1. Roll or choose 3 adjectives for flavoring how this pokemon looks from the choices below and then click to mark them:

2. Roll or choose one type (assuming this is a first-evolution or not-well-known pokemon) that you can determine just from looking at it and click to mark the type:

3. If this pokemon has been caught, give it a nickname

Setup: Bumping into someone on the road who is a self-proclaimed "Rock Fan," Sig the grindset archetype player character thinks they'll be able to defeat Acey easily with their water pokemon. But it turns out Acey is a musical classic rock fan and his definitely not rock (electric) pokemon Vox poses a real typing matchup problem for Sig. Will Sig be able to get his water type Champ to prevail despite this?

Tension: Not being sure whether the gang will win an expected pokemon battle. What is/are the opponent's pokemon capable of? We've never seen a pokemon like this, and we have no idea what they can do.

Opponent: "Acey"
Archetype: Vibe Freak (vibe: classic rock fan)
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. upright
   b. chill
   c. goofy
2. Typing:
   a. electric
3. Name: "Vox"

Player: "Sig"
Archetype: Grindset
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. hyperactive
   b. ferocious
   c. little guy
2. Typing:
   a. water
3. Name: "Champ"

Setup: The gang arrives in a new town after a multi-day journey traveling. They want to rest, relax, and get some nice food to eat, but they quickly find that everyone in town is asleep and unresponsive. In the middle of the town square, they find a mysterious pokemon sitting in the grass open its eyes at them, but it teleports away before they can get a good look. Midway into discovering this, a traveler and an Officer Jenny (responding to the previous day's report that was sent by a flying carrier pokemon) show up and find the gang in the main square. Can they manage to find that teleporting pokemon and figure out what it's doing before Jenny arrests them for the cause of this sleepy town?

Tension: Not being sure whether the gang will be able to escape a dangerous situation that's outside of an expected battle. The dangerous situation was caused by a pokemon.

Opponent A mysterious pokemon that they've never seen before, but it teleports away before they can get a good look. Systemic police incompetency as well, I suppose?

Gang: "Scorpio", "Freddie", "Jazz"
Player: Scorpio
Archetype: gym leader wannabe (gonna be the first good bug gym)
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. prickly
   b. ferocious
   c. shelled
2. Typing:
   a. bug
3. Name: "Millie"

Player: Freddie
Archetype: chaos gremlin
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. slender
   b. elegant
   c. mysterious
2. Typing:
   a. dragon
3. Name: "Bowie"

Player: Jazz
Archetype: ranger
Pokemon: "Raine" & "Nettle"
Raine:

1. Adjectives:
   a. sneaky
   b. cloudy
   c. goopy
2. Typing:
   a. dark
3. Name: "Raine"

Nettle:

1. Adjectives:
   a. dangly
   b. furry
   c. a group
2. Typing:
   a. grass
3. Name: "Nettle"

Setup: The gang arrives in a small town for some downtime and celebrates the grand opening of a new lighthouse just a short walk from downtown. However, a few nights into their stay, a terrible storm hits and after a few days of nothing but storms, it's starting to look like it'll never be nice out again. Can the gang work together with the locals to get folks out of town and/or stop the storms? And why did this only start to happen once the lighthouse was opened?

Tension: One-off side quest. Mystery that's not necessarily dangerous.

Opponent: Unexpected many-day-long thunderstorm at this rocky coastal town has caused the pier to be partly broken and washed away. This was only a week after the new lighthouse was built.

Gang: "Igny", "Locke", "Thea"
Player: Igny
Archetype: Youngster Joey
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. armored
   b. hulking
   c. ferocious
2. Typing:
   a. rock
   c. ground
3. Name: Tectonic or "Tect" for short

Player: Locke
Archetype: Know It All
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. sneaky
   b. bashful
   c. little guy
2. Typing:
   a. ghost
3. Name: "Scoob"

Player: Thea
Archetype: Vibe Freak (vibe: wellness)
Pokemon:

1. Adjectives:
   a. chill
   b. sleepy
   c. a group
2. Typing:
   a. fairy
3. Name: "Cudpud"

The damage calculation for gen 3 (the most complex gen I played) is as follows:

A lot of this is noise, viewing from a not-very-tactical TTRPG perspective. The main things to consider seem to be type, weather, level, consumable items that affect attack or status condition, and what causes a crit. Everything else feels like the wrong level of abstraction to apply.

I'll go over how I want to fold in these ideas that I want to keep in a below section.

In the anime, the battle ends one of three ways:

1. Protagonist wins
2. Opponent wins
3. The battle is interrupted by another plot event

For the first two, it tends to be after a back and forth between the trainers. Maybe the match-up favors one person's pokemon at first and then swaps to the other once the second pokemon is sent out. Maybe the one pokemon that's battling goes from disadvantaged to advantaged as the round goes on and one side learns about the other's tactics. Maybe there's a psychological game happening with the trainers outside of the battle that leads to a worse outcome in some way. I think of this back and forth being a sort of tug of war metaphor, with the rope being the battle, the goals being defined by the trainers, and each movement of the rope corresponding to something the trainers and/or the pokemon did, though I'm trying to keep from having this be "selecting a pokemon's move" or "doing X amount of damage."

For the third point, team rocket or any other plot beat can come in at any time and disrupt the match. This can even be directly caused by one of the pokemon in the battle doing something that poses a new danger/risk to the trainers involved -- basically anything from the tension list except for "a second, expected battle." This option works best as a surprise twist way to delay the resolution of the original battle. However, to avoid feeling repetitive, this option tends to be used sparingly. The only pattern I've seen with this is that it happens after the battle has already become tense. Maybe it's the point of the battle where a winner would be decided. Maybe it's the beginning of the battle, but there was already enough verbal sparring in the scene leading up to the battle that it feels charged.

