Review: Pokemon Tabletop United

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Frank, those are specifically special Pokemon that are larger than others of their species.
Also I will have nothing from Detective Pikachu anywhere near my games whatsoever, out of spite.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's been long enough and we're nearing the end of the book, so let's get on with it!

Chapter 9: Gear and Items

You will carry 10,001 more items than Red does.

Now we arrive at everyone's second favorite thing to procure in this game: Loot!

The Pokedex makes its appearance here, and, uh... I just realized I never gave my party any kind of analogue. Oops. As a Standard Action, a Trainer can use the 'dex to scan a Pokemon within 10 meters and learn "the average height and weight of the species, height and weight of the individual being targeted, Moves that the Species learns through Level Up, and some brief facts about the species’ typical behavior." Presumably you learn what species it is, too. I think the reason my players never bugged me about it is because they really don't care and can figure out that a bird does, in fact, learn Flying moves. These fuckers cost $12,000, though they recommend giving them away for free at the start of the campaign.
The upside to not giving out 'dexes is that if they want to learn about a specific species, they have to watch it in the wild or go ask someone who does that. It can feel a bit more like going on safari.

I can't remember if I said exactly how Pokeballs work earlier, so here: You make an AC 6 Status Attack, with a range equal to your Throwing Range. After that you make the capture roll, and what Pokeball you're using will modify the capture roll accordingly. A large chunk of the existing Pokeballs are here - 25 total. They generally impose a -20 modifier to your capture roll if you meet the requirements: A Repeat Ball gives you a -20 if you already own a Pokemon of that species, for example. The Master Ball, rather than just auto-catching, gives you a -100, so technically something healthy and overleveled could break out. They cost $300,000 and are sold nowhere. WTF?
Basic Balls go for only $250, Great Balls are $400, and Ultra/Special Balls are $800, though they recommend having some Special Balls available at some shops and not others, to distinguish them. Yes, these magical monster-ensnaring devices are actually pretty cheap. They're supposed to be.

Travel Gear

We've got Bait, for luring in or distracting Wild Pokemon, Collection Jars for getting some Honey or delicious MooMoo milk, or, y'know... anything else you can shove in there. First Aid Kits let you regain some HP, Fishing Lures are like Bait but specifically for fishing and it can be used over and over again. Saddles are very useful - they give a +3 to checks made to mount or stay on the Pokemon when you get hit. The catch is that saddles that fit one type of Pokemon may not fit others, obviously.
There are 3 kinds of Rope: Basic, Utility, and Sturdy. Basic Rope has a tensile strength of 77 lbs, Utility's is 176 lbs, and Sturdy is 500lbs. Anything but the Sturdy Rope is shit, even if it's 4 times as pricey as Basic Rope.

You can also buy Sleeping Bags and Tents! They don't actually fucking do anything. No, really, I'm serious.



Are you fucking with me, man? This a joke? I couldn't abide by this, so I made it where sleeping in a Tent gives you +1 to Body Rolls the next day, and sleeping in a Sleeping Bag gives you +1 to Mind Skills. To complete the trifecta, I introduced the Towel, a cheap Hitchhiker's reference way to stay clean and get +1 to Spirit Rolls, too. This means that if you're a good adventurer and sleep all cozy in your tent, bundled up while using your towel as a pillow, you just get +1 to all your rolls forever, as long as you remember to fucking go to sleep.

There's also Lighters (just catch a Fire Pokemon), Flashlights (no, it doesn't give ANY details on how far the light is cast), and Water Filters. This brings me to an interesting question: Is it safe to drink water that comes from a Pokemon? What if it's like... freshwater? Can I just get Squirtle to spit in my mouth instead? oh god nevermind

Anyway, Repels are a thing. They repel Pokemon from you. If you're an asshole, you can just spray a Repel right onto a Pokemon and it'll try to run away from you as quickly as possible... assuming it isn't at a decent level.


If you don't have at least one encounter like this in your game, I question your methods.

There's a variety of healing items, which are very important unless you stay tethered to the Pokemon Center like a little bitch. Of note: Full Restores only heal 80 HP instead of all of it. DO NOT EVER USE THESE IN COMBAT. Except maybe Revive, if another PC gets knocked out of the fight and they can't send out any more Pokemon, and even then it's questionable. Why? "Applying Restorative Items, or X Items is a Standard Action, which causes the target to forfeit their next Standard Action and Shift Action, unless the user has the “Medic Training” Edge. " Goddamn!
Bandages are also critical: They're applied as an Extended Action and last for 6 hours, doubling your natural healing rate and healing 1 Injury if it stays in place that whole time. Taking any damage causes the Bandage to stop working. Yes, you can slap on multiple Bandages at once, but you can still only heal a max of 3 Injuries per day. If you're doing any real adventuring, you need these.


Jessie without her usual stupid haircut is a total fox, prove me wrong.

Food Items are their own category. These include Candy Bars, Honey, Leftovers, Black Sludge, Chef Snacks, and Berries. These you eat before a battle and get a weird "Digestion Buff", and you can only have one at a time (unless you have the Gluttony Ability, in which case you can have three at a time. Yes, that includes Triple Leftovers). Refreshment Items are a bit different - they're all drinks that heal you, but they can only be used outside of combat, because you're supposed to relax and have a sippy. From weakest to strongest, these are: Enriched Water, Shuckle's Berry Juice, Super Soda Pop, Sparkling Lemonade, and MooMoo Milk. The last thing here is Baby Food, which just gives a 24 hour +20% EXP boost to Pokemon level 15 or lower.

There's some rules for growing your own Apricorns, Berries, and Herbs. Unless you plant them in some good soil, you're not gonna be yielding much of anything... but hey, it only takes 2 days for a plant to Mature and you get to make Yield Rolls every day after that! 1 Apricorn a day can add up if you fuck around enough. Apricorns are for making Pokeballs, Berries have a ton of baggage and I hate them, and Herbs are just a different kind of healing which can make your Pokemon butthurt cause they taste bad.

Then we have a solid two page chart detailing every single fucking Berry the Pokemon franchise has ever had. They're not mechanically bad, some of these outright let you resist a certain Type or restore Frequencies. There's just... so many. 66 of them, to be precise. God.

Crafting Kits

All this stuff you either NEED to create things, or it just makes you WAY BETTER at doing it. There's Chemistry Sets, Cooking Sets, Poffin Mixers, Pokeball Tool Boxes, Portable Growers, and Dowsing Rods. Those should be self-explainatory except for the last one - Dowsing Rods let you go play minesweeper for 10 minutes while looking for colored Shards.

The way crafting generally works in this game is that, if you have the appropriate toolkit and Edges/Features, you just pay some cash money and come out 15-60 minutes later with your item. However, using your adventuring funds can be a bit of a drag, so we have the Scrap mechanic. It's simple - Scrap is money that can only be used on specific crafting. For example, literally dumpster diving for Food Scraps that you can use to make... Candy Bars. Ugh. They have 5 categories, though I added one more: Food, Medicine, Repellent, Pokeball, and Fashion Scrap. I added Tech Scrap, because of course I want to loot the machine after I blow it up. It's a neat way to let you do the crafting you want to do without biting into your real money.


I fucking love all of the art in this chapter.

Equipment

CRY 'HAVOC' AND LET SLIP THE HOUNDOOMS OF WAR!
This is all of the shit that helps you kill and not get killed in return.
Trainers have a reasonable 6 Equipment Slots: Head, Body, Feet, Main Hand, Off-Hand, and Accessory. Personally, I allow an extra Accessory Slot because I throw shameful amounts of loot at my party.

Equipping/swapping out items is a Standard Action, and so is handing an item to someone else... although they still need to spend THEIR action to fucking equip it! Notably, it doesn't mention what kind of an action it is to simply drop an item you're holding. Is it Free? I dunno. Equipping a Pokemon makes them forfeit their next turn. These guys really, really want you to handle all this shit before the combat music starts.

WEAPONS! Because this is Pokemon and not fucking D&D, we don't have any of that "weapon table" shit here. It's nice and fucking simple. Weapons have a Quality and a Category. Quality ranges from Crude to Simple to Fine, and the better the quality your weapon, the more Moves you unlock as your Combat skill increases. Yes, this is the main use of the Combat Skill. Crude gives no moves, Simple gives an Adept Weapon Move, and Fine ALSO gives a Master Weapon Move.

The Category of Weapons determine the range and damage of your Moves made with that Weapon (keep in mind that some Class Features let you use regular Moves as Weapon Moves). Large Melee Weapons are your greatswords and shit - They give a +1 AC penalty and raise the Damage Base of all moves by +2. Small Melee Weapons are one-handed and simply give +1 DB. Foot Weapons are mentioned, and they say you should make them shittier Small Melee Weapons. Next are Short Range Weapons, which are one-handed and have a Range of 4 meters. Long Range Weapons raise the AC and DB by +1 and have a range of 4-12 meters, being unable to attack targets near them. If you want to distinguish weapons further, you can tweak the template from there. A Spear, for example, would probably be a Large Melee Weapon with Reach.

The other half of this equation are the Weapon Moves. Certain Moves can only be used by certain kinds of weapons, distinguishing them further. As an example, Backswing just inflicts a ton of damage onto 2 dudes in Melee range and is only usable by Large Melee Weapons. Bullseye crits on a 16+ and can only be used on Ranged Weapons. That sort of thing. There are even some Status Moves like Take Aim, which just makes your next Weapon Move roll damage twice as if you'd critted... except you can still crit. I have a lot of fun making up new Weapon Moves for increasingly bizarre weapons, like an Urumi that causes you to bleed out when stricken. Adept Weapon Moves all require Adept Combat and are EOT, while Master Weapon Moves require... Expert Combat and are Scene x 2. Up here is where you find shit like "Riposte", which annihilates someone who misses you in melee, and "Slice", which lets you move through a bunch of dudes and deal damage to them just like in the animes.


Behold, the Meteor Masher. It gives you Backswing and Titanic Slam.

Then we get to the equipment list. I am... unimpressed in its brevity. Armor gives you DR and comes in Light and Heavy varities. Light only gives +5 DR to Physical OR Special Moves, while Heavy Armor is straight 5 DR. Heavy Armor price: $12,000. Totally worth it. There's Fancy and Stealth Clothes as well, if you need to look fly or inconspicuous. My favorite Headgear are Sunglasses - they don't do anything to protect against the sun, they just give you a +1 to Charm, Guile, and Intimidate checks. Ballin'. We have a whopping 4 footwear choices, most of which are generally useless: Snow Boots, Flippers, Jungle Boots, or regular fucking Running Shoes. I wonder which one of these I should get first... Hand Equipment you can't kill people with include Fishing Rods, GLUE CANNONS, Hand Nets like all the cool bugcatchers have, Weighted Nets, Capture Stylers straight out of Pokemon Ranger, Shields!, and Wonder Launchers. The Wonder Launcher lets you shoot X-Items into your Pokemon from a distance and not forfeit their next turn. Oh, and other items too, if you're a Researcher. Just shove it all in there, baby. Our Accessories are short: A Focus, which just gives +5 to a Stat, chosen when crafted, but they can also be Head, Hand, or Off-hand items. You can only benefit from one at a time though, fuck you. We've also got Mega Rings, essential for Mega Evolution, and... Snag Machines. Big Snag Machines can turn Pokeballs into Snag Balls permanently, while portable Snag Machines can only do one Pokeball for a single round. Yeah, you can totally fucking go there if you want.
They then mentions that you might want to make your own equipment. I kind of have to since this section is barely longer than the goddamn fucking Berry Chart.

