Review: Pokemon Tabletop United

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's a slow morning here, so let's finish up this piddy crap. Am I wrong in thinking a lot of the Edges available so far are kind of lame? Hopefully the Spirit Skills have more interesting stuff.

Charm

This is one of the most erotically charged images I've seen in a TTRPG book.

This is your diplomacy skill. Mechanically, you really can just use it to improve the disposition of wild Pokemon. It says that when you're rolling to convince an NPC, the GM should just set a static DC instead of opposing it with another skill. I ignore this shit and just have it be an Opposed Check vs your target's Focus or social skill, depending on whatever's highest. I appreciate having multiple social skills, but without any kind of rules or guidelines on how to fucking use them, I prefer to resort to options that don't involve me pulling numbers straight from my asshole.

The Edges here are also for Poffin shit, but you can also pick up Baby-Doll Eyes... it lowers a target's ATK by 1 Combat Stage. It's Growl, but at a distance, so it fucking sucks and you'll never use it. There's one Edge here really worth taking: Smooth. You get +4 Evasion against all Social moves and a +2 to Saves against Rage and Infatuation. It's still really situational since Social moves aren't too common, but the numbers are good enough to almost make it attractive.

Command

Nothing pithy this time, just a reminder that the Battle Subway was stupid and awesome.
This is THE social skill and the among the most useful in the game - you need to make checks to command pokemon with low Loyalty and you're FAR more effective at training your Pokemon than everyone else, giving out tons of free EXP. It also lets you Take a Breather, the worst combat maneuver I've seen in my life, and it is often used in Opposed Checks, to either keep people together in a fight or knock people out of supernatural compulsions. This probably governs your "force of personality" moreso than Intimidate does.

The Edges here are all gravy, aside from the Poffin shit: One of them lets you give experience during Training to UP TO TWELVE POKEMON AT ONCE! You can give out EXP during Training based on your Command rank: Rank 2 lets you give 2 pokemon experience, Rank 6 lets you give 6 pokemon experience. You can see how this immediately spirals out of control. Adepts can pick up the Move After You - the best Move we've seen so far, since as a Swift Action you can make someone who hasn't gone that round take their turn after you. It's fucking hilarious. If that wasn't enough, you can pick up an Edge to give out EVEN MORE EXPERIENCE WHILE TRAINING! I appreciate how strong all these Edges are, but this is over the top - there are very few Edges as good as these, because if you're not retarded you'll be Training your pokemon every single day.

Focus

For some reason, Ice-types are associated with this skill. I don't get it, either.
Focus is basically willpower, and it's typically used whenever you make a check during combat or if you're particularly fucked up. To be honest, I don't really use it for that very often. Their example here is wild: "A complicated maneuver such as jumping into the air, throwing a knife to hit a specific target, then teleporting to a platform mid-air and pulling a lever at an exact timing when landing would also call for a Focus Check in addition to the Acrobatics Check that would be invoked." What the fuck kind of games are these people playing? Do they platform often? Typically I use Focus for powering supernatural abilities that aren't combat related, but it is also used to resist mental effects. I think the idea behind this skill is to make it harder to do stuff when you're fucked up or doing something intense, but it just sounds like more rolling to me. Perhaps that's more my problem than the game's.

Holy shit we can learn Confusion here. That is an early game trainer's bread and butter... but it actually doesn't have any Focus prerequisite at all! It needs an Elemental Connection edge, which is completely unrelated to skills. Why is this here? That's weird. We can also pick up Work Up, which beefs both our ATK and SPATK, which isn't bad. It can be handy to have a buffing move or two so you have something to do when nobody's in range. You can also pick up Smooth, like in Charm, but also Iron Mind - which lets you know whenever somebody tries to read your mind. That's extremely situational, but probably awesome if your game involves a lot of Psychics. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Good on them for finally introducing Moves I'd actually use.

Intuition

Mercifully, this game was released before Detective Pikachu, so we just have a picture of a regular detective here.
This is one of my favorites - it's about "making decisions from the guy or gaining insights into a situation though instinct". If that sounds like "make a check to get a hint from the DM", then you have good intuition - that is exactly how I use it from time to time. It also governs reading people's social cues, which is basically getting hints during social time, too. In a weird twist, artsy stuff falls under here as well - including cooking! Chefs are really good at telling when someone's lying to them, apparently.

Our Novice Edges are both pretty good: Basic Cooking lets us make Candy Bars and Baby Food, and it explicitly lets us fluff it however we like. Mystic Senses is some magic shit that lets us use Intuition instead of Charm to make wild Pokemon like us more, but it's incompatible with Elemental Connections - the devs don't want us mixing too many magical powers together, which is something I can understand. There's also an ultra shitty one mixed in here: Trainers have Action Points and can spend one to get a +1 bonus to whatever roll they want. Now you can get an Edge that lets you get +2 instead! Holy shit, my cock is so hard thinking about getting a +2 instead of a +1 when I expend my resource that powers my class features! Thank you, PTU devs! Thank you!

Those are our 17 Skills, and they have issues: The biggest one being that some skills are blatantly more useful than others. It doesn't matter if I'm in space or underground or whatever, being able to see shit and get around nimbly is always useful, but Occult Education might be useless in a Wild West campaign or something... but I think this is an issue a lot of skill systems have. Is it worth trying to combine some of these Skills together? I can see the need for the granularity between them, but I'd like to trim the fat wherever possible. I believe the new game, Pokemon Journeys, just has 7 not-skills that are shit like "Wits" and "Grit", and I really hate that kind of nebulous shit that you'd argue with the GM about. I dunno.


More Fucking Edges
This is the part where it really tells us how Edges work: you'll be spending most on Skills, and they're split into five categories: Skill Edges, Crafting Edges, Pokemon Training Edges, Combat Edges, and Other Edges.

Skill Edges are straightforward. In addition to ranking a skill up, you can also get +1 to a specific Category, like all your Body rolls. There's also an Edge that gives you a +2 to 2 different Skills and can be taken multiple times.
However, there's an interesting Edge you need to be a whopping level 20 to pick up: Virtuoso. It's weird and I hate it. Here's the wording: "Choose a Skill at Master Rank. Consider that Skill to be effectively “Rank 8” for any Features or effects that depend on Skill Rank." It's phrased this way because you do not actually make your Skill Rank 8. To give an example, remember the experience training Edge I ranted about? Can you comprehend training SIXTEEN POKEMON AT ONCE? Too bad you'd still be rolling 6d6 despite being a total badass. I kind of really hate this - if it were up to me, I'd just let people rank up from Master to Virtuoso, signifying the true peak of the skill system, but nope. Eat shit. There's also a Skill Stunt edge, which I quite like: You say you have something like: "Perception Stunt (Farsight)", and then whenever you're rolling Perception to see something far away, you can instead "roll one less dice, and instead add +6 to the result". Sounds like maximizing one of your dice to me. This is a good Edge to stick onto items and shit.

Crafting Edges all let you make shit, and I've already touched on them: Pokeballs, food, gems, repels, Cleanse Tags, and Apricorns. This is a good category.
Pokemon Training Edges are sketchy - you have Poffin shit, Breeder, Groomer, Paleontologist, the two Training edges, and the one that lets you bully your Pokemon. These, especially right next to each other, look a bit unbalanced.
Most of the edges are Combat Edges - lots teach you moves, but there's one new one in this part: Weapon of Choice. It sounds badass, but it just lets you pay an AP to not get disarmed. Lame! Most of these are fairly lame, actually. The best one here is Slippery, which is actually thematic AND useful, but most of them just teach you shitty moves you'd forget past Pokemon level 10.
Other Edges are the most random, naturally. Here is the Elemental Connection edge, which basically means you have a connection with Pokemon of a certain Type... and you can become a Power Ranger if you're using splats. You get a +2 to all social checks targeting Pokemon of that type, which is pointless compared to shooting lightning from your eyes.

Overall, Edges are a huge mixed bag. You have some legitimately neat and character-defining stuff in here next to crap like learning fucking Leer. Why would I ever get excited about that, even at level fucking 1? I think the idea of Edges is a workable one, but it needs some quality control so that people don't accidentally take trap options. And don't fucking tell me that learning Baby-Doll Eyes isn't a trap! IT FUCKING IS!

Next time: Features!

[Iduno]

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

For some reason, I find that image just as erotically charged.

[jt]

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 that the authors didn't know how to use, like Focus and Combat. (Use Athletics and Occult Education for martial artists and psychics.)

Command, if it's a skill at all, should be automatically set to level-appropriate maximum, by virtue of taking any PC class. It's a Pokemon game, if you're a PC you're good at commanding pokemon; there shouldn't be a "be bad at the game" button. Maybe you still want a number attached to it so you know what separates you from a regular shmuck.

Perception is frequently the god skill, that's not unique to this game by any stretch, but I wonder if that has to be the case in a game where everyone's carting around a bunch of trained animals? Like, you're not going to surprise the party that keeps a Pidgeot riding around on someone's shoulder. If you're searching for something there's a bunch of dog pokemon to choose from. The skill might be limited in use to when you don't have a pokemon handy to do it better.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I can see where you're coming from. Combat is probably one I'd keep, because that doubles as general military/combat knowledge in my game - and as I say that I realize that sort of info never fucking comes up at all. Oh, well. Combat is used almost exclusively for qualifying for Weapon Moves and in Combat Maneuvers. I can appreciate having a skill for beating someone's ass that's different from you just being buff, since that allows for slinky rogue dudes who stab people in the dick. In fact, a fair amount of combat classes have Combat as one of the prerequisite skills. The way Combat Maneuvers work is that you roll to hit, and if you do then you and your target throw down some Opposed Checks - and all of the useful (read: non-social) Maneuvers let you roll Combat OR something else, depending on the maneuver. Pushing someone around is Combat OR Athletics, while tripping them is Combat OR Acrobatics. I'm kind of reminded of Pathfinder's weird CMB mechanic, except it's just a skill like anything else.

I can definitely see Command being nixed and just going up as you level up or faking it and keeping the skill, but maximized for whatever tier you're in. I'm not sure what you mean with Perception, though - Pokemon (somewhat) share skills with people, so they have it too. In fact, a Pidgeot only has 4d6+3 Perception - and that's its best skill. Lots of dog Pokemon explicitly have the Tracker capability that lets them track someone if they pass a Perception check.
In fact, there are a grand total of 12 Pokemon with Master Perception:
Dodrio, Furret, Celebi (6d6+2, baby!), 2 forms of Zygarde, both Hoopas, Stakataka (all those eyes give it 6d6+3, even if I have no idea wtf this thing is) , Butterfree, Beautifly, Dustox (those three ALSO have 6d6+3, holy shit!), and Luxray, which is the best scouter in the motherfucking game, since it is MOUNTABLE, CAN SNIFF PEOPLE OUT, *AND* HAS X-RAY MOTHERFUCKING VISION, PLUS 6d6+3 PERCEPTION.

Random tirade, but that's an interesting little list.

