This is it: the final chapter. I'll admit that this review has taken longer than expected, but I've picked up quite a few useful ideas by going into too much detail, so let me start by thanking everyone who helped out. Hopefully I can put together something better than this in the future.
Speaking of putting something together, let's get into how you're supposed to do that for
this game. We have arrived at the GM chapter.
Chapter 11: Running the Game
I saw Powder once 20 years ago and the last scene has stuck with me for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, Ash Ketchum is immune to electricity, ruining this reference.
First sentence: "Fleshing out a world to play Pokémon Tabletop United can be trickier than it seems." Given the massive difference in expectations between players, this is very true. We've had issues in this thread regarding what different people want and expect from a Pokemon game, so it's vital to settle those issues at the beginning of the campaign. The book states they don't want to prescribe "a specific form of setting", so they share their experiences and pose questions that your group should probably answer before they start playing. So what are the things we should know before we start?
Getting Started
The first thing you need to get out of the way is what kind of campaign you're doing. Examples include: A standard Pokemon gym crawl with a villain team; "Wild West Mons", post-apocalyptic gang warfare, high school, a villain game, "Poketrian Odyssey" (JRPG heroic fantasy), and Monster Hunters (yes, like the game). They explicitly say you can really just take any existing premise and slap Pokemon on top of it, especially if you're bored of "regular" pokemon games. I am bored of regular Pokemon games, so I agree with this statement. You could do fucking Pokemon Wacky Races if you wanted - though obviously the crazier your premise, the more you'll probably have to make up to support it. Then again, it's not like D&D is any different in that regard.
There are also a few more questions that you should answer: Do you have a Pokemon League? If so, what is their role in your setting? Is it like the manga where they have some kind of political power, or are they like celebrities and just entertain people? Is there an Elite Four? Battle Towers or other non-League entities? If you don't have a League, do you have some kind of goal for your players that could replace that progression? Their examples (which I suspect are just games they ran) include having exams in the academy setting or beating giant monsters in Poketrian Odyssey to replace gym badges.
Additionally, what's the tech level of your setting? This has big implications on how Pokeballs and Pokemon storage work, and can even influence TMs and other NPC services. Chances are the farther back you go, the more difficult it is to get your hands on most of this shit, and vice versa. You also need to hash out how much trainer combat you're planning on having - is it cool for people to just walk around armed with actual weapons in addition to the weapons that Pokemon are? What about supernatural powers? If a player picks up Oracle or Telekinetic, is that something that's generally accepted or are they ostracized? Is it common or rare?
There are certainly more questions that you could ask, but in my experience, these are the serious foundational questions you need to have answers to before you can begin a serious game. I remember reading a post from Ancient History recently saying that players typically have 3-4 layers of questions before they start being satisfied by your answers, and these cover those first couple of layers pretty well. The minutiae of how Pokeballs
really work can be answered on a table by table basis, as can many other questions the Pokemon world poses but doesn't bother to answer. Everyone's got their own stupid headcanon, after all.
Pokemon Leagues
Chances are pretty good that you'll run at least one "vanilla" game, because the one thing everybody thinks of when they think of Pokemon are getting Gym Badges and becoming Champion. Of course, we immediately run into a problem - "Champion" is a singular title. This is a group game. How does the book recommend we handle this?
Well... in this chapter, it doesn't actually mention Champions at all. It's brought up in other slices of the book, but not here. The implication I'm getting here is that a "Champion" is merely anyone who's beaten the Elite Four and is not a title you hold like in WWE or something. This is probably the easiest way to handle it - everybody challenges the Elite Four, everybody becomes a Champ.
If you're lazy or in a rush, there's a basic outline for a League that you can slot into most campaign settings. The gist is that the League is basically in charge of all Trainers in a region - they issue IDs, track Pokemon registration, sponsor Professors, and set the rules and regulations for sanctioned Pokemon battles. Vigilantism is "to some degree actively encouraged in certain settings", depending on how many bad guys you have running around. There are Gym Leaders, who are locally elected officials who represent the town they're in and are sort of sheriffs, even capable of appointing Gym Trainers as deputies. The Elite Four are those chosen by the League itself and oversee broader areas than Gym Leaders. They hold more political and social influence, and are generally powerful in their own right. Frontier Brains run the Battle Frontiers, where Champions can go for post-game fun. These are typically more business-oriented due to the sponsorships necessary for such ostentation. They tend to lobby on behalf of their corporate sponsors, and I'm sure you can get some ideas from that.
You can become a Gym Leader if you want, though it can be difficult. Mostly you become renowned in that particular town and possibly get endorsed by the Leader that already lives there, then take their job when they retire. Getting to the Elite Four requires skill AND social connections, on top of showing more heroism than a mere Gym Leader. You rescued Lavender Town from ghosts? That's nice, but the Elite Four rescued all of Kanto from Mewtwo, fucker. Come back when you've got a real resume.
I can't believe that three fucking generations have been released since this edition dropped.
