How To Create Palladium Character Sheets with LibreOffice

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

All right, let's create some Palladium character sheets by hand, for free. While this tutorial is for Palladium Games, specifically Ninjas and Superspies, nothing is stopping you from doing this for D&D 5E, Pathfinder 2, GURPS, or any other game you can imagine. All we need are some free tools, like LibreOffice; grab it from the link above, or if you are on Linux, you probably already have it installed.

Why LibreOffice? Why Linux?

Because we are not supporting the AI ecosystem and are staying away from paid character hosting sites, software packages, and learning to be self-sufficient without spending money or having Microsoft feed our documents into AI models. My characters are my IP and thus mine. Also, I am not feeding into this RAM crisis. I choose not to use AI.

Also, my hand-crafted character sheets come out far better than these pretentious ones you get in the OSR and other games with dungeon maps and far too much clip art tossed all over them. They are simple, to the point, save paper and toner, and I can create custom sections to my liking if a game needs special information.

Download LibreOffice and install it. Then, go to Format->Page Style...

Set your margins to a half-inch, and give yourself a half-inch gutter. This way, we can three-hole punch our character sheets to store them in a binder with dividers. You may not want to know it now, but if you plan to run many characters or track one as they level, you will thank me later.

If you run an adventure, three-hole punch that too, and put the old character sheet in with it when you print a new one. This way, you will have a record of the adventure and the characters who went on it, and how they were at the time. Since you have hard drive space and these are small files, save a new file every time you level, just to watch the progression.

Next, go to Format->Columns and set this to two, and leave all the default values, including autowidth. This will use our paper better. Three columns are sometimes too hard to manage, and I end up with a lot of overflow onto the following line.

Part of me wonders if people need a tutorial like this, but another part of me knows that many just don't know. This is how we used to hack together character sheets in the 1990s, using word processors and dot-matrix printers, doing our own layouts and working magic with the features of the programs we had.

If you want an actual throwback, 1990s experience, doing your character sheets this way (or by hand) is the way to go. This is how we did them, and they always came out so clean, with plenty of room for notes and other scribbles. Did a value change? Cross it out, pencil in the new number, fix it later, and print a new sheet when you level up.

Remember to shred and recycle! But, seriously, doing my character sheets this way wastes a lot less paper than printing out a 16-page monstrosity with Hero Lab. One double-sided sheet can hold a lot of information when done this way. Of course, one sheet done by hand is the most waste-reducing way to make a character sheet, since you can use it until the holes wear through the paper. These sheets can do the same, as long as you pencil in new SDC and other changing values. I could do empty tables for "fill in by hand" parts, like for gear and open skill slots, and that is probably a smart improvement I can make to enhance reusability.

But it is my choice to make them! In many sheets and programs, you get no choice. This way, I get exactly what I want, and I can engineer re-use into the sheets if I feel I am wasting paper. I could go the whole way and make the entire sheet rigged for re-use, with a fill-in-the-blank box for everything.

For Ninjas and Superspies, I laid my first page out like above. The stats have tab stops, so I can create "columns" for the value and then the modifier. If a character has more than one martial art, copy and paste the Primary Form section for a new one. I made one since that is enough for now.

Skills and secondary skills will expand! Leave a lot of room at the bottom of a column for these expanding lists. In general, open lists will appear at the bottom of your page. Also, use the Insert -> More Breaks -> Insert Column Break command to stick a section at the top of a column, as I did for the weapon proficiencies. This way, they won't keep backing up into the skill lists.

Palladium has a lot of weapon modifiers that can add up for different weapons, so I split out the "to strike" modifiers for different weapon categories and include any bonuses from PP.

My second sheet has gear and, on the right, a list of the characteristics of different attacks. I have equipment back here, cyber implants, and a section for the training programs I selected during character generation, including the colleges the character attended and the time spent there. Cover is not on the official character sheet, but it improves as you level, so it needs its own section. Background is another fun section that covers family and other personal details. Remember to total your equipment weight!

If you need to set tab stops, you can do that by putting the cursor at the first spot in the document, choosing Format->Paragraph, and choosing the Tabs tab. Type in 0.5, press New, and then add them like that. I did mine every half inch.

If you want to get fancy, you can insert tables, too, and be very organized! I do everything with tab stops, but to each their own. If you like tables, go for it, and your sheets will begin to look very fancy. For games like Pathfinder 2, this may be a lifesaver feature. I will need to adjust column widths, and that is just a matter of dragging them over. Doing it this way gives me higher reusability, as previously discussed.

I like these hand-made character sheets a lot. They are more work, but this is a small trade-off for a sheet that grows as you fill it in, and you can create custom sections for whatever you want on the character. I can also copy & paste out of my PDFs into these, saving me a little work typing. If I need an entire spell description, I can create a sheet for it and paste that right onto the character's grimoire. If a character has an animal companion, I can make a place for their stats on the sheet.

If I want an adventure log, I can create a spot on the next sheet and list the adventure, the location, people involved, a summary of what happened, the XP gained, and other information.

Also, given the way you create characters in Palladium Games, you are copying and pasting a list of skills and modifiers into the sheet, making a few choices, and moving on to the next training package. For my character, I just added all the skills first with their modifiers, sorted the list, and removed the lowest-modified duplicates. Select a bunch of rows of text, and use Tools->Sort to sort that list so you can keep your skill and ability lists alphabetized for easier reference during play.

Would I love a Palladium software package and character designer? Yes, I would, and I know about the spreadsheet designers and have those for fantasy. But even those can't be as fine-tuned as this style of sheet, which is very personalized, and I can optimize the numbers I need and put them all in easy-to-read sections. The availability and quality of the character sheets I can find for the game do not limit the amount of fun I can have with it.

And my DIY sheets, while taking a little longer to set up, are fully customizable and quick to use during play. Are they fancy? No. Are they retro, and look like something we would do back in the 1990s with a 486 and a dot-matrix tractor-feed printer? Oh, yes! We did this for Spacemaster (with WordPerfect), and those sheets worked very well. All the same skills were used, including columns, bolded titles, and tab stops.

Now I don't need character creation software; I can do this myself on Linux. I am not feeding into the AI nightmare, and as a gamer, I can make the conscious choice not to feed into the AI bubble madness. I have the freedom to make that choice as a consumer.

Also, this throwback, 1990s-style word-processor sheet makes me happy.

Palladium Characters: Amazingly Good

I created a character for my throwback 1980s Palladium Ninjas and Superspies game last night, and there it is. That incredible feeling came right back to me. This is a character I want to play. Wow, what a fantastic experience, and this is a character with depth, real meat, and substance. When I am done, the character feels substantive, authentic, and seriously cool.

