Number 1 Moth Girl

@Her-Lady-Weaver

She/they

y'know like, m'yah? (moth nyah)

Number 1 Moth Girl @Her-Lady-Weaver1/21/2024, 7:51 PM

Juniper Bug @JuniperTheory

Jama @Jama1/21/2024, 4:44 AM

I am a casual onlooker/granted GM permissions to a Pokemon RPG game that some of my friends are playing. I get to bounce stuff off the GM, and shitpost with them in the discord, since it was the one we used for Curse of Strahd last year.

As I'm catching bits and pieces of the game, I'm noticing something that bugs me, and the behavior it encourages.

Getting pokedex entries counts towards progression, called Honors, which are also earned for gym badges, contests, and other things.
It encourages the "touch trading" behavior, which I feel like is awful for a game based around Pokemon.

The reason for my distaste is that when I think "A Pokemon game", I'm thinking more of emulating the show. The game rules though want to emulate both the show and the video games. And that's where the disconnect is with me. The game puts the 'mon you catch at like, ranking 1 or 0 Friendship (out of 5 I think), and trading it resets it to the same low level, so there's 0 punishment for doing it. I see everyone go "OK, I got this, you got that, we'll just trade these two Pokemon around so everyone gets them" and maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan, that sucks to me.

It feels like a bad thing for someone who just wants to catch and befriend some critters.

#TTRPG #pokemon

Juniper Bug @JuniperTheory1/21/2024, 5:57 PM

This is something I see a lot when people come up with TTRPG versions of video games and such

There's a desire, when the mechanics of something are already Pretty Close to a board game or tabletop game of some sort, to try to emulate those mechanics in tabletop form. As much as I love seeing Maximalist game devs try to do this, it often comes Firmly at the expense of... Everything else that's beautiful about a thing. A pokemon game could be about perfectly emulating the video game combat, or it could just be about having little buddies. A Castlevania game could desperately try to include every single weapon and monster from a Castlevania game, or it could just be about exploring a castle to kill dracula.

I blame a lot of this on DnD's ethos of having a weird separation between combat and roleplay. People see that and go "okay so the roleplay can be Normal and the combat/mechanical stuff should be way way too in depth". There are other options.

Once again, this isn't to say any of those systems are bad, I LOVE a good Maximalist attempt to emulate Pokemon in a ttrpg or whatever; just that they're only one vision, and I wish we saw more.

#TTRPG #ttrpg design #pokemon

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Jama's post:

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 4:50 AM

I think I know which Pokémon Tabletop you’re talking about and I couldn’t smoke that one. There was something going on in the version I was looking at where stat progression was too sculpted and involved with little help creating opposition. Like literally coming at it from the opposite angle where I wanted something like the games, they incorporated the aspects of the games you don’t want to touch for a frictionless user experience. It’s the worst of all possible worlds, that ruleset

Jama @Jama1/21/2024, 4:55 AM

Pokemon Tabletop Adventure 3 is the one!

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 4:55 AM

Yup. That’s the one (edit; maybe not that precise edition, but I remember it was Adventures when you mentioned honours)

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 4:55 AM

I think the best way to put it is that system desires to be frictionless in the wrong way. It wants to be pat as opposed to accessible, and if you want something consistent and pat, a ttrpg is going to be the wrong engine

Mannie @manwad1/21/2024, 5:05 AM

pat?

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 5:07 AM

“too quick, easy or simple; not seeming natural or realistic.” I picked that up from a creative writing prof so I was shocked to find I was using it right

Mannie @manwad1/21/2024, 4:53 AM

Oh man that feeling of ttrpg devs like, playing it too close to the chest when emulating games.

i get a similar vibe with like, every attempt at a Fire Emblem ttrpg. they do the weapon triangle and fail to realize that you need a full, 8 man party to make that shit work.

Jama @Jama1/21/2024, 4:56 AM

Yeah I can see that for FE. I feel like you can cover a lot of the vibe with like, Weapon Keywords for things beyond Armorslayer, and the various mounted units.

Mannie @manwad1/21/2024, 5:00 AM

No no, the problem becomes enemy composition.

As a GM, you'd need to be super careful in the early levels so you don't say, deploy all spearguys against Swordparty.

or if 2 people wanna be Swordguy.

With the triangle, you sorta pigeonhole yourself for a few fights until everyone gets like, a Promotion to like Hero [sword/axe] or Gremory or Paladin whatever.

Jama @Jama1/21/2024, 5:01 AM

Aaah, coverage is an issue. I see what you mean now. Gotcha gotcha. Yeah. You'd need to like, combine basic classes then, or just remove the triangle entirely.

