The Gaming Den

Frank wrote: According to certain... kinds... of fanfiction, you can catch humans in Pokéballs and then teach them moves.

In Pokémon Go there's a scene where a rival starts chucking pokéballs at you specifically asking to become theirs.

jt wrote:A competent Pokemon system would tell you that Porygon can hack things, you can ride Rapidash

Yoh gawd Gamefreak heard you like Pokémon riding so here's an official Pokémon game with an Eevee riding a trainer that's riding a Rapidash so you can ride while being rided.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Dean wrote:If you have cavalry riding Rapidashes it won't be Pokemon anymore

Very wrong.

I'm not. Rapidash wasn't the contentful word in that sentence, cavalry was. If your contention is that you can have armed forces meeting with their pokemon riding dragoons or whatever and that that's not too large a setting change to make a bunch of people tag out I will point you to the post where someone talked about pokemon not repeating their names as a full dealbreaker exactly as I said they would.

I think you could make a pokemon inspired RPG or an RPG that had pokemon appear in it but a "Pokemon ttrpg" is impossible because pokemon has hundreds of individual breakpoints that if examined or even addressed cause the setting to shatter into dust and sand. The closest you could come to a legit product would be like the actual My Little Pony RPG but for pokemon. It's very rules light and literally mandates you play things out in the structure of an episode to get credit and that would probably work fine for kids.

God forbid people just use their own settings like the special snowflakes they are.
I think a better question to ask is what do you absolutely need for a Pokemon game to work? What is the bare minimum that people will accept to recognize it as Pokemon? There's a whole lot of shit across the past 20 years the games have been out, so you have to separate the bullshit from the ideas that actually work. No matter what you do, the GM and players MUST sit down and talk about the game before it starts simply because of how many different expectations people bring to the table. Some things have to be answered collectively - how do Pokeballs work? What level of morality are we operating on? What Pokemon are available at the start? Are we even in the regular setting anymore? Session 0 is mandatory for a Pokemon game and that should be made very clear in the rules.

Dean wrote:I'm not. Rapidash wasn't the contentful word in that sentence, cavalry was. If your contention is that you can have armed forces meeting with their pokemon riding dragoons or whatever and that that's not too large a setting change to make a bunch of people tag out I will point you to the post where someone talked about pokemon not repeating their names as a full dealbreaker exactly as I said they would.

But again and still: you are very wrong. "Pokémon at War" is a plot point that has come up several times. Now, Pokémon is a Japanese property and also for children, so the demilitarization of Pokémon has been presented as an unambiguously good thing. But remilitarizing Pokémon is a plan that a couple different villains have had.

But for example, the Great War of Kalos involves many Pokémon dying on both sides, and eventually someone uses a super weapon that's very much like a nuke and now Pokémon have been demilitarized. It's all very Japanese. But if you want to play in Kalos during the Great War period, that is canon. The official moral takeaway for that period is that war is bad and the use of radiation based weapons of mass destruction is tragic, because Japan, but the period certainly exists.

Personally, my Pokémon related campaigns have had a mixture of D&D monsters and tropes and Pokémon monsters and tropes. People like seeing Pikachu alongside Ashrat, they like seeing Arbok alongside Naga. And references to various D&D concepts and Pokémon anime concepts interchangeably can be a lot of fun. It brought the house down when one of the NPCs demanded the PCs "Stop or I'll call the cop!"

-Username17

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:God forbid people just use their own settings like the special snowflakes they are.

But this is in a discussion about the creation of a book with a setting. The topic being debated is if a pokemon setting can be written that does not require a sit down conversation to nail down what exactly it is and isn't and how its rules operate. The position that one needs to talk through and negotiate out a setting that vaguely incorporates pokemon in some sense each time you'd start a game is the opposition's side to this argument.

The thing in Vampire where everyone needs to sit down and talk about what their characters even want to do with their lives is a weakness. The thing in D&D where they waffle back and forth as to whether undead (and demons really) are evil incarnate or just scary looking is a weakness. If you can just sit down and play "Star Wars" that's a better setting than "Sci-fi Game" where you need to negotiate with your players about what it is you're doing first.

The authors of a Pokemon TTRPG book can sit down with themselves, choose answers for the open questions of the setting, and write them down so everyone who reads the book's intro chapter is on the same page. They can't pick the objectively true best way for the setting to work, because there isn't one, but that's not the same thing as it being impossible to pick.

Hell, it's Pokemon so it'd be entirely within-brand to write multiple TTRPG books with contradictory answers to those open questions. The games and spinoff games have multiple separate canons, there are multiple animes with different canons, and there are so many different manga canons that I can't even figure out how you'd count them.

FrankTrollman wrote:But for example, the Great War of Kalos involves many Pokémon dying on both sides, and eventually someone uses a super weapon that's very much like a nuke and now Pokémon have been demilitarized. It's all very Japanese. But if you want to play in Kalos during the Great War period, that is canon. The official moral takeaway for that period is that war is bad and the use of radiation based weapons of mass destruction is tragic, because Japan, but the period certainly exists.

Huh, now I'm thinking about a PokeUniverse where there was a Radiation pokemon type, possibly developed by a military, but after the Great War, the existence of it was covered up, and all existing Radiation pokemon were to be destroyed.

And of course, some fell through the cracks, which provides the plot hook for a campaign.

Edit: Oh shit. The ??? type could be Radiation. Curse, when used by a ghost, at least, is pretty fucking fitting for video game radiation.