You must be able to follow instructions! Most modern players do not have the patience for this process and will never be able to figure it out, but that 'speed bump' is not gatekeeping; it is a skill test to see if you are worthy of putting in the time and attention the game demands. If you can't get past character creation, other games are going to be better for you.

This was true of games like Advanced Squad Leader in the 1980s; the rules were a certain way, creating a natural barrier, so more casual players would play other games, while players who appreciated the level of detail the game delivers would stay. This creates a filtering system so people who want to put in the time will stay, and those better suited for casual games will go elsewhere.

And this is not bad design; it is a feature. Those people on gaming YouTube saying "it is common wisdom this is a bad design" have no idea what they are talking about. They just want to sound smart and push everyone into casual games so they can get on the monetization gravy train. This is also why the First and Second Editions of AD&D (OSRIC or For Gold & Glory) are better for me than BX or BECMI.

I will take devoted, attentive, and patient players over the casual crowd any day. It is the difference between home cooking and fast food. While fast food is great every once in a while, it never satisfies me, nor is it worth going out of my way to eat. Meals made with care and time are always better, and the people who share that love are the ones I can relate to and speak to about food. The same goes for gaming; simple, casual, easy games feel pointless to me.

That is not to say the system could be more organized. Keep listing the skills and their modifiers that your training packages provide. In the end, sort both the primary and secondary lists, go skill by skill in the book, and write down your base percentage (plus the education bonus for primaries) and the per-level bonus. Some skills also have a negative modifier when chosen as a secondary, so secondary skills are better for no-percentage physical skills.

I create my characters in a LibreOffice document in double-column format, with fixed tabs, and type all the values by hand. Who needs a silly character sheet? Real players use LibreOffice and Linux for their character sheets. If you know how to create columns and tab stops every half inch, you have everything you need. You will never be taken advantage of by a paid online character storage site or Windows and its AI reading your documents ever again.

I even prefer this method to many "crafted" character sheets that are too fancy or take up too much space. At least here I can set a half-inch gutter margin and three-hole punch the character sheet for binder storage. LibreOffice character sheets are the way to go these days, and you will get a greater sense of DIY attachment and accomplishment once you create a sheet that is better for you than what others can provide.

Once you create one character, strip it down and use it as a blank template for others. There is your blank character sheet, and you can do a better job of organizing things yourself. Make sure to use LibreOffice's "sort" feature (Tools->Sort) when you select a list of skills so you can alphabetize them quickly.

This works very well for me, and I can fit an entire character on a single double-sided page. Also, note that I listed the skills as a base percentage plus X%/level, so if the character levels up past level one, I will not need to go back to the book and find all these "per level" modifiers again.

This also works for any Palladium game, and you can even export to PDF or text to import into a VTT. It sounds primitive and like a lot of work, and while it is more work, I feel an in-line two-column character sheet that I design is superior to most anything I could find online. For one, I have infinite space, plenty of room, and I can create custom sections for things that I want the campaign to focus on.

You will get double skills in character creation, and only the highest level applies. Also note that the character's education bonus (if they have one) is added to all primary skills, and not the secondaries! Some skills will modify other skills, so take note of that.

And do those physical skills early, so they modify your stats and SDC.

Also note, this is an old-school game. If your character is missing a skill, you can either wait until the OCC says you get a new one or you can figure out a way to get it in-game. Let's say I want my agent to get a "combat motorcycle driving skill" and they don't have it, or I forgot to give it to them.

Your first option is to swap an unused skill for that one, but be careful with physical skills, since they modify stats! Another option is to wait for the OCC to grant you a skill pick.

The third option is to figure out how long it would take to get that skill through a training course, if they can take it, who they would take it from, and how much in-game time it would take to attend classes. Three months for a secondary and six months for a primary sounds right, and you are trading time for advancement. If the skill is more in-depth, this time may be 2 to 4 years in fields like medicine, and it will take place over a more extended period.

You are trading time away from adventuring and adding time to the character's age in exchange for that advancement, so it works out. If you wanted to start with this skill, add the time to the character's age and give it to them. You are trading lifespan for a skill that is more than fair.

Also, I added a few sections to this character sheet that the "official" one lacks. I created a background section for the character's background and family, including the university they attended and when they graduated. I made a training programs section to list the packages I took during character creation. I added a date of birth. I made a section for their cover that can also expand if contacts or other special notes are needed. I listed all their martial arts moves and abilities. I made a section that lists the strike modifiers for different weapons and attacks.

The combination of the time it took to create the character, craft the sheet, and go through the selections and picks made me excited to play. I don't get this feeling with other games, and games that are much simpler than this. This character means something, and I get that "excited to play" feeling that I do not with other games.

Fantasy characters done this way are likely just as good, and clearly a step above anything 5E gives me.

Off the Shelf: Ninjas and Superspies

You get one Palladium SDC game out, you get them all out. I like Ninjas and Superspies. No game does as many martial arts types as this one. This is all the same Palladium system, so you don't need to learn much new to play.

The fact that this game is stuck in the mid-1980s with its weapons, gear, and vehicles list is good with me, and it has its own charm. This game is stuck in 1980s action movies like Rambo and Commando, and every Chuck Norris movie ever made. Also, the game draws on 1980s supercars, spy shows like Airwolf and Knight Rider, and TV shows. The James Bond spy movies also influence gadget-based agents, while cyber-enhanced agents perform missions similar to those of computer-enhanced agents in Terminator, 80s anime, or other action shows.

Everything feels like a comic-book reality, which is a massive appeal of Palladium games. You play these games because you want to have fun and do cool stuff. This is just like TNMT or Heroes Unlimited, but with spies and ninjas.

This game would make a great GI JOE role-playing game, especially if set in the 1980s. This is probably what I will do with the system, and it pulls off that heroic, cinematic action with the SDC system, making the first few bullets and blows miss and deplete that invisible stamina pool before the real wounds begin. We played GI JOE with the Aftermath system, but Ninjas and Superspies is also a great choice, especially if you lean into the ninja side of the lore.

Each character gets pretty detailed as well, so the team size should be smaller, like a three-person team handling problems and going undercover in hot spots of the 1980s, such as Central America, Libya, Beirut, and exotic locations such as Italy and France. Fewer sci-fi toys and lasers, and more realistic spy and commando actions are needed.