We start winding things down with Pokemon Items - specifically Held Items. Pokemon can only hold a single Held Item, which seems kind of lame to me. Why not 2? Trainers already have the edge in that they can drape themselves with all sorts of shit. All of this stuff is from the games, but not everything from the games made it in. Don't worry - Rare Leeks and Thick Clubs are still in. You can also buy Egg Warmers to double hatching speed, Groomer's Kits, and Reanimation Machines. For reanimating fossils, sicko. Of course, there are also Evolutionary Items. This was never changed "officially", but since the game isn't being worked on officially I don't really give a shit anymore: In RAW PTU, some Pokemon can only evolve with Stones. You know how it is. In the newer, "unofficial" Pokedex, Evolutionary Items merely allow you to evolve into that Pokemon 5 levels earlier than usual, so you can get a Flareon at level 20 instead of waiting until 25. Honestly? Thank fucking god.

There's Vitamins, which increase your base stats or give you Tutor Points or, if you get a PP Up, boost the Frequency of one of your Moves. Rare Candy does the level thing. There are even Stat Suppressants, which further highlights the stupidity of the Base Stat Relation rule.

Of course, there are also TMs and HMs! But OH NO!!! They ignored the advancements the video games made here! TMs DISAPPEAR AFTER ONE USE! Excuse me, what the FUCK??? HMs can be used indefinitely, but only once per day. I cannot tell you how much I hate this. I made things more... interesting. TMs are infinite-use, like they should be, while HMs are one-time uses that can be used on anyone. Yes, you can learn Surf. For the life of me, I cannot understand why they would do this, especially when there's going to be a TON OF POKEMON WALKING AROUND! If you have even 3 players, then they have around 12-18 Pokemon on then at any given time, to say nothing of what's in the box. And only one player is going to benefit from it! AND EVEN THEN, ONLY ONCE! I SPIT ON YOU!


GROWLITHE CAN'T EVEN LEARN ENERGY BALL! NOW YOU'VE GOT ME MAD AT THE FANART YOU STOLE!

Let's wrap this up: This chapter ends on a lame note with Combat Items. Spikes, Toxic Spikes, Smoke Balls, that sort of thing. You can guess what those do. Here is where Cleanse Tags are finally detailed: they all have Power Values and they stop anything within 30 meters of it from Phasing through walls unless they can beat the Power Value with a Focus Check. Passing the check destroys the Tag while failure repels phasers for at least an hour. You can literally smack them onto a weapon or "appendage" and hit Ghosts with your Normal or Fighting-type moves. On top of that, smart Occult kiddies can burn a Tag to get rid of Cursed, Suppressed, and Disabled conditions... OR cause everything within 30 meters to be incapable of going Invisible or Phasing for 5 minutes. Very niche, but it sounds neat. Pester Balls are little balls filled with chemicals that inflict Status Afflictions. You can also use Dream Mist as a melee attack to put someone to sleep? Uh... okay, then. Finally, we have Magic Flutes - these are tied to a specific Status, and when played, anyone within 20 meters is cured of that Status.


This is not what I had in mind when I read "Smoke Ball"...

With that, we've finished the gear chapter. It's fine, but I honestly think it could go farther in some areas. Perhaps they didn't want too much focus to be on the items or something, but all of this stuff is really meant to make Trainers better, since Pokemon are still limited to a single Held Item slot. This whole section was 32 pages - does that seem like too much or too little?

I will share another bit of homebrew I've done: Introducing Off-handed Weapon Moves for dual-wielders and shield-bearers and giving every Weapon Move an additional effect when used as a "sneak attack". Bullseye, for example, crits on a 12+ as a sneak attack. It makes sneaking around and shit much more fun, according to my "rogue" player. I also threw in EVEN BIGGER SHIELDS, because sometimes you want a bunch of goons with tower shields blocking a hallway.

Anyway, up next is the longest chapter in the game, the one that eats up literally a quarter of the book and has its own separate PDF for easier searching. It will detail all of the 4e Powers Capabilities, Abilities, and Moves in the entire game. It's only, uh... 137 pages. I'm kind of stuck on how I should handle this one, guys. Should I do a one-sentence summary of each Capability and just take requests for Abilities and Moves while highlighting some of the PTU-exclusive ones? I hesitate to consider going through all of it...

Next time: Chapter 10: Indices and Reference

[Wiseman]

Frank, those are specifically special Pokemon that are larger than others of their species.
Also I will have nothing from Detective Pikachu anywhere near my games whatsoever, out of spite.

Anime sizes are better and more fun anyways.

Also, what do you have against Detective Pikachu?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Detective Pikachu is a blight against humanity.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Also, what do you have against Detective Pikachu?

It's everything wrong with the hyperrealistic live action cartoon character aesthetic, which has to be some sort of corollary to the uncanny valley hypothesis. It looks like someone stretched realistic textures onto a CGI cartoon, which of course is literally the case. It looks so bad that I honestly wouldn't care if it was otherwise the best movie on the fucking planet because most of the designs I've seen from trailers/previews/screencaps/clips/etc. range from "stuffed animal left in the dryer for too long" to "genuinely terrifying". Like the only thing I can think of that looked worse was the original live action Sonic trailer. As that may suggest, I have not been able to watch Detective Pikachu just because of how godawful the visuals are, and for a Pokemon movie good visuals are key. So it's entirely possible that the writing and acting are good once you get past all of that...but getting past that is an extremely hard sell for me.

[Shrapnel]

Which is all a shame, because you're depriving yourself from a good, funny and heartfelt movie. The visuals are really not that bad - unlike the Sonic movie, the makers of Detective Pikachu really cared about how the Pokemon looked, moved and acted, and worked closely with Nintendo and Game Freak to make sure each Pokemon was true to the games and anime. Further, it is blindingly obvious that the people who made it loved the franchise, unlike every other live-action video game adaptation, which are all soulless, cynical and awful.

If you disagree with me, than I'm sorry, we can't be friends. But if you do agree with me, than maybe we can be.

[Username17]

Personally, I watched Detective Pikachu on a laptop screen, and it mostly looked between acceptable and good. There's a lot of CG, and some of it doesn't look good, but most of it does. I don't know if seeing it in a movie theater would drive me nuts by making flaws more visible or not.

I'm aware of the arguments against Detective Pikachu, and I respect them. But I think it really is the gold standard of what people interacting with Pokémon is "like" and throwing that source material away is making it much harder to tell a cooperative story than embracing it is.

-Username17

[Koumei]

There are 3 kinds of Rope: Basic, Utility, and Sturdy. Basic Rope has a tensile strength of 77 lbs, Utility's is 176 lbs, and Sturdy is 500lbs. Anything but the Sturdy Rope is shit, even if it's 4 times as pricey as Basic Rope.

Not some kind specifically called Escape?

Can I just get Squirtle to spit in my mouth instead? oh god nevermind

Just get a RRRRRRRRRRRRRRAINMAKERRRRRR pokemon and a suitably large funnel.

"Applying Restorative Items, or X Items is a Standard Action, which causes the target to forfeit their next Standard Action and Shift Action, unless the user has the “Medic Training” Edge. " Goddamn!

Presumably this is to emulate the fact that, in the games, it works like that. When Rich Trainer Mortimer uses Full Restore, his Ratatta doesn't get to take an action that turn. And if they result in players just never using items in battle, that basically means you emulate link battles.

1 Apricorn a day can add up if you fuck around enough.

And a Leppa Berry per day keeps PP stalling at bay!

I added Tech Scrap, because of course I want to loot the machine after I blow it up.

That seems like a really obvious one to include, it's baffling that they didn't do it.

These guys really, really want you to handle all this shit before the combat music starts.

Again, that's basically how it works in the video games so I guess they felt that was important. But as you noted later, they've already made concessions there.

My favorite Headgear are Sunglasses - they don't do anything to protect against the sun, they just give you a +1 to Charm, Guile, and Intimidate checks. Ballin'.

But no bonus to Dark type moves? Or are sunglasses completely different to Black Glasses?

Pokemon can only hold a single Held Item, which seems kind of lame to me. Why not 2?

Again, I assume the reason is "because the video games". And while changing it can indeed do weird things with balance, they already shrugged their shoulders about that a bunch of times, and also thinking in terms of the video games, the main things where that's a big issue are very special items that are basically plot items (mainly "a Mega Stone + ______") and... I'm not sure how much I care about the consequences of Mister Cavern specifically introducing extra powerful things for people to use?

Trainers already have the edge in that they can drape themselves with all sorts of shit.

Yeah that's the really weird thing. "We're being faithful to the games even in the weird ways that make no sense. Oh also, you're taking part in the battle alongside your pokemon and personally know pokemon attacks and have stats that are basically the same and are using a bunch of equipment that is normally just for pokemon."

Should I do a one-sentence summary of each Capability and just take requests for Abilities and Moves while highlighting some of the PTU-exclusive ones?

I'd suggest just straight-up listing them without even summarising, and then just talking about PTU-exclusives, things that you consider particularly noteworthy and so on.

[maglag]

The bizarre tininess of Pokémon is very much a video game continuity thing.

In other continuities, big Pokémon are just allowed to be big.

Hyper big Pokémon are in the main games now too!

[Koumei]

If you're allowed to strike Detective Pikachu from the record books, I declare the same thing happen for the entirety of eighth generation or the Switch in general. The last Pokemon game to have been released is USUM and people are looking forward with some interest to what the future may hold.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Look, I'm cool with stealing ideas from Detective Pikachu, it's just that someone else is going to have to tell me what they are because this is the only Detective Pikachu I acknowledge in my world.

But no bonus to Dark type moves? Or are sunglasses completely different to Black Glasses?

No, all that shit like Blackglasses and Charcoal have been combined into a single item: the Type Booster. Gives +5 damage when you use a move of that type. They have their counterparts in Type Braces, which give 15 DR vs a Type. Arceus' Type Plates are both of those combined. Trainers can still wear them.

Yeah that's the really weird thing. "We're being faithful to the games even in the weird ways that make no sense. Oh also, you're taking part in the battle alongside your pokemon and personally know pokemon attacks and have stats that are basically the same and are using a bunch of equipment that is normally just for pokemon."

So... extra slots then? One thing that baffles me is that there's no Pokemon armor either! How can I be a real cataphract if my Donphan isn't in lamellar armor?

Gigantamax

Yeah, this is why I think the game needs more size categories than it currently does, now that there are truly big monsters. It's really not that hard to just say "actually all charizards in my game are Huge instead of Medium because I have a chariboner" because that's one of the easiest things to change about it. Especially since size doesn't actually mean much of anything in this game - just how much space you take up. It's not harder to hit something smaller than you and something larger than you isn't inherently stronger. I'm still on the fence as to how I feel about that.

