#214 – TMNT Redux Game Play Retrospective

Breakfast puppies.

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Hi, I'm Sean Owen Robertson, and I listen to the Glitter Boys.

At this point, I hope that everybody has listened to and greatly enjoyed our sessions with Sean Robertson. playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, at least as much as I had fun playing them.

Well, I'm really glad you had, you enjoyed yourself because—

I got to blow things. No, I didn't get to blow anything up. No, but I did get to set some things on fire.

As was pointed out by the people on the Discord channel, you, we all walked or you all walked away from a building which was primed with explosives.

You know, I seriously, I literally, no, 100% legitimately that was going on in my mind as we were leaving. And I, as a player, thought, I'm just going to leave him. That seems like something he might do.

It's like all the '80s films with where there's the big building explosion, but the explosion didn't happen. And everyone in the audience, it just goes black. Everyone in the audience goes, wait a second, wasn't that building? Oh, oh, what's going on with the building? So no, I enjoyed running it. I looked at the rules ahead of time quite a bit. Tried to follow the rules as written. I realized, I don't know if anyone else caught it, at one point or another there was a 5th terror bear because I messed up initiative.

I wasn't wrong about that.

No, there was a 5th terror bear and I don't know, and it was just a generic extra bear that showed up in the combat.

I remembered that when I was editing it and listening to things. And at one point you said something about the 5th one. And then I remember the next round thinking, wait a second. And did he, did he just Family Matters that terror bear?

And I did. And I corrected it because I realized after we had done it, and I honestly think it comes down to, I am so used to rolling initiative at the top of every round. It gives me a mental bookmark to reset. who all is still up and running. And without that, I, even as the GM, lost track. Now, for those who haven't figured it out, I tend to over-prepare for running sessions. I have been known to test sessions 2 or 3 times before I'll run them at a convention. I did not do my normal prep for that session. I did it a little more seat of the pants.

I think it was great.

I think it went well. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but I'm very critical of myself and all of my My weekly players are always commenting on how critical I am of myself.

Luckily, I completely understand why you would be critical on yourself. And I intentionally stated that so it could potentially sound like a backhanded compliment. But the truth is I am ridiculously critical of myself. Therefore, I understand it. It sucks and it's a real thing and it will never go away.

And the only other thing that makes me more uncomfortable Is when someone gives me a compliment.

Jacob.

And some people do it on, on recording and freak both of us out. Anyway, uh, besides that, uh, the other thing that really I took away, the Terror Bears are terrifying. The psionic powers in rules as written, the psionic powers in TMNT, they're scary.

Oh yeah.

There's not a lot you can do about them once they initiate.

Yeah.

Which is—

Several of them have no save.

No save. Uh, you— there were saving throws as the rules were written to become aware that you were in their dream. That's about it. And they last forever.

I mean, don't they last until you stop looking at the person or do they have a set duration?

So they, they end when the terror bear stops looking at you. because they can really do very little while they're in power. That's the only saving grace. Or like minutes go by. I mean, it's— and which is, it's quite a few minutes. I'd have to look it up to verify, but which means that that's 4 to 8 to 12 rounds of combat that you're stuck in that dream, which is kind of scary.

Yeah.

Uh, the other part that it dawned on me, uh, because this is a big thing today, is player agency. In many ways, it feels like it takes a lot of the player's agency away because there's nothing— they can't save their way out of it. They can't fight their way out of it. There's no secondary saving throw. It's very old school.

Nope.

You're just fucked.

I have—

which I loved.

I have a personal list of squicks. Everybody, I think, has them, but some are longer than others. Mine is very short. I don't— one of those items is I don't like mind control. I don't like it in stories. I don't like it in the games. And ultimately in gaming for me, and I guess also in fiction that I read, I don't like having the player's agency taken away.

Right.

Similarly, I don't like playing board games where a regular occurrence is I'm going to play a card and you don't get to do anything. Because I'm not a big fan of mechanics that say you don't get to engage with the game. You know, here's a game, we're all gonna play it, but you don't get to play it for a round. To me, that's bad design. Anyway, mind control. I don't like taking away the player's agency unless it's in a fun way. Unfortunately for me, that wasn't that fun simply because I didn't have much control over anything. But if it's done in a way that a game master has a villain use like a charm spell on somebody, but you know, back in the day we used to do this. The GM would like look at the player and like, hey, you and me, let's go have a conversation in the kitchen.

Yes.

And then they'd say to the player, look, you are currently being mind controlled to do this. I'm gonna trust you to do that. See, do it any way that you wish, have fun with it, but remember the spirit of the spell that you're underneath. You are, you are now lying to your party or whatever.