And if this is set in the 1980s, a good reference book on timelines and history is needed, at least to get into the vibe. There are a few of them on Amazon. Nothing is stopping me from setting this in the modern era. I need more references on modern weapons and vehicles, and all of that is available online. I grew up in the 1980s, so I am familiar and fond of the era, and this is when the cartoons first came on TV.

There are some heavy political and military overtones in the 1980s as well, along with lots of terrorism in the world's hot spots. We have the farm crisis, the multiple savings and loan collapses, inner city gang violence, the Drug Wars, Iran-Contra, Central American wars, Chernobyl, cruise ship hijackings, the strikes on Libya, the wars in Beirut, the Iran-Iraq war, the mining of the Straight of Hormuz, airline hijackings and bombings, embassy takeovers, hostage rescues, SDI, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the echoes of the Vietnam War, hostage takings, and plenty of material to use in a commando-style game. Things will get dark and gritty at times if you cut a swath through 1980s history and draw inspiration from it.

Truth be told, setting a game in the retro-modern 1980s will insulate your game from current-day politics, and it may be the only way to play a modern game these days with other people and not have fights break out at your table. Since I play solo, I can get along with myself pretty well, but I can see this being a problem with other groups and online play.

There is a genre I will call 80s-Punk (Neonpunk, Reaganpunk), and these transformative years of neon-opiate flash and a very dark undertone of societal change into a technological era and new world order, which we live with today. Clearly, this is a throwback 80s-Punk game with bright neon colors and some of the best music ever made, set against a dark, sinister, twisted undertone of a nation's loss of innocence and the coming tide of crushing global and technological change.

Terrorism is a symptom of a massive realignment in the social order, as violence is often the last resort of a dying way of life. We also see that, in war, as nations get boxed in a corner, war becomes the only way out. That is happening today, and the process is irreversible.

The synth-pop decade ended with hair metal and gave way to the hangover of grunge music and the tech-corporate 1990s, the budding Internet age. By the 1990s, the corporations and big data had won. By the 2030s, we will see the same shift again, but with AI winning and taking over every facet of human life, determining who lives and who dies. With AI denying insurance claims for lifesaving treatments, we are already there.

No drones, no public Internet, no AI, no search engines, no PCs, and no smartphones are a plus in my book, and make the action and communication a lot easier. Computers are all text-based terminals, and there are no home PCs. The closest thing to a cell phone is a vehicular radio phone, and those only work in major cities, are the size of a loaf of bread, are voice-only, and have a limited range. They had them in Miami Vice, and that is another good show for reference, plus a fun time on the DVD collection.

Nothing is stopping Ninjas and Superspies from being used in a Miami Vice game, either. GURPS has better police supplements, though. Miami Vice also had far fewer ninjas than GI JOE did. GURPS is still the better fit for this type of game, thanks to the excellent supplements on police procedure. The 1980s books are still just as valuable as the DVDs for both campaigns.

If I were doing any other historical game, I would use GURPS. But Ninjas and Superspies have the advantage of being written in that era and accurately reflecting its gear and technology. Even the weapons book comes from around that time, and it is a good sampling of guns and military gear for the era, making my job a lot easier.

While I would love to see a modernized Ninjas and Superspies game, it is easy enough for me to do, and having all this information on the 1980s in the existing books makes it perfect for throwback, action movie, nostalgia games. The game is slightly dated, but that makes it ideal for me. Still, updating the weapons and vehicles is a trivial exercise; just buy a modern gun book, the ammunition has not changed all that much (and the new calibers are mostly around 9mm and 0.45, with a handful of rifle calibers between 5.56mm and 7.62mm), and most vehicles have not changed all that much. 

The stats for all these things have not changed much at all from the 1980s, from a game perspective. A car is still a car, and a jet is still a jet. Multiply all the 1985 in-book costs by three, and you will have 2025 costs. That is actually shocking, in a way, now that I look back.

Why not use GURPS? For one, the SDC system in Ninjas and Superspies gives characters a buffer of soft hit points, lessening the lethality just a touch to a more action-movie level. Also, the martial arts rules are great, and put a massive spotlight on that part of the lore. This feels like 1980s James Bond movies, mixed with Commando and Invasion: USA. The system is fast and straightforward. GURPS is a slightly heavier game that leans more towards realism.

If I want that guns-blazing, martial-arts action, then Ninjas and Superspies is perfect.

Palladium SDC Games and Sandbox Play

Strangely, the concept of dungeon crawling took over the hobby. It is suitable for follow-on sales, but it feels strangely fake as the core of the hobby. Many games in the 1990s walked away from the dungeon concept, and a lot of creativity and imagination came into the hobby. We had the Palladium games, which were never really dungeon-crawling games, Vampire, GURPS, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and a few others that did not put "the dungeon" as the peak of adventure gaming. By the 1990s, the dungeon had been done, and even AD&D 2nd Edition shifted more towards story-gaming and modules based on novels.

Which is why my Palladium SDC games are sticking around. They come from the post-D&D era and tried to do something new. We are in that post-D&D era again, where the "dungeon as adventure" has been done to death, and we are ready for more story-based adventures. Once you build your character in a Palladium game, that is your "playing piece" that you take through various situations and scenarios. That sounds precisely like D&D, but it differs from the 90s RPGs.

The first goal is to "assemble your team of experts," and characters in Palladium's games need each other since they are all specialists in certain areas, and below average in areas unrelated to their specialties. In Palladium games, if you pick the archer, you will be the best archer ever. If you choose the ninja, you will be the best ninja ever. You will excel in your area of specialization, but you need the healer, warrior, wizard, and all others in your group.

You are trying to solve a series of situations with your characters, where you will all have a chance to shine. A dungeon is not a dry grid of room descriptions; more than it is a list of situations you will all need to resolve, circumvent, or work your way through to achieve your objective.

The "SB" in SBRPG stands for situation-based. This is what our game was about.

The gameplay in situation-based gaming is dynamic and incompatible with set-in-stone keyed room descriptions. It is almost sandbox-based play, with factions in the world working "live" to achieve their own goals, and you running around trying to stop them. In a Keep on the Borderlands-style adventure, the Caves of Chaos would not be the focus. The area map would be better filled with hamlets and villages around the keep, interesting locations, a wizard's tower, a soaring ancient bridge, small farms, outposts, trading camps, and other spots. Then, the tribes would enter the map, set up camps, and begin to take down civilization as marauders.

Each group's force numbers and memorable NPCs would be tracked and killed, and the situation would evolve organically. Your group may choose to root out the goblins stealing food from farms and burning them down first, and that may slow down the other forces when they begin to suffer food shortages. You may choose to break the orc siege of a southern town first, and that would free up men to reinforce the outposts.