So how the fuck do we actually play that out? Well, though League Matches, of course! Officially sanctioned, legally recognized cockfighting. They mention that, if you have the time for 1 on 1 sessions, then you can do traditional league matches where it's you versus one other guy. They don't mention that duels aren't actually that fun compared to the bonanza of 8-man brawls. You COULD, theoretically, host several 1 on 1 fights at the same time so everyone at the table has something to do, but they explicitly do not recommend doing that. The obvious answer is that League Matches are officially group affairs - maybe the Elite Four is just the best adventuring party in the land, and you and your friends have to challenge them all at once. This can get a bit wonky, though. It's more appropriate for your group of 4 Trainers to fight 4 other trainers, but it's just plain cooler to have your whole party challenge a single Gym Leader who arbitrarily commands 4 Pokemon at once. You could handwave it away as part of the league rules - maybe you literally sit there for the full 10 seconds each round is so that the Leader has time to actually command each Pokemon. Alas, boss battles have their own issues - more on that later.
If that seems too weird and gamey for you, there is another option: Alternate victory conditions. Maybe you don't actually battle the Flying Leader - you instead have a race across dangerous terrain, or you have to do a Contest, or perhaps something like the Orange Islands from the anime and it's just obstacle courses and other minigames. Regardless, you should limit how many Pokemon trainers can bring to the gym battle, even moreso than usual: They recommend capping Trainers at 3 Pokemon so they don't drag on forever.
Now that you've showed up to the League Battle, there's the question of what you can and can't do in them. The book puts it perfectly: "For formal matches at Gym Battles and Tournaments, or even between trainers, walking straight up to your opponent’s Pokémon and personally giving them a swift kick is usually frowned upon quite severely." Of course, they aren't going to go through and label everything that's League-legal and what isn't, because that would be too much work. Instead, they just have some rules of thumb:
- Static or permanent changes, like things that teach your pokemon Abilities, are totally legal.
- [Orders] are legal unless specified otherwise.
- No Moves. You can't Sing or even Leer at your opponent's Pokemon. You can't even use Abilities like Intimidate.
- Features that represent training or encouragement "should probably be okay to use". These include stuff from Ace Trainer, Cheerleader, and Athlete.
- Supernatural features work on the same paradigm - using Warper to reroll your Pokemon's rolls is not okay, while using Rune Master to make super-Unown is.
- If you're too dumb to get it yet, anything that actively interferes in the fight is not allowed, while things you do before the fight are fine 99% of the time. That's basically it.
Of course, you can tweak these if you want Trainer Combat to be league legal or something. Just talk to your players before they make their characters so they don't get (metaphorically) sucker punched when they try and fight Youngster Joey.
Maybe you're running a One Piece game where everyone's pirates in Pirate World and there isn't a Pokemon League at all. No worries - they recommend just taking the structure of the League and adapting it to other games. What is that structure? "A series of challenges, usually based around a theme, with incremental difficulty and a need to travel between challenges." When you put it like that, you could just structure your game like a fucking JRPG. As the players beat each challenge, they qualify for more difficult and prestigious challenges. This is so obvious to me that I wonder why they brought it up, but some GMs are total fucking noobs and might need this shit spelled out for them. I guess.
They have even more examples, undoubtedly ripped straight from some guy's campaign notes:
- Pokemafia, a game based in a single city where different rival gangs vie for power and influence among the criminal underworld. Each gang is headed by a Don, who is basically a Gym Leader in this context. Beating the shit out of other gangs lets you spread out your turf and you get recognized by high-level criminal bosses who have hands in government business and things like that. Alternately, you could still have the actual Pokemon League be a thing, but you advance by assassinating or subverting Gym Leaders to your criminal cause and getting paid fat stacks like you're in Shadowrun.
- Trainer Academy, because high school settings are required for young adult adventures. Instead of Gym challenges, you have Exams that are designed to test a particular aspect of battling concepts. Each Exam is given by a different teacher, who should obviously have their own styles and quirks. Fail your exams too much and you get kicked out of school, pass them and you can be given special privileges like being allowed to hunt for rare Pokemon in the Forbidden Forest. I'm surprised I went this long without a Harry Potter reference. It's Pokemon Harry Potter. You know what the fuck is up.
- Pokepirates is the aforementioned One Piece example. You're pirates. You take out other pirates or naval officials. Advancement is earned through increasing your power Wanted Level.
- Pokefantasy is what I went with - instead of gyms you just have giant fuck-off dungeons and cool boss monsters. I know I'd rather fight a magic Venusaur that's supernaturally attuned to a wild forest than go knocking on a Gym Leader's door. If you've played D&D, you can play this very easily.
- World War Pokemon lets you pretend you're Lieutenant Surge. You work for the military and you get told what to do - maybe it's attacking vulnerable positions or doing espionage, or maybe it's defending key points in your lines. Instead of Gym Leaders, your bosses would be enemy Generals and Commanders and shit, and you just earn military promotions instead of badges. I assume that these are the darkest campaigns, even though they probably don't have to be.
Regardless of where you're playing, there are some common locations you're going to want, for the sake of your players. After all, certain locations persist across Pokemon generations and games, and you might want to go there. These include Research Labs (for your Pokemon Professors), Safari Zones, Pokemon Graveyards, Ancient Ruins, Shopping Megacenters, Entertainment Cities, Shrines, Fossil Quarries, and Villain Hideouts. These can all appeal to a different kind of player while still allowing the rest of the party something to do while they're there, and that's generally the kind of locations you should be making up.
But What About The Fucking Pokemon?