You also raise a good point about the skill system: Why would anybody in the party have good Athletics when someone's starter is a Gyarados and that motherfucker has 6d6+1 Athletics? You're not gonna try grappling shit when you have a 20-foot long murderous dragon snake thing. My answer: Sometimes Gyarados is knocked out or you need to scale some shit while your Pokemon is doing something else. That doesn't work in every situation, but Pokemon straight up don't have as many skills as people.
In fact, Pokemon only have 6 Skills: Athletics, Acrobatics, Combat, Stealth, Perception, and Focus. The other skills were gotten rid of for the same reason the Intelligence stat was: It's hard to quantify how much Occult Education a Mismagius has, and since Pokemon lore is usually pulled straight out of someone's asshole, you could seriously justify them being anywhere from Untrained to Master rank. Didn't stop me from giving Gyarados 6d6 Intimidate, though.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Features
First question: What the fuck is a Feature? These are supposedly the things that are actually important to your character, and are going to define who you are and what you're really capable of. Here's an example one of the denser ones:


A bit involved, but overall, I don't think it's too bad. I think the most important thing to note is the Frequency of the feature: There are 6 major types you'll see. At-Will, which is obvious; Static, which is just a passive effect; "Time X", which just means you can do it a finite number of times during that Time, which is usually Scene, Daily, and sometimes One Time Use - so something might be usable twice a day or something. Is this game's 4e DNA showing yet? "X AP" means that it's At-Will, it just costs that much AP - and AP refreshes after each Scene. "Bind X AP" means that the Feature only has an effect while you've got that much AP Bound... but you can Unbind it to get it back. Reminds me of Dragon Age. Finally, there's "Drain X AP", where you spend that much AP and you don't get it back until you take an Extended Rest. The features are supposedly stronger the further you get into this paragraph. We shall see.

That's a Class Feature though, so those are naturally more involved. What about Gen-oh my god look at it


Let's read this page.
Features have tags, and tags are good if you don't overdo them. Fortunately, this game doesn't... in this section. What are we dealing with?

[Class] just denotes the Feature that's the entrance to a series of Class Features, and you can only have 4 of these.
[+Stat] is sweet, because when you take this feature, you get that stat point. +Attack gives you +1 ATK. Pretty straightforward.
[Ranked X] means that Feature has several levels and you can take it X amount of times. You still the the +Stat!
[Branch] is fairly unique - it means you can take the Feature multiple times by taking up another Class slot and picking a new specialization. I think it's only used for the Researcher and Stat Ace classes.
[Orders] can only be used when you can communicate with your Pokemon. Specifically, these are "League Legal", a style of play I don't really use. These are also Priority (Limited), which means you can... interrupt someone else's turn to use them! Just that specific Order, though. They're usually just bonuses, so they aren't too much harder to resolve.
[Training] can also be used as [Orders], but when you do, it isn't [Training] anymore. Okay, a bit weird, but I get it. Used as [Training], you apply that Feature after spending at least 30 minutes training your Pokemon, at which point all your Pokemon have that bonus until your next rest - but they can only be under one Feature at a time unless you're an Ace Trainer or something. You can use them as [Orders] as a Standard Action to apply the Feature to your Pokemon until the... beginning of your next turn. When done this way, they stack with the bonus from [Training]. This is vital. I know the Den has a hate-boner for effects that end at different parts of your turn and shit, but I've never had any problems resolving it in combat, since it's just a +1 bonus to something for a turn.
[Stratagems] are Orders, but so badass that you have to Bind AP to use them, and a Pokemon can only be under the effect of one at a time, and you have to Bind AP for each person you're targeting with it.
[Weapon] means that the Feature makes use of a Weapon, usually getting a bonus while wielding one. Gee willikers, really?

Okay, those are the basics for Features. Let's take a look at some, shall we?

General Features
These, as the name implies, are available to everyone if they meet the Prerequisites. But isn't that how this normally works?

Pokemon Raising and Battling Features
One lets you pay 1 AP to regain a Daily or Scene Move once per Scene per Pokemon. More Thunder Waves and Hydro Pumps? Yes please.
Next is my favorite of the group, I just need to repost it:


I know we don't want to encourage this sort of behavior, but 1/6th your Max HP is a fucking lot, and in return you wake them up and get to use Work Up on them or something. It's kind of pointless, really.
Another Feature lets you spend 2 AP to swap Pokemon as a Free Action when yours gets Fainted OR if an opponent sends out a Pokemon of their own.
Species Savant has an amusing prerequisite: Having 3 different Pokemon of the same evolutionary line - in return, you increase all their stats by +1. Not bad, but not great. Nice for gimmick builds, I guess, but +1 is piddly.
Tutoring is an NPC feature - you Master a move you or 3 of your Pokemon know and you can teach Pokemon the move, as long as it's something it can learn in the Pokedex. Just find someone, bro.

Pokemon Training and Orders Features
Unsurprisingly, these all have the [Orders] tag. There's a blurb here that reiterates how [Training] features work, and now we can see the 4 Training features that every Trainer get to pick from for free. You get one, so make it count!
Agility Training gives +1 to all Movement Capabilities and +4 to Initiative. Good for zipping around and all that.
Brutal Training gives +1 to your Critical Hit and Effect Range of all attacks. This means you Burn easier and shit.
Focused Training gives +1 to Accuracy Rolls and +2 to Skill Checks. If you can stack this a lot, things get silly.
Inspired Training gives +1 to Evasion and +2 to Save Checks. Obviously the defensive one.
As a GM I forget to use these 90% of the time, but when you're a player and you're doing this shit all the time, a +1 isn't so bad - especially when you score a critical hit or land a big attack that you'd otherwise miss, or dodge something that would have wrecked you.

There are also some Features here that fuck with the action economy, solidifying Command as the true god skill. If you've got 2 sets of Orders, you can pick a Feature up to give out 2 Orders as a Standard Action, or 1 as a Swift... including our next Feature. Focused Command. Something so good it eats up your Standard and Swift Action, but this is At-Will. It lets you have a second Pokemon take a turn, but both Pokemon you command can only make At-Will actions and deal -5 damage. HOWEVER, you just need to pay 1 AP to lift the Frequency Restriction and another AP to lift the damage penalty. This is something truly worthy of Master Command, and it needs another social skill at Expert to grab - it's the kind of thing I'd like to have as a baseline for high-tier powers and shit, because nothing says "I am a badass" like extra turns. Of course, that can easily spiral out of control so I probably should stay far away from all that.

Stratagems all require Expert skills of some kind, and they each give you 2 new Orders. One Binds and the other is usable once or twice a Scene.
Ravager Orders are bonkers - Bind 2 AP for your Pokemon's melee attacks to deal +8 damage and Trip on an 18+, AND they lose their Evasion for a round. If that wasn't good enough, once a Scene your Pokemon can immediately make an At-Will attack, which is stellar.
Marksman Orders also do not fuck around - Bind 2 AP for your Pokemon's ranged attacks to have -2 Accuracy, but +3 Crit Range. Your Scene x 2 Order doubles the range of your moves and deals X damage, where X is how many meters your shot traveled... and if you crit, you add the damage roll again.
Trickster Orders's Bind gives your Pokemon a hefty +3 Evasion, but they deal -5 damage. No biggie, really. Your Scene x 2 is a bit overcomplicated, but I like the idea: "until the end of their next turn", your Pokemon adds their "non-stat" Evasion to their Movement Capabilities and whenever they attack or move through an enemy, that foe has -3 to all rolls until the end of THEIR next turn. Jesus.
Precision Orders are straightforward - Bind 2 AP for your 'mon +2 Accuracy and Effect Range at the expense of -5 damage. Your Scene x 2 Order makes your Pokemon's next damaging move auto-hit and ignore all "Defensive Abilities" (of which there are many), but the target resists the damage one step more than usual, but the target can't do fucking shit about your attack whatsoever.
Guardian Orders are some I actually forgot about. Whoops. Bind 2 AP for your Pokemon to gain 5 DR as a Standard Action OR when they use a Status Move. DR is fucking great if you can stack it! Your Scene x 2 Orders lets you get up to 15 DR when you Intercept an attack for an ally - more on that later.

Overall, this is a really solid section and I think it's one of the parts that had the most work done on it, since it's so fundamental to the Pokemon experience.

Combat Features
Oho, did someone say free actions? You need 20 Speed and Master Acrobatics to be able to take 2 Standard Actions instead of 1 twice per Scene. At-Will actions, yeah, whatever, I'm gonna kick this Rhyhorn to death now. Nothing compares to that Feature, but you can pick one up to make moves without ACs like Shock Wave require an AC roll to hit you like regular moves. Another fun one is Dive - when you get targeted by a Ranged attack, you can just move and become Tripped, allowing you to dodge the attack entirely. Is that strong enough to be a Feature?
Another one lets you increase the Frequency of a Move you know, like making Fire Blast Scene x 3 instead of x 2. Just spam that shit, son... it'll be fun until you run into a Water Pokemon. You can also pick up STAB, if you know enough Moves of a certain type. If you're a tough boy, you can pick up free healing or Intercept for people as a Shift Action instead of Standard. The last one lets you give up a Scene/Daily Move to regain a different Scene/Daily Move you've already used. Since Trainers have no limits on the number of moves they can learn, that one seems potentially abuseable... but not that bad, really.

These are all decent enough, but the ones that fuck with the action economy are the clear winners. Did I mention these all give out Stats, too? Always appreciated.

Other Features
Here's where they threw in all the random shit. I appreciate the honesty.

First one lets you be Nurse Joy, actually - 3 times a day, out of combat you can remove 1 Injury from someone and heal them to full HP while removing all status afflictions. Can't use it on the same person more than once a day though - I guess the drugs are too strong or something. I'm sure Frank could elaborate on the kinds of drugs you shouldn't give people more than once per 24 hours. One is shitty, but my player picked it up - when your buddy fucks up their Skill Check, if you've got Novice in that skill you can make them reroll the Check and add your Skill Rank to the roll. He never fucking remembers to do that, ever. Interestingly, you have to spend a Feature to make Dusk, Dive, Heal, Luxury, Net, Nest, Quick, Repeat, or Timer balls, for $700 (fuck you I'm not using the Pokemoney symbol or whatever). Given that they cost $800 to buy, this seems shitty... but you're not supposed to sell all of those at every shop, since they're supposed to be special. Being able to shit out whichever you wanted on command might be nice, I dunno.
PokeManiac! This one's for the players who can't remember what Types a pokemon are. If you make a DC 10 Pokemon Education check, you determine the target's Level, Types, Nature, and Abilities. Since Abilities can be a real grabbag and people love using homebrew Pokemon in this shit, this could also be useful. The super situational and kind of shitty Psionic Sight feature lets you see "Psychic Residue". It says that Humans or Pokemon leave Psychic Residue on their targets, but it doesn't say how that happens. I think it's through telekinesis or telepathy or something? We'll see. The last Feature here is the aptly named Skill Monkey: If you fuck up a roll, reroll that bitch and add +2! 3 times a day isn't a lot, but it isn't a little either.

These are all questionable features that could probably be collapsed into class features, items, or just fucking NPCs. I'm not thrilled about any of them.

But with that, we are finally done with chapter 3. I went way too fucking overboard with this review, but I can't stop now. Am I trying too hard?

