The Gaming Den

Dean wrote: These are my initial brainfarts. Anyone got anything else?

Yeah.

Actually include a couple of spells that take a natural feature of one creature and graft it on to another. If mad wizards are making owlbears, having a 4th level spell that lets you do that absolutely makes sense.

Rituals that increase a creature's CR and let is 'buy' abilities that reflect the higher CR are also a thing you should just include. Building monsters doesn't necessarily mean CONTROLLING monsters, so there's no problem with PCs building monsters, and they'll appreciate that even if they don't do it, they COULD if they wanted to.

If your game ever comes up with the answer 'a wizard did it', you should strive to make it knowable and repeatable.

Absolutely that should exist but doesn't actually address the problem. The question isn't "How do panthers with shadow tentacles exist?" the question is "How can a panther get shadow tentacles". Evolutions are different than crafting monsters narratively. Yes a wizard could be upgrading sea creatures to sea serpents and wyverns to fire wyverns but the fun of the idea of a gyrados or rathalos upgrading from a base model is that it upgrades without a guy showing up to bolt fins or flames onto it.

Maybe the "Wizard did it" part can be dormant in creatures that currently exist. Like some varieties of eel or snake or panther have been modified so that if conditions are just right they upgrade. Like if they're very successful predators their body undergoes a transformation. There would even be a logic to that. Where if a Wizard wanted the best possible sea serpents or nightmares you'd want the snakes and horses you we're gonna spend your magic and training on to be the best possible ones. So you kinda infect the species so that the one eagle out of a thousand who's such a good hunter it can catch thousands of calories a day undergoes a magical transformation and becomes a giant eagle. So that the elf wizard capturing giant eagles for his Skyrider Corp knows the giant eagles in his region are ones that have the right stuff.

Bees can be transformed if they're fed a specific jelly. There might be something there too. Where eating enough magically resonant things or possibly just being in certain magically resonant zones supercharges a creature.

So a wizard goes and stuffs a Berserk Gene inside a bear, and three generations later every bear in the woods magically turns into a Dire Bear if it kills enough people? Sounds solid. If you did it to bees or something then it wouldn't be a stretch for their honey to be suffused with something similar, so if you make it past the Killer Beehive then you can feed their honey to your dog to make it a hellhound.

I remember only two things about Donaldson's Covenant series that have stuck with me and I still think are cool. The first is the part about how the poisonous ghost swamps and some of the random mutant creatures are the way they are because of a river running under Mount Doom Thunder washing out the contents of various evil temples and magical laboratories. The other is that the ancients left behind a series of magical resources that are supposed to be opened in order, once you've mastered the previous one. Totally possible to fuck it up. Human wizards do exactly that in the second series, but I could see potential for something like that in an RPG where ogres or intelligent ligers or something manage to get into the wrong tier of goodies.

Covenant himself actually screwed up the Ward sequence in The Illearth War, second book of the first trilogy. Also, I'm shocked that that was more memorable than the color-coded magic dog creatures that amplified their spellcasting by assembling in wedge formations.

I guess it's time to punish myself by re-reading those. It's been a while. Is there an OSSR for old wacky fantasy novels?

Ok, random thoughts, does evolving just happen to critters, or can it happen to people as well? I mean, can you borrow some of the weirdness and apply it to PCs when they level up or gain feats or something?

Thaluikhain wrote:Ok, random thoughts, does evolving just happen to critters, or can it happen to people as well? I mean, can you borrow some of the weirdness and apply it to PCs when they level up or gain feats or something?

"Eat their flesh, gain their strength" is popular in various world mythologies.

Hindu & Daoist lore is filled with supernatural studies and surgery to gain power. The protagonist of Qing dynasty classic "Carnal Prayer Mat" installs dog parts in his dong to make it stronger.

Thaluikhain wrote:Ok, random thoughts, does evolving just happen to critters, or can it happen to people as well? I mean, can you borrow some of the weirdness and apply it to PCs when they level up or gain feats or something?

Hell yeah, motherfucker!

Guy Fieri only needs one more orb

I've got an interesting question on my hands.

As you know, in the Pokemon games some Pokemon only evolve when you shove a magical rock in their general direction. A Fire Stone, for example, turns a Vulpix into Ninetails. Okay, neat. Out of nearly 900 Pokemon. 4 of them evolve with a Fire Stone, specifically. That is so niche that it hurts. I could barely give a shit about that in the video games and on tabletop that's a downright obstacle.
So how do you translate evolutionary items into a workable tabletop context? Here's what I think:

1. Pokemon that need a specific Stone or whatever to evolve don't need it anymore, it just lets them evolve sooner than usual.
2. A Fire Stone should let any Fire-type evolve sooner than usual, but not as much as the 4 who normally require it. So a Charmeleon might be able to evolve 1 level sooner, while an Eevee could evolve 2 levels sooner or something.
3. These items also function as accessories that do cool things on their own. Maybe a Fire Stone enhances your firemaking abilities outside of a lame damage boost. I'm on the fence as to whether or not they should be consumable when you use them to Evolve something, leaning towards yes. I think otherwise they would have to be fairly expensive and not appear until the middle levels.