Oh, right, those things. Yeah, we should probably figure out where to put those, huh? They recommend keeping two goals in mind when doing this: Fun Game Progression, and Sensible Ecosystems.
Can you guess what Fun Game Progression is? They mention you can stick to the game's layout: Starting off in a generic forest or cave or typical easy environment and populate it with weak, fairly vanilla Pokemon. If you've played literally more than 1 Pokemon game, you should know exactly what this means. After all, picking up a Larvitar on the third session would make catching a Pidgey far less exciting, because there are a fucking million of those all over the place and getting something perceived as "rare" makes you feel like a cool Trainer. If you're literally just playing PTU in one of the settings from the games like Kanto or Johto, then you can be UTTERLY LAZY and simply modify the actual encounter lists that already exist for those areas. This is easy, but can be predictable to those who've already played the games.
Regardless, the PTU pokedex generally puts more common Pokemon at the beginning and the rarer ones towards the end, so just grabbing shit from the beginning of the book early on can serve you in a pinch. If you want, you could keep regional pokemon together - so one forest is full of Johto pokemon, while a different forest only has Kanto pokemon. But what if you're not a shitter who has a bunch of linear routes from one town to the next? What if you actually allow your players to go open world? In that case, it's still not hard - keep the boring stuff near the roads and other easily accessible areas, and stick the high-level rare stuff up in the mountains or other places that are a bitch to get to. They do this shit in video games (or at least halfway competent ones), you should be able to figure it out.
Sensible Ecosystems should also be obvious. The term "Gygaxian Naturalism" exists for a reason, after all... and we probably don't want that. So let's get into Biology 101. There are entire blogs dedicated to this subject. No, not biology - Pokemon biology. And also regular biology, but I digress. The large scale stuff is easy - don't put Water pokemon in the desert and Grass-types in caves. Basic. Once you get to specific areas is where you might need to do some thinking. They bring up the energy pyramid as you first consideration: What's the primary source of food for the area? What are the most common Pokemon that would eat that? What eats those? The games have this set up decently already - outside you run into lots of Grass pokemon and herbivores, while the apex predators tend to be rare and hard to find anyway.
If you want to go even further, you can consider ecological niches and competition between Pokemon. Murkrow, for example, probably do better in dark forests than Spearow, which prefer open plains, and you can design encounters based around that. Of course, maybe they both compete in the same forest and the Spearow have evolved a darker coloration to avoid dying out. Tweaking a species' abilities, types, and moves are good ways to handle this without messing up progression too much. Of course, some Pokemon don't eat regular food - Ghosts and Electric-types are the most obvious. They would probably be around whatever it is they eat, whether it be the emotions of others or raw electricity or whatever. They even say that if it's inappropriate for your setting, you can just ban certain Pokemon entirely - their example is a Porygon in a pre-electrical campaign, since it's a digital Pokemon. You may need to create weird areas just to give certain Pokemon places to live, but honestly? That's fine.
The books gives a
spheal spiel about how "no one can tell you the one right way to handle how you populate your Pokémon world", which... can be right, from a certain perspective. We sure can tell you what the wrong ways are and what you shouldn't do, though. Different groups will have different levels of scrutiny for these sorts of things, so you should figure out how sensible your ecosystem is at the start of the game, to temper expectations.
I think they're just getting random art now. At least it's still good.
Pokemon behavior is another topic to discuss with your players. There used to be an Intelligence stat for Pokemon that gave a rough idea of how smart the species was, but that was removed in this edition and they told the GM to figure that shit out on their own. Do they have anime-tier intelligence where most Pokemon are basically people with their own goals and personalities and shit? Are they just feral animals? How do they feel about being caught? How do people feel about catching them? They point at Chapter 5 in case you want to add social and education skills to Pokemon, otherwise they aren't answering that for you. However, Pokemon should at least be intelligent enough to understand orders otherwise the game just falls apart.
They do mention that different Pokemon may have different kinds of intellect: an Alakazam might be interested in actually reading books in a stereotypical example, but maybe Oddish and Bellossom are excellent at telling time and determining soil quality. Fucking Conkeldurr somehow figured out how to make concrete, but it probably can't figure out a telephone. Something simplistic like a Combee may be unable to learn any complex tasks at all, but has excellent memory for knowing where the honey's at. Just fucking look up how the actual animal operates and slap some Pokemon flavor on top of it, really. It is mentioned that, generally speaking, caught Pokemon are more intelligent than wild pokemon due to spending time with people who actively push and train them to learn new things - though they don't recommend going past childlike intelligence to avoid... weird ethical questions. "Coco the Primeape may know sign language, but she doesn’t know how to hold down a job." Shit like that.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind an Intelligence stat that sticks to a relatively low scale like 1-5 or something. After all, you can just tweak that or ignore it if you have smarter or dumber Pokemon. That being said, the intellectual capacity of Pokemon is something that hasn't really come up in my own game very often, since everyone seems to get that they're (for the most part) just slightly smarter animals in my setting. They actually
aren't and they come across some weirdly smart Pokemon sometimes, but that's a plot point, so it doesn't count.