The concept works on a master "situation" and breaks down into lower levels of "sub-situations" each faction pursues to achieve a goal. Your goal, as heroes, is to be the monkey wrench thrown into the scene. The master situation will not end well. Left unchecked, these bands of humanoids will surround the keep, lay siege, kill everyone inside, and take over the fort as an evil, demon-worshipping humanoid stronghold and blight upon every surrounding kingdom as more evil flows in from the broken lands.

This is how we played these 90s games; they were never dungeon crawls but live, active, dynamic, and engaging meshes of cause-and-effect, live situations that required multiple play sessions to work out and play through. There are no 'passive skills' that play the game for you, so you can stay on your phone. The Palladium games are perfect for this 'live action' play since your "team of experts" is there to tackle these problems with the tools you have and in the best way you see fit.

Do you have a stealthy ranger and ninja pair that can wreak havoc on goblin warbands?

Are you more a heavy metal group with tanks and healers, meant to bloody the nose of an orc assault?

Do you work more with magic that manipulates the mind and can turn the humanoid factions against each other? Or are you a more arcane sorcerer who can summon elemental forces or twist the land to stop the invaders?

Are you more in tune with nature and turn the land and animals against the invaders, washing out roads, tangling vines to slow them down, and calling on woodland spirits to fight alongside you? Are there nature factions to align with for this character type?

In Palladium games, other characters need you, and you need them.

The story modules for D&D in the 1990s were all about railroads. They were a series of combat encounters strung together by a story. Again, the live sandbox style of play ends up being the same series of combat encounters, but again, there is a vast difference here. There was typically zero freedom in how you pursued your goals in the 1990s TSR story modules.

The structure of the D&D adventuring party did not change, and it felt like a poor fit for those scenarios. Even today, D&D struggles with skills, and characters don't feel like "they have the tools for the job."

Palladium?

I have the skills for many jobs, thank you.

D&D rarely does "big magic," and 90% of the powers in the game are meant to be used in a small room. In the old days, you had "big spells" mixed into the list, like 'illusionary terrain' spell, and the 'pass without trace' spell. By the time we got to D&D 4, the game's scope had shrunk to become an MMO with small powers, and 5E continues in that direction.

Does it matter that characters in Palladium games are complex and take a while to create? No. Character creation is 90% of the game, where the focus of the rules should be. The rest of any Palladium game is so simple it puts rules-light games to shame. Combat is simple. Turn actions are simple. Skill rolls are simple. The action economy is simple. Damage and healing are simple. Armor is simple. Resources burn down, requiring rest and breaks, so you need to be able to plan for downtime and replenishment.

Palladium still captures the classic resource management elements of the classic role-playing games.

With d20 games like D&D, the story is the same as in the 1990s. D&D's characters are too simple and lack the tools to deal with dynamic situations. Your powers are room-based and don't do anything big and cool. While characters are specialized, they are specialists. The overlap of spells and abilities makes some character types obsolete. Every class is set up to tackle dungeons and not live situations. With frequent rests restoring most resources, the game feels like an MMO where your powers are full in every encounter.

Yes, there is always the Rifts game, but I am not focused on Rifts right now. I do not want MDC. I want a lower-level game where hit points and SDC matter. That part of the Palladium system is excellent, and focusing on the SDC games in an SDC universe is a joy. MDC weapons and powers are a distraction and trivialize the combat math into all-or-nothing, alpha-attacks, and going first. Playing with weapons that can destroy city blocks is fun, but my heart lies in the lower-level, smaller-focused, personal games.

The Rifts game is another discussion entirely. It is a lot like Robotech at heart; that is where you need to begin understanding it all. For me, the SDC games capture the Palladium charm the best.

I like the SDC games. I wish they made more of them. I would love to have a Weird West game or a 'hard science fiction' game combining horror and psychic powers from them. These books would also be great to combine with Rifts, adding cowboys, shamans, astronauts, and space marines. I would love a gangster game, pulp adventure, or a take on the Cthulhu mythos. I can make all these myself with any of their modern-day games (Dead Reign, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, or Beyond the Supernatural). Still, they have a way of making a single-book game compelling and exciting.

Ninjas & Superspies: Education Bonus?

 

Since I have been creating secret agents under the Operative Agent OCC the Education Level for these characters has always been "Special Training" and that is nebulous enough for me to ignore it.

But let's say I want to create a Private Eye OCC, and right there under Educational Level there is this:

Educational Level: Two Years of College or equivalent, +15 % Education Bonus.

What is that? What is an Education Bonus? It does not say anywhere in the book!

Well, sometimes to play Palladium Games, you need other Palladium Games. Page 44 of Heroes Unlimited 2E has this wonderful section on Education and Skills, and this concept is described. Basically, the Education Bonus is the skill percentage modifier for all of the skills chosen in a Skill Program (college learning), and NOT in a character's secondary skills (on your own learning).

So let's look at our Private Eye:

Available Skill Programs: Character can take any two (2) from among General Skill Programs and two (2) from Espionage Programs, plus any two (2) from among Military Skill Programs or Gizmoteer Skill Programs.

Secondary Skills: Select any eight (8).

So every skill taken under "available skill programs" gets the +15% bonus, and every skill chosen under "secondary skills" does not. Also note, that some players like saving their secondary skill pick choices for weapon proficiencies since they want to maximize the impact of that educational skill bonus on their percentage-rated skills. On another note, under some skills you take a percentage penalty when selected as a secondary skill, so check these when you pick them.

Also, since my Operative Agent's education level is "special training" that education bonus is factored into all of the skill programs.

Heroes Unlimited Character Creation

Now, Heroes Unlimited is way different than Ninjas and Superspies. In Heroes Unlimited, they assume almost a "generic" OCC and create characters based on random tables to determine education level, and from that, you pick skill programs. Only certain backgrounds can pick military and espionage skills, so you don't have that many characters who can play with military hardware and do cool spy stuff as their Ninjas & Superspies counterparts.

In spy school, you can play with a lot of cool hardware and learn all sorts of nasty skills, so those OCCs give you a lot of great skill choices. While you can generate military and espionage characters with Heroes Unlimited, I feel they are more generic "comic book" style soldiers and spies suitable for superhero backgrounds.

Also note, that the Heroes Unlimited GM Guide has a wonderful summary page for skills on pages 49-50 worth printing out on its own for character creation that has all the skills, percentages, per levels adds, specialty choices, and skills with special rules. This is what I want for Ninjas & Superspies, and I know that I could use this chart, but there are differences between the skill lists, and would like one more suitable for this game.

