Designing a Pokemon TTRPG

[Username17]

I don't actually understand what this means or why having a four-armed bugman is somehow not awesome.

You rejected using the Monster Manual and having players catch Winter Wolves and Nightmares and Phase Spiders because they aren't "real" Pokémon, right? Well, 4 armed bug men aren't real Pokémon. They just aren't.

So either you're happy with doing Pokémon shit in a non-Pokémon world with non-franchise monster and have people say "Marilith! I choose you!" or you are not. And if you are not, you're also not OK with getting some fucking four armed bug dude the MC just made up instead of a Frosmoth or an Orbeetle.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

If you posit multiple characters who all have Pokémon, they need to be differentiated in a different way. Once we have established that the Bug Catcher is a character class who has Bug Pokémon, the differentiation is clear. And in that context, giving the Bug Catcher a bullshit made up Pokémon that's kind of like a Machamp is shitting all over the player's agency in announcing that they were going to play a Pokémaster who had Bug Pokémon.

But beyond that, if the players are essentially crafting their Pokémon out of captured parts like they were assembling mechs in MechWarrior, you're basically just giving out points that players are buying their Pokémon with. Which is not different than just giving the players XP points and having them Elothar up some level and idiom appropriate Pokémon, except that you're literally and specifically declaring your intention to distribute those advancement points in a totally uneven and unfair fashion like you were playing an RPG from the late 1970s.

I don't actually understand what this means or why having a four-armed bugman is somehow not awesome.

While I disagree with Frank's absolutism re: all deviations from the canon roster being equal ("Machamp, but a bug" is clearly less of a deviation from the canon than "just a Marilith"), I agree with him that you're missing something here (you're proposing cheapening the distinction between character options and diluting the setting thereby).

A four-arm bugman in isolation might be awesome, but a four-arm bugman in Pokémon dilutes the setting, and a four-arm bugman that is not a normal Pokémon but a mutation of a normally non-bug-related Pokémon dilutes the setting a lot.

Is the roster of Bug Pokémon so sparse that you feel the need to expand it like this to accommodate Bug Catchers?

[Foxwarrior]

Pokemon fusions are much cooler than type-shifted pokemen.

[Omegonthesane]

Type-shifted Pokemon is the hill I am willing to die on. Variant Pokemon are extremely popular and I personally love them. They're going in, one way or another.

You rejected using the Monster Manual and having players catch Winter Wolves and Nightmares and Phase Spiders because they aren't "real" Pokémon, right?

Yes. However, my players just fought a whole shitton of goblin and orc Pokemon. Clearly that's not something that bothers me as long as it's a "Pokemonized" version of a regular monster. Fuck, there's ghost horse fakemon already. The game MUST be able to support creating these things and adapting material from romhacks and shit people drew on Deviantart. It gives people far more to work with and I don't give a shit if it looks weird in Pallet Town.

What makes an orc not a Pokémon? What traits can be added to and/or subtracted from an orc to make it a Pokemon while still recognisably being an orc?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Did you mean this kind of stuff?

If so, that's totally true. However, I don't see how they're mechanically that much different from type-shifting. You do a ritual or experiment or whatever and then you have a new kind of Pokemon. Perhaps fusion actually consumes both Pokemon, or maybe you're talking about breeding, but still.

What makes an orc not a Pokémon? What traits can be added to and/or subtracted from an orc to make it a Pokemon while still recognisably being an orc?

Personally? The style. This right here is an orc Pokemon that can be caught and given weapons and shit:

I actually do have Pokemon and separate, uncatchable monsters like Gashadokuros and Jinmenjus along with setting-specific reasons as to why they are distinct creatures, but I'm not sure if that's an acceptable answer to your question.

[Username17]

Type-shifted Pokemon is the hill I am willing to die on. Variant Pokemon are extremely popular and I personally love them. They're going in, one way or another.

Then go ahead and die on it. I don't think I'm particularly interested in your creation, since I don't actually understand what's in it or why. As far as I can tell, your suggestion is "Like Pokémon, except not with the actual Pokémon or with monsters written up anywhere in particular, just with Pokémon-like monsters that TAA happens to think are cool, many of which he made up himself."

And sure, that basically describes Digimon or any other Pokémon knock-off setting. "It's like Pokémon, but with a different arbitrary list of monsters for copyright reasons and also because I really like this drawing of a harpy my friend did." But... that's deeply personal, in the sense that I have no fucking idea what monsters you're using in your world and won't until you've told me about them. And I don't care about your made up monsters and I won't until you've told me about them and maybe not even then because honestly you haven't sold me on any of your made up monsters so far.