There's also a footnote about Water pokemon that basically says they aren't answering any fucking questions about that one. I can't remember much from the anime, but they mention that some aquatic Pokemon are seen functioning outside of water by flopping around or literally just fucking floating there. I absolutely cannot stand that shit and refuse to allow fish Pokemon to arbitrary travel on land as well as most other things. It's a fucking fish, it has Overland 1, it fucking flops around on the ground because fucking duh. I've heard some people let them use half their Swim speed and just "bubble up" when on land, but that's fucking stupid and I hate it. Maybe as a Trainer feature or something, but not just as a thing that they can fucking do all the time. Personal opinion.
In a flash of intelligence, they included a Pokemon Habitat List. It's got all the terrain types in the game and a list of Pokemon that typically live there. This was a great place for me to start when trying to populate various areas, but not so much anymore, now that I have most of the ground work laid out. If you need to know what lives in fresh water, a marsh, and the ocean, here's where you look. It's a solid 5 pages and I have no objections to it.
Metagaming and You
Guess what? Pokemon is an incredibly popular franchise with a lot of obsessive fans who can remember the stupidest fucking details about everything. The odds that none of your players are walking into this with knowledge of the mechanics and other shit are almost 0%. Fortunately, you shouldn't sweat it. If you describe something as "a little purple bulb with two legs, eyes, and leaves growing out the top of its head" and one of your players screams out "OMG IT'S AN ODDISH", then fucking deal with it. Even with Untrained Pokemon Education, people still know what Types are, how they interact with each other, and the Types of most pokemon. Even in-universe, people obsess about this shit, so a lot should be assumed to be common knowledge. Now, if they have Pathetic Pokemon Education, then that's their dump skill for a reason and you can and should totally fuck with them for it. Not too bad, but you should deny them some obvious info every now and again, since chances are someone else can pick up the slack. Lots of people get into this game BECAUSE they like Pokemon, and fucking with their pre-existing knowledge can lead to some harsh dissonance in play. Besides, what are the odds they know EVERYTHING about a given species? Sure, they might know its types and stat spread and move list, but how many players have Pokedex entries memorized? Just because they know how a Weavile fights doesn't mean they know its social structures and behavioral ticks, and that's where you can really RP high Pokemon Education.
Campaign Structure
Like in most games, PTU campaigns pick up a certain level of inertia after you run enough sessions and the game sort of starts running itself. They recommend alternating between two phases of play: Calmer, more open sections where the players can fuck around pursuing their own goals and waste time catching Pokemon, and PLOT. Y'know, when the "main quest" intrudes. The early game should have lots of the former, giving the players time to establish their characters and fill out their teams with shit they want. After they've done a bit of that, you can have more pressing matters come up to give them some guidance. Their examples are basic: As the party is out catching Pokemon, some clues related to your plot get dropped. Maybe a Gym Leader won't take challenges until a local criminal team is beaten, if you want to rip straight from the games. Maybe hunting down a Team Rocket member leads to their hideout, which naturally has lots of stolen Pokemon for players to take care of and add to their teams.
To be honest, this sort of thing has just naturally happened over the progression of my campaign and it's not something I've had to concern myself with much. Then again, I have a whole overland system that almost forces you to switch between the two "phases", since there generally isn't "plot" shit happening out in some random woods. The book says that even experienced GMs need to keep this in mind when running PTU, but this shit is so obvious that I don't really get it. I guess it's still worth keeping in.
There's some guidelines on how to handle sessions - give players shit to interact with and set up challenges so they have to use each other's skills and Pokemon to get past them, having "meaningful" choices, and make sure that each individual session is interesting on its own while also contributing to your overall plot. Obviously you can have hot springs episodes and have nothing to do with anything, but don't do that too often unless you're straight up doing episodic anime shit where every session has nothing to do with anything. They also recommend having dossiers on each of your PCs when the game starts, so you can refer to it when considering new goals and challenges for your campaign. Y'know, mild background info, their main skills and interests, in and out of character goals, the basics. Frankly, this is good for any long-term game, so I approve.
But what if the players... go off the rails?! Shit happens. However, this game is a pain to make things up on the fly for, and there's not a Monster Manual full of pregenerated Pokemon you can grab if you need to - you've gotta make that shit from scratch, since there isn't an online repository where people can put up encounters they've made. There are various generators out there, and they grow more outdated every day. What's a GM to do? Easy! You have some modular adventures or non-specific encounters you can pull out when you need to. In my case, if my players want to fuck off in a direction I didn't plan, they can do that since I have random encounters made for every single fucking terrain type they can go into. While they're trekking through the wilderness watching the wildlife kill each other, I can come up with the facade of a dungeon or town for them to run into and we end the session when they get there, allowing me time to make up all that shit later. Was it a lot of pre-campaign work? Yes, but in return I feel totally secure when PCs do that PC thing they do.