If you're allowed to strike Detective Pikachu from the record books, I declare the same thing happen for the entirety of eighth generation or the Switch in general.

Koumei, I stopped playing the games when they went 3D.

[maglag]

If you're allowed to strike Detective Pikachu from the record books, I declare the same thing happen for the entirety of eighth generation or the Switch in general. The last Pokemon game to have been released is USUM and people are looking forward with some interest to what the future may hold.

Heh, good luck with that since the rommers are already working on 2D sprites for the new Sword and Shield mons besides implementing the new mechanics.

Also I recall you being a fan of the anime and that one's introducing S&S material too.

Gigantamax

Yeah, this is why I think the game needs more size categories than it currently does, now that there are truly big monsters. It's really not that hard to just say "actually all charizards in my game are Huge instead of Medium because I have a chariboner" because that's one of the easiest things to change about it. Especially since size doesn't actually mean much of anything in this game - just how much space you take up. It's not harder to hit something smaller than you and something larger than you isn't inherently stronger. I'm still on the fence as to how I feel about that.

Well Pokémon Sword and Shield does adds official combat rules for that, plus the giant raid mons would work particularly well for boss-style fights.

[Koumei]

Heh, good luck with that since the rommers are already working on 2D sprites for the new Sword and Shield mons besides implementing the new mechanics.

Not the ones I already have and play, and I see no particular reason to get other ones. Checkmate.

Also I recall you being a fan of the anime and that one's introducing S&S material too.

I like the idea of the anime. I liked it back when I watched it. And that stopped back when the only second generation pokemon was Misty's Togepi.

[maglag]

Heh, good luck with that since the rommers are already working on 2D sprites for the new Sword and Shield mons besides implementing the new mechanics.

Not the ones I already have and play, and I see no particular reason to get other ones. Checkmate.

Maybe for now, but you'll eventually go looking for new Pokémon roms, and by then they'll all have Sword and Shield material.

Plus you said you're looking towards the future of Pokémon, meaning you're still checking Pokémon news, but every Pokémon media channel will be referencing the 8th generation in one way or another.

Also I recall you being a fan of the anime and that one's introducing S&S material too.

I like the idea of the anime. I liked it back when I watched it. And that stopped back when the only second generation pokemon was Misty's Togepi.

Actually, the first second generation Pokémon in the anime was Hoho. In the very first episode.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

But I think it really is the gold standard of what people interacting with Pokémon is "like" and throwing that source material away is making it much harder to tell a cooperative story than embracing it is.

Anyone gonna elaborate on this one? Otherwise I'll start chapter 10 today.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

We near the end. Only two chapters to go. I'll do what Koumei said and list all of the Special Capabilities, then mention any noteworthy Moves and Abilities. There aren't many because most moves are shit like "Burns on 17+" and that's the whole effect.

Chapter 10: Indices and Reference

Ghosts actually have incredible amounts of utility.

Special Capabilities

This is what you wanted - all the non-combat shit your Pokemon can do that doesn't involve the GM puppeteering its asshole. Ones in Italics are non-core, from later Pokedexes.
It's worth mentioning that some of these Capabilities can be picked up via Moves. The Glow capability comes with Flash and Tail Glow, for example, and if you don't normally have it, you lose the Capability when you forget the corresponding Move. That's probably one of my favorite things about Moves.

• Alluring - Like the smell. Think Oddish, not Gardevoir.
• Amorphous
• Aura Reader - Read someone's Aura like that girl from high school.
• Aura Pulse - Throw your thoughts into someone else's head, like that girl from high school.
• Blindsense
• Bloom - Our first exclusive Capability, this one is for Cherrim. This is how it changes forms - in the Sun.
• Blender - You blend in with your environment like a chameleon.
• Breathless - This one is not normally in the game. Yes, they failed to make a distinction between having gills and not needing to breathe at all.
• Chilled - You are physically cold.
• Confined - Hoopa's exclusive Capability. This is mildly interesting - when you open its bottle, it becomes Unbound for THREE FULL DAYS and if its bottle is destroyed, it's Unbound until someone makes and uses a new one. Unbound Hoopa is always Enraged and has a different set of Moves.
• Darkvision - No ranges mentioned, thank god.
• Dead Silent - You are dead, and make no noise unless you want to.
• Delta Evolution - Rayquaza's exclusive Capability that says it can go Mega as long as it knows Dragon Ascent.
• Dragon Fusion - Kyurem can merge with Zekrom or Reshiram as an Extended Action, splitting EXP earned between the two of them. Sorry, no triple dragons here.
• Dream Mist - Munna and the Sleep Legendaries can make Dream Mist every day. Just kinda oozes out of them or something.
• Dream Reader - Doesn't work on targets with Mindlock.
• Egg Warmer
• Firestarter/Fountain/Freezer/Groundshaper/Guster/Materializer/Zapper - Type-shifted Struggle Attacks.
• Forme Change - This Pokemon can change forms and you should keep a separate set of stats for it.
• Fortune - Exclusive to Murkrow and our now THREE Meowths (plus Perrserker), you wander around town for an hour and come back with cash... unless your Loyalty is 1 or 0, in which case you might decide to not come back.
• Gardener - You literally shit Mulch. Three times a day!
• Gather Unown - Level 20 Unown can summon a random Unown of Level 2d8.
• Gilled
• Glow - Notably, it doesn't fucking say how far the range on your glowing is. Come on, guys.
• Heart Gift - Make 1 Heart Scale per week.
• Heater - You are physically warm and cuddly.
• Herb Growth - You make a dank Revival Herb every single fucking day.
• Honey Gather - Guess what this does. Also once per day.
• Illusionist - We ain't talking about D&D Illusions here - they can't be bigger than half a meter in any dimension, cannot make sounds, physical contact disrupts them, and it can't exist farther than 6 meters away from you. A more clever man than I would be able to use these well.
• Inflatable - You can get "125% bigger", but you can't actually change Size Categories. Your weight does not change and you have -1 Evasion, but you also act as Blocking Terrain instead of Rough like usual.
• Invisibility - The wording on this one is weird: "While invisible, you must roll +4 during Accuracy Checks to hit the Pokémon. " Reading it, it looks like rolling over a 4 on your d20 means you have a chance of hitting them? This seems statistically insignificant to me. Also of note: BEING INVISIBLE DOES NOT GIVE YOU A BONUS TO STEALTH ROLLS! Fucking WHAT?
• Juicer - Shuckle's exclusive Capability. If it holds a Berry, 24 hours later that Berry becomes Berry Juice, which is a Refreshment Item. Leave the Berry Juice in Shuckle for 2 weeks and it turns into a Rare Candy. Not terribly useful, but awfully neat!
• Keystone Warp - Spiritomb's exclusive Capability. You can synchronize Odd Keystones to Spiritomb and it can freely teleport between all of them... if they're within 10 meters. Can we have some ranges that don't fit on a battlemat, please?
• Leaf Crafter - The Sewaddle-line's exclusive Capability, you can make a Grass or Bug Booster or Brace once a day. They fall apart at the end of the day because they're fucking leaf clothes. Shame you can't wear both!
• Letter Press - Unown's OTHER exclusive Capability, you can create A PRIME UNOWN. It's 5 Unown stuck together and says stuff like "DONGS". Every Unown boosts its stats and gives it another instance of Hidden Power - so a full Prime Unown will have 5 different types of Hidden Powers, which may be Special or Physical. The Prime Unown counts as a single Pokemon and cannot be separated.
• Line Charge - This was once an Ability that was SO shitty it was downgraded into a humble Capability exclusive to Linoone. Linoones literally can only shift in cardinal directions on the grid, but they're also immune to AoOs this way.
• Linked Evolution (Pokemon) - The Pokemon in the parenthesis can be treated as a fucking Evolution Stone. Exclusive to Shelmet, Karrablast, Mantyke and... Pancham? Holy shit, they do read the Pokedexes sometimes!
• Living Weapon - The most badass Capability in the game, for the Honedge Line. Honedge can be used as a Small Melee Weapon, Doublade as two Small Melee Weapons (that grants you a +2 Evasion bonus you do NOT get from dual-wielding normally), and Aegislash is a Small Melee Weapon and a Light Shield. While being used, Honedge can use the Trainer's movement in place of its own and imparts Weapon Moves as a regular weapon. I have to remember that re-equipping your sword is a Standard Action like any other weapon.
• Magnetic - You can "lightly manipulate magnetic fields". I'm curious as to how "lightly" they're intending, because it gives no indication.
• Marsupial - Kangaskhan's exclusive Capability, their babies are always born with the Baby Template and stay in momma's pouch. Trainers can have the momma gain 20% less EXP from all sources and give it to the Baby instead. At level 25, the Baby is no longer a Baby and exits it's momma's pouch permanently. As long as its mother has more than Loyalty 1, the baby will allow you to catch it easily. It's not terribly good, but it's flavorful.
• Milk Collection - Female Gogoats and Miltanks can piss out one bottle of MooMoo Milk every day. Yes, it is the second best healing item in the game.
• Mindlock - Immune to Telepathy, the move Mind Reader, and you cannot be chilled out with Gentle Vibe. Your dreams are unreadable, your mind inscrutable. Like how I feel after a V:TM OSSR.
• Mountable X - This Pokemon can carry X number of people, no problem. This is more of a guideline.
• Multipassform - Switch Forms as an Extended Action.
• Mushroom Harvest - Roll 1d20 to shit out one of the three Mushrooms. No mention on if you need to identify them.
• Naturewalk (Terrain) - Things with Naturewalk treat all listed terrain as Basic Terrain. So Naturewalk (Swamp) means that nasty, gross swamp water literally does not impede you whatsoever.
• Nectar Dancer - Oricorio's Capability that lets it change colors and Types.
• Origin Forme - Giratina's Capability - it's always in Altered Form outside of the Reverse World, and always in Origin Form when inside it.
• Pack Mon - These Pokemon defer to stronger Pokemon in their packs and instantly obey those 10 levels over them. Those WITHIN 10 levels of each other will fight for the dominance of the pack. Wild Pack Leaders do not give a single fuck about the fact that your Pokemon is in a Pokeball and will still expect to be obeyed, probably attacking you if you don't.
• Pearl Creation - You create a Pink Pearl... but only when you evolve. Clamperl-only.
• Phasing - Slow Terrain doesn't affect you. You can go Intangible and cannot be targeted by anything at all, but you also can't use Standard Actions anymore and lose a Tick of HP every round. Obviously, while Intangible you can move through walls.
• Planter (Plant Type) - You are literally a Portable Grower for that specific kind of plant. Parasects can grow Herbs, Tropius can grow neck fruit Berries, and Torterra can grow whatever the fuck it wants.
• Premonition - Absol-only, baby. Closer and bigger disasters tip you off days in advance, while lesser disasters might only give you a "bad feeling" a few hours beforehand. I'm not sure if this lets your Absol tell what the disaster is going to be.
• Reach - Literally the only thing in the entire fucking game (besides Stomp) that has ANYTHING to do with Size Categories. Small/Medium creatures can make Melee attacks 2 meters away, Large+ creatures can do it 3 meters away.
• Shadow Meld - Gengar-only! Ride the fucking shadows, baby - you actually DO get a Stealth Bonus for this one. You can explicitly ride along with people's shadows, too. Can't use Standard Actions, but this doesn't hurt you at all.
• Shapeshifter - The Ditto & Mew capability, given by Transform, were you to somehow learn it. OH FUCK MEWTWO HAS THIS TOO????? BITCH ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL? You can't increase/decrease your mass by more than 50%, and you can't make working computers or phones, but you can TOTALLY turn into "someone's prosthetic limb, a living lever or pulley system, or a Pokemon comparable in size". Easily one of the most useful capabilities in the game, if you can get your hands on it.
• Shed Evolution - Nincada's capability. When you become a Ninjask, you get a similar Shedinja with the same Nature, Moves, Abilities, and TP expenditures.
• Shrinkable - Fucking bonkers. Make yourself Shrunken as a Standard Action and get +4 Evasion! You can't use Standard Actions and only shrink to 25% of your normal size, but that is quite the bonus.
• Sky Forme - Shaymin's capability. Lets you turn into a... Pony thing? You need "Gracidea", a rare flower nearby in order to do it. Shaymin MUST revert if it is hit by an Ice Move, TOUCHES ICE AT ALL, or if the sun isn't shining. Lots of different transforming capabilities have been added, I've noticed.
• Soulless - Shedinja's default Ability will ALWAYS BE WONDER GUARD and you WILL ALWAYS HAVE 1 HP. Fuck you. As compensation, Shedinja is immune to Injuries and literally cannot die. Do not play a fucking Shedinja in this game because it's the "I automatically win or automatically lose" Pokemon. Not sure how to handle that problem...
• Split Evolution: Once exclusive to Wurmple, it is now on any Pokemon with more than 1 Evolution choice, like Tyrogue. No bullshit here - just pick what you want it to evolve into, assuming you meet its prerequisites.
• Sprouter - Once per week, you can make a plant bloom and "potentially grow up to 1 meter in any direction". This is so weak that I think I could emulate this capability by pissing in my garden.
• Stealth - Stealth does not give you any bonuses to Stealth whatsoever. Oh, yes. Its actual benefit renders you immune to being targeted by Ranged Attacks if you're hidden by Rough Terrain and you haven't fired off your own ranged attack in the past round.
• Sticky Hold - Your Held Item can never, ever leave you. Ever.
• Telekinetic - You lift shit with your mind and use Focus instead of Athletics to do so, DC 10. It has to be within 8 meters and leaves behind Psychic Residue. You can also use Struggle Attacks at range and even disarm and trip people from a distance. Killing them's easier, of course.
• Telepath - You can read the minds of things up to 12 meters away and shove your thoughts into them - possibly without them knowing.
• Therian Forme - WTF is a Therian? Oh, the Forces of Nature and their less ugly forms. Got it. Item for this one is a "Reveal Glass".
• Threaded - You can shit out silk or webs and pull yourself around like Spiderman, if Spiderman was limited to 4 meters... Naturally, you can instead grab things and pull them towards you.
• Tracker - You've got a sniffer. If you have someone's scent on an item, it's only a DC 8 check to pursue them. Picking up a random scent from nothing is a DC 14, and getting a specific scent from nothing is a DC 20. I'm not entirely sure why someone would want to pick up a random scent from nothing, because there are actually a lot of smells going on at any given time and place. Whatever. You make these once per hour.
• Tremorsense - You are Toph. Mercifully, the game says what the range on this is. Unmercifully - it's 5 fucking meters. I don't think that's very useful to a fucking Onix in its natural habitat.
• Underdog - Most Pokemon have this one and it simply means you have 45 total stat points or less. Usually. Some exceptions apply.
• Viral Fusion - Necrozma's capability, you can bond with a "willing or helpless Pokemon, removing them from play until they are released as another Extended Action". You take on your bond's Movement, Jump, and Power capabilities, and you get +1d6 to all your skill ranks, to a max of 6d6. Necrozma also takes your Primary Type and makes it its Secondary Type. Necrozma can also use one of its bond's Moves - predetermined if it eats Solgaleo or Lunala.
• Volatile Bomb - You know what you're doing, take off every zig. Using Self-Destruct or Explosion NEVER causes you to lose Loyalty. Belongs to Geodude, Pineco, Voltorb, Baltoy, Koffing, Turtonator, Blacephalon (what a stupid fucking Pokemon) and anything else that learns an Explosion-type move before level 30.
• Wallclimber - You can move half your Overland over any surface.
• Weathershape - Castform's capability. It has four forms in PTU: Sunny, Raining, Hailing, and Sandstorm. I throw in Poison too, because I'm an asshole who uses Acid Rain.
• Weapon Bond - For our new legendaries, Zacian and Zamazenta. As long as they have their Ancestral Whatever, they can go into their Crowned Forme and have access to Behemoth Blade or Bash.
• Wielder - This Pokemon can WIELD FUCKING WEAPONS. Cubones can only hold Small Melee Weapons, but Medium-size creatures can swing around greatswords and shit. Still uses up your Held Item slot, though. Yes, you do get Weapon Moves if you qualify for them. Belongs to Oshawotts, Timburrs, Cubones, and Farfetch'd.
• Wired - Porygon and Rotom only. They can enter machines and ride the internet to pop out somewhere else, but only Rotoms can actually control what they possess.
• X-Ray Vision - Luxray's personal capability. You can see through walls, up to a foot of thickness, and the other side is sort of vague. Like in real life, lead and shit like that completely blocks X-Ray Vision, but most things don't.
• Zygarde Cells - Jesus, christ. This is the entire thing:
  
