For those who aren’t aware, the very kid-friendly cartoon about a quartet of “radical dudes” who stop fantastic, gonzo villains from taking over the world, who always get back home for pizza and, oh yeah, are anthropomorphic turtles, started out as a comic book series that combined the grim and gritty art and writing of Frank Miller’s Daredevil with the tropes of “funny animal” comics. Kids expecting cute and adorable characters instead got the Terror Bears, a clear parody of Care Bears, but with brain-melting psychic powers instead of the Care Bear Stare, and Dr. Feral, a mad scientist twisting animals into new and terrifying shapes.
This, combined with a multistep, complicated and opaque character creation system, made for a game that was perhaps not ideally suited to the, “I just wanna play Leonardo” crowd. Okay, enough preamble - on to character creation!
In the first step, you roll three six-sided dice to determine each of your attributes, and you do this eight times, assigning each to an attribute, in order. In the original printing, and multiple subsequent printings, it refers to their being eight attributes and then lists seven of them, “I.Q., M.E., P.S., P.P., P.E., P.B., and Spd.” Get accustomed to this kind of attention to detail. The “roll six-sided dice in order” thing is similar to attribute generation in Dungeons And Dragons, and similarly if you have a 16 or higher in a given attribute, you get bonuses. Given the way averages work in D&D, this is annoying, but TMNT adds a further level to it: if you roll a sixteen or higher, you roll another six-sided die and add it to your total. So, yeah, you rolled a 4 for P.S. and someone else in the group rolled a 24, and now you’ll be expected to play your character as an utter physical weakling, every week. Fun!
The attributes stand for Intelligence, Mental Endurance, Physical Strength, Physical Prowess, Physical Endurance, Physical Beauty and Speed. These are pretty self-explanatory. The missing one, Mental Affinity, denotes your charisma and personality.
Aficionados of the Palladium games know what comes next: charts! So many charts. There are a variety of sourcebooks, including one with dinosaurs, and a bunch set in a post-apocalyptic future, covering North America, South America, Australia and other places,* each one with its own set of charts. The order does differ a bit, but you usually start by rolling to determine what animal you are and what turned you into a mutant animal, then actually building your animal character, then determining your equipment, then your alignment, your experience level (we’re almost done, I swear), your skills and your equipment. Yes, I already mentioned equipment. This book was made in the before times, when gaming had yet to evolve editors.
I should clarify, too, that you really aren’t supposed to pick things out, at all, ever. If there’s a chart, you should always, always roll on that chart. It doesn’t matter if this results in a mouse gladiator, that’s what the dice intended, and you WILL play it. This is a common feature in the Palladium Games, and one of the most common house rules is to gleefully ignore it.
Let’s break those steps down:
Step One: Cause Of Mutation
This can involve a series of charts, but you eventually determine if you were exposed to ooze accidentally, created in a lab, or time travel or something weirder still. This also determines your skills, often with yet another roll on another table. More on those in their proper section. This isn’t the last time I’ll be talking about character options out of order.
Somewhere in this step, you also determine the animal you’ll be, not down to the species, always, but at least to the genus.
Step Two: Build Your Animal
Once you’ve determined your animal type, you get three basic stats: Size Level, Build and Total BIO-E. What’s BIO-E? No one really cares what it stands for, just that it’s the points that you spend to alter your animal. See, you start out as the animal, unmutated, and spent those points alter their Size Level, and their four major attributes:
Hands
Biped
Speech
Looks
These are rated from None to Partial to Full. None doesn’t mean they’re non-existent, but rather that they’re completely animalistic. None Hands means that they have paws or hooves, Partial Biped means that they stand and move like a bear, and Full Looks means that they look as close to human as they can get - not necessarily fully human, but close. As a general rule, you can make a character that has Full Hands, Biped and Speech and is of roughly human size, which matches, but, well, it’s broken.
Remember when I said that you start with the unmutated animal? You kind of don’t. In addition to adjusting the four dials mentioned above, and your Size Level, you also buy your animal’s typical characteristics. Let’s take the mighty elephant as an exemplar.
You start as a creature with Size Level 20, a Short build, and no tusks, trunk, big ears or thick skin. You have no hands, you’re totally nonbipedal, and can't speak, but you're an elephant. I mean, you don't look like one, but it says right on your character sheet that you are one. Buying those elephant traits costs 30 BIO-E. We have no starting BIO-E, so we have to reduce our Size Level to get some.
I should note at this point that the section describing the characteristics of the various animal types starts on page 29, but the chart with the Size Levels is back on page 10. Sandwiched in between are the experience and skills sections which, again, are a later stage. That stage also includes determining our starting equipment, but that comes after Animal Types because this book hates us and wants us to cry.