Dead Reign

Dead Reign is also notable for listing a bunch of jobs and giving them skill picks and mini-OCCs under the Survivor OCC, such as Builder/House Construction Contractor. Note that in Dead Reign, Military and Espionage skills are disallowed as Secondary Skills. In Ninjas & Superspies, Military skills are not allowed as secondaries, but some espionage skills are as a "thief" sort of background.

Dead Reign also lists skill percentages with the skill lists, so this looks like a sorely needed improvement they are rolling forward. Heroes Unlimited GM Guide does it one better by asterisking skills with special considerations and putting an (s) on skills that can be secondaries.

Dead Reign is sort of becoming a universal Palladium resource for "job OCCs" under that survivor OCC, so if you ever wanted to play a house contractor pulled into Rifts this is where you start. And then you start dreaming of having a tool belt with a wonderful selection of MDC damage hand tools and an MDC nail gun just for splurgoth tentacles.

Unified SDC Cinematic Universe Rules

What would I love? One 300-page book of all the modern-day SDC world skills and character creation rules, unified in one book along with combat, insanity, vehicles, and all the other common rules. Even the civilian, military, police, spy, science, medical, and other common OCCs are in here for "generic world" play. Call it the Palladium World RPG.

Next, sourcebooks then for eras of equipment, world info, weapons, and gear. So I can play Dead Reign in the 1950s. Or 1920s. Or the 2020s. Or the cowboy era. Or sci-fi. This way, the games never go out of date, and your historical support never goes bad. If technology changes in the 2030s, release a new sourcebook in 10 years and let the 2020 guide stay in print.

And finally, sourcebooks for the worlds with none of the common rules in them. You could do way much more background, OCC, creature, and world data in the base book without the rules taking up space.

I know this is sooooo not how Palladium works. You buy one book and you get a complete game. And this sounds like how GURPS organizes things. You lose a lot of the specialized rules for each game too, so I don't think this would work for some settings - but enough of them are similar enough that I wish we had a unified modern ruleset.

Some out there are probably saying "just use Heroes Unlimited for this!" I would not disagree since the support is there and a lot of the improvements, playability, and attention seem focused there.

The One Book Magic

And I suppose having a unified central rulebook would increase system bloat, and get rid of that "one book magic" Palladium is famous for. If we could have two sets of rules, a shorter "basic rules" common modern subset included in all of the modern games that were cut down and focused on the setting (put at the end of the book), we could ignore that section if we had the main rulebook - and there were NO differences between the subset rules and main rules.

Fantasy? I don't know, I like Fantasy and how it is in one book. I know, just release a generic book and make Fantasy a sourcebook! No, I like Fantasy how it is, in a Fantasy book. Even GURPS did a Dungeon Fantasy game and split the fantasy rules out and simplified the system, and that feels like a better-focused game and more playable.

But a part of me wonders if the base Palladium system needs a complete rewrite and reorganization, and the core rules put in a base book, and all of the repeated rules and little differences finally eliminated. It feels like heresy, but it may just be an evolution to a Palladium Core System that we need for the game to become a little easier to manage, play, and learn.

And I would love to have more room in the base books for each setting and to lose the pages of repeated rules. Just having OCCs, world info, monsters, gear, unique powers, and other setting fluff in one book would be cool.

I probably stumbled into a divisive topic here, but one I feels needs discussing. Essentially, the work I need to put into making Ninjas & Superspies more playable is the work that will need to be done anyways in a full system cleanup - and parts of this have been done in later games.

Ninjas & Superspies: Character Creation

Despite my praise for this game, I can see why people hate it.

So I went through character creation last night, and almost everything went pretty well - except for the skills. Oh, the skills. The hour-long slog through the skill lists. Please don't calculate the final stats before you do the skills! The 40%+5% per level but -10% if secondary skills thing. Why do we need so many specific skills tracked down to the percentage skills? The two skills in the same skill but different percentages skills thing. The whole why is this skill listed twice thing?

Now I want to make a cheat sheet for skills, where I list them alphabetically and then put the percentages and modifiers after them. I do not want to open that book again for skill calculations, trust me. The amount of flipping and losing my place, even for the PDF, was insane.

But I still like the game.

My character took me over an hour to create, but I still like the game.

I know, d20 people, please just give the character a skill set, add their level and ability score mod to the skill check, set a target number, and be done with it! Why does it have to be that much work? That is just...wrong. If I were playing any other spy game I would be in and done in 10 minutes tops, playing my first game, and not messing around with rules.

You like Castles & Crusades, right? You can do this all in the sister game Amazing Adventures with the companion that adds in modern gear, and be playing now. I know! But that game is more pulp, and it is also a more modern design.

With Ninjas & Superspies, when I was done I felt I had something real. When you put a little work into building a character you tend to feel a greater sense of accomplishment and connection to that hero. With a simple system such as a B/X, I do not get that same level of connection. The story becomes the focus, and the characters feel a little like generic replaceable any-bodies. For those who like stories, great! But there are times I feel more complex characters write the story on their own, and they don't need help from a module or storytelling dungeon master.

This is what it is feeling like with my character. He is so interesting and cool I want to go out and write stories with him myself, instead of having someone else to a story to me (or a random table providing it) and I have to react. There is something to character design driving the story that is at play here.

Without Rifts, Does it Hold Up?

One of the questions I ask in my exercise is can the SDC Cinematic Universe games stand on their own without Rifts? I feel they can, but they do need a little help, like cheat sheets, quick reference guides, and a few flowcharts. The character sheets too needed some love, and I found myself cleaning up my skill list by pulling the languages and weapon proficiencies out of the main skill list and putting them in separate lists. There was a coma/death save to add to my saving throw list.

Beyond optimizations for ease of use, can they stand on their own?

I feel they can. You start comparing them to other games and they will start to look a little less optimal ways of spending limited time. But then again, when I had my completed character I felt pretty good. I ran him through a sample arrival in a foreign nation, going through customs, meeting his first contact, getting on the road, spotting an ambush, and things went very smoothly. The system melted away, and my character sheet became the "game" I was playing.

My head was not in a rule book.

My head was in my character sheet, where it belongs.

Would I like to see a modernized version, cleaned up, with ease of use put first? Yes, of course. Modern weapons and gear, less of a focus on microfilm and microdots, more on modern spy stuff and drones. An updated weapons list, and new vehicles and communications gear. Also, I feel the more specific game worlds hold up a little better than a generic spy game - anyone can do a world like that - but Nightbane, Dead Reign, Beyond the Supernatural, and After the Bomb are cool and unique worlds I feel hold up a little better than a more generic setting.