  Guys?? Where am I supposed to get these Cells from? Do I put them in a jar or something? How do I made a 100% Zygarde? Hello?

In my quest to not have yet another giant wall of text... I seem to have made yet another giant wall of text. I thought I'd only skip the boring stuff, but I wound up thinking that some of these needed explaining... and then it turned out to be most of them. Oops, sorry.
I'll take a break and let you guys digest this one. I really do like the concept of capabilities a lot, but some of these could use some work. They're all basically noncombat tags with a fancy name and I appreciate that level of division, since the Moves themselves tend to be far, far less interesting. Even the higher-level ones.

But up next are Abilities, and they are legion. No, I will not be going nearly as hard for Abilities because if I did, I would want to kill myself afterwards. There's still some cool ones, though. Or maybe they're just cool to me. We shall see.

Next time: Abilities

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Abilities

For those of you unfamiliar with the games, an Ability is basically a more powerful, permanent Move that usually has some sort of static effect or reaction. The Ability Static is a good example: If something makes physical contact with you, you Paralyze it. Many Abilities work like in the games, except usually weaker, because god forbid we Paralyze two dudes in a single fight. Mechanically, they are similar to Moves - they have the same Frequencies and shit.

Abilities, in a vacuum, are completely unbalanced against each other. Some Abilities are LITERALLY stronger versions of other Abilities. Absorb Force, for example, lets you resist a Physical attack once per Scene. Fur Coat makes you resist ALL PHYSICAL ATTACKS FOREVER. Judging them on their own is a mistake, because they will never, ever actually be in a vacuum - they're attached to the chassis of a Pokemon, or possibly a Trainer. Absorb Force is an "uncommon" ability (my own categorization) and is given to things like Makuhita, Grimer, Drifloon, and other blobby blob 'mon as an Advanced or High Ability. Fur Coat is exclusive to Furfrou, being its only Basic Ability... and Alolan Persian, for some fucking reason. Compared to other Pokemon, neither of those have particularly good Stats or Skill Lists, and their Move Lists are... adequate. In this case, the only thing really INTERESTING about them is their ludicrously OP Ability because all they can do otherwise is hit shit and maybe sniff out a lead. THIS is where the PTU devs decided to show off their creativity. They will not assign new Moves to Pokemon, they will not change their Stats, and they will not change what Abilities they have... but they will give them MORE Abilities and fuck around with the ones imported from the games. Shitmon doesn't have any resistances? Just MAKE UP A NEW ABILITY THAT GIVES IT TO THEM! Doesn't deal enough damage? NEW ABILITY!

I find it odd that this is the only lever that is used to really "balance" Pokemon compared to the video games. You would have a lot more freedom if you used the video game's information as a baseline rather than the end goal. They did that with Abilities, so why not Moves, too? Fuck if I know their answer, I can just swear to not make the same mistakes.

Anyway, there are a grand total of 5 Ability Keywords.
They do not need 5 Ability Keywords.

The keywords are:

• Connection - This is written out as "Connection (Ember)" or whatever Move the Ability is connected to. These Abilities tend to modify a single Move, like Ember, so when you pick up the Ability you automatically learn the Move and can never forget it. You can spend a Pokeedge to make this Move not count towards your Move Limit, so you can have 7 fucking Moves at once. I cannot overstate how much I hate the video games for the 4 Move Limit.
• Defensive -
  Yes, this is literally a screencap of the most recent Pokedex. I know they do this because this Keyword doesn't do anything on its OWN, but it still looks ridiculous.
• Innate - These cannot be disabled, copied, or Swapped. Do not pass GO, do not collect Wonder Guard.
• Last Chance - For some reason, rather than have a single Last Chance (Type) Ability, they have a dozen Abilities like Blaze, Overgrow, and Torrent that all have this tag. It just means you deal +5 damage with that Type and +10 when under 33% HP. Why a third? Is there any reason to use anything in this game except for Ticks of HP? Just say 3 Ticks of HP, it's easier to do in your head.
• Pickup - The Ability Pickup lets you roll 1d20 every day to try and find some random shit. I feel the need to inform you that this game doesn't fucking have random tables in it. So when you see "Any Random Vitamin", you have two options: Pull it out of your ass or go to the publicly available random tables I made for this game. Thanks, guys. It's the little things.
  
  Yes, you have a 5% chance to find a TM every single day. Might not be a good one or one you can even use, but it's there. This is being removed in Pokemon Journeys.

Anyway, onto the Abilities. I'll be pointing out anything interesting. I will probably be the only person who finds any of this interesting.

Abilities A-E

Great, I'm already talking about the very first fucking Ability.

