Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness/Palladium House Rules?

At the very least you should adjust the costs of the offensive psychic powers. It is completely nuts that the ability to paralyze someone or trap them in an illusory world costs the same amount of Bio-E as the ability to make them itchy, and both abilities have the same chance of success and the same unlimited uses.

>dead levels.
You mean for martial arts bonuses?

I use the martial arts from Ninjas & Superspies; much more variety and better balance too.

>nonne sumus homine
"We are not people."

>nonne summus homine
"People are not high".

Does it still have the problem where once you pick a style and some skills at chargen you're locked into one course for the rest of the campaign with no more choices to make? My players hate that, too.

Those house rules look breddy gud. Which skills are easy/medium/hard, and is it based on real-life difficulty or game utility?

Well yeah, it is a class based system. Some of the OCCs can choose multiple martial arts, which gives more flexibility like crosstraining. But you shouldn't be giving just random bonuses or whatever players want; each martial art has strengths and weaknesses and should be modeled that way. This isn't D&D or a generic fantasy world; it's supposed to model real life to some degree, even if it's an exaggerated mutant version of real life the Turtles were still doing Ninjutsu and using oriental weapons, etc.

Kind of a mix of both. Easy skills are hobbies that will almost certainly never come up outside of downtime, like model train fancying. Medium skills are useful but so.ething anyone can try to do untrained, like stealth and first aid. Hard skills require training to attempt at all, like surgery and flying a plane.

TMNT is a parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil, something that was itself already pretty wacky and off-the-wall. Applying any interpretation of the word "realism" to TMNT seems to be deeply missing the point. Maybe that was the whole problem with Palladium's approach. Like how in the first pri ting you had to roll to see if you were a pedophile, because some people really are pedophiles and it'd be unrealistic if your character had no chance of being one.

That's what I meant by the IRL/game utility split. You're doing IRL difficulty.
In-game Stealth will be used 10x more often than Surgery or Flying a Plane, so it should be Difficult and the latter should be Medium.

But the difference between easy and medium skills is based on metagame utility. Ballet may be just as hard or harder to learn and perform correctly than first aid, but it'd qualify as an easy skill because when the fuck are you going to need it?

"Nonne" signifies a rhetorical question. "Are we not men?"

Ninjas & Superspies was more of a traditional class-based system like others of its time. TMNT is much the same except that everyone is the same class. You can carve out a niche for yourself at character creation (through flight, psychic powers, physical skill buffs or proficiency in guns) but these distinctions would not increase with level in the same way that, for example, distinctions grow between the classes in AD&D. Every TMNT character receives the same benefits from leveling up. And if you're using the team rules you can't even disti guish yourself in those small ways at chargen!

Here's a newer draft than the one I had on my phone earlier.

Currently my party consists of a quail samurai, a breakdancing chimpanzee, a completely psychopathic wolf, and a completely non-humanoid 70 lb. psychic sparrow. A punk porcupine and an orangutan trucker have defected to the Foot clan, mostly due to the wolf's antics.

Coolio. Are you perhaps interested in a After the Bomb adventure?

I don't usually play stuff online, but maybe?

Oh, I meant as a PDF. I'll dig it up when I get home. Have you played AtB before?

I like your house rules and have some of my own to share later...

Never played AtB but I understand it's what Palladium did after they realized that their TMNT license wasn't making them any money, because after the cartoon came out RPG players tended to dismiss TMNT as kids' stuff.

OP here. It is stuff like that that make us feel like we are gonna be have a good time. We enjoyed Nightbane, so this seemed like a good place for us to go. Also thanks a lot of those house rules seem helpful.

Here's the ATB adventure: Rendezvous in N'Yak.

I like how each Attribute is tied to a Maneuver.
Perception for Parry is a bit of a stretch, but hey, still good.

What does the Attribute bonus do for a Maneuver like Rhetoric? Is it tied to speech skills (of which there are very few in Palladium)?

Also, why does the # of attacks vary with creature size? Why would a large slow elephant have more attacks than a small, quick mouse?

Instead of using speech skills, I handle Rhetoric like an attack vs. the target NPC's Psi Defense (assuming there's a reasonable chance of the target seeing things your way. More outlandish attempts at Rhetoric get a penalty or simply fail.)

That's not the number of attacks; it's the amount of damage you do with a basic unarmed attack. (Special unarmed attacks like flying kicks don't care about your size.) The only way to get extra attacks in this homebrew is to take the Flurry ninjutsu ability.

What's your skill list look like? Is it the same very long list in the Palladium books or your own?

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I mostly do it Unknown Armies style and let players make up their own skills. I classify it as easy if it's a fun almost-useless skill, medium if it can be tried untrained, and hard if it can't. The only skills that are kind of expected and pre-built into the rules are Stealth, Detect Ambush, and First Aid. I also let them make up their own weapons, since all you need to know about a weapon is what category it fits into on that table on page 2. So far I don't have a system in place to allow for special weapon properties, but it's on my to-do list.

Another item on that list is to find a good way to handle rolling with blows. I wanted it to come with some kind of penalty so people don't do it every time they take damage, just to reduce the number of dice rolls that happen every turn. Right now I have it knock you prone unless you beat the roll to strike by 5 or more. As a result, none of my players are using it, and one guy who tried to make a "tank" character has found that maxing out his Toughness doesn't do all that much.

I see what you did there.