Head Out of Book

I contrast this with games like D&D 3e or even Pathfinder 2e, where my head is constantly inside a rulebook when I am playing. Some classic games, such as Aftermath or Rolemaster, also fall in this category. This system falls into a unique category of "complex character sheet and no rulebook needed" and I feel the same way honestly about GURPS. A game with involved character creation, but most of the important parts are on your character sheet when you get done, and you don't really need to reference the book much past that point.

With B/X or other simple games, I don't need a book in my head to play, but the characters are extremely simple - I could play the entire game in my head.

Back in an era (the early 80s) where you could get a thousand players together in a game center over a weekend and play games all night, I can see why this sort of system would be the ideal design. For one, you can play with a lot of people and never need to be passing a rulebook around. Everyone does not need a rulebook to play, just a character sheet, and the rules are so simple anyone at the table can tell new players what to roll or what they can do next. For people trying the game, gamers with limited funds, or a group of kids where their parents could only afford one book - this was great.

And yes I know in the 80s your character sheets were hand-written and typed or photocopied ones were a luxury. And yes, this is a lot to hand-write, even on a computer I was still doing a lot of typing and work to get my sheet perfect.

For character creation? Forget it, you need a rulebook. Everyone does. But once you get through that, and keep a stack of pre-gens handy, you can play until dawn without needing to "pass the rulebook."

When I was playing my sample scenario I would do the "solo play" thing, ask myself what could happen next, and check my character sheet for a skill. If not, I would roll the percentage under an ability score, modified, or figure something out.

The book stayed closed.

I did a Pathfinder 1e game solo recently, and the number of times I had to find a rule in one of the books physically hurt. It killed the play of the game always having to go back and reference something, find out how a condition worked, get a combat rule right, or looked up a spell or class ability. The game had the worst of both worlds, complex character sheets, and constant book references. I felt the same with Starfinder.

Can it be Better?

If I spend the time to make skill cheat sheets for these games, yes, character creation will improve tenfold. Also, a decent checklist that makes sense and works in the order you need to do things would help. My second and third characters will go much better, and I will start to develop my systems and shortcuts.

The above is what I have in mind, but sorted alphabetically so I can just go down the chart as I fill in my character's skills without opening the book. I can probably add a notes column for ability score adjustments, but that is it. I would need to make one for each game, just because I half-expect the skills to change or have special ones in each game.

The game needs some love and organization, but it can be made better for fast play and easier character creation. It is not a hopeless game or far too broken to fix, just a little cleanup and organization is all we need.

Ninjas & Superspies: Martial Arts Cheat Sheets

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.

Ninjas & Superspies: In-Line Character Sheets

Creating cool character sheets is another thing I am doing to prep for my Ninjas & Superspies campaign. Okay, what do you mean by cool? Well, for one, it has to work with my copy & paste skill selection and sorting method, so it has to be in MS Word.

What I did was create a document and copy what was on the official N&S character sheet. This looks a little like the formatted characters when you see them in the books, but with a little more spacing and room. I made this two-column to match the typical Palladium layout too, and to save a little space. Notice I added the saving throws that were hiding in the book somewhere? I originally did a beyond the supernatural character sheet that HAD the saving throws, so I decided to find them and add them to this sheet to make sure they got used during the game.

My Beyond the Supernatural character sheet is above, and you may notice a few differences. The saving throws are different. The "spy stuff" like nationality and cover identity is gone. BTS' Perception stat has been added. Chi is replaced by PPE and ISP. N&S has a pain category of saving throw, while BTS has two types of magic and also psionics.

These let me create a new file for each character, and as skills, abilities, gear, and notes are added the sheet just keeps filling out. I don't really expect this to go beyond one sheet of paper, two columns, and double-sided, but it could.

Is it as pretty as an official character sheet? No. It does let me copy & paste and type in values, which is 100 times better than using a pencil on the "officially too small to write on" standard character sheets. My eyes are just not that good anymore, and if I can type, I will do that. If I can't use the spreadsheet generation (Rifts and PFRPG only), this style of the character sheet is my next best option.

Also, if I need a new section, like an agent gets a secondary martial art form, copy & paste, fill in the new data, and I am done.

Having sheets like this is the difference of whether these games will be played or not, at least for me.

Ninjas & Superspies: Rapidstrike

 

We loved the old Operation: Rapidstrike module for TSR's Top Secret game as kids. The tournament characters went on to be some of the best NPCs we had in one of our long-running games, so it is fun to pull my copy of this out and reminisce.

And since I am currently on a Palladium nostalgia kick, would it be fun to spin up these characters in Palladium's Ninjas & Superspies? I was thinking of doing a fun conversion, maybe playing through a little of the module and seeing how different it comes out.

And I shouldn't have done that.

One of these characters feels like they could raid this island and complete the mission alone.

They are that badass.

I started with the agent with the highest HTH Combat value, which would be the Frenchman Clause "Mongoose" Bouchet. And I made him a Tae Kwon Do Karate fighter. The guy came out amazing, he can kick things directly above his head, throw death blows, do snap kicks, roundhouse kicks, gets four attacks in melee, has an awareness bubble around him that prevents him from being surprised, and he has an entire arsenal of other attacks and defenses that blow my freaking mind.

His skill programs include being a bodyguard, expert thief, guerilla warfare, military intelligence, medical, and Romance (European) languages. He came out like this guy the agency sends into an area of the world to protect a target; while he is working as a bodyguard, he will use his military intelligence skills to figure out the threats and his guerilla war skills to eliminate the threat cleanly without the person he is guarding knowing a thing.

He is Coooo...

I do that in my Eric Cartman voice, and you know if you can say that about a character, you know you are playing a Palladium game. In some games, we get character classes built like high-end European bikes, a joy to ride and incredibly engineered, but they have this almost mechanically sound but not incredibly exciting feeling going on.

I get this feeling from some of the Old School Essentials expansion classes and incredible works of B/X design and rules interpretation. Great designs, they work incredibly well, but my want to play them is sort of in the middle somewhere. A lot of B/X characters have this disposable feeling to them. Mechanically they work well, but ultimately they feel too simple to invest in without pages of backstory.

When I take the time to design a Palladium character, that is both an investment in that character, but also me making choices that give me ideas for adventures. Inspiration is a part of the character creation system.