How to GM
Now that I have all this pre-game information, how the fuck do I start my game, though? They mention that you generally start at Level 1, with a single Level 5 or 10 starter Pokemon and $5000 to spend. If you want to start at a higher level, then you can give out an extra $500-$750 per level. This is the closest thing to any kind of wealth by level in this entire fucking book. Even at higher levels, they recommend not starting with more than 3 Pokemon, unless you have a new player joining an existing game and you don't want them to totally eat shit. After all, part of the fun of Pokemon is
catching the fucking Pokemon, not just having them. But what makes a good starter Pokemon? Part of the appeal is picking a starter you can't get in the video games, but you should still restrict them to Pokemon that need to evolve at least once, because having one dude start with Rattata and another with a Pinsir is bullshit. You should look at the Pokemon's move and ability list to make sure there's nothing hilariously overpowered at low levels, because as you know, Pokemon is not a balanced video game. Ideally, you would do some actual design work so this shit isn't all on the GM to figure out, but we don't live in an ideal world yet. They do recommend letting players pick the Ability, Gender, and Nature of their starters, because it's still a part of character creation. Starters should also get an Inheritance move, just to make them feel even specialer. There's a brief list of sample starter Pokemon, if you don't want to crawl through the Pokedex yourself.
Some games prefer to use milestones instead of experience, so the GM can pace the campaign the way they want and ensure that players don't wind up at different levels. If you want to do that, then you can just set Milestones for the players and they level up when they achieve them - the obvious example are grabbing Gym Badges. Otherwise, the only way to get Trainer Experience is catching, hatching, or evolving Pokemon. That's it. Of course, they say you can have other ways for trainers to get TXP, like winning a contest or something, but the only hard rules are for Gotta Catch 'Em Alling as much as possible.
Trainers always need 10 TXP to level up, regardless of their level. If you're not an asshole, you'll probably give out TXP after certain battles, because otherwise they'll be starved for levels and desperately catching every Caterpie they see. Random battles with weak Pokemon shouldn't give any TXP, while fighting a stronger wild Pokemon or another Trainer should be 1 or 2 TXP. Significant battles, whatever those are, should give 3-5 TXP. If you failed in your attempt to get a Milestone, like losing in the last round of a tournament or something, you should still give 1-2 TXP as a consolation. They say you shouldn't give out individual experience that much, but RAW, there are very few ways for an entire party to get experience at once, so... what the fuck, guys? A bunch of examples aren't as useful as an actually functioning, coherent system.
On the other hand, Pokemon experience is very straightforward, and I already went over it in Chapter 5. Go look there.
I hope your get rich schemes are better than these guys'.
There's a section on how much cash you should be giving out to your players. Again, there are no guidelines as to how much money a PC of any given level should have - it's just kind of "whatever feels right". If you want to do it like the games where Trainers give you cash money for winning, you can set up a wager, agreed to by all combatants. Younger, poorer trainers might bid up to $2000 on a high-stakes game, while older people with real jobs might go all the way up to $5000. I am uncertain as to if this money is supposed to be divided up among the party... I think it is? Contests & Gym Battles could give out $6000-$8000, or maybe you just fucking get cash from your parents like a lameass. You can do raffles or promotions where trainers get points when they buy shit at a shop, and they can spend the points to buy more shit. Oh, god, this is getting too real. Side jobs are also something you can do, except there are absolutely no fucking numbers or rules for that at all, so it's full MTP. If you're really desperate, you can roll 1d20 once a route to see if you find anything on the ground. That's so lame I can't even describe it.
Sometimes you'll want to pay an NPC to do shit for you. There are a few categories, and different levels of rarity within those categories. There are Commonly Available services, Possibly Available services, and Rarely Available services. Specialist Tutors generally teach a single specific move and charge $1000-$3000, depending on how good the Move is (I really wish moves had their own tiers right about now). Generalist Tutors are just NPCs with levels in the Mentor class, and charge anywhere from $800-$2500 for fixing your Pokemon's shitty build. You can buy shit from NPC chefs, fashionistas, and breeders. You can buy common shit like Rattatas for $1000, rarer pokemon like Sandshrew for $5000, "starter" pokemon for $10,000, and super strong or rare pokemon for $15,000. Of course, there are no guidelines for buying services that aren't shit a PC could already do... so if you want some kind of travel service where people travel on Pidgeottos or some shit, make it the fuck up, bitch.
I've gone over Skill DCs before and nobody really seemed to take umbrage with rolling a fistful of d6s, so I won't go over it again. I still fucking hate them for not having tables of set DCs for particular tasks. Fuck you for not believing in them, you fucking fucks.
However, I don't think I mentioned circumstantial difficulties. Sometimes shit happens - opening a locked door when you're not in a hurry isn't the same as doing it with a gun pointed to your head. Enter Penalty Dice. For "each mitigating circumstance that makes a task more difficult", you, the GM, roll 1d6 and subtract your roll from the character's Skill Check. Let's say a PC is trying to see a thing, and it's normally a Perception DC 10 check. If you're doing it at night without darkvision, then you could apply one Penalty Die. If they're doing it during a storm at night, you could apply two Penalty Dice. They mention they do it this way rather than simply subtracting d6s from a player's roll because they wanted to avoid cases where someone would literally be rolling 0d6. Sure, you might only have 2d6 Perception, but you could still theoretically make that DC 10 check, even with 2 Penalty Die. Almost impossible, but TECHNICALLY possible. Sometimes you need that.
Fucking With Pokemon
Not like that.
SHINIES! I shouldn't have to tell you that changing the color of a Pokemon is far less exciting in a tabletop format. These are by far the least interesting Shiny Pokemon you could have. It's so uninteresting that the only mechanical effect are +2d6 during certain Contest rolls. Where you really start cooking with gas is when you start fucking with mechanics - a Fire/Ghost Ninetails with Pressure that can Phase, or a completely albino Breloom that adapted to cave life and can Glow. You can and should fuck with absolutely anything you can. The most extreme example is the Giant Caterpie - it has +6 to all stats, +3 Power, +4 Overland, and +2 to Jumping, and has hardcore moves like Thrash, Body Slam, and Megahorn... but for whatever reason, it can't evolve.