Next up: Trainer Classes

[Avoraciopoctules]

It will be interesting seeing what a Trainer Class can get away with in this. If you can warp reality like Sabrina in the anime by picking psychic, that's pretty hardcore.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Uh... yeah, actually. Warper is said to be the strongest class in the game and the devs ban it in their games and want it removed from the system entirely. Being able to teleport is apparently super OP.

[Avoraciopoctules]

That's pretty cool. Maybe I should pitch this for the next time my group that likes high-mechanics RPGS with an emphasis on combat is looking for something new. If there's support for some of the crazy unbalanced stuff you see in the anime, it might be fun seeing how it performs in different settings.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

All of the REALLY fun stuff is in the fantasy splat, Game of Throhs - it has 18 Elementalist classes that are all distinct, so you can be the Human Torch or a magical princess or something. However, today we'll be looking at the more boring and mundane classes. It's not their fault, the Elementalist classes are all explicitly more powerful than 90% of the classes in core, and being an Ace Trainer just can't have the same pizzazz as a Shade Caller or something.

Chapter 4: Trainer Classes

I don't recognize any of these fucking people.

First thing's first: This game expects you to multiclass, so you should think of each class as a feat chain representing a narrow specialty... because that's basically what they are. You can multiclass whenever you want as long as you don't take more than 4 classes. How many classes are in this book? 39! Holy fucking shit! And some of those classes are actually multiple branching classes! Jesus fucking christ. People LOVE to shit out new homebrew classes too, it's even easier than making a D&D class. I guess when you've got 4 class slots and your whole party is multiclassing, you NEED a classplosion right out the gate. Fair enough. Despite being clogged full of classes, they're all fairly distinct and cover a wide variety of situations. Let's get into it.

Classes each have a description that is mercifully one page long, and that page also details the Skills the class uses as well as the Roles it's best at. There are 5 different roles: Active Pokemon Support, where you buff your 'mon in battle; Passive Pokemon Support, where you focus on buffs OUT of combat; Crafting, which... is crafting; Trainer Combat, which is the best role because it lets you throw down with your Pokemon; and Travel/Investigation, AKA everything else. Classes have 5 "role points" which are distributed among these categories - for example, Ace Trainer's got 4 Passive Pokemon Support and 1 Active Pokemon support. To be honest, I usually ignore these, but they're probably useful to newer players who can and do get overwhelmed by what classes to first pick. The game encourages you to not over or underspecialize: Don't pick up a bunch of classes whose features activate on Standard Actions, for obvious reasons. Don't just pick passive classes or you'll be fucked in a fight - same for crafting. Good advice. That's one of the things I really like about this book: it actually tells you how to use it sometimes. Not always, but usually where it counts.

There are six categories of classes. Because there are a million classes, I'll try to keep things short this time... but I have a tendency to ramble. The categories are: Introductory, Battling Style, Specialist Team, Professional, Fighter, and Supernatural Classes.

Introductory Classes
These are your all-rounder classes that you can slide into just about any build. Thanks for explicitly tagging the baby classes for PTU noobs!



Ace Trainer is probably the best class in the game in that you can slide this bad boy into literally any build and improve it. The "specialization" of this class is that they're good at Pokemon Battles. Yeah. They get bonuses to Train their Pokemon so they walk into fights with bigger stats, can TRIPLE their Training Bonuses for a turn, get free Training Features, free Tutor Points so your Pokemon can learn more Abilities and TM moves and shit, PLUS they get access to Signature Feature - it turns one of your Pokemon's move into a Signature Move and makes it a thousand times better. Hit 3 dudes instead of 1! Deal damage even if you miss! Get DR! Change the move from Special to Physical! Fuck it! This feature is so awesome that I would debate letting everyone have access to it.



Capture Specialist is an obvious one, and can rack up XP faster than any other trainer under RAW. This one gives you a bunch of Capture Techniques - damage something with a Pokeball, fuck something up if you don't catch it, throw a Pokeball outside of your turn, not Fainting something when you bring it to 0 HP, or catch it as soon as you Faint it. You can also get combat bonuses when you catch a Pokemon, or fuck with the awful Capture rules to make it easier for you to catch shit. This is a very one-note class that I've never used or seen anyone use, but it certainly makes catching Pokemon easier. The problem with that is this isn't the video game and I don't really need more than 6-8 Pokemon.



Commander is busted, but only because Orders are so good and they get easier access to Focused Command so they can boss around 2 Pokemon at once. You get a Stratagem for entering the class and can Mobilize allies so they can move without incurring AoOs. Notably, you can also start using Orders on things that aren't your own Pokemon - including your buddies! You also pick up the ability to give Orders to 3 targets at once and give them different Orders, if you want. Or you can spend 2 AP to hit all your allies within 10 meters with an Order. It's not busted in a bad way, but it's really strong and one of the best ways for noncombat trainers to keep up when their friends are punching Machops to death.



Coordinators are... special. They specialize in Pokemon Contests. Since nobody uses Pokemon Contests, this means that half of the class is literally worthless. The only combat abilities let you play around with your Pokemon's Initiative, not expend Frequency when you miss with a Move, and create a new Move for your Pokemon. There's a page detailing how to do it, and it's till tied into Contest shit. God help us. Turns out you just pick one of the six Contest Types (Smart, Beauty, Tough, that sort of shit), pick a Contest Effect (in the Contest chapter I have almost never looked at), then grab a Template for your move. That's not very innovative. I'd probably nix this class and Contests altogether, because fuck modelling Pokemon minigames.



Hobbyists are bland. It's the most generalist class of all, and I have been informed that it's actually a late-game class meant to fill in the gaps your other 3 classes might have. In that case, why the fuck is it here so early? It's a straightforward class - you get 3 Skill Edges just for entering it, and you can grab Edges and General Features off a big list, even if you don't meet the prerequisites. Also, remember how in Chapter 2 Trainers got bonus Edges or Stats every few levels? Hobbyists don't need to choose between them! There's a note here saying to not take this Feature unless you know you'll actually pick up the levels to take advantage of it - so talk to your GM. The capstone Feature here lets you pick up a Feature of another class - so you could get some Capture Techniques from Capture Specialist and the like. This is from a list, too - so you can't dumpster dive and go crazy. Overall, it's a very middling class without much flavor to it, but it does an effective job of caulking your build if you fucked up... or if you take it early, you are probably THE skillmonkey in your group. It's not a very valuable role, but it's there.



Mentor is our final Intro class. Mentor is a fucking NPC class that specializes purely on passive support. This is the ONLY class that lets you teach your Pokemon Tutor or Egg Moves, but it ALSO is the only way to change your Pokemon's Nature, refund shit you've spent Tutor Points on, or swap your Pokemon's abilities. Their Pokemon can also learn 7 Moves instead of 6, but fuck this fucking class. I fully intend to scrap it and just move all the shit it can do into a subsystem you can do with an NPC, because nobody should have to invest character resources into teach your Pokemon moves that let it function. Some Pokemon are just straight up fucked without this - Gastly, that notorious Special Attacker, doesn't learn a single Special move until level fucking 26, and it evolves at level 25!.

Battling Style Classes
These Classes are all about making their Pokemon badass in a fight, whether it's through kind words or riding it like a slave driver (or literally riding it).



The Cheerleader is so strong that it's the only class that has actually, no shit, been nerfed in Errata. Blast Ketchup is a Cheerleader, probably. This one's all over the place: when you give someone Orders, you can also give them a Condition that can stack, but only be used once at a time. For example, you can give your Poochyena orders over 2 turns and it'll be Excited twice. Two times, you get +5 DR when you get hit by an attack. There are other conditions, but this is the important one. They can teach their Pokemon the ability Friend Guard - anyone adjacent to your Pokemon gets to Resist an attack once a Scene because... Friend Guard! The best feature is Moment of Action - give 2 allies 1 Temporary AP that disappears after a round. The nerf made the Feature that gives out Conditions only work once a Scene. No more getting +5 DR every round, sorry! Fucking lame, honestly. You can also dish out positive Combat Stages, Temporary HP, and Evasion to your party, and even give stop people from fainting! Overall, it's solid.



Duelists will shit on you, your party, and everyone you ever loved. This class is more advanced and has its own subsystem involving Momentum. You Tag a foe and your Pokemon gets up to +3 Accuracy and Evasion against them. You get +1 Momentum when the round ends or when you hit a Tagged foe - 6 is the max. You lose all of it when you faint or get switched out. Here's where the money is: You can spend 2 Momentum to automatically roll an 11 on a d20 of your choice during your next turn. You can also get back Scene Moves and teach your Pokemon either Exploit or Tolerance - they deal extra damage with SE moves or take less damage from SE moves. Depending on which your Pokemon has, you can spend 2 Momentum to increase the Effectiveness of your attack or Resist the attack one step further. If that wasn't enough, you can DOUBLE the bonuses from those Abilities AND switch them out in battle. Lastly, if you get 6 Momentum you can dump it all to immediately attack your Tagged foe, and if you miss, you deal half damage - otherwise you crit. If it would have critted anyway, you get HALF OF YOUR HP BACK. What the fuck? This class is fucking awesome and rocks my face off. Its only disadvantage, if you can call it that, is that it doesn't play well with combat classes, since you'll be using your Standard Actions on Orders a lot. Honestly, this is about where I'd aim for balance-wise.



Enduring Soul... exists. The first feature introduces us to the concept of "Base Stat Relation", and it says you can ignore it when adding HP to your Pokemon. Base Stat Relation is something I have mixed feelings about. Basically, it means that the order your Pokemon's Base Stats are in dictates its progression: if your Base ATK is higher than your Base DEF, then DEF MUST always be lower than your ATK. Since I use a houserule that lets people ignore BST and dump HP into whatever they want, that effectively shits on this class right out the gate. Why do I do that? Because some Pokemon have HP as their lowest stat, like Diglett. A level 5 Diglett LITERALLY has 18 Hit Points before you put any stats into it. Any Diglett in the world explodes if you hit it once. That's not very cool, even if it is really fast. This class is all about mitigating problems: Too Injured? You can remove 1 Injury a day from your Pokemon! How about a +2 to Save Checks? Turning crits into regular hits? The problem here is that, as in many tabletop games, it is faster, more effective, and more fun to simply blast the fuck out of something rather than tank it sorta well. I can get behind the idea of the class, but its implementation is just too shitty to ever really use. The only truly worthwhile Feature lets your Pokemon make an attack when they faint.


What's up with her tits? Is she juggling those too?

Jugglers are all about swapping their Pokemon out as quickly as possible. Your Pokemon gets +10 Initiative in the first round after they're sent out, and you can literally bounce your Pokeballs off of shit to get them out of your range or around corners and shit. There's a contest feature here - and Round Trip! Spend 1 AP when your Pokemon uses a Move to immediately swap it out with another Pokemon. Very solid. If that wasn't enough, you can spend 1 AP to act like your recalled Pokemon used fucking Baton Pass. If you're really in a rush, you can get a Pokemon out as an Interrupt, and once it's out you can immediately attack with it, even if it's not its turn. The concept is weird, but it's surprisingly effective.