Anyhow, we’re back on that chart - so we have to go down to Size Level 14. Based on our Short build, we’re 60+1d6 inches tall. Yeah. We’re an elephant that’s shorter than an average adult man, and we still don’t have hands, can’t walk and can’t speak. If we want to be able to do all of these things - and what’s the point in having a TMNT character that can’t strike a cool pose and drop a sick burn on a Foot Clan Ninja while clutching a culturally appropriative melee weapon in its fist - they we need 30 more BIO-E, which takes down to Size Level 8, making us 36+1d6 inches.
Who’s a wee little pachyderm man? WE are. Oh, and those tusks that we paid for? They cost us 10 BIO-E, or two Size Levels. And why? They’re intended for us to use them as natural weapons, but it doesn’t tell us how much damage they do, anywhere, and given that damage for other natural weapons goes from 1d8 to 2d12, we’re just plain guessing. Board might give us a clue - they have Large Tusks that do 2d6 damage, so I'd probably go with that.
I should note, I plucked the elephant out because it was the first one that caught my eye, but this is the way the book works out - if you want all of the cool stuff, your character will quite often be pocket-sized.
Oh, I should mention - your Size Level can adjust your attributes. Between Size Levels 6 and 10 is the “butter zone” where you only get bonuses - any lower and you get penalties to Physical Strength and … I.Q? Sure, everyone knows small people aren’t smart, I guess. Larger, and you have penalties on Speed.
This is, frankly, the biggest letdown of the whole system. This was a time in game design where there was an emphasis on having players make “hard choices” when building characters - you shouldn’t be completely happy with your character, or the options available to them because … well, no one every gave me a good reason for that, and so I usually adjusted their characters so they were roughly the creature they wanted them to be.
Step Three: Equipment
It’s shopping time! Palladium Games books are famous/infamous for having long lists of detailed descriptions of equipment that have very little difference between them, mechanically. The TMNT book's equipment section is relatively slim, but does have lots of lovingly rendered pictures of ninja weapons.
We rolled up the money we have to spend during step one, so now we flip forward to page 63, where we’ve made an oddly smooth transition from the combat rules into the equipment section.
It’s worth noting, by the book as written, we might have some skill with weapons, but we haven’t actually chosen our weapon skills yet. In addition, we have a bunch of other things that we can buy for skills that we don’t have yet. Again, smart players realized that you should pick skills first, and it’s not actually made entirely clear in the book’s layout that we’re actually supposed to buy equipment now or later, but at least one version of the character creation steps tells us to do this third, so here we are.
Step Four: Alignment
There are seven different alignments, but, realistically, you’re, like, ten years old - you’re probably picking from the Selfish or Good alignments, of which there are four. I genuinely dislike alignment systems because, as here, they give you an ethos, and a poorly defined one, rather than giving you individual drives that you can use to determine your character’s ethos. As we did back in the day, we’re going to ignore it.
Step Five: Experience
Thanks to Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of RPGs had a level-based system, where you start weak and, through play, become considerably more powerful. TMNT goes from level 1 to level 15 and, thanks to the increases in skill, hit points and other traits, a difference of just four or five levels can make a character practically untouchable by those of lower levels.
As with other major concepts in this game, this is presented in a patchwork quilt. We first get two pages of philosophical musing, accompanied by two charts. A little more than 40 pages later, we get a single page that tells us combat skills and how they’re modified by level. Other references to level and experience are scattered throughout, most especially in the next section.
Step Six: Skills
Skills are … a mess. They’re percentile based, from 1%-98%, modified by your attributes and sometimes your background, animal type, level, and probably some other factors I’m currently blanking on. There’s a lot of math.
You can get skills in everything from fishing to explosives, but in a game that’s based on a comic book about a group of people tracking down bad guys and following clues, the only real investigate skill is Tracking. Well, there’s one other skill that sounds useful - “Intelligence” - but it’s mentioned in just one spot and doesn’t get written up, at all, so we have no idea how it works. It’s also the name of one of our eight attributes, so perhaps that’s for the best.
That skill shows up as an item in a “skill program,” a small suite of skills that you might be able to pick as an option depending on what you rolled for background or mutation cause, and is copied and pasted from a different Palladium RPG, but only the description of the skills made it into this book. I didn’t check to see if all of the skills show up here, or if all of the skills in the main list can, in fact, be selected, because I have things I need to do other than write this blog post. I’m going to assume that this isn’t an isolated incident.