To help you with this are a couple of pages on type shifting. An undead Ponyta might be Ghost instead of Fire, and learns the exact same moves, except all of its Fire moves are now also Ghost-type, and they cause Suppression instead of Burn or whatever. Naturally, you change the name Ember to... Spirit Ember or something. If you want to fuck with a Pokemon's type, you have 3 options: Add a type onto something with only 1 type, change a mono-typed Pokemon into a different mono-type, or replace one of the types of a dual-typed Pokemon. There's not really anything stopping you from changing both types, but that calls into question if it's even the same species anymore. When doing this, you should change its Move Tutor list, Capabilities, Ability, and Level-Up move list to reflect the new creature. The fun part is actually fluffing these changes. There's some examples on how you could do that, my favorite of which is literally "A Wizard did it. No, seriously." Or your Trainer could make a potion or ritual to do it, y'know, whatever.
Every day we stray further from Arceus's light.
There's a short page on how to handle Mega Evolution in your game. It's a good way to increase the power of late-game teams and give your players some new quests to go do. Obviously, they need a Mega Ring and appropriate Mega Stone, but you generally need to have a strong bond with your Pokemon, too. Of course, the game doesn't bring up Loyalty at all in this section so I'm actually a liar and you don't NEED a bond with them at all... but c'mon, man. They recommend starting these quests when most of the PC's teams are at least 5-10 levels past their final evolutionary stages. This is also generally a good time to go searching for Legendaries or other overpowered bullshit, too.
There's a page on how to quickly build NPCs. You do not quickly build NPCs in this game. I can shit out some basic goons in maybe 20 minutes, and that's because I do it shorthand and have been doing it for years. All you really need are the NPC's level, their major Classes and Features (as in the shit you actually plan for them to use, not everything they would actually have for their level), and major Skills and Edges as relevant. If you're thinking they're gonna fight, give 'em combat stats, too. This might sound quick, but unless you're already familiar with all this shit, you're going to be taking a lot of time looking through the book to get what you want. God forbid if you don't already have an idea when you crack the book open. Given that there aren't even example trainers or pokemon anywhere in any of these books, I consider this a pretty big failing of the system. This is something that I hear a lot of new GMs complain about, desperately searching for a quicker way of generating encounters.
At least the game is honest and just tells you that the most time-consuming part of being a GM is making combat encounters. Obviously you need a premise, so come up with one. They recommend working backwards from how much EXP you want to give your players. Let's say you have a generic, everyday encounter with a Significance Multiplier of x1, because this is a boring fight. Multiply the average Pokemon Level of the PCs by 2 (or average Trainer Level x 4, since that's about the same), then multiply again based on how many players you have. That should give you enough Levels to work with and challenge the party. Obviously, this doesn't consider synergy or action economy - things with builds that compliment each other and outnumber the party are going to be harder than their experience level might suggest.
An example might help: Let's say you've got a fight coming up, and you've got 3 PCs, average Pokemon level is 20. Multiply that by 2, then 3 for the number of players, arriving at 120 EXP total, or 40 EXP each. You could pit them against 6 level 20 Pokemon, 10 level 12 Pokemon, a Level 10 Trainer and his 4 level 25 Pokemon, and so on. I've had little problems with these guidelines and they do a good job of challenging "appropriately powered" trainers of whatever level. Of course, I fucked my shit up and my players are far stronger than they should be for their level, but there's no real power guidelines, so... oops?
We continue with GMing 101 tips, like making encounters that either Tax or Threaten the party, using the environment in battles, using different victory conditions, and fucking with player expectations. For some reason, the rules for Boss and Swarm Pokemon are here... but not next to each other, because that would be easy.
So let's say the inevitable happens: You're in a cave and you're swarmed by Zubats. In this instance, you slap the Swarm template on that bitch and go to town, because the game explodes if you seriously try to have 30 individual Zubats fighting 3 people. You should be familiar with this problem. We have charts to handle this problem:
A Swarm is a single entity with a single stat block. It has a number of "HP Bars" equal to its Swarm Multiplier, can't take Injuries, and decreases its Swarm Multiplier as you knock off HP bars. It has a number of Swarm Points equal to its Swarm Multiplier and uses those to take actions. The first Standard Action is always free, then you subtract 5 from its Initiative and it goes again on that new value, and so on. Its actions have a cost according to Frequency - At-Will moves cost 1 Swarm Point, all the way up to Daily moves costing 4 Swarm Points. Big swarms can explicitly spam Daily moves multiple times in an encounter, just to fuck you up. They can use Swift/Free Actions a number of times each round equal to their Swarm Multiplier, unless that action is already at At-Will or EOT frequency. If a Swarm would lose its turn from something like Sleep, it loses 1 Swarm Point instead, always having at least one action no matter how fucked up it is.