One of the first questions I get when introducing people into this system is "Can I ride my Pokemon?" You sure can, and Riders specialize in doing that: Agility Training bonuses get doubled while you're riding something, you can Pass through dudes when using Moves so you feel like a gnarly stampeding horseman, and you and your Mount and use each other's Speed Evasions and go on each other's turns. If you and your Mount both get hurt, you can both Resist the damage. If some fool hits your ride, you can kick him in the fucking face if you pay 1 AP. The capstone is alright, but seems more of a middling ability to me: When you Dash on or Pass through a fool, your Pokemon can add their Speed stat to damage... but the target gets to add their Speed stat as DR. Every person I've seen play this class usually rides into a large group of enemies and gets completely bodied - I wonder if the class facilitates that sort of behavior or if those 2 are just idiotic TTRPG players? I'm not opposed to both.


FUCK?YOU?LEATHERMAN?

Taskmasters are usually mean, but sometimes they're just really intense about Pokemon training - think of the dude who made his Sandshrew take dives in pools of water just to make it stronger, and that pansy-ass Ash took offense to it. This class is all about playing on the edge - your Pokemon gets far, far stronger the closer it is to death. And not KO, either - I mean actual fucking death. When Training your Pokemon, you can give them up to 3 Injuries and Harden them. I'll let a picture explain the bonuses:

Heavily Injured is when you have 5+ Injuries - you can't heal naturally anymore and you take a Tick of HP damage (1/10th your Max HP) when you use a Standard Action in combat. You fucking die when you have 10 Injuries - that's actually the only way to really kill someone in this game, since the alternative is hitting -200% of your Max HP. I have never, ever done that, although some stray SE criticals got us close. However, the class can remove a ton of Injuries outside of combat and your Pokemon gets oodles of HP back when you do so. They also gain Cruelty, and can Injure other people in fights even more. You get to beat your Pokemon to cure it of some mental effects, use Orders on it, or just Injure it and give it more HP. You can also pick up extra DR for your Pokemon and faint at -30% HP instead of 0 HP - and get bonuses while fighting under 0%! The capstone for this is great - you automatically get critted by your foe, but you immediately crit them the fuck back. This is a mean class and it plays like one.



Trickster focuses on Status afflictions and shit. Your Pokemon get to use the asshole Combat Maneuvers when they hit someone with a Status Move, but you can ALSO power up certain conditions so they're even worse than usual. Want Poison to do extra damage every turn? Want to trip someone who wakes up from Sleep? Hey, how about being able to crit with Status moves? When you do that, you can fuck up their Saves, their Combat Stages, or just get free Temp HP. We also have a feature that lets your Pokemon get another Standard Action - always the mark of an at least playable class. The capstone lets your Pokemon use a Status move as an Interrupt and probably completely ruin somebody's turn. This class is aptly named, because you are an asshole if you play it. Fun class!

This is getting on a bit, so I'll cut it off here tonight. I think I'll talk more about the structure of classes in the next post. My idea is to have tiers of play, like what's so commonly talked about around here, and Features from lower tiers simply scale to higher ones. The way the classes are structured already kind of facilitates that, so I'll explain more next time.

Next time: Specialist Team Classes!

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

A Brief Digression

Classes are all 7 (or 8) Features long. Over 50 levels you gain 29 Features total, so it's possible to pick classes that have so many Features you'll never max all 4 classes out. Classes almost always require a Novice skill to enter, but others require Edges too, like Rider.
Typically, you enter a class and then you have 2 Features whose only prerequisites are that Class Feature, so you can take them immediately afterwards. From there, progression is tiered by Skill Rank and having other features in the class - perhaps an illustration would help.



This is the entire page for Ace Trainer (although their Signature Feature stuff is on the next page). As you can see, the idea is that you need higher Skill Ranks to get to better features, but you still have choice in the order you pick up most of those featurs. Since Skill Ranks have caps based on your level, this means it is impossible to max out the majority of classes before level 13... but some only have prerequisites that go up to Expert. Since all the features are supposedly ordered according to power, this lends itself nicely to moving things over to a tier system. For example, Ace Trainer might have Perseverance and Elite Trainer as their Tier 1 features that scale as you level up, and Critical Moment would be a Tier 2 feature, and so on and so forth. Would writing up half of the Features to scale inflate the page count too much to bother with? I think it might make the prerequisites a bit more consistent, since they can be all over the place with some of these classes - they don't all progress at quite the same rate. Feature or bug?

I also find it strange that classes don't all have the same number of Features in them. I can't even think of any design reason behind that. Anybody have any insight into this?

[Shrapnel]

Chapter 4: Trainer Classes

I don't recognize any of these fucking people.

From left to right: Office Lady and Businessman (Clerk male/female), male Psychic, male and female Veterans, the abdomen of a Doctor, a Lady, the scalp of an Ace Trainer, a Lass, a Waiter, and a Nursery Aide. I can't identify whomever is in the black shirt behind the Psychic.

All of them are Trainer classes from Gen V.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

From left to right: Office Lady and Businessman (Clerk male/female), male Psychic, male and female Veterans, the abdomen of a Doctor, a Lady, the scalp of an Ace Trainer, a Lass, a Waiter, and a Nursery Aide. I can't identify whomever is in the black shirt behind the Psychic.

All of them are Trainer classes from Gen V.

Your ability to recall generic NPCs from different Pokemon games impresses me - even now I only recognize the Veterans, because they were cool. I guess it's a fitting picture, then.

Specialist Team Classes
There are only 3 classes here, but don't be fooled - two of them are secretly 5 classes each, and one is 18 classes... so in reality there are well over 50 classes. Fortunately, these are all straightforward.


Despite all of this art coming from the internet, it's surprisingly good and consistent.

Stat Aces focus entirely on a single stat and can break BST to do so. Want a Diglett with DEF as its highest stat? Take this class. You can teach your Pokemon status moves and Abilities that suit your specialization, even if they can never learn the move normally: Attack Aces get Swords Dance and Rage, Defense Aces get Iron Defense and Reflect, and so on. I'm not going to bang on about the class too much, but here's what one of the features looks like:



I must mention that even though this class is actually 5 classes, it still fits into 3 pages like 90% of other classes. Good form! The capstone here gives your Pokemon a bonus to something depending on how many Combat Stages they have in that stat - Attack Aces get +1 Crit Range per ATK CS the Pokemon has, up to +3. I fucking love critting people in this game, it happens constantly.



Style Experts... oof. These guys focus on Contests Styles - Beauty, Cool, Cute, Smart, or Tough. This is actually an interesting class in that many of its features are actually battle-related, but they have different effects in Contest and Battles. These let your Pokemon use moves that aren't even on their move list, and some of the battle stuff is actually neat: Your Pokemon can Bait other Pokemon, get bonus points for doing action shit, improve the dispositions of wild Pokemon, reroll skill checks, and ignore falling damage/being Heavily Injured. They're all thematic enough, but I wonder if it's necessary to have any of this Contest shit moving forward. Some of the non-contest features here are neat and useful, but they could probably be affixed onto other classes or something.



Type Ace! The Gym Leader class. Not literally, but if you want a team of nothing but Bug-types or something, then this is your class. It has 3 Features that all Type Aces share, followed by 18 different sets of features for each Type. The features they all share let them teach their Pokemon abilities that either give DR when using an appropriate Type move, or they deal extra damage with that type. Another one lets you regain Scene moves, which is alright, but the REAL moneyshot for Type Ace is the Move Sync feature. It's straightforward: Take a Move your Pokemon knows and make it into your Type. The shenanigans are almost endless. I'm not going to go into each different Type Ace, but trust me when I say they're all thematically appropriate, and some are just better than others. Ice Aces are one of the best ones, probably because Ice is such a shitty type: You get DR, the ability to proc Hail abilities outside of Hail, have SUPER-MIST that debilitates everyone or gives you EVEN MORE DR, and you can just straight up Freeze people and tell them to fuck off. Total page length: 11 pages.

Professional Classes
This is an odd category: It says they "represent a skillset that one might not expect to see in the life of a wandering Trainer, such as an academic field of study or professional skill", but they generally focus on doing things out of combat at the expense of combat utility... but not always. Some doctors still know how to knock your ass out.


Oh, look. It's the most forgettable set of Pokemon in the franchise!

The Chef! This is irrationally one of my favorite class concepts. Obviously, they focus on making food for the party: but since they make items, it's not just for their Pokemon, but everyone's! It makes your Pokemon better at eating things, too, but it's a great force multiplier for everybody. They can make Snacks that have different Flavors, and Pokemon that like that Flavor get an even bigger boost when they eat it. Consuming food and getting buffs from it works a bit oddly in this game: I'll feed my Numel some Sour Candy in the morning, and it will have a "Digestion Buff" that lasts until you use it or go to sleep, but the buff itself does nothing. Only when you get rid of the buff in combat do you actually get the effects of it - so my Numel would get +5/10 DR only when it gets hit by a Physical Attack. Chefs also make better healing items for even cheaper than other classes, and can increase the Max AP of other Trainers. The capstone? You can COMBINE foods for two effects, PLUS you can just straight up make Vitamins now. This class kicks fucking ass.


Personal opinion: This is the cutest Pokegirl in the book. Fight me.

Chronicler is the Pokemon Snap class. No, really. They can make "Records" of Pokemon, Trainers, Moves, and Locations, and get bonuses when interacting with things they have Records of. They can teach their Pokemon some of the Moves that they've recorded, and can make their Pokemon completely wtfpwn people/pokemon they've recorded. To be honest, this class isn't terribly strong outside of that, but the idea is really fascinating to me: The more the Chronicler explores and records the world around them, the stronger they get. Is this class salvageable?



Fashionistas, ironically, only have a single feature that interacts with Contests. These guys are all about creating Held Items for their Pokemon - they get bonuses vs Disarm attempts, get more item slots to fill up for them AND their Pokemon, and can eventually create the various Focus Items and Incenses. This class places a huge value on Pokemon item slots, though: Trainers have 6 slots normally, while Pokemon only have 1. One of these features gives you +2 slots all the time, while you pick up one feature to unlock a new Held Item slot your Pokemon can SWITCH BETWEEN, while the capstone is using both Held Items for a SINGLE ROUND. What the fuck is this piece of shit? Are there some gnarly combos that I'm unaware of here? This seems overly limiting, especially since Trainers get fucking flooded with items.



Researcher is the "we couldn't make a whole class out of this idea so... here" class. This class is unique in that it is actually 9 "half-classes", and when you take Researcher, you pick 2 of those "Fields of Study" and advance in them like usual, since all the Fields are 4 Features long. Given that the majority of these really wouldn't be able to fit an entire character class, I can see where they're coming from. Here's some examples: The General Research field makes you better with skill checks of all kinds; Apothecaries are about making healing items, making them last longer, and eventually combining them for super healing items; Artificers are about taking Shards and making them into Type Boosters/Braces/Plates, Stat Boosters, and exploding people with fistfuls of magic; Botanists are pretty much mandatory for any real kind of berry harvesting, but also sling around Volatile Statuses all day; Chemists make "Pester Balls", little capsules that explode and cause status effects, but their capstone is "Playing God" and lets them shit out one of those artificial Pokemon like Castform or Grimer; Climatology is the only class that has anything to do with Weather; Occultism kind of sucks since it's all about not getting your mind read and picking up on Psychic Residue like anybody gives a shit; Paleontologists are great at beefing up their Fossil Pokemon; and Pokemon Caretakers beef their Pokemon up through breeding and has a feature that explicitly lets them MTP with the GM about a Pokemon being born with "special qualities".
This class is all over the place and some of these fields could be fixed up, but they all seem important in different ways.