So what you have is something that I genuinely can't see working for cooperative storytelling at all. You could maybe give a lot of authorial voice to the other people and do it as like an improv comedy thing, but you aren't meaningfully playing a game. Whether your 4 armed bug dude that's kinda like a Machamp but also kinda like a Scizor but really just made up as you go along is "good" or not is not an answerable question. You don't have a setting, and because of that the points are made up and nothing fucking matters.

Good luck with that.

Honestly it's a giant red flag that you don't think it's maybe a little bit important to familiarize yourself with the movies or the show or the comics or the card game or fucking anything except a couple of video games when trying to jump in with both feet and write a game. That's like JJ Abrams levels of hubris. And this entire conversation is falling apart in pretty much exactly the way it inevitably was going to once you revealed that you actually don't know anything about the setting and don't care that you don't know anything about the setting.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I don't think I'm particularly interested in your creation, since I don't actually understand what's in it or why. As far as I can tell, your suggestion is "Like Pokémon, except not with the actual Pokémon or with monsters written up anywhere in particular, just with Pokémon-like monsters that TAA happens to think are cool, many of which he made up himself."

I probably wouldn't interested in anything you made if I was this fucking deluded about what you were actually doing. What are you even talking about at this point?

[DrPraetor]

Frank is rather negative, but a multiplayer version of the pokemon videogam is basically a nonstarter. There's not enough there to sustain a party of characters, unless people play pokemon, and the trainer is an NPC. So if you're serious about doing a pokemon RPG, you need to watch at least detective pikachu (which is good anyway) and familiarize yourself with some of the other properties. Otherwise, your game isn't going to be satisfying to the target audience, who will disproportionately be people who have absorbed one or another pokemon canon.

OTOH, I'm not so concerned about martial artists leveling up. You can just declare that high-level martial artists can travel through time with the temporal fugue just because they're bad-ass and the problem is solved.

https://cavesofqud.fandom.com/wiki/Temporal_Fugue
Found by googling, ought to have an acknowledgement to the Zman.

[Foxwarrior]

The idiosyncracies of my knowledge of Pokemon mean that I'd probably like a Pokemon game with a roster of: generation 1, 150 of the most amusing pokemen from later generations, and the Fusions of the aforementioned. However, a Pokemon game that had the full roster of official pokemon and nothing else would probably make the most sense as a "Pokemon game", and if you commit to Fakemon I'd prefer a roster that consisted entirely of a creature of my creation to represent each Denner. I have a 3D sculpting program and I know how to use it, I'm armed.

[Darth Rabbitt]

If we're going by "drawing from multiple different takes on Pokemon" then the Pokemon cards have been doing alternate type versions for years, and not just because of the limitations of going from like 18 types to like 8. Delta Pokemon are "literally some people gave Pokemon alternate types". Pokemon was not Ruined FOREVER by them.

If we go by the anime then apparently there are single unevolved non-legendary Ghost Pokemon that are stronger than most pantheons of deities and can fucking conjure and fuse Pokemon out of nothing, and sometimes Pokemon just are way bigger than normal or have weird extra powers or whatever (almost any episode that has a giant Pokemon). Pokemon was not Ruined FOREVER by this either; the Ghost of Maiden's Peak is actually my favorite episode because of how absolutely batshit insane it is.

And of course the games will just give Pokemon moves they can't normally get, or come up with alternate forms of Pokemon with different types, or hook them up to nonsense plot devices to kickstart stories. Again, not Ruined FOREVER.

I don't think it's any more or less valid to want to use any/all of those in addition to or instead of Detective Pikachu (which has a batshit plot involving technology and soul swapping) as source material.

TL;DR I don't think having Bug Catchers be able to have bug Machamp will cause the game to explode or even "not feel like Pokemon". Nor do I think it's any more daft than mashing Pokemon up with D&D (it's probably less honestly, and I'm not even trying to slam Frank's Pokemon D&D hack.)

Nevertheless taking the base Pokes from all the base games seems like it's a given. But you can justify adding whatever bullshit you want to on top of that and it will still probably feel like some flavor of Pokemon.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The idiosyncracies of my knowledge of Pokemon mean that I'd probably like a Pokemon game with a roster of: generation 1, 150 of the most amusing pokemen from later generations, and the Fusions of the aforementioned. However, a Pokemon game that had the full roster of official pokemon and nothing else would probably make the most sense as a "Pokemon game", and if you commit to Fakemon I'd prefer a roster that consisted entirely of a creature of my creation to represent each Denner. I have a 3D sculpting program and I know how to use it, I'm armed.