This is all predicated on the assumption that a Flareon is different from and slightly better than an Eevee of the same level, but not so much so that you can never just keep your Eevee cute and fluffy forever.
Thoughts? Do I even need any of these fucking items to begin with?

So Fire Stones (and Thunder Stones, Leaf Stones, etc) look like an idea that Gamefreak had for diversifying the evolution process and encouraging players to explore the game. In later gens, Gamefreak decided that there were better ways to mix up the evolution metagame than "use this colored rock". Now they just put a reference in once every few generatons, which is why Fire Stones randomly showed up for the elemental monkeys.

I'm not keeping up with your other Pokemon RPG work, so I'm not sure if this question has already been answered: Do you plan on having players play mostly around a single Pokemon, or run the full 6-person team?

If it's the former, you may want to consider leaning into fire stones and mechanics like them. It gives players opportunities to differentiate each other, and you may be able to create quests around finding items like elemental stones so players can improve their pokemon.

I like the idea that these items would also improve pokemon by default. Similar items like King's Rock (+flinch chance) and Razor Claw (+crit chance) already do something similar. You could probably make fire stones the fire equivalent of Metal Coat... just like a blinged out version of charcoal.

Gamefreak has had a lot of ideas for diversifying the evolution process that they then proceeded to immediately fucking ignore forever more. It's almost impressive.

My idea is that how many Pokemon you can have at once depends on your class selection. Whether you want one or two really strong Pokemon that you don't do much bookkeeping on or 6 Pokemon that you've tweaked to your pleasing, I think there's room for both kinds of players.

I wrote up a bunch of the evolutionary items and did my best to give them mildly interesting effects. Most of them can only be used by Pokemon, but if a human equips the Whipped Dream, which evolves Swirlix (and only fucking Swirlix), then they gain the same tasting capability that Swirlixes do. Not terribly useful, so it's a really cheap item, but it's good for sussing out things that taste wrong. Like fucking poison. A Fire Stone straight up boosts all of your Fire effects, but not your actual Fire damage - so your Fire Pokemon would have a higher body temperature and produce hotter, more volatile flames. Metal Coats make you not have to make temperature checks outside of extreme situations, but also boost Steel-type creatures' defensive stats.

I'm rambling, but what I'm trying to get at is a mixture of both. Stones not only let you evolve Pokemon earlier, but you get access to a free Tutor Move (like how Charizard can go to a tutor and learn Iron Tail and stuff). HOWEVER, that consumes the item, which also happens to be a pretty decent accessory on its own. You may need to consider the costs.

Shadowrun 4e: Can you toggle adept powers? If yes, where is it explained?

I'm rambling, but what I'm trying to get at is a mixture of both. Stones not only let you evolve Pokemon earlier, but you get access to a free Tutor Move (like how Charizard can go to a tutor and learn Iron Tail and stuff). HOWEVER, that consumes the item, which also happens to be a pretty decent accessory on its own. You may need to consider the costs.

Seems cool to me. I think the idea that these items are consumed makes them a bit more interesting.

If I were making a pokemon game, personally I'd be sorely tempted to add in a mechanic where pokemon can evolve into a sort of (extra) element-infused form of whatever they already are, possibly involving the use of elemental stones. So, you can use your Fire Stone to evolve your vulpix, but you can also use it, possibly with a special machine or spell or whatever, to turn your Pikachu into a... Pikachar, or something, and it gains the Fire type, and maybe a boost to, like, Special Attack and Speed, or you can give it to your Geodude to evolve Geodude into a Volcadude. Now, whether Pikachar can evolve into a Raichar and Volcadude can evolve into Lavaler and then into Volem, eh, I don't know. It would be an interesting cost benefit analysis if infusing your pokemon meant they couldn't continue their evolution path, or even if they "lost" the infusion when they evolved and you had to go re-infuse them.

You could even have a thing where certain types of pokemon reacted really well or really poorly to certain infusions. Like, infuse an Electric type with Fire? Cool. Infuse a Fire type with Fire? Even better as you're essentially giving them a pure upgrade to their "magical hot force." But infuse a Grass type with Fire or a Fire type with Water? They're super not going to like that. Maybe it can be shortcut by using type advantages, so if a pokemon is weak to the element you're infusing it with, it's a bad reaction, if they have no type interaction with it, it's normal, and if you're infusing it with an element they're not weak to but is strong against an element they're weak to, it's better? That sort of shortcutting leads to weirdness where infusing, say, Charizard, with Grass energy is really good, but I'm going off the top of my head here.