• Abominable is boring, but one of the very few Abilities that straight-up boosts your Stats. You are immune to all Recoil damage, and get a hefty +5 Base HP, probably making it your highest stat. This is exclusive to the Chesnaught, Crabominable, and Abomasnow lines. Rillaboom's got it too, because this Boom's got style, this Boom has grace. It's also Innate, so you don't have to recalculate HP during a fight.
• Adaptability, in the games, literally gives you STAB twice. Rather than sensibly say "the user gains STAB again" or something, guess what you get? A fucking +1d10 damage bonus to your STAB moves. Excuse me? You have this nice, neat little Damage Base table and you start throwing in +ARBITRARY bonuses on top of that too? Fucking WHY?
• Anchored is an actually interesting ability that is exclusive to Dhelmise, the Ghost Anchor Pokemon. Dhelmise also has an Anchor token that cannot be more than 3 meters away from it, and vice versa. You can move it around as a Swift Action, and when you do so, you can immediately use a Move originating from your Anchor, but it becomes a Melee attack and deals +2d6 damage, and even becomes Physical. Given that your highest stat will always be Attack and you learn a TON of Special Moves, this Ability radically changes your Pokemon and makes it actually sort of usable.
• I'm gonna skip ahead to Dhelmise's OTHER exclusive Ability, Steelworker. Yes, you don't actually get to pick an Ability until level 40. This one lets you pretend to be a pure-Steel type when you get hit, and you get STAB on Steel-type moves that come from your Anchor Token. Combine this with Anchored and you have a Pokemon that doesn't play like any other in the game and has STAB on 3 Types.
• Anger Point is for your RIPSHIT PISSED Pokemon. Get critted and you IMMEDIATELY fly into a rage and your ATK gets FUCKING MAXED OUT. This is At-Will.
• Battery causes an Adjacent ally's next Special Atack to deal +2d6+4 damage, or +3d6+6 damage if it's Electric-type. I bring this up to point out what the fuck is up with these numbers? I seriously do not get it.
• Blaze simply says "The user gains Last Chance with Fire". Fuck you.
• Blessed Touch is literally one of the only non-shitty healing options in the entire game, and it's still MELEE RANGE and you only heal ONE QUARTER of your max HP. Yes, this is the non-shitty option.
• Blur is.... exactly like the Trainer Feature of the same name. Hey, what are you trying to pull here?
• BONER LORD is the High Ability of Cubone and Marowak. Regular Marowaks - Alolan ones get Dancer instead. This Ability modifies your Bone moves - Bone Club, Bonemerang, and Bone Rush, and makes them much stronger.
• Bone Wielder is available to all Cubone and Cubone derivatives, and let you hit Flying-types with your Bone moves... and Normal-types with your Shadow Boner!
• Brimstone is Houndoom and Salandit's exclusive Ability - your Burns also Poison and your Poisons also Burn.
• Cave Crusher is Druddigon's exclusive Ability. You remember Druddigon, right? This one just gives you Resistance against Ground and Rock-types. Boring, but not bad for a pure Dragon that can't fly.
• My Chemical Romance is Salazzle's High Ability, and it makes all Males want to fuck you when you hit them with Poison Gas, Smog, Sweet Scent, TOXIC, or Venom Drench. Sexy. Gamefreak knows exactly what they are doing.
• Cherry Power is another example of how much this game hates healing - You can gain 15 Temporary HP and cure yourself of all Persistent Statuses. Once per day.
• Clay Cannons are Claydol's exclusive Ability and they just let you use Ranged moves from any square within 2 meters of itself. I question the utility of this.
• Cluster Mind is a personal favorite, and it belongs to things with multiple brains - Exeggutor, Barbaricle, Metagross - those sorts of things. Their Move Limit is increased by +2. Oh, yes.
• Color Theory is good old Smeargle's Basic Ability. You roll 1d12 when the Smeargle is born to determine the color of its tail secretions. The colors can be singular, like Red, or a mix, like Red-Violet or Red-Orange. You get a +6 to the Base Stat tied to the color, or +3 to 2 if you're a mix. This is necessary due to Smeargle's shitty, SHITTY stat line. Even then, it doesn't help that much.
• C-c-combo Striker gives you potentially infinite attacks and is exclusive to the Mienfoo line. All you need to do is roll a natural 1, 10, or 11 when trying to damage someone and you can Struggle Attack for free. Yes, the Struggle Attacks can proc Combo Striker.
• Corrosion famously lets you Poison Steel-types. BUT, it's been buffed - Now ALL OF YOUR POISON ATTACKS ARE RESISTED ONE STEP LESS and Steel-types only doubly-resist Poison instead of being outright immune. I fucking love buffs!
• Crush Trap is the classic Anaconda Death Squeeze... except it's once per Scene. And all it does is let your automatically hit with a Struggle Attack that cannot proc anything or be a Critical Hit. Uuuuuhhhhhh.......... okay. May I ask why?
• Dancer gets you free actions! Twice per Scene when someone uses a Dance move near you, you can immediately use it, too. No, you are not your own ally in this game. I asked.
• Dark Art. "The user gains Last Chance with Dark". Fuck you again.
• Dauntless Shield is the Shield Legendary's exclusive Ability. It sets your Default DEF CS to 1. This is a Legendary's exclusive fucking ability and it translates to a measly +5 DEF or some shit.
• Decoy is weird, because it makes you use the move Follow Me as if it were on your move list... but this doesn't actually have a Connection with it. It just makes everyone around you want to kill you, but without actually giving you the move. I question this design methodology.
• Defeatist is one of those Abilities that is just bad in the games. It has no upsides whatsoever and is purely a power limiter on Archen. Here, it's not. When OVER 50% HP, all your attacks deal +2d6 damage (WHY!?!?!?) and when UNDER 50% HP, you deal -5 damage, but have +10 Initiative. Thematically appropriate and not completely useless! How nice.
• Delayed Reaction is the 'tard Ability for Slowpokes and the like. It sucks. You get to halve damage now and take the other half at the end of your next turn... but only once per Scene. It might save you from being KO'd, but fuck me that is lame.
• Desert Weather is another one of those completely busted Abilities. You're immune to Sandstorms, resist Fire damage in Sunny Weather, and gain a Tick of HP every turn in Rain. Only 3 Pokemon get this, but still, goddamn!
• Disguise, the exclusive Ability of the ever-popular Mimikyu. This lets you completely avoid any Move you want and gain +1 CS to any stat you want. Once per day.
• Dodge is exactly the same, minus the +1 CS. These people do not like things that let you completely negate attacks, at any level of play. I understand that it isn't terribly interesting, mechanically, but it's effective and fast to resolve. The player says "Fuck you, that didn't hit me", and I can't argue with them and we move on. It is the most perfect defense there is.
• Drizzle/Drought are our first Weather-creating Abilities. Back in the day, you'd activate Drizzle and it would start to Rain for 5 rounds. Now you activate Drizzle 3 times a Scene, and it Rains for 1 Round each time. This strikes me as overly gamey and limiting.
• Eggscellence is Exeggutor's exclusive Ability. You get STAB from Barrage and Egg Bomb, and the fuckers can become SUPER EFFECTIVE on a 16+. Eggscellent, indeed. You may have noticed by now that the non-video game ones are usually some kind of reference or dumb pun. I can't say my own naming conventions are much better.

I'll take a break here and resume F-K next time. Possibly later today!

[jt]

There's sort of an awkward mix of general-purpose features (gills) and species-specific minutia (Shuckle is a juice machine) in here. That's fine and good from a game-mechanical standpoint, but messy from a book layout and typography standpoint. It'd make sense to move all the exclusives to the pokedex instead. But it's 2019 and this book is never going to be physically printed anyway; you can inline every single copy of every single feature. Especially if it's on a wiki, you can just use MediaWiki templates.

Naturewalk - I think this one is a problem. It fills a useful function - it's good that pokemon can navigate their native terrain and that the combination of that plus mountable is useful. But if you want to do wilderness problem solving, it'd help to break this down into its constituent parts so you know exactly why this pokemon is able to handle this kind of terrain so well.

Shedinja - In the games, Wonder Guard doesn't protect against entry hazards, hail, sandstorm, burn... basically anything that isn't a damaging attack move. I imagine they're constantly getting pwned by a stiff breeze, and useless outside of a regulation Pokemon Arena.

Threaded - I want this with vines on a bunch of things.

Wielder - Wait does this mean that I can have a Marowak holding an Aegislash?

A ton of these abilities have (Wired, Threaded; I wasn't making a list) have a short punchy name at the expense of having a name that actually tells you what it does. These aren't words that need to fit on a Gameboy screen, they can have real names like Move Via Wires.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well... I was gonna go work on my setting, but Worldanvil's getting DDOS'd right now and I don't want to do actual office work. So the journey continues!

Abilities F-K

• Fabulous Trim is one of Furfrou's Advanced Abilities. It is literally 9 Abilities in one.
  