That would be absolutely hilarious and I would not be entirely unopposed to the idea, as a joke.
However, releasing a Pokemon game without all of the Pokemon is a bad idea. People start getting upset that a Pokemon they like isn't in the game and they just make it up anyway. You need a Pokedex with all 890 Pokemon in it to drop at the same time as your core rulebook or else you have failed to actually model any Pokemon world. After that, much like a Monster Manual 2, you release a book full of Sage/Insurgence/Uranium/whatever Pokemon, and then you have over 1000 monsters to work with and you can keep interest with semi-regular releases of new content.

Is anybody actually going to tell me why Detective Pikachu is worth watching, or are we just going to continue the worthless shilling?

[merxa]

As an outside observer that's not especially interested in Pokemon, I do find it odd you're so interested on creating a Pokemon ttrpg when you clearly have contempt for much if the franchise as well as the fan base.

Hating people for wanting to play nurse jenny isn't exactly a healthy point of view when trying to create an rpg for fans to play.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I'm not sure if you threw in "Nurse Jenny" to try and piss me off or if you're testing me. I also played a motherfucking cop in an adventure once and it was awesome. Pokemon are fucking awesome. The franchise is full of retarded and self-contradictory shit that makes playing a tabletop game difficult and I personally do not care for the generic Pokemon setting. I like some of the mechanics and the general conceit of the whole thing.

I don't know why anyone here tries making D&D fantasy heartbreakers when they clearly have contempt for the franchise and the fan base.

[deaddmwalking]

However, releasing a Pokemon game without all of the Pokemon is a bad idea.

Having 890 Pokemon on release is almost certainly not going to be possible. More importantly, it's not even necessary. People are very forgiving of expansion material. If your setting is small (say Kanto Region or whatever) you don't have to have all the Pokemon at once. In EVERY GAME there are some Pokemon who are not included. People will be upset if you say their Pokemon DOESN'T EXIST, but they'll be much more forgiving if you don't have it yet.

Is anybody actually going to tell me why Detective Pikachu is worth watching, or are we just going to continue the worthless shilling?

I am not really a fan of Pokemon. I saw some of the anime, but it was released on TV when I was involved with the fan sub-titling community so I was watching anime titles that were not broadly released in the US when Pokemon came out. It was also aimed at a younger demographic (I'm 40).

I watched Detective Pikachu with my children (12/8/4) and they all enjoyed it. As someone who isn't really a Pokemon fan, I found it watchable - I've seen many worse kids movies. The animation was surprisingly well-integrated, and the plot was interesting. I thought it was an interesting take on the concept. A major point is that the city where most of the action takes place EVERYONE has a Poke-buddy. If you're interested in a Pokemon game, it'd be worth it just to see how they approached that.

If you're interested in Pokemon, I think you'd enjoy the movie.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Having 890 Pokemon on release is almost certainly not going to be possible. More importantly, it's not even necessary. People are very forgiving of expansion material. If your setting is small (say Kanto Region or whatever) you don't have to have all the Pokemon at once. In EVERY GAME there are some Pokemon who are not included. People will be upset if you say their Pokemon DOESN'T EXIST, but they'll be much more forgiving if you don't have it yet.

You are correct, it is an incredibly difficult endeavor that requires solid pacing and consistent delivery. It's worth mentioning that actually, until Sword and Shield, every Pokemon was included in the game. It might not have been accessible through playing, but they were all coded in and you could theoretically get all of them. Your last sentence is EXACTLY WHY people were so upset at Nintendo lying about SwSh - because they suddenly stopped doing something that had been a feature in every mainline game until that point. Also, since I use Pokemon from every region, I personally need every generation available at the same time.

A major point is that the city where most of the action takes place EVERYONE has a Poke-buddy.

I sincerely do not understand how this is any different from the games at all. Everybody and their fucking mother has Pokemon just sitting around the house. Schoolchildren can be found hours outside of town carrying their favorite Arcanine. However, thank you for being the first person in the entire thread to finally attempt to give me an answer as to why I should watch it. Perhaps I'll pirate it and watch it on mute at double speed.

