The Gaming Den

You can tone down all the pokemon that created the universe without getting rid of all the narrative abilities. There's a big gap between getting to rearrange the continents and limiting your out of combat abilities to Smash Brothers (or D&D 4E). Some of the narrative needs to be thrown out; Mag...

I don't think breaking things down by how much power the GM exercises is the best way to look at things. The GM is expected to wear a lot of hats, the keys are how well they perform these and how they balance them when they conflict. Game designer - RPGs are not batteries-included, and also the rule...

(I forgot to mention last post - Grek, your chart is awesome.) The "different kinds of levels" thing I was talking about before works on the sage problem too. Those guys have specialist levels instead of adventurer levels. The party doesn't have any specialist levels because you get them b...

I don't think tying everything into one sort of level progression is necessary for what you're talking about, Doc. You can have characters use one resource to buy better ability to go on quests and personally kill things, and a different resource to buy better ability to run countries and do giant r...

Those capability lists are actually pretty cool. I think I'd have to see what some of these terms mean to really know, but they sound like things that accomplish the sort of stuff I was hoping the game would acknowledge you'd want to do with them. The only omission I see is that Tangrowth, being a p...

Some pokemon that I would have specific questions about in an RPG context are Magnemite, Tangela, Lapras, and Aegislash. My favorites are Breloom, Espeon, and Chandelure. And yes, that's what I'm saying about stats. Let's look at some numbers: Level 5 Doduo: HP 9, Attack 14, Defense 10, Sp. Atk 9, S...

I use disks on a grid (even when not playing disk-flicking games) so facing is still fiddly bullshit for me even though I use a grid. I don't think bolting facing onto an existing system is a great idea. It's an extra thing to keep track of for everyone all the time. To make it worth it, you'd have ...

It's like someone understood that the regular Pokemon mechanics are not appropriate for a TTRPG and need to be simplified, then tried to recreate every feature of those mechanics one by one until they ended up with something more complex than the original. I like dividing base stats by 10 round up a...

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 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 o...

This isn't the worst skill system. I've certainly seen longer ones with more garbage in them. I like that Guile merges street smarts with lying - I've never run into a character concept that actually wants to make a point of being good at one and bad at the other. It could stand to remove the ones t...

A competent Pokemon system would tell you that Porygon can hack things, you can ride Rapidash, that Porygon is better at hacking than Magnemite, etc. It doesn't have to be consistent with any particular piece of Pokemon media - the various anime and manga adaptations aren't even consistent with each...

What? I thought every pokemon made weird electronic gameboy sounds.

Pokemon is the nerdiest thing a huge swathe of people are interested in. That's a great reason for there to be a TTRPG of something. And it has a strong built-in default adventure structure. You visit a new place, they've got some pokemon that are doing a thing. You learn about that thing and how th...

I'm glad that people have noticed how fucking bizarre the xd6 skill system is. However... I don't know if I'd call it swingy. It isn't when you compare it to your typical d20. What I meant when I called it swingy is not the usual meaning and frequently the opposite, which... yeah, my bad. What I me...

I don't see the problem with Xd6 add-together games. Going from 1d6 to 2d6 doesn't just extend the RNG range up by 6, it also shifts the probabilities of everything in the old range towards the top of that range. On 2d6, 6 is more likely than 1-5. And the most common number is 7, which is off the R...

Some of these DCs read like they thought the system was D&D and others read like they realized it's Xd6 and the overwhelming lack of DCs is probably because these two camps got in an argument or something. Also... holy shit it's Xd6. That's not what I thought you meant when you said it was d6 ba...

It's entirely normal for design discussions to go back and forth between the different concerns. You look at one aspect of the problem until you learn something about how you want it to work, then check on how what you learned applies elsewhere. A domain system obviously needs to know something abou...

Another reason most birds don't fly particularly high because there's no cover in the sky and a larger bird would eat them. Here are a few workable proposals in this space: [*] Bow ranges are cylindrical, with a finite horizontal range and a vertical range of "don't worry about it," becaus...

I think they could have gotten away with calling the guy in charge the Pokemon Master. That would abbreviate to PM. I'd never be able to resist calling them the Pokemon Manager. Oh, look at that: it tells you to skim through the book to get an idea of what the game has available before coming up wi...

I remember Gen I had some sort of overcomplicated rock-scissors-paper web that looked mostly balanced, except grass/bugs were shit and dragons were great. I think steel became the even better dragon, and fairy can maybe hurt everything? The idea that as you progress you must find better pokemon mea...

I also considered using a different dexterity game like Jacks for skill checks. The thing about disks that isn't as nice as dice is that, while you can probably come up with a fun shot scenario for any situation (get through in $STEALTH_SKILL flicks without touching anything to avoid waking the guar...

Almanac - Does time actually have an existing cost in this system? Is there some resource I'm losing out on if it takes me a week to adapt Swords Dance to competitive ballroom dance instead of just a day? If there's an existing cost, you can balance this system against that. If there's no cost, you'...

I don't know if getting flight ceilings via an appeal to realism is the best choice. If we're being realistic, projectiles at the peak of their arc have much less energy than when they land back on the ground, and pegasus archers are going to dunk on grounded archers even if they're in range. You ne...

Transitioning into combat is just a roll for initiative, no? If so, all of that except crafting sounds like stuff you can cover with a Risus hack. Or a FATE hack. Or copy pasting D&D 3.5's skill chapter in and adding an initiative skill. I don't know the games you're referring to (my board game ...