If you're trying to hit a Swarm, you get a +Accuracy bonus equal to its Swarm Multiplier. Any single-target damage is resisted one step further, while AOE attack are all one step more super-effective. I've only used these rules a handful of times and... they work. They could be smoother, but I've found them to be functional. Fighting swarms is actually a bit scary, like it should be.
After this, rather than bring up the Boss template, as would be logical, they go on about how to make recurring villains and dealing with unbalanced parties and shit. None of the information is terribly system-specific. It also mentions that trainers should use teamwork in battles, along with some examples. Uh... thanks for the heads up, I guess. They continue on about how to make Gym challenges and leaders interesting, along with the rewards you might want to give out for winning. These include custom moves, Badges that also give Capabilities or Abilities, Pokemon Eggs, or straight up equipment. There's also a sample gym challenge, starring Nicolette, the Mountain's Maiden. She's an Ice leader. In her gym, you and your buddies try and KO all her Pokemon... but naturally, the terrain is against you and she can use all of her Pokemon at once, while you're still stuck using your singular one. They have all sorts of random bonuses so they're better than you at fucking you up and running up mountains. For beating her, you get her Badge, which is a Held Item, cash money, and you can pick an Egg, the Blizzard TM, or an item that makes you immune to all Weather.
I honestly can't disagree.
Seriously, a large percentage of the base of this game play online, ripping off Pokemon tilesets and shit. Sounds horrible to me.
Boss Battles
I've brought these up before, but I'm not sure if it was in this thread. To be frank, 4 level 20 Pokemon can and will wipe the floor with most level 80 Pokemon because the numbers are not set up to where high-level anythings are way, way better than low-level anythings. I've hinted at it, but we have the 5e problem where showing up to a fight with 20 dudes is almost an auto-win. Even if your defenses are so high that you take 1 damage from every single attack, all it takes is a single Poison Powder and you're out in 90 seconds unless you can cure it.
To get around this, we have the kludgy Boss Template.
Despite the name, you don't actually have to use it sparingly - you can do this shit almost every session if you really wanted to, although you shouldn't go full power with it.
It's a decently straightforward template: First you count up how many Pokemon your players generally use each round, then add in any Combat Trainers who will be throwing down, too - you want to know how many actions the players are using. The number you arrive at is how many actions a fully fledged Boss should have. Minibosses and shit can get away with having one or two extra actions. Like with Swarms, you subtract 5 Initiative per extra turn they have until you run out. Let's say you've got a boss with 20 Initiative and six (6!) motherfucking turns. They would go on 20, 15, 10, and 5, but still have two turns leftover... SO YOU ADD 5 TO THE INITIATIVE INSTEAD, resulting in them going on 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5. I admit I forgot about that little part. In case you wondered how EOT moves work with this, they can use them multiple times a round as long as they leave a turn in between each use.
We already have a monster of a dude throwing around 6 fucking turns per round, but he's going to go down like a sack of wet paper. So... we give him HP Bars like he's a swarm! This motherfucker also has SIX HEALTH BARS! Any percentile damage treats each bar a separate, so being Poisoned makes you lose a Tick of a single health bar, rather than a tick off of each. Unlike swarms,
bosses do not lose actions as they get damaged. Also unlike swarms, they can take Injuries... but only when they take Massive Damage or lose half of their total HP Bars. To make things even more video gamey, when a boss loses an HP Bar, they become Staggered. This does not actually mean anything on its own, but generally causes extra effects. Maybe the boss becomes Vulnerable when you shave off its first HP bar... or maybe they get fucking pissed and gain some Combat Stages, or regain use of a Move they already used. If you're feeling SUPER gamey, you can go as far as to unlock special effects when they're on their last HP Bar, like gaining access to a super powerful move they couldn't use normally.
Because we're fucking with everything, Statuses affect bosses differently - things that hurt them only occur once a round, rather than on each of their turns. Action denial only causes them to lose the next turn in the Initiative Count - Paralyzing our example boss at initiative count 21 would cause their action at 20 to be lost on each round until it's cured, but they'd still have all their other actions. Sleep and Frozen are straight up nerfed, merely causing them to lose Evasion and deal less damage instead of losing all their turns. They can only have one move Disabled at a time. They can also only be caught while on their final HP bar.
Bosses are massively harder than anything else the system can throw at you, to an almost arbitrary degree. I'll admit that I have fun using singular badasses with tons of HP and turns and shit, but those battles can feel sloggy and I can tell that my players get a little butthurt when one guy ducks and weaves between the entire party, dishing out damage the whole time. Ideally, you could just have boss fights be naturally higher level enemies that are really hard to take down, so to avoid this whole... template thing. It's actually so bad that if you catch a boss, they say "there’s no shame in ratcheting down their Level to be a more reasonable catch for the players, rather than trying to deal with them having a new Pokémon far above their average party level". People bitched about that in fucking Chrono Trigger and I guarantee they will bitch about it here, too, regardless of whatever explanation you offer up to them. By the way, even when using this template, you should still have a small number of minions to spice things up.
It is a crime that this is not statted out.
But what if you're fighting something stupidly big? I've mentioned before that Pokemon are generally really fucking small. Probably so they can fit in your pocket. It would be shameful to not have rules for fighting shit that's way bigger than usual. Well... you have two options. One is to make multi-part enemies, also like in Chrono Trigger, and each part has one or two extra HP bars and actions, statting them out as normal. Your other option is to make the whole enemy a dungeon. They explicitly say "Think Shadow of the Colossus", because of course they do. In fact, this isn't really a boss fight at all, since it's more about getting to their weak point and hitting it rather than actually fighting it toe-to-toe. I'm terribly unimpressed by both of these.