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 4:58 AM

I’ve seen it emulated to a tee on a text based PBP where instead of “what if chess if it made you horny” it was “what if mail order chess had discord drama.” It was so idiosyncratic in some ways it was its own game though, and there tended to be a player who became the group’s Caller of sorts. My exposure was too brief to recall much beyond that

Mannie @manwad1/21/2024, 5:01 AM

i think i also saw that discord, briefly. Were all the rules in a fuckin google sheet?

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 5:02 AM

Yup. And the character sheets were so loaded with numbers my first PC accidentally erased someone else’s work in a visual tracking error

Mannie @manwad1/21/2024, 5:04 AM

amazing.

Those dinguses had both the 2d100 AND the flat d100 to hit rules. it was such a mess!

glad i bounced instantly, I knew it'd end up as you said. Got the One Guy Who Played Fire Emblem just like... play fire emblem, but slower.

@Asukapaper1/21/2024, 5:09 AM

Chapters measured in months and campaigns years. I think the server regulars were trauma bonded by the experience

Jama @Jama1/21/2024, 6:13 AM

This thread...

Jesus goddamn Christ

M A R M @virtualmarmalade1/21/2024, 6:55 AM

This is like so not the point but I took a crack at an FE ttrpg and my solve for this was making each player character a Lord with a customizable class and giving them each control over a small squad of allied NPC units. I never finished it but it was fun to work on anyways lol

Binary @binary1/21/2024, 2:54 PM

You see this occasionally and it's usually weird when it shows up: single player mechanics applied to individual PCs without really thinking about what that means or how weird that is, especially around experience. Make that a group mechanic (as in, track the pokedex across the whole group) and you get a lot closer to the vibe you'd want.

Smoke and Honey @smokeandhoney1/21/2024, 9:52 PM

This was exactly my thinking: You house rule it so that when anyone in your group gets a pokemon it gets added to everyone's pokedex automatically.

I was going to say that I didn't know if that would unbalance the game in some way (since I don't know the game). But given that the players are effectively already doing this, you might as well just embrace it and skip the tedious and immersion breaking touch trading step.

Binary @binary1/21/2024, 10:10 PM

If it's too much of a problem it wouldn't be too hard to like, tweak accumulation of those Honors downward - like if you'd gain 1/Pokemon, instead gain 1 for every 2 caught across the party or something.

Jama @Jama1/21/2024, 10:15 PM

You gain 1 per 30 in your 'dex, since those are like your "level" things.

Yeah, eliminating the vibe of "we're just trading it around' is the easy solution and just say like, oh these things are linked and share information or whatever.

Josh Average @ImplausiblyJosh1/21/2024, 6:49 PM

It’s interesting to see how every person/group makes their fan games, because that Show vs. Game feeling was exactly why I started working on my own Pokémon TTRPG lol.

I wanted to play/run something closer to the show, especially the vibes of the Kanto, Alola, and Journeys seasons. So when I was thinking about the Pokédex and its mechanics in-game I tied most of the mechanical benefit to a specific character class (basically a professor in the making) since I was making a PbtA game. So while everyone could use the Pokédex for info or even minor mechanical benefits, that specific class was focused on filling out the Pokédex, adding new info, and using that Pokédex knowledge for moves for the rest of the party and themselves. I also divorced Pokédex entries and mechanics from catching, and instead tied them to “meaningful” observations of Pokémon, which meant players could observe their Pokemon, their friends Pokemon, or wild Pokemon, without having to catch them unless they wanted to.

Again, it’s all so interesting because I think my decisions are based on where my head is at in what I like about Pokemon, and you can see what other people like about Pokemon in their fan games. You see the same thing in stuff like Dragon Ball fan games, where some TTRPGs shovel huge importance on power levels, whereas others don’t even care about them.

Jatea @Jatea1/22/2024, 4:16 PM

Fun fact: there is actually a pokemon ttrpg that I think is more styled towards the show, called "Pokeymanz"! I haven't played it myself yet, but from occasionally poking around in the community, it seems a lot of them enjoy it for:
-its lightweight nature (it's a hack of Savage Worlds); there's not an excessive amount of statlines to keep track of in terms of bookkeeping
-and its ability to accommodate a wider array of situations, including the potential for making what could be considered "weaker" pokemon in the games, just as viable as the "stronger" pokemon

It could be what you were hoping for a "Pokemon game" to be, although this is based on my own limited pokemon experience (in general, not just in ttrpgs)