versions
Armor SDC: Damage track for worn armor. When depleted, remainder passes on to pSDC.
pMDC: personal megadamage capacity; hit points for many MegaDamage critters are pMDC.
aMDC: megadamage capacity of armor. All MegaDamage armor is always effective. When depleted, passes to pMDC

Vehicles have
Structural SDC - same as pSDC for characters, but when gone, breaks
Armor SDC - as characters, but feeds to sSDC
structural MDC - equivalent to pMDC
Armor MDC - same as characters.

2 kinds of damage:
SDC/HP Damage: SDC and HP are the same kind of damage, and it's 1:1 between. Cannot do damage to any non-Zentraidi MDC structure; Zentraedi actually have HP in the hundreds, not pMDC.
MDC damage: 1:1 for MDC, ×100 conversion to SDC tracks

Combat is 1d20+Skill Mod, needing 5+ to hit. If standard damage weapon and standard armor, rolls 5⋯ ArmorRating-1 hit the armor SDC, AR & up hit the personal SDC.
MegaDamag Armor is always hit on 5+.
Nat 20 and sometems lower, can do various special effects.

Initiative is usually rolled, but is vague in many. 1d20 plus any listed mods from combat skills
Work downward until everyone's done one action. Repeat the count if there are attacks left...
Note that reactions (parry, dodge, roll-with-impact) cost an attack, and must roll higher than the to-hit to be effective.

Note that Robotech mecha combat attacks also get the character's personal attacks as well, so rounds can get up to 6+ attacks per melee round.

All combat skills are tables, giving a modifier to hit, and some other effects.
Non combat skills are percentile, 1d100 ≤ skill + mods to succeed.
There are no interpersonal skills, nor rules for influencing others. Siembieda is vehemently opposed to them... screed in most corebooks.

 

[aramis erak]

Great job! I never played that much, so I was going to have to dig out the book to answer nearly that well.

Definitely one of the things that jumped out from memory was how certain skills could add to your ability scores or other capabilities (like that bonus attack for being trained in Boxing). So unlike AD&D your stats weren't "fixed" (barring later magic), but could increase in part depending on what skills you took.

I also remember that the game has basically the same nine AD&D alignments, just named with adjectives and explained a little differently.

There are only 8 in most, and they don't map well to the AD&D ones all that well. Most GMs ignore them, anyway, but they are much clearer about what's normal than any D&D edition.

 

[pemerton]

I only ever played one session of TMNT.

Along the lines that @Voadam describes, we all built PCs who couldn't talk (but could communicate with one another by very limited-range telepathy), in order to have points or slots or whatever to spend on other abilities.

Then we started the scenario. The GM told us that we were at home, and the telephone started ringing. We all looked at one another, and shrugged our shoulders . . .

I don't remember much about what happened after that.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

More importantly, how do you order pizza?

 

[Voadam]

One consequence of the palladium active defenses is that it changes the flow of combat from D&D's quick shoot outs where a person makes an attack with a roll then the action moves on to the next person, to a more back and forth duel with both the player and GM making rolls to resolve every attack and lots of successful attacks being blocked.

This interaction and multiple rolls more than doubles the table time to resolve an attack compared to D&D, and it usually means more attacks are needed to land a blow. Actually landing a blow is more a matter of slim advantages on dueling d20 rolls and having more actions, it is easier to land hits if you still have attacks while your opponent has run out of defenses for the round.

Feeling like you actively defend in combat can be nice, the impact to the pace of resolving a combat turn and getting to the next person's action was noticeable for my group though.

 

[Willie the Duck]

More importantly, how do you order pizza?

Assuming you are a anthropomorphic hero in 1980s NYC calling from a payphone, this is typically SDC (Short Duration Calls). However, if your hero has one of those giant brick cell phones of the era (automatic for human sidekick characters with the 'yuppie' quality), then it would be MDC (Mobile Data Communications). However, these only applied if you were in the same area code. If you were in the 212 and the pizza joint was in the 718, then you had to apply megaPhoneNumber (one would assume that the converse is also true, but it isn't actually covered in the written rules).

Ordering requires a skill check, any of Business & Finance, Disguise, Impersonation, Streetwise, and Hand to Mouth: Basic will work. The order-taker at the pizza place has 'active confusions' similar to active defenses. It states that if their defense 'exceeds your skill check' they get your order wrong, which seems to be an error since your skill check is percentile (roll low) and their defense is d20 (roll high). Note that deliberately ordering 'Deep Dish' or 'Chicago Style' will send your order taker into 'shell shock' -- the only place this quality is mentioned in the game and unrelated to turtle shells.

Once your order is taken, you enter a mini game to create your pizza driver (only skills up through 'Highschool Level Education' need to be generated) and the vehicle they are driving (see appendix for stats on 1975 AMC Gremlin). In addition to structural and armor SDC and MDC, they also have delivery SDC and MDC which are separate tracks. These numbers start out the same as the structural SDC/MDC, but are tracked separately in case your pizza delivery gets involved in combat and you need to determine if their car explodes but they still manage to get you your pizza in 30 minutes or less.

Pizza can be used as an improvised weapon. Treat as a sai with a -5 to-hit which does 1/10 normal damage, but does invoke a roll on the grease-stain chart. Pizza cut into squares can be thrown as shuriken, but you need to succeed on your order roll by 50% or more to convince a NY pizzeria to do so. Frozen pizza is stated to exist, but is hinted to have been part of a supplement which never materialized. Pineapple pizza is covered in the mutagen rules next to green ooze under a bioterrorism sidebar. Anchovies are a playable Animal-Mutant Species.

None of the above is remotely true, but much of it is completely on-brand for the game.