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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8683656" data-attributes="member: 19857">I like the world building and the combat system is simple enough and close enough to pre-3e D&D to be workable (I honestly cannot say at this point if we were really playing Palladium's combat system or if we were just playing a modified D&D combat system with guns in it.  Everyone got multiple attacks so we were probably closer to Palladium than not but without a time machine my fuzzy memories will probably never know).The thing I appreciate most in retrospect with Palladium games is the embrace of randomness in character creation.  Just every thing imaginable will have a table to roll on.  It's not for everyone - if you're the kind of person who comes to the table with an idea for your character up front the random chargen is probably infuriating.  But if you're in a "go where the die rolls take you" sort of mood the committment to the random character creation minigame is just impressive even for a game of its time - and I actually don't mind the meaningless attributes because that's the trade-off that makes the random chargen work in the Palladium system.  If the attributes were as important as they are in modern games most Palladium characters would be utterly useless rather than just mildly incompetent.  (From what I remember in the Palladium games we played the only thing that mattered were high attributes giving you bonuses to things - low attributes didn't really penalize you, which is how a game with random 3d6 down the line attribute generation can work without being horribly broken).I also have to admit that the game that was my entry into Palladium and the game we played the most of is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  This thread caused me to reopen my Palladium books again and I came to a realization - TMNT and Other Strangeness is probably the closest that Palladium ever had to having a "Basic Set" for the game - at least among the ones I own.  The book is short, character creation is actually simpler than most of their games despite the BIO-E system because you don't have to wade through dozens of character classes to figure out what your options are, and the game is fairly focused on the kind of game you're going to run with the system (i.e. make up some mutant animals and have them fight some ninjas).  It was probably the best intro to the system for us back in the day - if we'd tried to start with Heroes Unlimited or - Grod help us - Rifts - we probably would have bounced off of it.  (As it is we kind of bounced off Rifts anyway - we played it a bit but it never really hooked us the way TMNT did).</blockquote>

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