[Orion]

Detective Pikachu is worth watching for many reasons. For example, watching Detective Pikachu enabled me to achieve a kind of enlightenment or altered state of consciousness which I had not previously accessed. Regardless of its merits as a Pokémon movie, it has substantial value as scripture or long form koan

[Omegonthesane]

The very fact that you are so hostile to the idea of watching a widely acclaimed piece of source material for the game you propose to make an RPG of - the fact you're questioning that it might be worthwhile to watch a critically acclaimed film on the topic, let alone angrily demanding someone tell you why it's worthwhile - heavily implies you aren't actually qualified to make that RPG.

Can't make a passion project, without passion.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Slighted nerd rage is the purest form of passion.

[deaddmwalking]

Slighted nerd rage is the purest form of passion.

When people are telling you that you missed the mark, it's often because you have missed the mark.

You are EITHER:
1) making something that you intend to have broad appeal
2) making something deeply personal based entirely on your own preferences

If you are making (1), you need to engage with the source material. and Detective Pikachu is a major studio release that made $400 Million world-wide and should be broadly known among the fan base. It was also certified fresh (68% critic rating) and the 'consensus' is:

Pokémon Detective Pikachu may not take its wonderfully bizarre premise as far as it could have, but this offbeat adaptation should catch most -- if not all -- of the franchise's fans.

If you're making (2), it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks because you're only focused on what pleases you personally. If you go this route, you're really better off filing off the Pokemon references and calling it your own thing so you never have to say 'it's like Pokemon BUT' and you can just say 'It's a game where you...' The point of using an existing setting is to create a common frame of reference; if you're not interested in doing that, you shouldn't do that.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

OH, I NEED TO ENGAGE WITH THE FUCKING SOURCE MATERIAL, DO I?

I've played the games. I've played spinoffs. I've watched seven seasons of the anime and a third of the movies. I read the manga. I've played the TCG. I've written fucking Pokemon fanfiction. But all of a sudden, just because I don't want to watch tertiary Hollywood garbage I don't know the source material? I don't give a fuck how much money it made, what the critics thought, or whatever other fallacies you're going to try to throw at me.

I've been watching clips of this shit because you all keep fucking hounding me and I am not impressed. As far as I can tell from the plot synopsis and the shit I have watched with my own two eyes, it's a by-the-numbers feel-good Hollywood flick, and I don't fucking watch that shit. I am more than willing to listen to other people who have experience in Pokemon fields I do not. I am not willing to waste my life away watching a movie I swore to myself I never would. Detective Pikachu is emblematic of why I fell out of love with the franchise. Would you have this much of an issue if I told you I never played fucking Pokemon Go? That game is really popular and TONS of people know about it, so clearly I should play to completion it so I can apply its ideas to a tabletop game!

Stop trying to get me to watch this shitty fucking movie and tell me what's worth taking from it, because all of my research has led me to believe that the answer is FUCKING NOTHING! Otherwise I'm not going to give a flying fuck about you trying to get me to watch this fucking crap.

[deaddmwalking]

Stop trying to get me to watch this shitty fucking movie and tell me what's worth taking from it, because all of my research has led me to believe that the answer is FUCKING NOTHING! Otherwise I'm not going to give a flying fuck about you trying to get me to watch this fucking crap.

Fans of the Pokemon franchise are largely fans of the movie. Previously I thought you also dismissed the animated series as something that you didn't watch.

Perhaps you should articulate what you DO want rather than forcing the audience to figure out what aspects of the franchise you are or are not familiar with. Basing it solely on the video games is very limiting - that isn't an RPG.

But if you're trying to make this for a wide audience, you have to accept that some of the audience 'aged into' the franchise long after the availability of the GameBoy was over.

By way of analogy, if this were a conversation about Star Wars, I can think of a lot of good reasons that you'd not want to watch the prequels/sequels, but just engaging with the original trilogy is going to exclude a lot of 'fans'.

You can't have it both ways - either you're adapting the material that the AUDIENCE wants, in which case, YES, you absolutely do have to engage with the material that they're familiar with or you should be clear that you are not trying to do that.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Perhaps you should articulate what you DO want rather than forcing the audience to figure out what aspects of the franchise you are or are not familiar with. Basing it solely on the video games is very limiting - that isn't an RPG.