There are physical skills that boost your physical attributes, like Body Building and Gymnastics. If you take enough of them, you can boost your attributes quite high, which seems appropriate for a game that’s heavily focused on physical combat. I generally focused on getting as many of these skills as possible.
Another branch of skills deserves a special mention, though, in the specific context of TMNT: Weapon Proficiencies. Honestly, if you don’t have a vested interested in how you can wield a kusari gama or naginta, why have you read this deep? This is, what, 3000 words about an RPG that’s almost 40 years old?
Anyhow, different backgrounds allow you to select from different sets of Weapon Proficiency (“W.P.”) skills. Like an ouroboros of suckitude, this leads us back to …
Step Three Electric Boogaloo: Equipment: The Quickening
Like any good writer of horror, I have saved the most terrifying moment for the very end: the sai, the iconic weapon of one of the title characters, is listed in the equipment section, along with all the necessary stats. There is absolutely no indication here of which of the Weapon Proficiencies one takes in order to be able to wield it. If you look at Raphael’s entry at the end of the book, you’ll see “W.P. Sai” listed as a skill, but nowhere else in the book other than a chart used to generate Foot Clan mooks.
The common defense I’ve heard for this is that this is a book that trusts you to be able to make up your own skills as you need to, to fill the needs of your game. My counterargument is to simply say that I will need documentary proof that this was actually an intentional choice and not an editorial oversight, because the latter seems far more likely, given everything we’ve been through.
The Rest Of The Game
Combat gets its own rather lengthy section to talk about exactly how one goes about kicking people in the face in this game. Palladium combat isn’t the worst RPG combat I’ve ever seen, but it’s on the list. It combines all of the math we’ve seen already, plus a roll of a twenty-sided dice and the addition and subtraction of a remarkable number of modifiers. In my day, most players drew out a little chart of the various kinds of attacks their characters were capable of and dreaded being asked to show their arithmetic. I didn't feel like telling them that I would absolutely never ask them to do so because I was pretty sure I couldn't figure it out either.
One question you might have about combat: What if you don’t have the requisite Weapon Proficiency? If your character doesn’t have W.P. Sword and there’s a katana lying there on the ground, can you pick it up and use it? There’s nothing to say you can, and only the fact that you don’t have W.P. Sword on your sheet to say you can’t. Depending on who’s running the game, they might let you use it with a penalty, or it might be like the 80s era point and click games where you keep clicking on something that ought to be clickable, but isn’t.
There is no clear section on how to use skills or when they come up. Some skills describe in detail how to use them, and what failure and success represent, while others just give a barebones description. “Forging,” for example, says that you can use it to make fake documents, and that “Skill forgers can recognize others counterfeits at a 6%.” That’s it. That’s what you get. If the person running the game agrees, you can make a hundred fake passports with a single roll, then make a second roll to make a slug coin that will bamboozle a Chuck E. Cheese arcade game, two tasks that are exactly as difficult, apparently.
There’s a section on building adventures that, yes, involves a number of new charts for making minions and bad guys, as well as a couple of short adventures and a list of characters from the TMNT universe, including the four shellheads themselves. There are some short sample adventures that basically present a group of bad guys and make some vague hand motions in the direction of how your players can meet up with them, and wear. There's a reference to how encountering one of the bad guys will be a lot worse if the players meet it in the sewers. We don't actually know why that's the case - there's nothing about how fighting in a sewer is any different from any other kind of fight.
There’s a set of rules for how to make your own Animal Type, rules that the book itself ignores, and that later books will laugh at maniacally.
And that’s it.
Final Thoughts: Why?
There are a lot of “why” questions going through your head right now, I’m sure, but somewhere near the top is, “Why did people play this game?” The truth, more often than not, is that we didn’t. Most of us spent our afternoons rolling on endless tables, making character after character. Occasionally we’d pick out a favourite one and throw it up against a friend’s in a sort of gladiatorial combat, but it was mostly about making our own mutant animals, but it was mostly about using character creation as a game in and of itself.
I ran a few brief games with the system, and they were reasonably fun, but we were barely in the double digits and the opaque nature of the rules left us wanting something simpler. I sincerely believe that one could make a TMNT game that actually works, and could even get back some of the feel of that character creation mini-game.
There’s a popular position that a good RPG does absolutely everything that the people at the gaming table want it to, and I disagree. The same way that the most basic verb, “to be,” is irregular in so many ways, I sincerely think that we are naturally attracted to systems that don’t quite work. TMNT And Other Strangeness’ major problem is that there are so many things that don’t work.
Still, though, in writing this up, I found I still have my copy of Transdimensional, which has dinosaurs in it. Now, where are my dice …