  Oddly enough, you can already learn Intimidate, making this Ability a strict upgrade.
• Fade Away lets you do your best Naruto impression - you turn Invisible and move out of the way of a Physical attack before it hits you. You don't even need to actually get hit to use this - you can just say "fuck it I'm out" on your turn. This like Dodge, but slightly more situational and it lets you move, too. Oh, and you can use it more than once a fucking day. Then again, it's restricted mostly to Legendary Pokemon... and Misdreavus/Mismagius.
• Filter gives you +5 DR against Super Effective damage. This actually translates to shaving off either 7 or 10 damage, depending on how Super Effective it is. Seems a bit roundabout to me, and it doesn't actually protect you against that much damage.
• Flame Tongue is the exclusive Ability of Heatmor, the FLAMING ANTEATER, which I have a soft spot for. When you Lick some fucker, you immediately inflict an Injury and a Burn. Sadly, it does not actually make Lick Fire-type.
• Flash Fire is one of many similar Abilities: You become completely immune to Fire Moves and when they hit you, you gain +1 CS in ATK or SPATK, your choice. I like these despite how simple they are, as they actually give you a small amount of tactical options - you can stand in AOE Fire Moves and get buffed up, you can intercept Moves that would otherwise annihilate your teammates, or you can just tell your whole side to hit you with Fire Moves for a round and get your stats through the roof. Typically these go to Pokemon that already resist the type - lots of Fire Pokemon get this one, for example, and they can sit around in flames all day, which they couldn't before.
• Flower Power lets ANY of your Grass Moves become Physical or Special. I bring this up because this is extremely rare in this system, and honestly I don't think it should be. Pokemon Journeys throws this shit around everywhere, under the "Versatile" keyword, and it's one change I can wholeheartedly support, especially on otherwise shitty moves you'd never use, like Mud-Slap or something.
• Fluffy is the exclusive Basic Ability for the Stufful and Wooloo lines. You resist EVERY SINGLE MELEE ATTACK that hits you, and since you're Normal-type, that is extremely welcome. However, there is a downside - you're weak to Fire moves. This is the kind of Ability I like - powerful and defining, but has a logical weakness.
• FLYING FLY TRAP shows up because I like the name. Obviously, it's for Carnivine, the flying fly trap Pokemon. You get a straight IMMUNITY to Ground and Bug type moves. Fuck those bugs. Fuck them hard. Shame you still don't get anything that actually hurts them more, but it's a nice start. Also, it can't actually fly - but it does Levitate! Fucking terrifying.
• Focus: "The user gains Last Chance with Fighting". FUCK YOU!
• Forecast is Castform's Ability. Remember how it has the Weathershape Capability, which determines its form in different weathers? Well, I guess it doesn't really do anything, because you need this Ability to actually change your fucking Type in different weathers. That's pretty fucking redundant, man.
• Forest Lord is sick. Any Ability that is "X Lord" tends to be. This is Trevenant's exclusive Ability and lets you originate Grass or Ghost Moves from "fully grown trees" within 10 meters, a relatively huge range for this game, and you get +2 Accuracy on the Move when you do it, because sneak attack. Unfortunately, it can't actually do this all the time and is stuck at Scene x 2. Please just let us fucking do fun stuff, I promise it won't break the game.
• Fox Fire is for the two fire fox pokemon lines. Go figure. It's actually neat - once per Scene you create 3 Fire Wisps around you and whenever you get targeted by someone within 6 meters of you, you can use Ember on them for free after they hit you and expend one of your Wisps. It's all quite graceful.
• Freezing Point: "The user gains Last Chance with Ice." I'll stop posting these when I STOP BEING FUCKING MAD ABOUT IT.
• Gale Wings has been nerfed into the fucking ground. In the games, it basically turns all Flying Moves into Quick Attack and makes them faster. In PTU... you can use Quick Attack as a Flying-type Move. I feel shot in the dick.
• Giver is Delibird's exclusive Ability. Yes, Delibird can still only learn Present and Drill Peck. When you use Present, you roll 1d6 and your DB is equal to twice what you rolled, unless you rolled a 1, in which case you heal your target 20 HP. Giver allows you to fix the roll and make it a 1 or a 5... twice per Scene. Enjoy still having a shitty move. As a consolation, Giver also lets Delibird stuff its Move List with as many TMs and Tutor Moves as it wants, unlike literally every single other Pokemon in the entire game. It still sucks. A lot.
• Gore is the exclusive High Ability of both bull Pokemon. It SUPER BUFFS the move Horn Attack and lets you push people 2 meters when you use it. Because of the raw power of this unfathomable effect, Gore is Scene x 2.
• Gorilla Warfare Tactics is the exclusive Basic Ability of our new icy Darmanitan friend, that weird fucking snowman dude. It's a bit interesting: You gain +10 damage to all your Moves until the end of the Scene, but after activating this you can't use any Moves that you haven't already used before triggering the Ability. Why is this an exclusive Ability?? Sounds good on a lot of monkey 'mon.
• Gulp Missile is the exclusive Basic Ability of Cramorant. Go google it right now. Seriously, look at this stupid fucking bird. This is the dumbest looking birdmon I have ever seen in my life. This Ability is fantastic. When you use Stockpile, Surf, or Dive, you gulp up a fish and put it in your mouth. The next time you get damaged, you make an AC 4 attack against the guy who hit you and if you land, they lose 2 Ticks of HP. If your attack was Even, they're fucking Paralyzed. If it's Odd, they just lose 1 DEF CS. I assume it's this weird because it's how it works in the games?
• Handyman fixes the thing I was complaining about and lets you have two Held Items at once. It's the High Ability of Delibird and... Hoopa Confined? Okay...
• Huge Power/Pure Power/Sorcery work slightly differently than in the games. Here, you get +5 Base ATK/SPATK and +1 per 10 levels the user has. It mostly a nerf, except at very high levels.
• Hustle has been buffed and imposes a -2 Accuracy Penalty and +10 Damage bonus to ALL MOVES YOU USE. Now they don't need separate abilities for buffing Physical and Special moves! There used to be...
• Ice Shield lets you throw up 3 meters of continuous Ice Walls that are 2 meters tall, 1 meter wide, and 2 cm thick. They have 10 HP, 5 DR, and are Ice-type. This is once per Scene and requires a Standard Action to use... I would throw this Ability in the fucking trash if it wasn't an Interrupt, and even then it's barely worth using to save your own life. Am I being overly harsh or is this actually fucking pathetic?
• Illuminate imposes -2 Accuracy on everyone who tries to hit you. Unless they have Blindsense. They probably will not, but I appreciate the note anyway.
• Illusion is the Ability version of the Illusionist capability: You automatically mark up to 6 targets, and make yourself look like one of them as a Free Action. Which targets? "An object, Pokemon, or Trainer, that takes up the same space on the battlefield as the user." You can "vaguely mimic sounds" made by a target, but cannot actually make real speech. The Illusion is destroyed when you get hit. Despite being the Illusion Pokemon, Zoroark is actually really, REALLY shitty at disguising itself. I had to break the rules of the game just to have one of these things disguise itself. Seriously, unless I'm reading this wrong, it is so hilariously limited as to be almost unusable.
• Intimidate is a very common Ability in the games, which is why I bring it up here. It works up to 5 meters away, and is At-Will! The downside? You can't target the same target more than once per Scene with it. This is actually a buff. It used to be once per Scene! Even if you spent every Swift Action every round, you'll inflict like 5 dudes with -1 ATK CS, which is next to nothing. To think that this ability once dominated the competitive scene...
• Iron Fist gives you +2 DB to all Punch moves. However, this game is dumb and Punch isn't actually a Keyword, so it lists out every single fucking move it applies to.
  
  If only we had some kind of... tag system to make this easier...
• Juicy Energy is the HIGH ABILITY of our Lord Shuckle. Remember how it can make Berry Juice? When Shuckle drinks it, it doesn't get 30 HP back - it gets its LEVEL in HP back. Given that this is a High Ability, that's 40 HP at the minimum. Gimmick 'mon, go!
• Kampfgeist is the exclusive Ability of our boy Pinsir! Once per Scene you can resist Bug, Dark, or Rock-type damage. That's a bit lame, but this also gives you STAB on Fighting Moves, to let you compete with that big dumb bitch Heracross. You'll show them all...

I really wish a lot of these were stronger than they actually are. Maybe I'm just a filthy powergamer or something.

Next time: Ability List L-P

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

There's sort of an awkward mix of general-purpose features (gills) and species-specific minutia (Shuckle is a juice machine) in here. That's fine and good from a game-mechanical standpoint, but messy from a book layout and typography standpoint. It'd make sense to move all the exclusives to the pokedex instead. But it's 2019 and this book is never going to be physically printed anyway; you can inline every single copy of every single feature. Especially if it's on a wiki, you can just use MediaWiki templates.

Clearly having some sort of giant online repository for ALL THE CAPABILITIES AND ABILITIES AND MOVES AND POKEMON is the way to go for usability, but I question having some stuff in one book and others in another book. 99% of the time I use the book to look for an Capability or something, I CTRL+F that bitch, so having it all in one document is conducive to that. In fact, I did that and slapped it onto the Pokedex so I don't have to tab over to another book. It's 1108 pages long.

But if you want to do wilderness problem solving, it'd help to break this down into its constituent parts so you know exactly why this pokemon is able to handle this kind of terrain so well.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean. I think you're saying that Naturewalk should be granulated even further, but if you are, I have to ask why? Is it worthwhile having Naturewalk (Salt Water) and Naturewalk (Fresh Water), Naturewalk (Wetland), AND Naturewalk (Ocean)? And what exactly is "wilderness problem solving" anyway? In my experience "problem solving" in the wilderness usually boils down to going from Point A to Point B and/or beating the shit out of things outside.

Shedinja - In the games, Wonder Guard doesn't protect against entry hazards, hail, sandstorm, burn... basically anything that isn't a damaging attack move. I imagine they're constantly getting pwned by a stiff breeze, and useless outside of a regulation Pokemon Arena.

Actually, Shedinja gets multiple Abilities, remember? Its best trolling options are Magic Guard, which makes it immune to damage from Hazards, Weather, Status Afflictions, Vortexes, Recoil, and any other indirect sources, and Wonder Skin, which gives you +6 Evasion vs ALL Status moves. Either of those will make it quite hard to get pwned. Both is just lulzy. One thing you're overlooking is that Shedinja literally has no use for DEF or SPDEF whatsoever - it gets hit and it's out. That means you can MINMAX THE FUCK OUT OF IT. And by "minmax" I mean "put literally every single point in ATK and SPEED and get the Edge that lets you add half your ATK to Special Moves". If they can't hit you, you blow them up. If they can, you get blown up. It's a rather binary Pokemon.

Wielder - Wait does this mean that I can have a Marowak holding an Aegislash?

I... how have I not thought of this? Yes, RAW, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. Theoretically you could have a team composed of Samurott, Conkeldurr, both Marowaks, and Farfetch'd, then just have them all use your Aegislash, but you wouldn't be able to actually command both at once, so it's not a terribly competitive option. But fuck me, that's awesome.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I'M ON A FUCKING ROLL, BABY! LET IT RIDE!