Right.

And then you come back, and if the player's in on it and they can engage, even if it's fighting their companions— yeah, I'll stab my companions. Just let me make the rolls. That kind of stuff. But if it's just like you just stand there and do nothing, Really? You don't get to play this round. Sorry, dude.

Yeah. And that's, that's really hard as a player to not be able to do anything.

I, you know, as long as the game master gives me agency like you did to enact, to act within the context of the mind control, I'm always down for it, but I, have a very, very different approach to that. It's like, I see that as, as long as the mind control isn't basically making me go sit in the corner.

Yeah.

It's when it totally takes you out and makes you do nothing but stare at your shoes, then yeah, I'm 100% on board with mind control's bad. Anything else, it's like, Ooh, this is a novel way to express this character. And I embrace that and roll with it. Like, in the case of what you did with Smooth, I was loving that because you were— while I hadn't ever written out anything for that character, you were literally playing into every single fucking fear that I had kind of in the back of my head crafted for the character.

Yeah.

And it was great. Um, like he was about to at one point just like totally go wild with a MAC-11, you know. But yeah, no, it's— I, I can see where a lot of people don't like it. Um, it's— I also— it's, I— it's not everybody's bag.

So overall, I felt pretty good about the session and The, with one of the things that's difficult in some, in the scenario like that is I only had as the GM an hour or so to get a feel for your characters. So with some of the abilities that the terror bears have, the more you know about the player's character, the more you can actually set that scene and really immerse them. Jacob, you kind of gave me a real easy one there, right? Because, you know, you're, you're, you were a newt and I'm going to put you in a desert. Yeah. That's going to hate that.

Right.

Yeah. Uh, and then the terror bears, of course, give you an idea of what they tend to project when they use their abilities. Uh, the— it was, it was a fun set the scene, and I think people got a feel for it, and it felt very, very TMNT to me, you know?

Yeah.

You know, why are you doing this? Well, they're bad. We're gonna go do bad, and we're gonna stop them, and there's gonna be some detectiveness, and we're gonna like search around, and there's a bigger overall plot. We do, you know, it's connected to some government in there, or some company, not government. You know, it felt, it felt fun. It felt fun.

I'm not a fan of the static initiative. No, it's a problem that I have had in Dungeons and Dragons since 3rd edition. Static initiative, simply, we all just sort of sit around waiting our turn kind of thing. Whereas I feel that re-rolling initiative and having that variation in the flow, sure, yes, it adds another roll that you have to make periodically. But it changes things up in fun ways and it keeps everybody, keeps everybody thinking, right? You're no longer just waiting for your turn. You're, oh no, wow, this, this is all changing now. We got to come up with a new strategy. I miss that.

More broadly speaking, I'm, if the game allows mechanics to adjust your or other people's initiative, I'm cool with static initiatives because that changes combat from focusing on who can hit the hardest to who can get the initiative by performing actions that modify the initiative. If the system doesn't allow for that, I'm not a huge fan of static initiative. Um, even though we're, you know, as the more simulationist person at the table. It tends to be more reality.

I will agree with that, but I don't think that the way that Palladium has traditionally handled the concept of having and losing the initiative works in a static initiative system, because in the Palladium pair-off system, having and losing the initiative, if you do an effect that makes someone lose the initiative, It is as if you were playing a game of Uno and you just played a skip card on them.

Yep.

They're not gonna lose anything, but they're simply— you're gonna get to act again before they do. And in this system, it doesn't work that way. It just pushes them further back in the round or something.

Which is kind of odd.

Yeah.

Now, there's a bigger conversation to have about how initiative has been interpreted. And the different rules for initiative, probably for a different conversation.

Yeah.

And when I went through and looked at some of this, there are some interesting things that came up and I was like, huh, I've never used that ability. But in a TMNT game, I could totally see people using those types of things. Whereas my experience is a lot more around a modern setting, Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, a little bit of Nightspawn, you know. Which ranged combat is a bigger, bigger deal, right? So it was, yeah, I think, I don't think I could really run a long-term game doing a static initiative.

One of the things that I took away from our set the scene and the initiative experience with it was I had a eureka moment for some of what Eric Wojcik was trying to do with Ninjas and Super Spies.

Same.

Uh, I, it suddenly like a whole bunch of things clicked for why certain things were the way they were in Ninjas and Super Spies. And I am kind of interested in running a Ninjas and Super Spies game with fixed initiative.

Oh, I'm not.