Survivalists get a +2 bonus to Body Skills when they're in a Terrain they choose once they've spent some nights in it and can ignore movement/accuracy penalties there. There are 9 Terrains, all of them from the games: Grasslands, Forest, Wetlands, Ocean, Tundra, Mountain, Cave, Urban, Desert. These guys can use Moves specific to the Terrain they're in, but they can also create Terrain-specific Hazards to impair their foes. They also can beef up the ENTIRE PARTY in their chosen terrains and their capstone lets them act like they're in a different Terrain than the one they're actually in. This class is also really cool - this section is full of neat concepts I like seeing in games.

Fighter Classes
These are the... more braindead classes. You could spend hours optimizing your badass Pokemon build that relies on comboing your opposition into oblivion with moves that hit the entire enemy team for +300 damage... or you can pick up one of these classes and do almost as well since now you have 2 combatants under your control putting out damage every round. A few of the classes prior to these gave out stat points, but everything from here on out will also beef up your numbers. Yeah.



Athletes are buff and work out. Exciting. They're kind of the Ace Trainer of fighters, but not as good. They can passively buff their own stats, gain bonuses based on which stats are buffed, and even give their Pokemon bonuses for Opposed Body Skill Checks, Sprinting, or AoOing. They can also pick up some very solid moves, among which include Strength, Take Down, and Mega Kick. Thematically, I think this class is kind of boring, but is it so boring as to be worth scrapping? I don't know.



Dancers excel at creating and learning "Dance Moves" - think Swords Dance or Dragon Dance. Their Dances can not only buff themselves, but debuff enemies - plus you can teach your Pokemon the Dance Moves you create. They also get the power to destroy Hazards after dancing or transfer their buffs from dancing to an ally instead. For obvious reasons, I like to pair this class with Musicians.


Hunters are interesting in that it explicitly relies on double teaming bad guys with your Pokemon. The first feature gives you +2 Accuracy to everyone adjacent to an enemy you're next to, OR you can get an Ability that lets you AoO for free when your ally attacks someone next to you... AND that attack deals a Tick of Hit Points (1/10th of Max HP) in damage. You can teach your Pokemon both of these abilities as well... and they do stack. This means if you and three Poochyena with Pack Hunt all surround a guy, and one of you attacks him, the other 3 get immediate AoOs... and then when the next guy attacks him, the other three get to do it again. It's actually sickeningly awesome. You can also force Flinches on enemies you surround, you and your Pokemon can make up to 3 AoOs per round, you fuck up people who are incapacitated, and your capstone permanently beefs the effects of those 2 Abilities you can teach your Pokemon. This class is totally baller.


Martial Artists throw the fuck down. This class is about picking a different "Martial Style" that gives you different Stat Tags, Abilities, and Moves. Some Moves are available to all Martial Artists, some are only available to specific styles - these Moves range from Acupressure to High Jump Kick, and they're almost all Fighting-type. This is one of the few classes that gives Trainers access to Moves that aren't Normal-type, which is very useful. The real fun part is the class's Martial Achievements - wanna use Focus Energy as a Free Action or counter-grapple some fucker who failed to grapple you? What about the classic whirlwind attack? This is a cool class, but it never gets crazy - you aren't doing anything superhuman here whatsoever.


Musicians can give +5 Damage or DR to all their allies within 4 meters of them every turn, but they can also become immune to all Sonic Moves or fuck over other people when they use them. This class teaches a ton of moves: Sing, Supersonic, Screech, Metal Sound, Uproar, and Hyper Voice. If that wasn't enough, you can make all you and your Pokemon's Sonic moves Friendly, so they never hit your allies. The final feature allows you to deal damage when singing Songs, but a big chunk of the class's power is frontloaded: Giving all your allies +5 DR every turn really adds up if you do it every single motherfucking fight, and the status moves are just gravy on top of that. Overall, a simple but effective class.


I think someone writing this book had a crush on Green or something. Must be the outfit.

Provocateurs are an odd combat class that never lays a finger on anyone: Their domain is Social moves. They pick up Sweet Kiss, Taunt, Lovely Kiss, Torment, and can give those moves even greater effects, like Tormented targets deal -10 damage PLUS their you can disable one of their Abilities. They really had to give this class a lot of power to make the idea work: The SECOND feature is a bit crazy: when you miss with a Social move its Frequency isn't expended, you get a free Edge, can crit with Social moves on an 18+, AND when they crit your target loses a Tick of HP. I don't get why they just didn't let Status moves crit in the first place, honestly - this seems a bit clumsy to make the idea work. That being said, it is still a cool and very anime-esque concept - I can imagine players getting really into talking shit to their opponents.



The Dick Ass Thief Rogue is this book's only Weapon-using class, and their first feature gives them fucking FEINT ATTACK AND THIEF. A no-miss move with decent damage of a good type that you can spam? Yes fucking please, thank you. The class also lets you use any Moves you learn from it as Weapon Moves - this means they get a possible damage boost, or you can use them at range. Yes, you can Feint Attack a fool from a distance. Additionally, when you hit someone you can use a Dirty Trick for free. This class also learns Pursuit, Sucker Punch, Assurance, and Payback, and they pick up the ability to either Injure people harder or ambush them for big damage. I had a friend who played this once - his weapon was a chain and whenever someone came up to attack him, he'd Sucker Punch them before they attacked and would Blind them with his dirty trick, giving their attack a -6 to hit him. We fluffed it as him whipping people in the face with chains. It was awesome.



Roughnecks are scary motherfuckers who cause foes to lose Combat Stages just by hitting them. They're also good at eating damage and scaring the enemy at the same time, preventing people from fleeing combat, beating through DR, and generally ruining people's days by hitting them in the fucking face until they give up their lunch money. This class gives you the moves Mean Look, Chip Away, Headbutt, Glare, Endure, and Slack Off. The only issue with this class is that it needs an Edge to get in - the one that teaches you fucking Leer! This entire class demands that you take fucking Leer to use it. I get it thematically, Leer is just such a shitty and worthless move that they had to make a feature to beef it up... but it also beefs up your other moves too, so meh.


I remember your level 9 Pidgeotto, you cheating asshole.

Tumblers are social justice warriors speedy acrobats who immediately become immune to slows and AoOs. They pick up Aerial Ace, Splash (don't laugh, it doubles your jumping distance in this game), Acrobatics, and Bounce as moves, and get boosted versions of those moves later (including using Splash as an INTERRUPT to gain DR and action jump out of danger). They can Dodge one attack per scene and straight up ignore it, and can Disengage for free every time they land an attack, Jump, or get up from being Tripped. They have the best feature in the game: The capstone lets you get a free turn once per fight, although it must be at half of your Initiative or less. This feature might as well be called "win PTU".

Whew... this one was a doozy. I've gotta take a break from this for now, but we'll finish up the classes next time. I went too far with this chapter, didn't I?

Next time: Supernatural Classes!

[Shrapnel]

From left to right: Office Lady and Businessman (Clerk male/female), male Psychic, male and female Veterans, the abdomen of a Doctor, a Lady, the scalp of an Ace Trainer, a Lass, a Waiter, and a Nursery Aide. I can't identify whomever is in the black shirt behind the Psychic.

All of them are Trainer classes from Gen V.

Your ability to recall generic NPCs from different Pokemon games impresses me - even now I only recognize the Veterans, because they were cool. I guess it's a fitting picture, then.

Heck, that's nothing. I could amaze you even more listing and identifying hundreds of obscure Transformers, Digimon, and prehistoric sea animals. My capacity for useless trivia knows no bounds!

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Heck, that's nothing. I could amaze you even more listing and identifying hundreds of obscure Transformers, Digimon, and prehistoric sea animals. My capacity for useless trivia knows no bounds!

I think I'm becoming more horrified than amazed. Anyway, let's wrap this chapter up so we can get to the fucking POKEMON!

Supernatural Classes
These classes have it all: They can fight and have neat stuff outside of combat. I can't say I'm surprised.



The Aura Guardian is our Fighting Elementalist class, and it requires the Elemental Connection (Fighting) Edge, plus Intuition later on. You can only learn 4 Moves from this class: Detect, Vacuum Wave, Force Palm, Aura Sphere, Focus Blast, Drain Punch, and Focus Punch. The tags for this class are ATK OR SPATK. You can get the ability to read people's auras and project their thoughts into the minds of others, on top of reading the surface thoughts of those who are willing. If all this shit didn't sound totally awesome, you also get to add your ATK AND SPATK to your Aura Guardian moves by spending 2 AP, plus it goes straight through DR. If that STILL wasn't enough, how about giving people up to 18 DR for a turn, curing people of Volatile Statuses, and gaining fucking Blindsense? Is that enough for you yet, you fucking powergamer? What? You can hit Ghosts, too? Fuck!



Channelers require the Mystic Senses Edge, but they gain the ability to Channel Pokemon - including hostile ones, although that needs an Intuition DC 15 check, and they stop being channeled if they're more than 20 meters away. While Channeled, it can "communicate its intentions, emotions, and motivations to you and you may communicate similarly with them; neither party may be deceitful in this exchange. You also become aware of all of its Moves, Abilities, and Capabilities." That's pretty sweet, but you can also Imprint them - and you get all their sensory information and get rid of your range limit. They have a Stratagem that only works on Channeled Pokemon, but gives you some decent stat boosts while active. On top of that, you can trade Combat Stages, Coats (like Substitute, more on that later), and Move Frequencies between your Pokemon, and even divide damage between all the Pokemon you have channeled. As a capstone, you can straight up heal Pokemon you're Channeled to. This is a very interesting class that I've unfortunately had little experience with. It could probably be a useful bad guy class, but I've gone for the more... obvious classes there. This class also doesn't give any stat points, I've noticed... I wonder why?



The Hex Maniac picks up some sweet gear: Confuse Ray, Curse (which they can use as a Ghost-type), Hypnosis, Spite, Will-O-Wisp, and Hex. Hilariously, you can pay 2 AP to hit 2 targets with any of those moves, and when an enemy misses their attack near you, you can immediately use one of those moves for free. The capstone here is great: When you hit someone with Hex, you regain a use of a Move that inflicts the Status that they had - so if they're Asleep, you get 1 use of Hypnosis back - PLUS you regain a use of Hex if the target has a Status, because Hex just did double damage and you want to skullfuck someone else on your next turn with it again. This class gives out extra HP, which is icing on the cake. A basic, but awesome class that unfortunately doesn't have much use outside of combat besides making Occult Education checks.


Anyone who makes a Naruto joke is getting stabbed.