Abilities L-P

• Lancer must be pronounced "Ransa" or I won't let you get the benefit from it. This used to be Escavalier's exclusive Ability... until Sirfetch'd got it too. If you move at least 3 meters, you get +3 to your Crit Range. If you don't move at all, you get +5 DR. Both of these last 'till the beginning of your next turn. I like this one more than I probably should.
• Leek Master is Farfetch'd's exclusive High Ability. The NORMAL Farfetch'd - the Galar versions do not get this at all. When holding your Rare Leek, you can use Acrobatics as if you weren't holding an item. Except you are, and it gives you +2 to your Crit Range all day, every day. You also straight-up cannot be disarmed or have your Leek removed from you in ANY WAY. This means you can spam a Move that does 4d10+10+ATK damage. Every turn, if you use a PP Up on Acrobatics! No complaints here, I'm unironically glad for the Buffetch'd.
• Levitate makes you immune to Ground moves. Duh. But it also gives you Levitate 4! Thanks for the noncombat utility, guys.
• Magic Bounce is quite magical - you reflect a Status move at the asshole who used it. It even lets you change the "placement and affiliation" of Hazards around you.
• Memory Wipe is for Pokemon that mindfuck you - Malamar and Beheeyem get it earlier than Mewtwo, but of course Mewtwo overshadows them. You can use it as a Swift Action and Disable somebody, or you can use it as a Standard Action that Flinches and Paralyzes them. OR you can use it as an Extended Action and erase up to 10 minutes from your target's memory, as long as it's happened within the last half an hour. This is seriously one of the coolest Abilities and I wish more were like it.
• Migraine gets mentioned for being Psyduck's signature High Ability... so you can't evolve it into a Golduck. What do you get in return? When you hit with the move Confusion when under half HP, it automatically CRITS and Confuses the target. If that sounds good, well... you don't have STAB on Psychic moves and Confusion is DB 5. Critting with it means you're rolling 2d8+16 damage instead of 1d8+8. Ummm... I waited until level 40 for this?
• Mimitree is, if you couldn't guess, Sudowoodo's exclusive Ability. Whenever you use Mimic, you put the Move you target in your Move List and it replaces Mimic for the rest of the fight. With Mimitree, whenever you use that Move you Mimicked, you can get Mimic back and continue the shenanigans. Given that Moves that let you copy others are WAY BETTER IN THIS THAN IN THE GAMES, this isn't as bad as it might look. Because you can mimic anyone on the field, which means you have a lot more options than ever before.
• Mini Noses is Probopass's exclusive Ability, and it's fucking weird. Once per day you can put 3 Mini-Noses adjacent to you on the battlefield and they have your stats and a bit of HP, and can even move on their own, although not more than 5 meters away from you. You can originate ranged moves from your Mini Noses. Oddly tactical.
• Mirror Armor is the exclusive High Ability of the fan-favorite Corviknight. It's actually intense - whenever someone tries to lower your CS, you scream FUCK YOU and instead THEIR CS gets lowered instead of yours. This is an At-Will Free Action Reaction, making it superior to Abilities that just make you immune to CS loss. IT'S NOT EVEN A DEFENSIVE ABILITY!
• Missile Launch is the High Ability of Dragapult, that weird... air carrier... thing. You put 2 "Dreepy Tokens" within 6 meters of you and can move them as a Swift Action. When they hit an enemy, it's an AC2 DB5 Physical Dragon attack. If your ATK is high enough, this is actually not terrible. It's only twice a Scene, though.
• Mold Breaker gets brought up because it justifies the existence of the Defensive keyword. By ignoring it. This includes Abilities such as Levitate, Insomnia, and Hyper Cutter. You can really shit in somebody's cereal with this one.
• Moody works like in the games - at the end of your turns, you roll 1d6 to determine which stat gets +2 CS and another 1d6 to determine which stat gets -2 CS. Accuracy is the 6th stat, BTW.
• Mud Shield is Mudsdale's High Ability and lets you get 2 Ticks of Temp HP once a Scene. Whatever. The part I care about is where you get 5 DR for standing on "any muddy or dirty terrain that is either Slow or Rough Terrain". I enjoy Abilities that interact with the actual environment, sue me.
• Mummy, of course, belongs to the mummy Pokemon, and it's even stronger now. Whenever some asshole hits you in Melee, you randomly disable one of their Abilities for the rest of the fight. This is an At-Will Free Action and you can shut down all of their Abilities by getting hit like, 3 times.
• Neuroforce inflicts an ACTUALLY SUBSTANTIAL +10 damage with all Super Effective attacks. This translates to 15 extra damage, minimum - 20 if you hit a real idiot. It's also Static, making this INCREDIBLY powerful.... oh, it only belongs to Ultra Necrozma after it's eaten Solgaleo or Lunala. Okay, then.
• Nimble Strikes is the Ability that makes Raticates fucking terrifying. Seriously, Rodents of Unusual Size are not the laughable low-level enemy like in D&D - these rats consistently beat the shit out of my party more than any other Pokemon except Beedrill. You get half your SPEED stat to all physical Normal moves, AKA the shit you get STAB on and is your highest or second highest stat. They will rue the day they laughed at Raticate and Furret...
• No Guard is slightly less stupid than in the games. You get +3 Accuracy to all of your attacks, forever. So does everyone who attacks you!
• Pack Hunt is one of the Abilities you can teach your Pokemon as part of the Hunter class. When an enemy adjacent to a Pack Hunter gets hit by an ally, the Pack Hunter immediately makes an AC 5 attack, and if it hits the target, they lose a Tick of HP. Things immediately go off the rails if more than 1 combatant has this Ability. Were you to theoretically surround someone with Pack Hunters and land all your attacks, that's an automatic 7 TICKS OF HP you're making them eat, which can then be repeated the next turn. And the next. Forever. But only a GM would be able to do something like that...
• Parental Bond is Mega Kangaskhan's Ability. The Baby gets out of the pouch and gets 10 DR and can also be commanded. If the Baby gets fainted, momma Kangaskhan gets 5 DR and +5 damage for the rest of the Scene. Both the Baby and the Mother get to act when the Mother takes her turn. Sounds about right and is probably totally busted.
• Parry is like Dodge, in that you just say "no". Unfortunately, it only works on Melee attacks. Fortunately, it's once a Scene instead of once a Day!
• Poltergeist is Rotom's exclusive Ability. Depending on what Forme (why is it spelled with an e?) you are, you get a different Ability and Move. The Move is totally free and doesn't take up Move Limit space, and all the Abilities are shit that give you immunities to attacks, like Flash Fire from earlier. Fucking Rotom.
• Polycephaly means "multiheaded". Naturally, only multiheaded Pokemon get this, and they let you make Struggle Attacks as a Swift Action, although they are resisted. 90% of the time is literally free damage and you don't give a fuck about what you actually roll, only that you get to hit someone with your giant ATK stat again.
• Protean isn't nerfed at all. Shit's At-Will, in fact. Whenever you use a Move, you can change your Type to match the Type of the Move. Yes, you get to apply STAB if you want. Yes, you can choose to not change your Type if you landed on one that wins the encounter. Yes, I still fucking hate Greninja. On the bright side, they gave this to Kecleon, but on the downside, the new fucking furbait Fire starter has it, too. Why!? It's a fucking anthro rabbit! It's not even a ninja or a chameleon! WHY CAN IT CHANGE ITS TYPE? SOMEONE WHO'S PLAYED SWORD AND SHIELD EXPLAIN THIS SHIT TO ME!

Next time: Abilities Q-U

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Naturally, the day after a manic burst of activity you look back and what you wrote and ask "WTF is wrong with me?" Then you do the same thing again because you never learn.

Abilities Q-U

• Queenly Majesty, AKA the Femdom Ability, exclusive to Tsareena. If anyone ever tells you that degenerate sex perverts don't work at Gamefreak, show them her. And Gardevoir. And any 100% Female pokemon. This one is interesting because it only activates when someone next to you uses a Priority or Interrupt move, and you immediately Stomp the shit out of them. Probably while going "OHOHOHO!" Your Interrupt can't be Interrupted by other Interrupts. Interrupt. I find this ability of questionable specificity.
• Rally is another impressively shitty ability. You spend a Swift Action and you and all your allies Disengage 1 meter for free. This is SO POWERFUL that it's limited to once a Scene. Why are people so impressed by things that let you move a single square?
• Regal Challenge is actually neat, Arceus be praised. It's limited to Serperior, Tsareena, and... Eternatus!? You look at a guy and you ask them "DEFERENCE... OR DEFIANCE?" If they pick Deference, they lose their next Shift Action and eat -3 CS to the Stat of your choice. If they pick Defiance, you get +10 Damage to all rolls for the rest of the Scene. This is seriously one of the most interesting abilities in the game. What the fuck? It should be the baseline.
• Rivalry lets you deal +5 damage to targets of the same gender. That's it. Just yet another mediocre damage boost. You'd be surprised at how many of these I'm skipping.
• Run Away is one of the most common Abilities in the game. Everyone and their fucking mother gets it. It makes you never provoke an AoO again, AND you're immune to being Stuck. Some of these abilities are so basic and common that it makes me wonder if it's worth having a kind of "role" system like in D&D 4e, except not shit... but Pokemon Journeys is doing that, too, and I'd hate to feel like I'm copying them. But you could just make a role called "Sneak" or something and just make them immune to AoOs so they can zip around with impunity. Shit, man, I dunno.
• Sand Rush is like Swift Swim and all that other shit. In the games, and old PTU, you'd get +4 SPEED CS when in the appropriate weather, in this case, a Sandstorm. NOW, it just doubles your initiative when you're in a Sandstorm OR when you're below 50% HP, and makes you immune to Sandstorm damage. This means that, unless you run into Weather fairly regularly, Sand Rush is functionally identical to Swift Swim. I don't have any deep commentary, that just strikes me as weird.
• Sand Veil, on the other hand, is actually useful. You get +1 Evasion, which nobody cares about, but it increases to +2 when in a Sandstorm or "on sandy terrain". Is it a big deal that the specific terrain isn't defined mechanically? I dunno. The part that makes this actually useful is that you make yourself AND ADJACENT allies immune to Sandstorm damage. None of the other Abilities that make you immune to weather let you spread that to your allies, and that fucking sucks.
• Serpent's Mark is another nod to the Poke-lore: It is both Arbok's Advanced Ability AND High Ability, allowing it to fulfill multiple roles depending on the pattern of its hood. I like these Abilities more than I probably should. Most notably, these Abilities are not all terrible!
  
• Shadow Tag lets you do another Naruto impression, pinning an adjacent target's shadow to that square. The target is Slowed and Trapped and cannot move more than 5 meters from its shadow, even through forced movement. Naturally, something this mildly interesting is only usable once per Scene.
• Sheer Force gets a mention for actually giving out a nice chunk of damage, unlike so many other abilities. You can't trigger Effect Ranges anymore, but in return you get +10 damage to everything. Some Pokemon can get this AND Hustle, turning into brute retards who inflict piles of damage on people but can't do anything else... but +20 damage to every single attack is actually nothing to sneeze at.
• Shell Cannon is the exclusive Ability of Blastoise, because duh. Whenever you use certain Water moves, you can get +2 Accuracy and... +4 damage? Why fucking +4? Why not +5? I feel like the people making this game are TRYING to piss me off at this point. When activating this Ability with a move with the Dash keyword, you have to move in a straight line, but you get +2 to all Movements. OF COURSE this is once per Scene. +2 Accuracy and +4 damage cannot be allowed to get out of control. God forbid. God FUCKING FORBID. Blastoise deserves better.
• Slow Start is the exclusive Basic Ability of my boy, Regigigas. In the games, Slow Start makes Regigigas literally one of the worst legendaries in the entire game. In PTU it... is still not good. For 3 rounds after joining an encounter, Regigigas has its SPEED and ATK CUT IN HALF. No CS alterations, it's just sliced in half, fuck you. What do you get in return for this? 10 DR. That's it. This is such a kick in the dick that I'd only THINK about using this if it was 20 fucking DR. Jesus.
• Sniper is the Crit Ability. In old PTU, this made you roll Damage Dice a third time when you crit, so if you crit on your 2d6+8 damage attack, it now deals 6d6+24 damage. For reasons COMPLETELY UNFATHOMABLE TO ME, it was changed to be +3d10 damage on a crit. Now, in this specific example the tradeoff is numerically similar - the old style does about 15 more damage, while the new one does about 16 more damage. However, 2d6+8 is Damage Base 6, AKA a fucking Tackle with STAB. You had BETTER have stronger moves past level fucking 10, making this a strict nerf to critical damage. If I Snipe someone with an attack that normally does 4d10+10 damage, I don't want to fucking roll 11d10+10 damage, I WANT TO ROLL 12d10+30 DAMAGE! Has "anti-Heinsoo craziness" afflicted these people? Is fishing for crits just SO STRONG it had to be nerfed? Fuck me.
• Soulstealer... does not work as I originally thought. Once a Scene, when you make someone Faint, you heal yourself of an Injury and gain 25% of your max HP back. If the TRIGGERING ATTACK kills the target, you get healed of all your Injuries and regain half your HP back. If you remember earlier in the review (bully on you for actually reading this shit!), you may recall that you die at -200% HP. The odds of you bringing someone from >0% HP to -200% HP is almost impossible. I have Super Effectively Critted dudes with a boss monster and STILL only brought them down to -150%. It's so unlikely to happen that I suspect the line was slipped in here as a fucking joke to taunt people like me who THOUGHT that you just got healed for killing fools. No, you have to kill then WHEN YOU CAUSE THEM TO FAINT! That's never gonna fucking happen! A shame, because otherwise it would have been a TOTALLY FUCKING SICK ABILITY.
• Speed Boost gets a mention for being the only ability that explicitly says it "has no effect while out of combat". Naturally, the game doesn't really mention what that is, exactly. In fact, you aren't supposed to be able to buff your stats AT ALL outside of combat. You can't use Iron Defense 3 times to max out your DEF and then walk around looking for a fight. They offer a piddy explanation that you can't stay hyped unless you're in a fight or whatever - but that's fucking lame and we all know it. My players and I have a gentleman's agreement - you can get off one free buff if you're walking/flying into a fight you know is coming, then I call for Initiative and start the fight like normal. Maybe I'm too nice. Maybe you should just be able to use buffs whenever you want. I'm not sure.
• Stakeout was once the exclusive ability of Donald Trump Gumshoos, but not with the advent of Sword & Shield. You deal +2d6+4 damage to foes that were released from a Pokeball or entered the encounter since the last turn. It's an average of +11 damage, so I actually can't complain as much as I'd like. I will, however, bitch that it isn't just +10 damage, since that's easier to remember and resolve.
• Stance Change is the exclusive ability of Aegislash, and lets it do the thing. Whenever it uses a damaging attack, it goes into Sword Stance and swaps ATK/SPATK with DEF/SPDEF. When it uses a few defensive Moves, it switches to Shield Stance and swaps out again. It can also do it as a Full Action. It's worth mentioning that it MUST change into Sword Stance when it attacks - no "can" or "may" shit in here. Because of this, you aren't totally wrong if you decide to never evolve it past a minmaxed Doublade, since its stats will stay exactly where they already are and Aegislash's stats are totally fucking lopsided and it's not very good at attacking AND defending, only one or the other. I cannot believe they managed to fuck this one up. God fucking dammit.
• Suction Cups really shouldn't be its own Ability. You use your Shift Action and get +5 DR for 1 round. That's it. For fuck's sake, you could just make that a regular thing you can do in combat and nobody would blink. The only thing saving this from the dumpster is an immunity to Push effects... except there aren't that many in this game and 99% of the time you're better off just killing a dude instead of Pushing them or what the fuck ever.
• Sway is the best defensive ability in the game, and it's exclusive to unevolved Snivys and Bellsprouts that are level 40+. Once a Scene when you get hit with a Melee attack you say "NOPE" and THAT ATTACK HITS THE FOE INSTEAD! On top of that, you can push them around to any empty square adjacent to you. The mental image is utterly hilarious. They don't even resist it or some other bullshit, you just turn their attack around on them.
• Thrust is sad. Just look at it. They pretend like you care about this. Jesus wept.
  