Oh no, no, no, no, no. Because I suddenly, I think I, understand why he wrote some. It's more of a, like, I want to run it to test it rather than run it because I necessarily think it's better. I just want to see if what I think I'm getting is actually true or not on the table. Because like in Ninjas and Super Spies, a lot of the martial arts have attacks that you would— why on earth would you ever do that? Why on earth would you ever really pay attention to the melee range rules in it. Suddenly with static initiative, and especially with some of the Atemi powers, um, it makes tons more sense why you'd ever use them. And so, yeah, it's, it's—

Well, I think I agree with you, but I think it means— let me make sure I'm interpreting what you're saying correctly. To me, understanding Having seen the game in a purely static initiative sense, it makes me appreciate those powers more for a not static, because now I suddenly realize the danger that those powers actually have in a, you either have the initiative or you don't have initiative system versus the 5-foot-square system, static initiative, which is what this has essentially become. Right.

Right. I take it from the other ways where there's a whole bunch of things where I wondered why anyone would ever do that and why Eric, who was a pretty darn gifted game designer, put them in there. And it's like, oh, you'd only use this if you were losing initiative.

Yeah. Yeah. In a non-static situation.

In a static situation.

We'll talk more. Yeah. Yeah. We, we, this is a good one. We need to do a deeper dive specifically into the Ninjas and Super Spies combat because it's so different. It is so different from the rest of Palladium. And I think it's, and I have a feeling we talked about this on a previous episode. I think you specifically led this conversation, Jacob. I think it's coming back with Redux.

It should.

I think they're going to start bringing more of that back into the game. Well, it should. Yes.

I mean, if TMNT is any indication. They'll, they'll start kind of brushing off, repolishing some books. So absolutely.

After the Bomb 3rd edition, anybody?

Yeah. So what else TMNT specifically? What other thoughts do you all have about the set the scene, um, flavor feeling?

Why was there not a Bone Stealer?

Um, well, I'm gonna think about the source material.

Overall, it was a really good session. It's weird. I think this is the first time I've played Ninjas in Super Size since maybe my early 30s, possibly my mid-20s. I'd have to like really, really think about it. And, uh, I've run it since then, but usually for younger folk.

Yeah.

And I forgot some of the interesting quandaries the game throws at you.

Such as?

Well, such as the, do I gun down what amounts to a bunch of children?

Yeah. Right. And they are, they're, they're, they're, they're infants. Well, they're not infants. They're teenagers or adolescent teenagers. And, uh, they were abused teenagers, like even worse.

Right.

Like there's, original source material for TMNT, there was real moral quandaries, there was real consequences. You had teenagers fighting, you know, different entities out there that weren't teenagers, you know, that were hardened criminals.

Yeah.

Uh, you had evil corporations doing chemical and biological experiments. You had like a lot of kind of nasty stuff.

I mean, the reality is, is every time the TMNT, the Turtles fought a gang, they were fighting people 15 to 24. Absolutely.

So even Casey Jones was pretty young, right? Um, so yeah, it's, uh, like the adults in the, in the setting—

I don't remember. I just remember Casey Jones in the comic was essentially a murderous psychopath.

Oh yeah, he was. Yeah, he was horrible. All the adult figures were horrible for the most part in the entire—

I appreciated We're playing a combat where not necessarily trying to kill them, you know? And I, that's what I was trying to do. I know I wanted to blow things up, but when it came down to fighting the bears themselves, my whole approach was tackle, disable, right?

Yep.

Absolutely. All that kind of stuff because that we weren't really here to kill anybody. Right.

You were here to stop them, but not kill them.

My whole thing about blowing up the buildings was more of just for fun.

Yeah.

I just want to blow things up. And honestly, I couldn't really think of a way to roleplay in an hour and a half having an explosive-minded character in a non-exploity scene.

I mean, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

It was really fun. And it definitely, it was interesting. Smooth was an interesting character to play.

Yeah.

Uh, dumbest box of rocks, like, which I normally don't have any problem with. Except he was supposed to be a covert espionage specialist. You know, it was, it was fun. It, I thought you did a really good job. Um, never once did I feel I didn't have the scene in my head.

I enjoyed character creation a lot. I mean, it was Palladium character creation. Absolutely. I will say in its favor, it hasn't changed. They've packaged things in a way that just, I feel that makes it slightly more accessible to a new player. I really, this is more of a statement about the books themselves, but the presentation of everything, I think, moved us along very quickly through creating new characters. I think we created interesting characters and I think that's definitely due to our imaginations.

Yeah.

But it was also heavily due to the way that everything was presented in the content we were given.