Oh, look. Ninjas. No way we weren't having one of these in here. This class gives you Speed and the moves Double Team, Poison Powder, Substitute, and Toxic (those last 2 are the capstone of the class), and the baller Infiltrator ability, so you can bypass all those pesky Protects and Detects and Spikes and Reflects whatnot. Just stab them right in the dick. Kind of awesomely, you get to make Antidotes, Smoke Balls, Caltrops, and Toxic Caltrops for very cheap - and as you Shift, you can leave behind smoke, spikes, or toxic spikes depending on what you've got. You can also pony up 1 AP to have any of your Weapon Attacks Poison on a fucking 16+, AND you can make it Poison-type damage, too. And lastly, we have... Genjutsu?
You can make Illusions around yourself. It can fool Aura Sight, but it's broken if you take any actions at ALL, and it takes an Occult Education or Intuition DC 10 + your Stealth (so 14-16) to see you. This is all very ninja-y, but I could have done without the reference...



Oracles... uh oh. These guys get to see past, present, and future events, or they can scry an object or their current location to see what's happened to it or in that location in the past 24 hours. Their stat is Special Defense. There's a whole section written up on how to handle this: It says to "negotiate" what the PC's method for seeing this shit is, and you should consider how you want to give out information. Don't spoil plot points if you don't want to, but you SHOULD totally give them information you want the PC to have. You shouldn't be afraid to make things vague, but don't do it often or you'll just come off as a dick because they never realize what you were talking about until it's too late. Scrying is just a video feed, so that's a lot simpler than in D&D or something. I've had to do this stuff before, but it was off the cuff and I got flustered about it... but that was just a bad game in general. Oracles also get to see through Illusions, which does have an actual combat effect. They can pay 1 AP to roll 1d20 and replace the roll that they or an ally makes, but only for a turn, so you can just not bother if it's a shit roll. You can also put some sick Marks of Vision on willing Trainers, and you can just see shit from their eyes whenever you want, although they can tell you to fuck off and refuse. The capstone here is... an attack misses you. Powerful and straightfoward, but a bit boring, don't you think?


Ufufufu...

The Sage is the inverse of the Hex Maniac - they also have a lot of HP and have little to offer outside of combat, but Sages can just give people DR every fucking round. That's their first feature! Not the best use of a Standard Action, but they pick up Reflect, Lucky Chant, Light Screen, and Safeguard - a killer suite of buffs that, in this game, the ENTIRE PARTY can take advantage of, which can be a lot of fucking units. And whenever they activate one of those moves, they can get a Combat Stage buff! The Sage is also the only class with any kind of in-battle healing, and it's a decent amount - 25% of their Max HP. Later, they get to give out DR for free whenever healing someone or when they take an Injury, which will be often. Your capstone here is that you can swap out any of those Blessings (the moves you got earlier) for another Blessing when it would be activated - so if you fucked up and put up Reflect when you needed Light Screen, you can fix that! This class has the same problems as Hex Maniac, but there are worse ways of playing the support healbot bitch.



Ah... the Telekinetic. As we go through this, I want you to keep in mind that this and our final 2 classes were once all part of the Psychic class in PTA. Just... remember they got split up. Anyway, you knew this was coming - you get the capability Telekinesis, which lets you pick up objects with your fucking mind instead of your Power rating, and you can also use Struggle Attacks at a range, and be Special if you want (guess which stat this class gives out...). You can Disarm, Trip, and Push people at range, and you eventually gain the ability to fucking WIELD WEAPONS AND ITEMS WITH YOUR RAW PSYCHIC POWER. You know what people do with that? Grab a giant hammer and smack tons of dudes from 10 feet away with it. You can also grab the actual, no shit Levitate ability and float around while being immune to Ground moves, and you get the moves Kinesis, Barrier, Telekinesis, and fucking Psychic. Your capstone? Pay 2 AP to either skullfuck people with your damaging moves or place an even bigger psychic barrier out for battlefield control. This class isn't actually that crazy, but it sure sounds fucking awesome.



Telepaths gain Telepathy. Wouldn't have guessed. That lets them read surface thoughts up to 12 meters away and also project their thoughts into other people. It's possible to read someone's mind without them knowing, but you have to make opposed Focus checks. Neat! This class gives out Special Defense and the Mind Reader, Calm Mind, Extrasensory, and Psyshock moves - not bad. They can automatically become aware of any living creatures within 20 meters of them, unless it has Mindlock. Oddly enough, you can also tell allies to get out of the way of attacks that might hit them... but only attacks your allies make? That's weird. Situationally useful, but very situational. The capstone here is implanting a fucking thought into something while you have the feature Bound, and they will assume that it was their thought. Oh, wait, this is literally fucking Suggestion. It explicitly tells you a good way of using it: planting a specific thought to dredge up surface thoughts related to it, so you can read them further. That's helpful. This class focuses more on the RP side of things, but it's still pretty neat.



Last, but certainly not least, we have the Warper. Apparently this class is notoriously broken, and people demand for it to be banned. What does it do? First feature lets you or your ally reroll any individual roll "once per scene". Oh, boy. Then you pick up a great selection of moves: Teleport, Ally Switch, Gravity, Trick, Heal Block, and Magic Coat. Magic Coat is awesome on its own, but the secret sauce here is Teleport and Ally Switch... because they give you the ability to teleport as a movement action. As long as you can see it and it's within about 4 meters, you can teleport to it. The neat part is that both of those moves are Interrupts - you can BAMF out of the way of an attack once a Scene, or you can switch yourself and an ally's positions, making them take the hit. The capstone can eventually teleport people with them and teleport up to three times as far, and after they or an ally finishes teleporting, enemies near them can't AoO them and have -3 Evasion. There's also a huge "Reality Bender" feature that needs to be seen to believe:



... thanks, Doxy. I can certainly see why this class is strong, but I don't see why it's so overwhelming. Being able to dodge two attacks in a fight is just something one of my players can already do, although that didn't come from a single class, admittedly. Still, this class could probably do without Reality Bender just to avoid headaches at the table. I don't know, I'm not terribly impressed, although it's still a great class.



And that finally brings us to the end... that took way longer than I expected. But we're finally done with all the Trainer shit! You can certainly see how newcomers can be intimidated when making their characters, but I have a problem... I think most of these classes are actually worthy of keeping in the game? A lot of them cover gameplay or RP niches and there's a wide variety of things that a player can be drawn to, plus a lot of them represent things that are actually in the Pokemon world, and would be hard to exclude. I'm not particularly wedded to the video games and have no problem with departing from them when necessary, but I think it's important to be able to see a class and identify various Pokemon characters with that class, so you can say "I kinda wanna be like Steven, but also a pimp who's really smart". I actually think that the classes are fairly well organized, too, they just need to be a bit evened out so some aren't so blatantly powerful. But even as I lament, this game actually isn't very unbalanced and it's hard to make a shitty character that gets outshined at EVERYTHING. I know I've been tl;dring a lot this chapter, but I'm really eager to see what the Den has to say about this section, since it's the vast majority of your character's ability to interact with the game outside of twiddling their thumbs.

Next time: Chapter 5: Pokemon!
Holy shit, we're 196 pages into this and we're finally getting to the MOTHER FUCKING POGEYMONZ?

[Koumei]

Are Contests just shitty and poorly implemented in this, or do you not like them in the actual video games? Because those are very different things and I don't know which is the case in this review. My favourite parts of pokemon actually are "everything except the battling". Give me more shopping mall / magic plaza ownership, movie filming, smart-and-cute contests, feeding-and-brushing-and-patting...

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I like them in the video games, but not a lot. They're terrible in this. I forget exactly how terrible, but we'll find out once we hit chapter 8. It's a completely new system, basically.
Oh god, I took a sneak peek, and there are position charts. What the fuck is going on?!

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Okay, nobody really cares about Trainer classes, so we need to talk about the most important part of this game: The fucking Pokemon!

Chapter 5: POKEMON

This is the part you cannot fuck up. If you fail here, you have failed to make a worthwhile Pokemon game at all. I will try and reserve all judgement in this post so that you can form your own opinion about it. However, I will still mention common homebrew rules when appropriate.

The first thing you need to know is that this game has a limit of 6 Pokemon you can carry around at once, just like in the games. They give out a couple of reasons behind this - Pokemon might be heavily regulated due to their capacity for violence, or that's just the number that the Pokemon League has set because it's "the number of Pokémon which a skilled Trainer can reasonably split their attention between when traveling without neglecting any particular Pokémon." It's recommended to not bend this rule because battles become less threatening the more Pokemon you have in your back pocket, but they say that exceptions like Pokemon Eggs may apply. If you catch something over the limit, they usually get teleported to a Pokemon Center or their Pokemon Professor, if applicable.

The example in the book uses a Charmander, but instead we'll use my favorite Pokemon as an example: Kabutops.

BEHOLD!

As you can see, there's a fair amount of information, but a single Pokemon always fits onto a single page, so... the Pokedex is still nearly 800 pages long. I'm not sure how avoidable that is, with the ever inflating number of Pokemon out there. I won't explain the obvious things, like a Pokemon species' name and picture is in the upper left, but I will explain some quirks that differentiate Pokemon from the video games.

First off, their Base Stats are divided by ten, but rounded up. A Pokemon's Nature still affects their stats, but in this case, it simply provides a +2 to one stat and -2 to another, except for HP, which is 1. A Pokemon has stat points equal to their Level + 10, so a level 5 Pokemon has 15 stat points to distribute according to Base Stat Relations, which I touched on earlier. To reiterate: Assuming a neutral Nature that doesn't raise or lower any stats, our boy Kabutops must always have ATK as his highest stat, followed by DEF, then SPEED, then SPATK & SPDEF, which can be different numbers but have to be in this same "order", and lastly HP. This makes Kabutops rather frail, even with its good DEF stat, so this is one reason why it's common to allow people to put points into HP and break this rule, like the Enduring Soul does.
In case you forgot, Pokemon have a different HP formula than trainers! It's Level + (HP x 3) + 10, since Pokemon have twice as many levels as Trainers.

Here's the Nature chart, in case you're interested:

It's worth noting that the developers of the game recommend ignoring Base Stat Relations altogether and put points where you want. In the "new version" of PTU, Pokemon Journeys, Pokemon stats are more like leveling up in Apocalypse World: you have a list of stat increases and you check them off as you level.

Pokemon in PTU can naturally learn up to 3 Abilities normally: They start off with a Basic Ability, gain a second Ability at level 20 that can be used for Basic or Advanced Abilities, and a third Ability at level 40 that can be used on any of them. However, there is no limit to the number of Abilities that anyone can know, so you can teach them as many as you'd like from your Trainer Features or whatever. Also unlike the games, Pokemon have 6 Move Slots! I can't not get excited about that one, sorry guys - with how move lists kept inflating over the years, 4 Moves just isn't enough for me. However, Pokemon can't have more than 3 of their moves come from TMs or Move Tutors, but if they learn that Move naturally later, it "frees up" that number, so to speak. Trainers, on the other hand, have no Move limits and can learn fucking everything.

One important aspect Pokemon have are Capabilities. You can see what Kabutops can do without MTPing or rolling skill checks in the upper right: It has a barely above-average Overland and Swim speed, is pitifully weak, but can breathe underwater and isn't obstructed at all by ocean or cave terrain. Geez, man. I would complain, but I don't think there's precedence to really give it anything else. Poor thing. I still like you. It's worth mentioning that some Moves and Abilities can actually give your Pokemon Capabilities - for example, picking up the Illuminate Ability gives you the Glow Capability.