I feel the strong, cool character is one of their driving design inspirations behind every Palladium game, it is not enough to make a game with a bunch of normal classes, and tropes pulled from movies and comics, or even classes that are more mechanical ideals of design perfection. They also ask if the classes fit into the world and game if they make sense, and how they fit in with the others already in the game. It is more than just cool, honestly, it is a game design that also factors in fun, the world the characters live in, and mechanics.

My Agent

Seriously, I am looking at his skill list, and I want to play this guy - just this guy - and have all sorts of cool adventures with him as an awesome bodyguard assassin. He is deadly enough without weapons; the guy could just fly into a country commercial, kick someone in the face and get a weapon, and complete his mission with that cleanly. Then, wearing his white tuxedo, attended the rich party and danced with the pretty woman (also the target), and know a few hours before anyone who threatened her, he took out by himself with his mad assassin skills.

He is a hundred times cooler in Ninjas and Superspies than in the original Top Secret game.

And I am sitting here wondering why people complain about the complexity of Palladium characters when they just come out so darn interesting. I look at the Top Secret character, and he seems simple and one-dimensional, the best HTH guy with a night vision scoped sniper rifle and pistol, the highest charm and coordination, three throwing stars, and 50' of rope. If I were playing this module, the only things that stand out about him are his high HTH, throwing stars, and his rifle. Maybe the rope. He has four skills in broad areas, such as military science and physical education.

This other guy? A James Bond-level agent ready to go. Freaking Chuck Norris martial arts skills. A guy who knows how to be a professional bodyguard, assassin, sniper, spy on radio communications, scramble his own coms, patch up wounds, survive in the wilderness, pick locks, kick out the lightbulb directly over his head, use a map, disguise himself, set up surveillance cameras, encrypt messages, and do tons of other cool stuff on his own. Everything screams out cool on him. I look at his character sheet, and I get excited to play him!

And what I like about him has nothing to do with his gear. He could have any gear, no gear, or stolen gear and still be cool. He could be wearing Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a white hat and be cool.

And I stopped there because I was so shocked the other agents would be just pure sensory overload.

Too Simple?

A lot of the TSR games made during these times had this really simple design, and you see this in all of the TSR d100 games (Top Secret, Gangbusters, Star Frontiers) and also B/X style games (D&D, Gamma World). This is what made them so popular. Looking back, I love the nostalgia that a B/X style game gives me, and it feels familiar and comfortable. I can jump right in.

But I see why other games with a slightly higher complexity appealed to so many, especially in character design. Some systems had complex systems of character design that felt like more work than what you got out of them (Rolemaster, Space Opera, by-the-book Aftermath, and a few others). This, combined with complicated play rules, "felt" like a complex game, but the time it took to play them weighed it all down.

A few systems and Palladium had this moderate level of complexity in character design but kept the combat and task resolution rules simple like B/X. When I was playing, I could keep all the rules in my head, and honestly, many rules were up to the referee to rule on as things came up. But the slightly more complex characters felt exciting and a lot more capable than their more concise counterparts.

My nostalgia for B/X and those classic, simple games feels broken now.

I am feeling simple is not always better.

Today versus Yesterday

I know that these characters were designed for game convention play, and the game should be able to be picked up quickly by people wandering by and signing up for games. It quickly gave them a cool spy experience and made them want to buy the game. That is great stuff, and we sure loved Top Secret too.

But today?

I look at the Ninjas and Superspies version, and I instantly want to take him on a hundred adventures. The Top Secret character seems like meals I used to like as a kid, but I am just okay with that type of food today (and some of it, wisely, I stopped eating). He is average but not something I would choose if I had a choice in what I would rather spend time with on my adventures. And I don't really need or want that team of six agents. I could spin up one of them and have hundreds of interesting adventures.

I create a Palladium Fantasy character recently and got that same feeling. I ended up with a seasoned bard in many areas, ready to take on the world and do all sorts of interesting stuff. Lots of different social skills that would benefit the character in interactions and lore. While others may be more capable on the battlefield, this character will excel when a tricky negotiation comes up, an ancient elven scroll needs to be saved from a goblin outpost with a bit of stealth, and a lost elven song on that scroll is decyphered and performed for a visiting elven dignitary. Perhaps an extra mile would be done by re-transcribing the scroll in a more beautiful document complete with elven runes and artwork and presenting that as a gift to them.

That bard is going to shine. No one else can do that.

My B/X bard had a short sword, leather armor, and a few spells. I did not get that same feeling of competence and excitement other than, "This is the playing piece that casts spells through music." I exaggerate a little, but I feel a simple class leaves a lot up to the player (which is both good and bad), and you get my point.

The question comes up, would I get this same feeling through a B/X game with non-weapon proficiencies? You could do all those as skills in an AD&D 2e style game. But I never felt as inspired by those games, and they always felt like the classes were a bit too generic, and the fighter could eventually pick up those same skills and do what I do. The skill packages for these classes, combined with their fighting styles and magic, make each OCC design cool and unique.

Instead of a game that lets us stumble into cool with a generic design or skill system, the Palladium way gives you a solid yet cool design.

All Six Together?

And if I spun up those six agents and sent them into this island fortress, the team would instantly feel like an Avengers-level of superspy team up instead of "six basic characters with different skills and weapons." Like if we had six different "00" franchise movies done over a dozen years coming together for one epic adventure.

Would each character be this complex system of fighting and skill usage? It would be, but it would be insanely cool if you played with friends who could each master their character and fighting style. Frankly, I would limit my first game to either the "basic" simplified agent styles or just the two martial arts forms these were based from. 

But I would have a game where every one of my friends would play a superspy who felt instantly like an MCU-level character. A somebody.

Given the little time I have to play as an adult, I would rather have more satisfying and complex characters who instantly inspire me to take on adventures. The simple ones I look at and get my nostalgia hit, but not much else.

A strange experience and feeling from this exercise and an interesting one. We learn a lot about rules and game systems with conversions of characters we "thought" we knew, but seeing them in a different light can open our eyes to things we may have overlooked because of the warm, familiar glow of nostalgia.

Ninjas & Superspies: 1985

Ah, yes, nothing dates a game like references to technology.

Memory Chip - Nothing more than storage for simply numerical or text data. Each chip holds about as much information as 20 typed pages, or enough digital audio signal data for a 10 minute sound recording, or sufficient digital images, for 4 photographic-quality images or one minute's worth of standard video recording. The memory chips can be installed in series for more storage.

This is like the Space Opera situation where computers that run battleships have 4K of RAM. Don't get me wrong, you can run a space program off computers like that, but your crew will be flipping a lot of gigantic banks of switches and dials.