The winner of the battle doesn't necessarily have to make the other person's pokemon faint. That's usually only done for official battles like gyms or the pokemon league. Once a battle is losing by a bunch (going back to the tug of war metaphor), it's reasonable for a trainer to call back their pokemon and concede for most of the time. Unlike in the games, people in the "real life" of pokemon don't want to have to trek back and forth to the pokemon center if they can avoid it. Sometimes the two trainers were battling over ideological differences or lack of respect or something, and through battle, they resolve these differences and find common-ground and call the battle off.

Sometimes the "battle" is more of a non-combat challenge like balancing somewhere precarious, running really fast, performing beauty contest, having a cook-off, or doing some non-lethal wrestling rather than full-on pokemon battle. This room for nuance is completely gone in the video games, but would make for more interesting story-telling in a ttrpg setting, imo.

As previously stated in the anime section, battles tend to be narrative tugs-of-war between the trainers and their pokemon. It's rare to have such a huge sweep that the battle is over in a single moment. My first instinct is to try to represent this mechanically the same way that I think of it narratively: each side is put on either side of a linear clock that's half-filled up

Ash <- ░ ░ ░ ▓ ▓ ▓ -> Gary

Each beat in the scene, the rope is pulled towards one side or the other, based on die rolls (we'll get to exactly what that looks like soon). It's generally a zero sum game, so one team can only win if the other loses.

Ash <- ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ -> Gary Wins!

I'm torn between just saying the entire battle is one roll versus having the battle span multiple rolls.

On the one hand, declaring your strategy ahead of time with all the various ways you plan to get bonuses or bonus dice added is nice, since the position your trainer character is in at the beginning of the battle is likely to be pretty similar to the one they're in at the end of battle, so having multiple rolls for the same stakes feels bad.

On the other hand, exploring the bond between the pokemon and the trainer seems like it requires the story to have beats where the trainer has to decide whether to keep their pokemon out even during a battle that it's losing versus call them back and try to preserve their relationship with that pokemon. That's a lot more narratively interesting to me, but it has to be balanced against this feeling of "I rolled. I succeeded. I rolled. I succeeded. I rolled. I failed. I rolled I succeeded. I rolled. I succeeded. I won the battle." That kind of "we set the scene up and you've said what the plan is, and now we're just rolling dice repeatedly to see how that plan works out" is not interesting to me at all.

Maybe the number of rolls (aka size of the tug of war rope) should be based off how important/difficult the battle is? A given beat probably moves the rope one to two spaces most of the time. Maybe a random trainer battle on the road is maybe a rope of 2 or 4 ticks. (meaning you only need to succeed once or maybe twice in a row to beat them, which should be easy if you're higher level, have a type advantage, roll well, etc) An important trainer battle might be 6, meaning you expect at least 2-3 sub-sequences within the battle scene. A rival fight or gym battle, maybe 8 ticks in total. And then the biggest of boss battles maybe 10? I imagine if the tick numbers increase for a given battle, you'd also expect to see more pokemon from each side to narratively justify the longer battle.

As a given battle is raging on, the player character describes what they try to do (ordering, telling their pokemon information about their opponent to help it plan better for the next attack, using up items from their load, trying a new technique now that they know this pokemon's typing and therefore what would be super effective. A roll happens (more on this later) and then it's up to the player and GM to determine what the outcome of the roll is narratively. This can and should include (real or fictional) moves that the pokemon knows that help it deal damage, but only after the die result is shown. That's when we can paint the picture.

Each roll during battle, I was thinking of pulling the mechanics from something like Forged in the Dark: the GM sets the position and effect, the player can push themselves or their pokemon to mark stress for a flashback, or for an extra die.. Other aspects to the battle (familiarity with the environment, type matchups, level, all that other stuff we wanted to keep from the "how do video games do it" section above would go here as ways to change the position, effect, and/or number of dice rolled. You end up rolling a number of d6s depending on what you and the GM just decided for extra dice. If you're successful (gets a 5-6 on any of the dice) then you get to explain how your pokemon succeeded. As always, there's the devil's bargain if you need better luck for one roll at any cost, though it'd cost something for the player.

This makes for some interesting consequences because the pokemons' and trainer's stress pool could be shared so that each player only has one, but you'd have to choose between using it to push yourself within battle versus pushing the trainer during some outside-of-battle shenanigans. Rest, downtime, going to a pokemon center kind of stuff would help alleviate that stress, just like in other FitD games. This stress narratively represents the situations that the trainer and their pokemon are put into. A Ranger archetype would happily take tons of stress to their person, especially if it could prevent a pokemon from getting hurt. Meanwhile, a grindsetter may be willing to stress their pokemon to the brink so long as they're feeling fine. This balances out the classes mechanically while still allowing them to be individually interesting narratively.

Ok, so if there's often battles between a player and an NPC trainer, then that opens up a question of what to do with the rest of the party while one person is battling one other person? Let's ignore double-battles for now. Drawing off of the anime and other shows where one person is doing battle and the rest of their friends are reacting from the sidelines (like YuGiOh), perhaps there's a way that their character archetype or their pokemon's expertise or their perspective sitting in a physically different location could all contribute to the battle by them shouting out information about the battle? "That sandshrew keeps burrowing underground after it kicks up a bunch of dust clouds!" or something? It doesn't fully allow other players into the battle, but it does let them help out and maybe reduce positional risk or something?

Still lots to think over, and I'm sure I'm being biased towards FitD to some degree because of the hit Band of Blades (a FitD game) actual play podcast "Oathsworn." They make the position and effect and how the players interact with the stakes so easy to follow it makes me feel like that could be right for this game. Who knows, though?