Pokemon also have Skills, but in a far more limited fashion than Trainers. Almost no Pokemon have Skills outside of Athletics, Acrobatics, Combat, Stealth, Perception and Focus, but there are a small amount that have one more. After some examination, the Porygon-line actually has Tech Education - up to 5d6+3! These aren't meant to be set in stone, though. If the GM thinks that Pokemon are more intelligent than feral, then they can assign social and Education skills as they feel appropriate. Additionally, some more "individualized" Pokemon can have Pokemon Skill Backgrounds to reflect their quirks. They're cute, so I'll repost them:



So how does leveling up Pokemon work in this? There's... an experience chart. The chart! Without the chart The chart!, you cannot play this game. When a Pokemon levels up, they get +1 Stat Point, and... might get a Move, Evolve, or gain a new Ability, depending on their level. A lot of levels are objectively just adding +1 Stat Point somewhere. Before I can show you the chart The chart!, I should explain how experience point gain is calculated in this game. It won't show up until the end of the book in the GM's chapter, but I'll lay it out now: You count out the Levels of the opposition, treating Trainers directly involved in combat as twice their Level, then you apply a "Significance Multiplier", which ranges from x1-1.5 for shitty encounters, x3 for "average" encounters, and x4-5 for things like beating gym leaders and tournaments. After doing that, you divide the total number of EXP by the number of players gaining EXP and dish it out. By RAW, you can only give EXP to Pokemon that were directly in the encounter, but it's very common to allow players to distribute EXP among any Pokemon in their party.
Here's the chart The chart! if you want to inspect its math:

A Pokemon has 1 Tutor Point for existing, and gains 1 every 5 levels. Tutor Points are used for teaching a Pokemon TMs, things from your Class Features, and Poke Edges. When a Pokemon evolves, you get to completely re-stat it from scratch, because its BST might have changed, and it's not uncommon for that to happen. Abilities can change when a Pokemon evolves: For example, Kabutops has Bully as its Advanced Ability 2, but it was actually Unnerve when it was a Kabuto. Additionally, if it evolves and can learn Moves of a lower level that it couldn't when it hadn't evolved, it can learn those Moves if you wish. For example, if Kabutops had Absorb but Kabuto didn't, it could learn Absorb when it evolved, even though it's past that level.
It's worth mentioning that, before the Errata, there wasn't really a limit to what moves you could teach your Pokemon through tutoring. Now, Pokemon under level 20 can only learn At-Will or EOT moves up to Damage Base 7 (more on that later), 20-29 can only learn Scene Moves up to DB 9, and level 30+ Pokemon can learn whatever.

I mentioned Poke Edges, so what are those? They take an hour of training to learn, and they're ways to tweak out your Pokemon further. There's a decent variety, but not as much as Trainers get. Crucially, Poke Edges are the only way to increase a Pokemon's Skill Rank... and you can only do it once for that Rank, meaning Kabutops could get 5d6+2 Stealth, but nothing past that. There are some Poke Edges that make it easier to be a mixed sweeper and have high ATK & SPATK and some Edges that focus on "Underdog" Pokemon - Pokemon with shitty stats that are almost always unevolved Pokemon. Thanks to these Edges, you can actually get away with using a Charmander for the entire campaign, since you can beef its stats up and let it learn moves that Charizard can. There's an Edge that lets you pick up a fourth Ability at level 60, and a bunch that improve your Capabilities. I won't detail them unless someone wants me to.

Mega Evolution is also in this game, and works like in the video games: Your Pokemon needs to hold a Mega Stone and your Trainer needs to wear a Mega Ring. When it Mega Evolves as a Swift Action, it gains +10 predetermined stat points and a new Ability, possibly changing its types. Yes, you just straight up get the ability for free, it replaces nothing. The book says there are two ways you can handle Mega Evolution: just applying the stats directly, or keep an entire second sheet for the Mega Evolved form, like Darmanitan's Zen Mode or something. They recommend making your own Mega Evolutions for your campaign, and you'd be stupid to not do it for people's starters.

Loyalty is another thing that the developers would ditch if they could. It ranks from 0 to 6.

• At Loyalty 0, they fucking hate you and try to disobey you whenever they can. You need a Command DC fucking 20 to give them commands. Their example is catching a Pokemon whose nest of eggs you literally just crushed. It's recommended to not leave them in public unattended.
  Loyalty 1 Pokemon just kind of hate you and need a DC 8 to command. Their example is catching a Pokemon that Team Rocket got to, and it just has trust issues.
  Loyalty 2 is the default, and they tolerate the trainer, even if they generally aren't affectionate.
  Loyalty 3 is the average loyalty for most caught Pokemon, and generally like and respect their trainer on some level. As long as you don't abuse your Pokemon and take care of them like a pet, they'll get to here. If you hatch an egg, it starts here as well. They actively want to play with their trainer and will feel disappointed if you just throw them in the box forever. At this level, Pokemon can Intercept attacks for their Trainer, like in Persona 4.
  Loyalty 4 Pokemon are a bit spoiled by their trainers, and you probably won't catch something at this rank. Their example for doing so is earning "the deep respect of a Venusaur that acts as a forest’s guardian by saving the local wildlife from a large expedition of poachers."
  Loyalty 5 Pokemon are actually friends with their trainers and it's basically just Loyalty 4, but over a period of time. These Pokemon go out of their way to help and please their trainers, and are just generally cute.
  Loyalty 6 is for the TRUE BOND. These are often "well-treated Starter Pokémon, or Pokémon that have been with the Trainer for so many years or through so many adventures that they might as well be that Trainer’s Starter." They will gladly put their lives on the line for their trainers - and vice versa. These Pokemon can Intercept attacks for any other ally, and have been through some shit with their trainers. This is the Nakama rank.

The GM's the one who determines if a Pokemon's Loyalty goes up or down, and it's kind of a bell curve distribution: there aren't many Pokemon at either ends of the Loyalty spectrum, but it's very difficult to change their Loyalty in any case. Not so much for the ones in the middle. It offers a suggestion for trainers who want to get to Loyalty 6 with their Pokemon: Go on a quest for it! "A Trainer struggling to earn the trust of a Pokémon they rescued from a lab that performed horrible experiments on its test subjects might be given an opportunity to take down another similar lab alongside their Pokémon. A Trainer who’s journeyed with their Starter for a long
time may finally take them on a trip to see a special location to that Pokémon or take on and defeat a longstanding rival who has been difficult for the two of them to overcome in previous battles." The problem with that is that the GM has to think about the Pokemon as an actual character, but that's actually the exact opposite of a problem and is very important to pull off.

But how do they fuck? By being "prompted" by a Trainer with the Breeder Edge, or just pure GM intervention fiat. Roll a d20 - 1-4 means the Egg is of the male's species, 5+ means it's the female's species. These Pokemon have an Inheritance Move List: any moves on the Child's Egg Move List that either Parent knows gets on this list, and they can learn it at level 20 and every 10 levels thereafter. Breeders get to choose their Pokemon's Nature, Ability, and Gender if their Pokemon Education is high enough. They're all randomly determined unless you have Adept, Expert, and Master Pokemon Education, respectively. Finally, you roll 1d100 to see if it's Shiny! 1 or 100 means it is, but the GM just kind of has to figure out what that means - just a different color would be lame since this isn't a visual medium, after all. There's also an optional "Baby Template", where you reduce all of the Pokemon's Base Stats, Skill Ranks, Capabilities, Weight, and Height. Every 5 levels they get +1 to all their Base Stats, and once they regain all of their Base Stats you remove all of the penalties. This is intended for Pokemon that aren't born weak - think Tauros or Scyther... or even a Legendary Pokemon!

We arrive at the most dreaded part of all: Capturing Pokemon.


Bitch, what the fuck?!

So you throw a Pokeball as a Standard Action, and it's an AC 6 Status Roll. If you miss, no harm - it just lands nearby. Y'know, unless nearby fucks the ball up or is unreachable... If you hit, then you make the Capture Roll. Critting with it gives you a bonus on your Capture Roll. This is the only roll in the entire game where you roll UNDER the target number. I'm not going to retype this entire process, since it's extensive.

I must confess that I don't actually remember how any of this works and just use an online calculator to figure out the number for me.

This has been changed in errata to be far less complex.

I must confess that I don't remember this either, because I use the online calculator from the last spoiler and there hasn't been one publicly made for the errata version yet.

I'm going to talk about Pokemon Disposition now, because the less said about actually catching Pokemon, the better. Pokemon have 6 Dispositions ranging from Very Friendly to Very Hostile. Friendly to Very Friendly Pokemon want to interact with trainers, while Neutral Pokemon just kind of don't care too much. Fearful Pokemon are wary of nearby trainers, while Hostile or Very Hostile Pokemon will be stubborn and aggressive. Wild Pokemon start between Neutral and Hostile, usually, but if they're made Friendly, it's not uncommon for them to ask to be caught. There's some MTP about what can change a Pokemon's Disposition, but Trainers can also make Charm Checks to improve their Disposition by one step. Going from Very Hostile to Hostile is a DC 30, though - good fucking luck! You can try again if you give them food or help them out, or if the GM just takes pity on you.

There's a section about Fossils, but I really went over that in the Trainer section. However, they mention this is a good opportunity to give a player a Rock-shifted Pokemon and treat it like an fossil version. One of my players has a Fossil Gyarados as her starter, for example. Fossils are "born" at level 10, unlike Eggs, which hatch at level 1. I guess I forgot to mention that another common homebrew rule is to just have Eggs be born at the average level of the party and slap on the Baby Template, or the lowest level Pokemon of the party.

You can Fish, too, but it isn't very exciting. Old Rods can't catch Pokemon over level 10, Good Rods can't catch evolved Pokemon, and Super Rods can catch whatever the GM feels like throwing at you. You need some Bait or a Fishing Lure, and then you roll 1d20 every 5 minutes you spend fishing - a 15 or higher means you've snagged something. A Bait is used every 3 checks, but Lures aren't. You need an Athletics DC 8 check to reel it in, at which point you can try to catch it... or maybe it'll attack you. Failing the check means you roll a d20 and it gets away if you roll under a 10. There's a handy list of what unevolved Pokemon prefer fresh water and which prefer salt water.

Our last section is on Mounts.


Fuck yeah, Gogoat.

A few Pokemon have the Mountable Capability, which they say is a mere suggestion. Gogoat, for example, has Mountable 2 and can carry 2 people, no problem. Wailord has Mountable 20. Even Nidoking has Mountable 1! There are some guidelines on how to determine if something is mountable or not: You can't ride things that are too small, although that can be fluid. A Pontya that's developed a bit and is at level 20 is rideable, one that was just hatched a couple of days ago isn't. Even an newborn Onix can't be ridden, since it's probably not more than a meter long or something (adorable!) You should also refer to the Pokemon's Power stat - 1 or 2 means the Pokemon can never, ever carry you, because it's weak as fuck. Finally, you might consider equipment, like having a Nido-sled, or a raft of Magikarp. MTP Creativity is encouraged.

