The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Jesus, Frank, I said the Karate Kid gets fucking Aura powers and shit. Didn't you write the Tome Monk? I thought you knew the power of kung fu? The Karate Kid is his own fucking Lucario, except even better.
He's better in the sense that he also has a Lucario. The point isn't that being a master of kung fu isn't enough to let you pull your weight. It
is enough to pull your weight in most scenarios. Lucario is a fucking Dragonball character. He has a battle aura that blows shit up and he can shoot energy blasts like he was in Street Fighter.
The issue is that being a Dragonball character doesn't scale up as high as some things in the setting go. To give a concrete example: Celebi has gone backwards in time and destroyed the town that you would eventually be born in. Which means that you have to solve problems in the past or you'll retroactively cease to have ever existed. That's a real adventure that actually happened and there is obviously no means of the Karate Kid's core ability set to interact with that whether they are powerful enough to shoot Aura Spheres or not.
As long as we confine ourselves to basic dungeon delve adventures where we go through ruins and Team Skull bases to fight monsters and rival Pokémasters, then making various Elothar classes is just a math problem. Some classes can be more or less competent as a
character and compensate by having a less or more competent Pokémon squad. Once we get out of that comfort zone, we get scenarios where the required ability sets are more specific and characters won't necessarily be balanceable by getting a bigger attack or having a better Pokémon.
And that doesn't just have to be Deoxys style universe shifting or Celebi style time travel. It could also just be social adventures. If you need to do ballroom dancing or some fucking thing, it's not going to matter whether you have Wailord or whatever, you need to be able to wear a sequined dress and fucking
dance. The fact that a lot of the character concepts are like fourteen years old means that they simply aren't allowed into some adventuring locations whether they can create Hyperbeams or not.
I'm honestly starting to think that nearly every class should make you start off with a Pokemon that's appropriate for the class. Maybe you pick from a list, or there are some guidelines you follow, but that seems like an obvious solution.
Well yes. If you're a Bird Keeper, you have Flying Pokémon. You have to or it's a violation of your character concept. If someone asks to play a Bird Keeper they not only need to have a starting Pidgey, but you also enter a social contract that they
will have a Mandibuzz or Braviary at some time in the future. Because if they were to end up with a Croconaw or something instead
they wouldn't be a Bird Keeper anymore.
I'm curious, though: Do you think Detective and Cop should be different classes?
That's a complex question, and the answer depends on how many classes you end up with. The fact that Detective Tim and Officer Jenny are major characters from major properties seen by millions of people means that you're going to want to support both characters. You
could make a single class that does both things.
Personally, I'd probably do them as separate characters, because that gives you a place to rant about the Detective games and movie separately from the Officer Jenny rant. And some of the Officer Jenny stuff is remarkably specific and weird. Did you know that one of the available advancement options is "Penal Legion Fire Captain?" That's when an Officer Jenny gets the services of a small army of ex-con Water Type Pokémon who form a paramilitary unit that fights fires. That has happened at least three times for different Officer Jennies, so it's not a weird one-off, it's a normal Officer Jenny advancement option.
-Username17