I HAVE TOLD PEOPLE WHAT I WANT!
Any Pokemon TTRPG, at its core, is a device for playing out Pokemon fanfiction. Maybe you're doing it in Kanto with nothing but OG Pokemon, or maybe you're doing a globetrotting adventure with everything you ever wanted out of the franchise, or maybe you've made up your own region with a spin on the Pokemon formula. All of this is fanfiction within the Pokemon "multiverse". Perhaps you're part of a special team that travel the world to solve mysteries, maybe you're a plucky group of JRPG heroes out to save the world, or you're some squad in the shogunate Poke-War. You must be able to enable people to tell the kind of stories they want within the Pokemon setting and allow people to make their own regions, because that is what people actually fucking do. The only thing uniting every Pokemon fan is the fact that they like pokemon. They don't even like the same fucking pokemon, to boot. Obviously you can't cater to everyone, but D&D supports a metric fuck-ton of adventure concepts even despite its failings, and a Pokemon RPG needs to have just as many adventures that you can do.

I'm not even trying to base it solely on the fucking video games, and I even bitched about PTU doing that in my fucking review that people seem to have tl;dr'd. I just stopped watching the anime and movies because they are bad and I saw that as a fucking stupid teenager, and that eventually translated to the games, too. I want people to be able to do things beyond gym crawls and I want people to actually interact with their pokemon beyond giving them headpats.

I can think of a lot of good reasons that you'd not want to watch the prequels/sequels, but just engaging with the original trilogy is going to exclude a lot of 'fans'.

Isn't that what overly obsessed fan-wikis are about? I have read two fucking plot synopses about Detective Pikachu, one of which was 2,133 words. I saw literally two aspects that mildly interested me, so I looked up the scene where the protagonist begs some Bulbasaur to help save Ryan Reynolds, expecting to glean some great insight. Instead, all I got was some dopey fucker going "They can't understand words, but they understand emotions!" like my fucking dog doesn't understand when I'm sad. I have engaged with this fucking movie and it does not make me want to engage with it further.

[LR]

Frank is rather negative, but a multiplayer version of the pokemon videogam is basically a nonstarter. There's not enough there to sustain a party of characters, unless people play pokemon, and the trainer is an NPC.

Definitely possible, since that's a thing that could just happen during a game of Maid RPG.

[GnomeWorks]

Maybe you're doing it in Kanto with nothing but OG Pokemon, or maybe you're doing a globetrotting adventure with everything you ever wanted out of the franchise, or maybe you've made up your own region with a spin on the Pokemon formula. All of this is fanfiction within the Pokemon "multiverse". Perhaps you're part of a special team that travel the world to solve mysteries, maybe you're a plucky group of JRPG heroes out to save the world, or you're some squad in the shogunate Poke-War.

Honestly this just sounds like you want a TTRPG that happens to have funny-shaped animals that may or may not be a significant part of society.

Like... take Shadowrun. Replace spirits, technomancer sprites, and drones with pokemon (and not even mechanics, like literally just reflavor them). Off the top of my head, I can't come up with a good reason that wouldn't be a reasonable starting point? Aside from the problems with Shadowrun, of course.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Honestly this just sounds like you want a TTRPG that happens to have funny-shaped animals that may or may not be a significant part of society.

Then I must be fucking up my explanations, because I don't see how you got that from the section you quoted. All of that shit I said already exists within the Pokemon franchise. I want a game where you go on Pokemon motherfucking adventures. As it turns out, "Pokemon adventures" is really broad.

My plan is to model the shit you would expect from a Pokemon game - your regions and your gyms and all that typical, generic shit. That way people can just fap around in Kanto forever and play out shit they saw in the anime or read in the manga. After that you come out with your Pokemon Conquest splat where you and your Samurott get into duels of honor within the Johto Shognuate and shit, then more detailed intraplanar adventures and other concepts that don't go completely fucking bonkers. This is not new. The Pokemon franchise has already gone beyond simply having kids stop the bad guy of the week. I personally do not enjoy playing in those regions, but I know that they are the most important thing to model and get right before you start fucking with anything else because that is what people expect from a Pokemon game. I am not planning on doing region-specific releases unless people really can't just pull any relevant information from Bulbapedia, because I think it's more important to get the rules right first. They'd be nice to get out eventually, but I'd put them on the same level of priority as releasing a city-specific book for Vampire.

The whole point of doing this and not grafting Pokemon onto an existing RPG is that those RPGs were not built to be Pokemon games. Unless you take a total shit on your rulebook, a game that is actually built to serve that purpose is obviously superior. If I'm in the mood for some monster-using fun, I would rather play "Pokemon with D&D" rather than "D&D with Pokemon". Pokemon is the main draw here. Even if I think this franchise is now for manchildren and their spawn...