What are the numbers, though? Mounting in battle is an Acrobatics or Athletics DC 10 to do, unless you're an Expert, at which point you can kip up on them as part of your Shift Action. Pokemon still take weight penalties, but you can use your Mount's movement in place of your own on your turn, and your Mount can move any remaining movement on their turn. Either of you taking an attack that deals more than a quarter of your Max HP, getting Pushed, or hurting yourself in Confusion requires another DC 10 check to stay mounted. You can explicitly ride around on a Mount while using your Pokemon turn to order a different Pokemon, too! It doesn't really say where you place yourself on a Mount, which is kind of important for the larger ones like Gyarados and Wailord, so that usually is relegated to MTP.

And... that's really it. I'd share my thoughts, but I'm curious as to what you guys think first.

Next time: Chapter 6: Playing the Game

[jt]

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 and converting natures to +2/-2 instead of using percents, but the stat points and distribution thing is trying too hard to match the game mechanics. You could easily make the system use base stat + nature + level. With the way that attack and defense work in this game, the end result will look more like the video games than this does anyway.

In the Pokemon video games, the damage formula is roughly (move power) * (attack stat) / (defense stat). The division in there means that the way you keep the relationship between attack and defense the same is to always keep them proportionate, so the stat growth formula is roughly (base stat) * level / 50. At any level, the attack/defense proportions stay the same.

In this game, the damage formula has (attack stat) - (defense stat). That's subtraction, so to keep the same relationship between the two you need to add the same number to both sides. That number could be, say, their level. Which is way easier to do on paper than trying to mimic percent growth.

The capability and skill lists are too short. That's the chunk of the monster entry that explains why I'd want to play a Pokemon TTRPG, and it's tiny. And appears to be missing Cut. I want the game to tell you that Kabutops can be used as a surf board or a machete, that Magnemite can pick locks and is indeed a magnet, and so forth. A lot of that is obvious, but one of the big reasons we even have RPG systems instead of just playing pretend is that we want to make sure everyone has the same set of things that are obvious. And hopefully someone making a Pokemon RPG would keep adding to and patching those lists to the point that it includes some non-obvious stuff.

Learnsets are something I don't think I'd bother copying from the games. In a TTRPG I expect that you're supposed to get attached to your pokemon and customize them, rather than continually honing your team by replacing members. That suggests to me that you should use a system that allows way more moves. I'd suggest having a bunch of fixed lists, and Kabutops learns whatever you want from the lists common water moves, cutting moves, mean-spirited moves, and shelled moves (this is also how you can trim things down to fit two pokemon per page). We don't need to model the difference between natural learning, TMs, and fucking tutor moves. And I'm okay with a more permissive system allowing pokemon to have moves they might not in the games, like Growlithe getting to learn growl, or Flareon getting to learn any useful moves.

(I haven't finished reading your post. In fact I'm quite behind on this thread.)

[Koumei]

Pokemon in PTU can naturally learn up to 3 Abilities normally

That sounds good though it could also allow for some unintended self-synergy. Like, people get sand up in their dickholes just if you have a Swift Swim pokemon on the same team as a Drizzle pokemon, not even in double battles, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the 800 can have both of them on the same mon. Similarly there are pokemon that can have Guts and also the one that doubles Speed when afflicted.

I like the pokemon Skill Backgrounds, they're nice little things there even if they don't actually affect that much.

Loyalty is another thing that the developers would ditch if they could. It ranks from 0 to 6.

They absolutely shouldn't ditch loyalty. Befriending your pokemon is sort of a key theme in it, and while the game mechanics around it aren't usually very important, you're supposed to care a lot. And as you noted, for a tabletop RPG that means actual adventure excuses.

I must confess that I don't remember this either, because I use the online calculator from the last spoiler and there hasn't been one publicly made for the errata version yet.

It's a lot less bad (and indeed less "outright impossible" for catching the innately high level Legendaries) than the original.

You can Fish, too, but it isn't very exciting.

Well neither is fishing (in pokemon and also the real world) so that's accurate.

I still can't believe some of those charts though, what the actual fuck?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I still can't believe some of those charts though, what the actual fuck?

I TOLD YOU this was like AD&D, dude. Apparently I may have been more correct about that than I intended.

I'm not sure what you mean by "unintended self-synergy". Politoed literally has Swift Swim and Drizzle and Rain Dish as the abilities it can get, so I think any synergy is entirely intended. It's not like you can sneak Abilities that are super strong onto your Pokemon - the stuff Trainers can teach is useful, but not overwhelmingly powerful.

The capability and skill lists are too short. That's the chunk of the monster entry that explains why I'd want to play a Pokemon TTRPG, and it's tiny. And appears to be missing Cut. I want the game to tell you that Kabutops can be used as a surf board or a machete, that Magnemite can pick locks and is indeed a magnet, and so forth. A lot of that is obvious, but one of the big reasons we even have RPG systems instead of just playing pretend is that we want to make sure everyone has the same set of things that are obvious. And hopefully someone making a Pokemon RPG would keep adding to and patching those lists to the point that it includes some non-obvious stuff.

Even though we haven't gotten to the actual Capability list yet (that's chapter 10), I agree with you. If you'd like, I can post a page of a different Pokemon so we can see how your expectations match up against the reality. Or if you just wanna see what your favorite is capable of in this game.

I like dividing base stats by 10 round up and converting natures to +2/-2 instead of using percents, but the stat points and distribution thing is trying too hard to match the game mechanics. You could easily make the system use base stat + nature + level. With the way that attack and defense work in this game, the end result will look more like the video games than this does anyway.

I'm a bit more uncertain about this. So you're saying Pokemon would get +1 to all their stat points every level? Once you get past level 13 or so, the bonuses you get from your level would outstrip the ones from your base stats, which would fine, except they would all equally outstrip the old stats, which strikes me as deeply odd. What's wrong with letting the player decide where to put their Pokemon's stat points?

[jt]

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, Sp. Def 9, Speed 13
Level 5 Litwick: HP 10, Attack 8, Defense 11, Sp. Atk 12, Sp. Def 11, Speed 7
Level 20 Doduo: HP 24, Attack 29, Defense 25, Sp. Atk 24, Sp. Def 24, Speed 28
Level 20 Litwick: HP 25, Attack 23, Defense 26, Sp. Atk 27, Sp. Def 26, Speed 22

As you suggested, the numbers of an individual pokemon become proportionately closer together as it levels. However, this does not actually do anything; a pokemon doesn't use its stats against itself. The important thing according to the game's mechanics is the attacker's attack minus the defender's defense. And that's what's preserved here: at level 5 Doduo has +3 physical damage on Litwick, and at level 20 Doduo has +3 physical damage on Litwick. Same for Litwick's special attack damage to Doduo: it's always +3.

If your objection is just that it scales too fast, it'd be fine to add a point every other level, every third level, or whatever. You mentioned wanting to change the level cap so I don't know the appropriate rate. Fully evolved pokemon have stat differences of less than 10 unless one of the pokemon is a weird gimmick, so ask yourself how many levels an Alakazam needs to be ahead of a Golem before the Alakazam has higher physical stats, and set it up that way. With +1 per level it takes a 10 level difference, with +1 every other level it takes a 20 level difference, and so on.

The problem with letting players decide where to put their points is that it breaks the assumptions of the game. If you're adding, say, one point per level, then by level 20 you can't tell whether a given Geodude has higher defense or higher special attack. It's really annoying and hostile if your players encounter a rock monster and don't know whether its physical defenses are higher than its special ones. This is what that proportionate stat rule is trying to fix, but that's dumb and complicated.

If you want a way to customize pokemon, I'd suggest making that separate from the primary way they gain stats. For example you might add an additional +1 to two different stats every few levels. (Forcing to split between two stats mirrors how EVs end up working).

(+1 to base stats every second level / +1 to two stats of your choice every 4th level happens to be how D&D 4E works)

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Here you are:

I can see where you're coming from, and I think it's worth looking into. Are you proposing that trainers also get +1 to all their stats every level, or should they be able to put stat points where they want as they level while also getting stats from their classes?

While a Pokemon's attacking and defending stats will rise proportionally to its level to match equally levelled opposition, the same isn't true for how much HP they have. That Doduo might have the same +3 physical damage over Litwick its entire life, but they're both going to get a lot more HP than they started out with, so more damage would need to come from Moves and other sources as they level up in order to compensate for that... and I don't think that's a bad thing. My idea was to have the level cap for Trainers and Pokemon be the same - 25. They would be split up into 5 tiers, and each tier should be a noticeable jump in power.

If you want a way to customize pokemon, I'd suggest making that separate from the primary way they gain stats. For example you might add an additional +1 to two different stats every few levels. (Forcing to split between two stats mirrors how EVs end up working).

That's not a bad idea, actually. We could do something like +2 to two stats every 5 levels or something, so Pokemon can still be a bit out there from their base stats, but higher level ones are still just way better than lower ones and you know a Geodude is always going to be tough. We could let players decide which stats those are, but should we let them change it after making that initial decision? I was thinking perhaps this is where Natures could come into play - your Nature simply determines where those +2 points get allocated every time you go up a tier. Even at the highest levels, this would only cause a +10 discrepancy, which isn't much compared to the +25 you'd have from levels. I don't have a problem with letting players decide what their Pokemon's Nature is, anyway.

That tiering scale would also make move distribution easier: rather than the kind of shitty "wait until you hit this level to learn this move" paradigm that the game uses, you could just have a set of moves available at each tier and at each level, you can learn a move from the lists you've unlocked. Since this is Pokemon, getting rid of shitty old move in favor of hot new ones is just how it works. Admittedly, this is how Pokemon Journeys works, but I've seen similar ideas thrown about here, so I think there's some merit to it in this context. Personally, I'm in favor of increasing the maximum Move Limit that Pokemon get as they progress through tiers, so higher level ones have a lot of badass moves at their disposal and don't have to be so one-note.

[jt]

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 pile of tentacles, should have some mention of being able to hold lots of things at once. Any expansion to those lists would be welcome though; as I said before, it's the most Pokemon thing in this entire game.

Yeah, I was thinking that improving moves would make up for HP goes up. The video games do this too... sorta. There are a lot of mechanics in those things.

I have no idea what trainer stats are supposed to look like. But it'd sure be convenient if they were the same as pokemon stats, so absent some really really good reason for them to be different, they should be the same.

I like the idea of tiered move distribution. And I think a combo of that plus the themed lists I suggested would work really well.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well, when I get to the chapter where it goes over that stuff, should I just mention what each capability does? There's plenty of homebrew ones that people have made for their fakemon, but not a lot for existing pokemon. Trainer stats start off at 45 total, right above a Pokemon with the Underdog capability, so they're about average with their starter unless their classes give them stats. Pokemon level up more, so in the end, they do have more stats... unless the trainer has a bunch of classes that increase their stats and they also choose the bonuses so they get +ATK or +SPATK every even level, which adds up fast.

While I'm on the subject of tiers, I think I've settled on the idea of trainers having 3 classes: 2 regular classes and 1 advanced class, all of which are 9 levels long. Trainers get only 3 Features at first level which have to be spent between 2 different classes. Classes have 2 Features you can get per tier, except for tier 5, which only has 1 Feature. Once you hit tier 3 or something, you unlock your advanced class, which would have similar skill prerequisites like regular classes, but otherwise be completely separate and all around better and more badass/thematic.