And the TMNT source material, it's much more refined. It's a much streamlined system. It's not like even making a Rifts character or something like that. It's a very simple streamlined process. You can whip out a character. We did it in an hour. Yeah, we had 3 characters made in an hour. That was awesome. And they were good full-fledged characters. And you had pretty much everything you needed to run and run and take down 4 adolescent terror bears.

I think that Sean's character should have been more capable. And that's not a statement about Sean. That's a statement about ferals. I think ferals got a little shafted maybe in the new, in the redux. Ferals had a bit more oomph to them originally. Now they're just, they just have fewer skills and an interesting combat style.

Yeah.

There's nothing really, there's no good benefit for playing a feral. Yeah. I think, I guess you may get some more bio-E, but that doesn't give you skills, you know? Yeah. And in a skill-heavy game, being skill-starved kind of sucks.

Yeah. Uh, that's very true. Very true.

I think combat was quick.

It was quick. The one thing that surprised me was looking at the terror bears and how much SDC and hit points they had. You know, where I'm glad we kind of figured out a way to do it the way we did it, because it would have been a slog to try to actually like kill them. Yeah. I mean, it would have been hit, then hit, then hit.

Well, yeah. I mean, they're bears.

They're bears. It makes a lot of sense. They're even, they're small bears too. So they don't have as much. SDC that they could have had. Yeah. Yeah.

And that, okay. Some people say that it's a failing of Palladium. I think that's a failing of gamers to understand that you don't have to fight every combat to the death. Yeah.

Especially in Palladium. Especially where the issue is to defeat or overcome, not kill.

Exactly. Your SDC isn't a measure of how many points I have before I lose. It's A gauge. You have to look at it like your gas. You don't get in the car and drive until your gas runs out unless you're crazy. You get in, your gas is a measure of how much you can do over time. And you get into a fight, you have 150 SDC, you've been dropped to 50, you know.

I'm gonna run away.

You might want to reconsider some things. We don't need to keep slogging. 1d6 plus 5 punches until that runs out. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, good. I'm glad you both enjoyed it. I think Sean definitely enjoyed it. He had the biggest grin on his face.

Oh yeah. He was grinning the entire time.

So that was great.

He was cackling like a madman.

So I have a question for you about this.

Yes.

Uh, did you have any questions about our characters that you were like, what is going on with that? Because, you know, while one of the side effects I noticed with our set the scene for this one Is because TMNT character generation goes so quickly, there was less at-the-table talk about what you're doing, why you're doing.

And I think—

which I don't have a problem with, mind you. Right.

No. So the way we do that and way we, you know, we have an hour interview. I'm pretty sure it went longer than an hour. We had an hour, you know, hour make the characters and 2 hours to run the session.

Editing magic.

Yes, I can only imagine.

NPC, you earned your paycheck once again.

I wanted to know more about the characters, but in that setting, that way we did it, there just wasn't enough time.

Okay.

Uh, it would have been nice to have like a 4-hour zero session where we kind of got to know each other. And so that's, as someone who likes the story, like I didn't know enough about your characters until it was, except for the obvious things, the real obvious things.

So let me reframe my question. I could tell because I know you very well that you had questions. The table is yours, sir.

I'll be honest. Uh, I, I would have to go back and really look at my notes because I know I wrote myself some stuff like, what the heck is going on there? It's just not in my mind right now.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

As a predominantly improv GM, I have a traditional gaming route, but I took a heavy extended detour into frou-frou hippie pass-the-stick story games before I came back around to traditional gaming with Savage Worlds and eventually back to Palladium.

Yeah, I don't know why he always has crystals on the table when we play. I still don't know how to get that part.

Seriously, I just have to align them in a certain way so that the feng shui around my laptop stand aligns with my chakras. Anyway, as that kind of GM, my advice on that would be both to you, Buckley, or to any other gamers who just want to run a one-shot, but you, you want to run a one-shot that also incorporates a bit of role-playing beyond just kill the terror bears. If you like, they've brought in these characters and these characters are interesting. I want to know more about them. in the hour and a half to 4 hours that we have for this con session. Whenever you're telling something that's happening, instead ask the player what happens instead. Like, okay, the whole visions that the terror bears are putting in her head, be like, you're experiencing your worst nightmare. Tell me what it is. Or stuff like that. The more questions that you have the player answer about their character's involvement in the scene, the more you get to know them. Yep.

Absolutely. It's a really good suggestion.

What is, what is your least favorite food? What is the worst thing you did to someone you were dating when you were a teenager? Or, you know, what, what is that one dream that you never accomplished? Just come up with these weird-ass questions. Think as if you were interviewing somebody for a fast food restaurant. Yet you had a background working as an interviewer at Google. So you're trying— so you're asking them these ridiculously complex questions because that's the way interviews work, right? You know, that's the way they work, but you're asking them for a fast food restaurant, right? Yeah. All right. I just patented that, by the way. If you use that in a game, pay me $50. I had a blast, by the way.