The guns, technology, vehicles, and entire vibe of this game are stuck in the mid-80s. The cybernetic technology is not, and that feels like it came from an afternoon kids' cartoon with a title something like "Cyber Agents." And yes, there was a toy line to go along with that.

And don't forget the ninjas. Whole lotta ninjas.

So the game is dated?

Yes, and that is why I love it. I get to put together a 1980s playlist on Spotify, watch some of the great movies from the time as inspiration, get the hair right, play some Miami Vice music, and play a great game in a time before the Internet and handheld cell phone usage (they still had them in some places in cars and suitcases).

That computer chip, you bet I am playing that for laughs when the gadgeteer walks up to the team, something like Q out of a James Bond movie, and says, "And this chip holds twenty entire typed pages! Amazing! But please don't give up your day job and think you are going to be a novelist, agent."

250 single-spaced (or 500 double-spaced) typed pages equal a megabyte of computer storage. So this chip is about 80K of memory, and 64K if you wanted to be Commodore 64K authentic and give a little wiggle room for spacing.

And a standard roll of chemically developed film in the day holds 24 high-resolution exposures (some did 36) compared to 4 low-resolution images (320x240 or 640x480-ish max) on that chip. Some things were still way better in analog back in the day, like vinyl LPs, Kodak film, rolls of movie film, giant audiotape reels, and stacks of typed pages, but that is cool.

This is very much an analog world. Give up on digital and embrace 80s tape-punk.

And one of the cybernetic upgrades for cyborg parts is a "modem chip." So if you have one of those in your cybernetic hand, plug your finger into a phone jack to transmit the data back to HQ; your hand will make those silly, loud, and embarrassing modem connect noises. You will smile with a smug smirk on your face, like this is the coolest thing ever, but 40 years later, we will laugh.

And you still would have been cooler than us.

Mid-80s Cool & Tarnish

My game will be set in the nebulous mid-80s era. The endpoint is definitely 1985 for any music and cultural references, as the 86-88 era felt like a downturn of artistic energy and tackiness. Once you get Iran-Contra, the Challenger Disaster, Chernobyl, and the stock market crash, the decade starts to lose its innocence and positive mojo. From 89 onward, that is, the 1990s, you begin to see a lot of modern cultural influences (The Simpsons, Seinfeld, etc.). The year 1984 is the high point, but that extended into 85, so that music was cool as well, and the world was riding the 80s new wave. The 80s ended in September 1985, so we can push that through to Xmas and call it our cultural inspiration.

For some, the warts of the 80s may be a bit much. You are talking inflation, AIDS, the rich-poor gap growing, Central American wars, terrorism, drugs, the decline of inner cities, structural intolerance, the farm crisis, the crack epidemic, the S&L crisis, corrupt televangelism, the Satanic Panic, African famines, and a whole bunch of other problems that TV and movies tend to ignore. If you are doing a more lighthearted campaign, you should probably downplay or ignore those elements and live in the plastic, fictionalized 80s that our memories seem to idealize.

Some of those could probably be introduced in spy stories, like the Cold War, terrorism, gun-running to Central America, and the "Miami Vice" style drug trade - but some topics may upset some, so tread carefully and create the fictional setting that you and your players want to play in, and agree to ignore the rest.

What You Want Them to Be

Some say that every Palladium game is played however the group wants it to play. I heard some say that since these games were developed before the Internet, every group came up with its own way of playing the game; some used d20 (or d30) attribute checks (and that rule is not in the game), some used modified percentage rolls, and everyone figured out how to play these games themselves.

Everyone made up rules to make things work, and that was cool. House rules to get things working the way the group wanted were common; GMs and players just made a lot of things up, a GM made a final ruling on how a situation was handled, and play continued.

And then the Internet came along, and everyone assumed there was one way to play these games. There wasn't, there still isn't, and while things online may be significant rulings and ideas for how others play the games, they are not the way you should play.

You need to come up with that yourself.

In a way, the Palladium universe of games exists in a strange temporal time loop, one where trying to explain how the game is played is like trying to explain love or the meaning of life. This is something you need to find for yourself. The tools are there; it is up to you to use them and build that meaning and experience with your friends.

Many old-school games are like this, and the original Traveller black books were, too. A lot of rules and "how to play" stuff did not exist. You made it up, house-ruled, and every group played Traveller slightly differently. Where rules did not exist, it gave you the freedom to make the game your own thing. So many of the games of this time had that freeform "you make it up" feeling, even earlier versions of D&D before they simplified the games for younger audiences.

We lost a lot when these games went mainstream.

They stopped being games of imagination, and they became structured play activities.

We Tell You How to Play

Contrast this with today. We need revisions to the games, clearly explaining how to play everything. Every ambiguity is reviewed by a grand council of hundreds, cleared up, and official rulings and compromises are made, and everything is laid out in tedious, exacting detail and procedures. Rules are patched like video games, and I remember how bad it got during the 4E days, when the books became worthless after a few months because all the information was horribly wrong.

Even worse, games that push the "official rules" narrative and paint your group in a negative light for breaking with what the company "says" about how the game should be played. You surrender your freedom and creativity to a billion-dollar corporate entity.

Your choice, but understand what they are asking you to agree to.

It is a fast-food, slick, corporatized role-playing experience.

You don't need any imagination to play the games or interpret the rules. I have had some games I DMed where I felt like a DVD player reading the story and setting up the combats. I have seen players dutifully follow the script laid out for them. We had rules questions, and no one needed to come up with an answer. It was in the book.

How You See a Game

Some games go wrong today because they lose that place where rules are left up to the group, and they try to be too much of a perfect reference guide on how everything works. They become more dictionaries than games that invite you to make up your own way of playing.

When our family played Monopoly, we made up all sorts of silly house rules and tried new ones every game. That was normal to do. The Free Parking pot of money for fees and taxes. Buying your way out of jail or paying for an extra dice of movement. Buying another player's house and moving it to one of our properties. Adding extra houses and hotels with buttons and thimbles. The game was ours, and we decided as a family how we liked playing.

Today, we put too much faith in rules and accepted gameplay procedures, as if we were all computers that need programming.

And some games appeal to those who like more structure.

Other games give you a box full of crayons and paints and tell you to make your own.

To many players today who grew up within that strict structural definition of what a game is, some of these more freeform experiences may not even seem like games. But to us kids who picked up sticks on the playground, called them swords, and made up our own cool playground games, a few pieces of "this and that" and our imaginations were all we needed to get started.

And the rest was up to us.