  THIS IS AN ULTRA BEAST'S ADVANCED ABILITY! WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK!? IT'S EVEN GALARIAN FARFETCH'D'S HIGH ABILITY! THIS MAKES ME WANT TO FUCKING KILL SOMEONE!
• Tingle, on the other hand, is not sad. Well, it's exclusive to Lickitung, so maybe the mental image is sad, but the effects aren't: At-Will, when you hit someone next to you with a 1-Target move, they lose a Tick of HP and deal -5 damage for a round on top of whatever you hit them with. It's even a Free Action so you can actually just... tingle away. On its own it's piddly, but do this shit every round and you can actually turn a fight around.
• Tonguelash is Lickitung's Basic Ability. It lets you use Lick as if it were Normal type and when you hit with it, you automatically Paralyze and Flinch a fool. It's only twice per Scene, but that's... actually a bit useful and thematic. And nasty. Nice!
• Truant is another "nerf Ability", this time for Slaking. On the beginning of its turns, you roll 1d20 and on a 7 or lower, you lose your Standard Action that turn. On the bright side you heal a Tick of HP and that turn counts towards turns used up by Interrupts or Exhaust moves (AKA Hyper Beam), and on that turn you get a +3 to your Save Checks, too. I appreciate turning explicitly shitty abilities into ones that are only kind of shitty and are still appropriate to the Pokemon.
• Type Aura (X) SEE! THEY FUCKING ARE CAPABLE OF COMING UP WITH TYPE-EXCLUSIVE ABILITIES? WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THIS FOR THE FUCKING LAST CHANCE ABILITIES! WHY?! Anyway, this gives the user and all allies within 3 meters a +5 damage boost to moves of that Type. That is... not a very long range at all. But okay.
• Unbreakable: "The user gains Last Chance with Steel."

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

may god have mercy on me for I will not have mercy on myself

Abilities V-Z

• Wandering Spirit is the exclusive ability of Galarian Yamask, so this is an analogue to the Mummy Ability. While Mummy just disables your foe's Abilities, THIS ability instead SWAPS out with a random Ability of the foe, so THEY have Wandering Spirit and you have THEIR Ability. Unfortunately, this is once per Scene and you can't actually pick what you're swapping out with. Sorry, you wanted to actually have tactical options? Too bad.
• Water Bubble is the exclusive ability of the Dewpider line, and is incredibly good, making you resist Fire moves, immune to Burns, and you can ALWAYS ACT LIKE YOU'RE IN RAIN. Granted, it only learns one Ability that's used in rain, but it's still +5 damage to all your Water moves. On top of that, you can change any Water move to be a Melee attack, and when done so it becomes Physical and deals... +1d6+2 damage. If you weren't already getting +5 from being in Rain, I'd bitch more. As it is, I enjoy Abilities that let you play with your moves and make them a different Class or Type or whatever. We should have more of those.
• Water Compaction is... deceptively bad. At-will, when you get hit by a Water move, you get +2 DEF CS. That's only 3 Water moves to max out your DEF! The downside? IT'S ON SANDYGAST AND THAT'S FUCKING WEAK TO WATER! This one's on Gamefreak, but you had the chance to fix it, goddammit! This isn't clever, you STILL DON'T WANT TO GET HIT BY WATER MOVES! You don't even get any resistances out of this Ability, you're just still fucking weak to Water. For fuck's sake.
• Weaponize has been nerfed to high heaven, and is the exclusive ability of the Honedge line. When being actively commanded and used as a Living Weapon, your sword can become the target of an attack that would otherwise hit you. Given the splendid typing of Honedge, this kicks fucking ass. It's only once a Scene now - but it used to be At fucking Will, basically rendering the wielder completely immune to Normal, Fighting, and Poison moves. This is literally the only time I will ever complain about an Ability being too strong, except it isn't anymore and it's fine now. Still...
• Weeble is exclusively Wobbuffet's ability. When it gets hit by an attack, it makes an AC4 attack against an adjacent target, inflicting 1/3rd of the damage it was dealt. Mercifully, it's At-Will, and it's also paired with...
• Wobble, which lets you use Counter or Mirror Coat once a Scene, ignoring Frequency. This is important because both of those moves are Scene x 2, meaning you have, at an absolute maximum, 7 uses out of them with this Ability. Your Wobbuffet has a fucking time limit, after which it literally can't do anything but Struggle. That's true in the games too, but FAR less likely to happen. Come on guys, it's not like Wobbuffet even has a way to force people to attack it in PTU, get a fucking grip.
• Wonder Guard is obviously Shedinja's exclus- what do you mean it's Cosmoem's High Ability???? Oh, it can't attack? Well, I guess that's okay... This one says "only damaging attacks that are Super-Effective affect the Pokemon with Wonder Guard; all other damaging attacks cannot hit the user or deal damage". Notably, if you have no weaknesses through whatever source, Wonder Guard loses its effect. I can appreciate the closing of that little loophole.
• Zen Mode/Zen Snowed are for Darmanitan and Galarian Darmanitan, respectively. They both let you go into Zen Mode for the rest of the Scene, and you can use Flamethrower/Psychic or Ice Punch/Fire Punch as if they were on your move list. They don't even replace anything, it's literally just free moves! I have a soft spot for the shitting flame monkey, so anything that makes its form shifting actually useful is appreciated, because in the games I NEVER took advantage of that aspect of the Pokemon. Seriously, it goes from having ATK as its highest stat to being its lowest, but your moves don't change, so most of the time it's just a huge power down... having free STAB Special Moves really helps alleviate that.

And with that, we are finally done with the Abilities... if you even skimmed over this shit, thank you for putting up with it. I really wanted to go into just how shitty a lot of these are, and I skipped so many of the even worse or more boring ones. The intent I get from a lot of these is to Voltron together a combo that actually lets you do something the Pokemon can do in lore or be useful in combat. It's a good way of passing out immunities to all sorts of things, but let's be honest - static effects are the most fucking boring kind of Ability you can get. It might be useful, but it's still boring. It's very rare that I actually get excited at some abilities, especially once I consider how they're actually used in the game. Something that looks awesome might be shackled to an utter shitmon that doesn't really get fixed, and something that looks shitty and boring might be on a really good Pokemon and it's actually super synergistic... and still kind of boring. Given the sheer magnitude of Abilities in Pokemon, it's inevitable that some are just boring but practical. I get it. I just think those should be minimized.

To use an example, Immunity makes you immune to the Poisoned and Badly Poisoned conditions. That's it. You'll write it down and laugh when you get attacked by snakes, but you won't really think about it 99% of the time. Should it also have an active effect you can use? Does that negatively impose on the available cognitive space of the players if you do that to most abilities? I'm genuinely not sure and I'd like to talk about it, since that's really the crux of this chapter. Is it better to have 10-12 options that are all generally useful, but kind of bland and boring, or 6-8 options that aren't universally applicable, but are way more fun to use? Is this a false dichotomy? Is anyone even still reading all this shit I keep typing?

Next time: Moves
I swear to fucking god I won't go over even 10% of the moves in this game, seriously nobody gives a fuck about most of these. Someone please yell at me if I do.

[Koumei]

Some of these (like Anchored and Brimstone and Regal Challenge) are cool. Now onto my questions and comments.

Chemical Romance: I assume that's just the Infatuation thing, right? Please just be infatuation.

Clay Cannons: does the game have flanking/facing? If something small enough is adjacent to you, you could shoot them in the back.

Delayed Reaction: it's not like the game even has much in-battle healing. It would only be good (not even overpowered) if healing was readily available and it also worked every single round.

Fabulous Trim: someone really likes Furfrou. Seeing as it is a dog, I am okay with that.

Gulp Missile: it kind of works like that in the weird tech demo beta thing they sold people. If you're above half HP, it causes the Defence drop. If you're below half HP, then you gulp a whole pikachu, and it causes Paralysis.

Handyman: you'd think things like Machamp would have it, what with having all those hands, but then again, the hands are probably already full of someone else's throat.

Queenly Majesty: in the video games it's just immunity to priority moves, and I think that's more useful than Stomping adjacent priority-users. As funny as it is to Stomp them straight away and go OHOHOHOHO.

Regal Challenge: not available to any of the pokemon with KING in their name?

Tonguelash: can Heatmor get it?

Water Compaction: for what it's worth, Sandygast is pretty bulky and gets decent healing attacks in the video game. It can sort of make use of that.

Wonder Guard: no mention of the weird fact that Fire Fang hits through Wonder Guard regardless of Weaknesses (suck it, hacked Sableye) for no apparent reason?

F-K next time.

You're allowed to swear here, you don't have to censor it like that.

[Shrapnel]

Protean isn't nerfed at all. Shit's At-Will, in fact. Whenever you use a Move, you can change your Type to match the Type of the Move. Yes, you get to apply STAB if you want. Yes, you can choose to not change your Type if you landed on one that wins the encounter. Yes, I still fucking hate Greninja. On the bright side, they gave this to Kecleon, but on the downside, the new fucking furbait Fire starter has it, too. Why!? It's a fucking anthro rabbit! It's not even a ninja or a chameleon! WHY CAN IT CHANGE ITS TYPE? SOMEONE WHO'S PLAYED SWORD AND SHIELD EXPLAIN THIS SHIT TO ME!

Because Scorbunny evolves into a soccer/football player, and those are known to have chromatophore cells?