I'm glad. I'm glad.

Yeah. I mean, first off, it's nice to not be the one who has to run the game and kudos to you. You ran the Terror Bears better than I ever could. I frequently would look at the Terror Bears and read their descriptions and being like, those are pretty cool. I'm never going to run them in a game.

I was able to get myself in the head of the Terror Bears pretty quickly. And if I ran it again, it'd be even more interesting. Yeah, the second time, uh, and it would help.

How so?

If I ran them again, I would have some better visual cues to myself to keep them straight. The problem with the Terror Bears for me is that I knew what all— what they could do as a body, but as individuals, I kind of lost myself. That's how there ended up being a 5th Terror Bear, at least in one of the rounds. It's because I kind of lost track of what they were doing, right? And so I was like, oh, and it dawned on me when I made the correction. I think it was between round 2 and 3, uh, and I made the correction and I'm like, yep, yep. My own notes were, were not quite where I wanted them to be. And they, they're so interesting. And there's some great guidance in the book about them. I like the highlighted, the one paragraph is, uh, it's important for the game master to remember that the Terror Bearers are very immature.

Yeah.

Almost childlike. They've been badly hurt and want to strike back, but they are not adults and will not act in an adult way.

I think you portrayed that very well.

And that's— and that I, I have highlighted, permanently highlighted in my book because— I know, um, you should see this book. Well, this is my, uh, normal cover. Okay, right, right, right. Um, and, uh—

Oh my God, he's got permanent flags adhered to the pages. I'm looking at all of the highlights. Is that a written note in pen? Oh my God.

Absolutely. I looked at them and I'm like, oh, these are abused teenagers who have crazy powerful powers and just want to strike back at everybody. And so in a bigger campaign where these are out there running amok, I could totally see the right party trying to rehabilitate them and make them benefit society. At the same time, they don't want to be rehabilitated. But they do. Like this whole quandary of going on is really amazing to me. And I really liked them a lot. I may want to use them somewhere else, just reskin them because they could show up in a lot of other games real easily.

For folks listening who also want to use the Terror Bears in other ideas or capacities, uh, what was it? TMNT Adventures?

Yeah, I think so.

Added the one where the Terror Bears could potentially end the world.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's, I believe, one of the books in the, the, this, this 2-volume set.

You mean the one where, uh, the Terror Bears created the After the Bomb setting?

Or something very, very, very similar to it. Yeah. Yeah. Depending upon which incarnation of After the Bomb you're looking at, the original one or the much, much, much, much better described one in the 2nd edition.

Yeah.

I think the description of the After the Bomb setting in 2nd edition is as long as the first book, which was very small. Oh yeah. Yeah.

The original edition was pretty short.

No, sorry. I'm exaggerating. The description of the setting in 2nd edition is like a page, 2 pages maybe. Like, Woodrick was very concise.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. Well, I think that's about it. I don't think I have any other items to jump out of my head. Maybe they'll come out at some other time, but I really appreciate you all letting me run it.

Let's do a quick round of questions here, or maybe question and answer. Um, the question I'm going to ask you, Buckley, What do you wish you had done different?

There are 2 things. Ignore this. There are 2 things. Ignore how it told me to run initiative because I absolutely hated it.

Yeah.

And then, and the second thing is probably really look at the terror bears and make sure that they each stood out uniquely in everyone's mind because they deserve that spotlight.

I think for me, my big one is I made a character that had no non-lethal options. Unless I was going hand-to-hand, which admittedly, given he was built like a brick shit house— It— he was kitted out as if he had just run away from the facility and was a murder machine on legs with no alternative. And yeah, it did— that really truncated his options when he finally got his head Straightened out.

Mine are very similar. I made a character who was the one-trick thing. I blew things up and I threw explosives. In retrospect, I should have made him a little more well-rounded. I had the skills to do so. I think of all the characters in the group, I had the most skills and the most choices and took the longest to make. I could have done better.

You had all the skills. Yeah, you really did.

Mm-hmm.

But We had 2 hours.

Yeah.

And that's— and for something like that, for those people who want to run quick one-shot type things, it's okay to lean into those one-shot stereotypes for your, you know, or archetypes for your character. It's fine. For a campaign, it's a little bit different, but for one-shot, absolutely fine. Go full tilt. I am the mad bomber and I'm going to blow everything up. That's fine. Because it's There's no tomorrow. I think that's a wrap.

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