The authors of a Pokemon TTRPG book can sit down with themselves, choose answers for the open questions of the setting, and write them down so everyone who reads the book's intro chapter is on the same page. They can't pick the objectively true best way for the setting to work, because there isn't one, but that's not the same thing as it being impossible to pick.

While you could make a Pokemon Conquest TTRPG and have it be more compelling and coherent than a Pokemon TTRPG, I think that few Pokemon fans actually wants to play a Pokemon Conquest TTRPG except for a handful of nerds who do things like write dystopian fanfiction about Pokemon breeding centers. Which isn't enough to sustain a game.

Because, let's get down to it, the most compelling parts of the Pokemon franchise to people who aren't fanfiction.net fanatics or tourney nerds are mostly marketing gimmicks and memetics. The most successful Pokemon TTRPG will be one that captures the fun of dressing Pikachu up in party harts and saying 'Squirtle'. Not one with a thoughtful deconstruction of what labor means in a world where Pokemon unconditionally consent to human exploitation.

So the best Pokemon TTRPG is literally magical tea party? I reject your premise on a fundamental level, Lago.

My first pick for Pokemon TTRPG canon:

The human world is peaceful except for some obvious bad actors, but human settlements are small and separated by dangerous wilderness full of wild pokemon. Pokemon are default hostile to humans but rapidly become tame with prolonged exposure, and pokeballs are the safest way to stay near a wild pokemon long enough for that to happen. The human population is small because it's hard to clear out farmland in a world full of hostile wild pokemon. The world is a bit obsessed with pokemon fighting because: tame pokemon like training to fight, it's just the most popular sport, and washed out wannabe-champions end up with the skills needed to become much-needed pokemon rangers. Rangers keep the routes clear and occasionally manage to clear out new areas.

That is, a reasonable enough approximation of the game settings, hostile enough to have easy sources of danger and challenges, but not trying for darker and edgier.

Pokemon is an IP that people have a lot of emotional investment in, more than almost anything except maybe Harry Potter. After all, if the gameplay is even passable people will excuse all sorts of other faults such as cutting well-loved mechanics, excessive hand-holding, or even the culling of the majority of available creatures. People will want a TTRPG of it regardless of how suitable the games might be to such a thing. A Pokemon TTRPG will have a point because large numbers of people will want a TTRPG with the Pokemon name and containing whichever Pokemon they are emotionally attached to. Just like D&D5e is well-loved regardless of myriad flaws simply due to brand loyalty and crossover from whatever Twitch improv theater groups claim to be playing it.

The real question would be "can a well-made Pokemon TTRPG exist and still satisfy the fans that would want it" rather than "should a Pokemon TTRPG exist". You can't put the genie back in the bottle on people wanting it, so you may as well talk about what would be a good way to address that want.

In regards to Pokémon's popularity, it should be noted it is literally the second biggest IP in the world, next to Hello Kitty, which is largest brand in the world. So the event better question is: why isn't there a Hello Kitty ttrpg?

Shrapnel wrote:In regards to Pokémon's popularity, it should be noted it is literally the second biggest IP in the world, next to Hello Kitty, which is largest brand in the world. So the event better question is: why isn't there a Hello Kitty ttrpg?

On the off chance you're not being facetious, I bet that Venn diagram is almost just two circles.

Facetious about a Hello Kitty rpg? Sorta. About Pokémon and HK being the two largest brands in the world? Nope, that's true.

I thought Pokemon brought in more money than Hello Kitty?

I'm not. Rapidash wasn't the contentful word in that sentence, cavalry was. If your contention is that you can have armed forces meeting with their pokemon riding dragoons or whatever and that that's not too large a setting change to make a bunch of people tag out I will point you to the post where someone talked about pokemon not repeating their names as a full dealbreaker exactly as I said they would.

Here's a scene from a movie from 2005 of armies of Pokemon in armor fighting.

Also, more detail, in the same movie, you can see armored dudes with swords and shields marching alongside them. This is absolutely a thing in pokemon.

https://youtu.be/vjYu9xKe9rM?t=140

(starts around the 2:30 mark)

Lots of examples, but suffice it to say, whatever you want for Pokemon will broadly work. What's important is production quality and whether you design it well.

But does it terribly matter right now? We are not legally allowed to work with the franchise, nor are our discussions going to really influence whomever gets to work on a TTRPG.

Pokemon is a traditional Asian fantasy setting with modern technology, stuff like riding dragons or eating dragons or evolving dragons shows up in 2000+ year old documents, as well as 20th century fiction.

The Pokemon audience already has the monk in Journey to the West raising Monkey King to be a good demon instead of a man eating one. There's already been centuries of tales of Daoist/Onmyudo sorcerers summoning spirits and taming spirits and so on.

Whatever high fantasy swords and sorcery or 'dark and edge' takes you want to do with Pokemon, the things Pokemon draw from already did it, and Pokemon has already did it in one of the manga anime and manga adaptions.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:I thought Pokemon brought in more money than Hello Kitty?

Yeah, 95 billion USD compared to Hello Kitty's 80 billion

Shonen Jump manga revenue is divided up between the publisher and individual hits, but if we combined Dragon Ball, One Pice, then it may be 100+ billion and above Pokemon, but I'm not sure how it all works.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_h ... franchises

virgil wrote:But does it terribly matter right now? We are not legally allowed to work with the franchise, nor are our discussions going to really influence whomever gets to work on a TTRPG.

Every Pokemon TTRPG released so far was a fan work. It's not especially likely, but it's possible that the guy working on Pokemon Tabletop Actually Good Game will end up being someone participating or lurking in this conversation. And even if they aren't, the conversation can still be interesting on its own merits.