Oh, absolutely. Adding on or changing the types of pre-existing Pokemon is half the fun of doing it on tabletop. I do want it to be available to players at higher levels. The GM can let them do it earlier if it's cool with them, but part of the game for some characters is getting to do magic rituals on your Pokemon or inject them with nanomachines or whatever. I haven't really written any of this up yet, though, so the question is how am I gonna let the players do it?

However, I think that there are enough Pokemon with disparate types out there (and in fanon) that we don't need to punish people for trying to make their Charizard into a Waterzard or whatever. Maybe the Pokemon is uncomfortable with it for a while, but I don't think we need negative reactions. Hopefully, things are complicated enough that just changing something's Type leads to a bunch of other changes about what it can do. Of course Waterzard spits water instead of fire, but maybe it also gets gills and pressure resistance, stuff like that.

Yeah, thinking about it, bad reactions is good for narrative, like if someone infuses their charizard with water or their bulbasaur with fire, it shows their hubris, inexperience, or pure callousness as their pokemon is in perpetual agony, but for a game, it's just more complication and unnecessary limitation.

I think there may still be some kind of mileage in infusing against or with type, but maybe it's just as a "complimentary infusions are more common/cheaper in (resource)".

That might be workable. I'll take that into consideration when I write up type shifting.

While we're on the topic of evolutions, there are actually a decent amount of special variations to work with. Mega Evolution, Dynamaxing, Primal Reversion, Shadow Corruption, BREAK Evolution, Crystal Pokemon, Delta Pokemon... it's kind of crazy once you go looking. What I want to focus on are the first 3.

Mega Evolution and Primal Reversion, in the games, are just different names for the exact same fucking thing. While we could roll these two together, I think there's value in distinguishing them from one another. Mega Evolution imbues your Pokemon with weirdo fighting energy to make it a murder machine, while Primal Reversion basically reverts your Pokemon back to how it was a million billion years ago. These seem conceptually different enough to me to work with. I'm thinking that Mega Evolution is what is in the games - some stat boosts and a new Ability, while Primal Reversion focuses more on unlocking new capabilities and other kinds of horizontal power.

The big question here is where Dynamaxing comes in - can you mix and match these? A Dynamaxed Mega Salamence sounds really dumb and awe-inspiring, especially in the hands of a player. Can it go Primal Mega? If I invest enough into my Wigglytuff can I make it a Mega Shadow Primal BREAK Dynamax Wigglytuff?

TAA wrote:Primal Reversion basically reverts your Pokemon back to how it was a million billion years ago.

Ooh, that dovetails with my headcanon that fossil pokemon are literally only rock type because the resurrection process is imperfect, and so the fossil pokemon we see in games are not truly the pokemon that was fossilized. Maybe all fossil pokemon have Primal Reversion?

I was gonna let every Pokemon have it, just like how every Pokemon should have a fucking Mega Evolution, Gamefreak!

Doing hundreds od megaevolution designs is... well within the budget of the worlds biggest entertainment IP. Cause youre doing a tabletop game you coild have general Mega templates like "speed/power/typing/resilience pick two" so three Nidokings can all be mega different

I have not seen toggles for SR4e adept powers. To be clear you mean that champions (that the right game?) thing where levitation-or-forcefield is cheaper than buying both always on right?

Well, to be honest, there isn't really much to Mega Evolution and it's already basically a template. "Pokemon gets way too much power shoved into it and it doesn't like it", which translates to +100 stat points and a new Ability. It might get some other bonuses, but that's the gist of it. I would like all the weird alternate temporary power-ups to be really different from one another, the question is just figuring out how.

Trill wrote:Shadowrun 4e: Can you toggle adept powers? If yes, where is it explained?

I don't think you can, though in some cases the adept can probably decide not to use them (I think that killing hands specifically mentions it, but it probably applies to other powers. I think that an adept with missile mastery can still play catch with their child without killing them).

Otherwise, you can "toggle" adept power by reducing his magic attribute, background count or some spells can do this (maybe some awakened drugs as well?).

After crawling through various Poke-forums, I have determined that nobody has a solid idea on what the fuck the difference is between Mega Evolution and Primal Reversion. While disappointing, this gives me conceptual space to leap into!

So only Kyogre and Groudon can go Primal, right? It's their "true power" from back when they created the world. That's neat. It would stand to reason that the same could apply to other legendaries as well. Zapdos may be fearsome now, but that's nothing compared to the primordial storms it whipped up thousands of years ago.
But they don't have that energy anymore, not without a Mcguffin. So where did it all go? Into the world itself. Every lightning bolt has a bit of Zapdos in it, every tick of the clock is because Dialga willed it, and so on. Basically... when a regular Pokemon uses Primal Reversion, they tap into this legendary energy. Mega Evolution is what happens when a Trainer and their Pokemon are super on the same wavelength (and also Mcguffins), so it's totally different. Primal Reversion harnesses the world's energy. Like Goku or something.

This is all pulled fresh from my asshole, so feel free to poke any holes in it, but... I like it.