Another tip for Ninjas & Superspies, if you have the PDF, copy and paste the fighting styles you are going to be using and format them to look nice, and print them out.
I was trying to copy all the information to my character sheets, but those got long. Here, I can just make note of my attacks per melee and level advancement bonuses, and leave the rest of this information on the cheat sheet. If I play with others I can pass the sheets around, or make one for a specific style and give that to a player as a reference guide.
The fewer reasons to pass the book around the better!
Here, an agent's attack options are clearly laid out and easy to choose from. I would probably create a reference booklet too of the modifiers and special attacks, just to keep the book from slowing down play at the table.
Simple Styles, Good for NPCs
Also, I did the basic agent styles. As I did my first agent, I slowly came to the realization that the specific martial arts styles should really be for PCs and important NPCs only. If I want to do a team of six NPC agents I am probably better off using the simplified "agent" styles instead of making them a team of six PCs with PC-level martial arts skills.
The special fighting styles are saved for PCs, and I could run a team of six as NPCs with less complexity for each character. After I wrote this I added Jujitsu and Tae Kwon Do to my sheets (one double-sided page per fighting style), since those seem like the first specialized styles I will be using.
If I am just playing one of them as a solo PC (like Mongoose), I will probably give that agent a full style and get to use and focus on all the cool special powers and abilities the form gives you, and also train in new forms as the agent grows. If the others show up as NPCs they will use the simplified agent styles and be the supporting cast. I feel this works better for solo play since the PC needs to have more detail and options, while the NPCs should have one layer of simplification, but still be capable foes on their own.
Then Again...
But another thing, probably something in my head after I watched a Kevin Siembieda interview, told me to NOT cut these characters down to make them easier to handle. If what you did inspired and excited you, why cut it down? Why accept less?
Part of the Palladium mindset is telling yourself to never settle for less. If you cut a character design down from the thing which inspired you to something less interesting, you are not taking full advantage of the system, you are shortchanging your experience with the game, and you will have less fun for the time you put into the game. If you are going to invest 20 hours in a game why would you design a character that would have half the fun?
You can have it all, you should have it all, and you should go for your dreams.
It is a very midwestern mindset of mid-19th-century America, in fact.
I swear there is some philosophical mindset behind Palladium versus other games that tell you "you can't have it all," "you need to simplify to have fun," or "please fit your grand ideas in the tiny boxes we give you." The Euro-game mindset of abstraction and fitting things into conceptual containers (ammo dice). The West-coast social-media marketing-driven game designs (network effects). The East-coast strategy wargaming RPGs of the early 80s (Space Opera). Mechanics games that name themselves after resolution methods and try to fit everything into that box (d20 System).
Palladium is very much rooted in that "go big" Midwestern dream.
Go for it.
Forget those second thoughts you may have had.
Go for it all.
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