If that isn't enough, you can bullshit up even more powers. Maybe an enemy is wearing power armor and gets extra ATK CS and Metal Claw, or maybe a dude has Unown grafted into his body and he can burn them away to use their moves or something. Just... just fucking go wild at this point. We're past the point of any kind of reasonable encounter guidelines.
Common GM Pitfalls
We arrive at the end of the book, where our writers give out the last bits of information they think you should know. How have they seen people fuck up in the past, and how do they fix it?
- The important one is that HP is a mandatory stat. Every trainer and every Pokemon needs to put points in HP regardless of their build. You don't need to put in a lot, but if you don't put any in, you are on a one way trip to Pain Station. Clearly this is a math issue that needs to be ironed out so you just have enough fucking HP to not die if you don't invest in it, but you can get beefy if it's your main stat.
- The second is to "Beware Flying Pokemon". This is the common Flying Archer problem - at low levels it's possible that your PCs have no ranged attacks and will get completely owned by something hovering 6 feet above their heads firing off Gusts. Solutions include "telling your players they can do things that aren't Moves", except there aren't actually any rules for throwing something besides looking at your Throwing Range and asking for an AC check. You can grapple the bird, but it's already got to be within grabbing distance, you fucking numbnuts. On the GM side, you can just have a lot of conveniently placed outcroppings and places for people to ninja flip off of. All of these are terrible fucking solutions, only surpassed by having flying things not actually fly, only be able to move through people on the battlemat (an actual thing I have seen supposedly actual people recommend). This issue has been discussed many times on the Den.
- They say to be careful with homebrew. Learn how the fucking game works before you start making new classes and shit. They also do not recommend adding more complex subsystems for the game or making existing systems even more complex. I can think of some places to violently disagree, but their example for this? "Reintroducing differing base capture rates by Pokemon species". I think I might have different ideas about what meaningful complexity is, because that sounds like a fucking worthless idea. They say the system is already complex enough and slowing it down more can fuck your shit up.
- Don't use shinies too often. Otherwise they won't feel shiny enough and players will try and reserve spots on their team for shinies that may or may not be coming their way. Don't devalue regular Pokemon too much.
- Watch what the fuck you're doing when giving out items. If people can buy a Blizzard TM at the store, then you've immediately devolved into rocket tag and shit gets weird.
- Tell players not to dump all their EXP into a single pokemon. That works in the games, but being all-powerful in some situations and useless in others doesn't work out very well in cooperative storytelling games. Some guy with 1 level 25 pokemon and the rest are level 5 is a drain on the party, especially if the others are all at around level 15. It's just not as strong as in the games.
- Four or fewer players. Shit gets really slow when you have 5 or more people. I can attest to this.
- KEEP IT QUICK, STUPID. Looking up rules during combats or having players go "wha? who did what this round" can fuck your game up. If it helps, have the Type Effectiveness and Damage Charts printed out so people can look it up quickly. Not terribly system specific, but still helpful.
Of these issues, some are the GM's fault, but others are actual problems of the system itself - the first two in particular. These should be addressed.
To end our review, we have Optional Rules.
They're short and sweet: There's a Baby Template, which I think was mentioned in the Pokemon chapter; a rule that makes Flying-types resist Ground instead of being immune to it, and Groundsource moves simply don't affect anything that's Flying or Levitating, regardless of its type; "Narrative Frequency", which is weird and is simply making all things that are "Daily" frequency be on a
"Per Session" frequency (jesus christ); and allowing moves that boost Combat Stages (like Swords Dance) only work when you're within 6 meters of a foe. Of all of these, only the second one holds any interest to me... and I still don't do it. I'm not a huge fan of making the game even more disassociated than it already is.
There is is, Pokemon Tabletop United. It's a game I like that has a lot of problems that I've come to realize over the years, and even more since I started this review. It has the framework to do some things well, and other concepts need to die in a fire. It's more of a departure from the video games than its predecessor, but is still held back by its adherence to video game nonsense. It's surprisingly self-aware of its mechanics for an RPG book, and there's little advice in it that is actually bad. There are lots of places where the game could be slimmed down, and there are equally as many places where the game could use more complexity.
Because this post has been long enough, I'll save a total summary of the system's issues and strengths for the next update. Now that the review is actually done, I'm going to try and compile a list of where PTU succeeds and fails, as well as what's worth stealing, modifying, or rejecting. If anyone has anything to add to that list, let me know and I'll try and work it in.
It's also worth mentioning that there are more sourcebooks for specialized purposes. These are the
Book of Divines, for beefing up legendary pokemon,
Do Porygon Dream of Mareep, the cyberpunk book, and
Game of Throhs, for heroic fantasy. Put together, all of those books aren't even half the length of the core rulebook. I probably won't be reviewing those in-depth unless someone would find that interesting. There's equal parts fluff and mechanics in all of them, so there are some mild things worth talking about.
Any way, if you actually read all of this shit, congratulations. I set you free from these shackles... for now.
Next time: PTU, Summarized
