Time for making your Pokemon Trainer. This book continually refers to a GM, but I think they could have gotten away with calling the guy in charge the Pokemon Master. It's dumb and silly, but we're already sitting around playing Pokemon fucking tabletop, our dignity never even entered the room. I usually just tell people I play D&D instead of trying to explain "it's like D&D, but with Pokemon". I don't want to have to answer those follow-up questions.
Chapter two!
Chapter 2: Character Creation
Rather than bother explaining the rules to you, we jump straight into making our Trainer. Trainers are a lot more complicated than Pokemon, and there's a 9-step process to making one:
- Step 1: Character Concept
Step 2: Create Background
Step 3: Choose Edges
Step 4: Choose Features
Step 5: Assign Combat Stats
Step 6: Find Derived Stats
Step 7: Basic Descriptions (???)
Step 8: Choose Pokemon
Step 9: Money and Items
Fucking hell, this has to be trimmed down. Plus the order is fucking wrong anyway - you want to be choosing your Features before anything because those are your fucking classes, and they have prerequisites. Who in their right goddamn minds would go through and pick their skills and shit and THEN pick a class based on those skills? Freaks, that's who. And people doing this for the first time. Let's go through this process and see how many of these steps we could combine or get rid of in a hypothetical heartbreaker.
Character Concept
Oh, look at that: it tells you to skim through the book to get an idea of what the game has available before coming up with a concept. On top of that, it even says to talk to the other players about what kind of campaign you'll be playing in so that everybody makes characters that are on the same page. Lastly, you only need a quick idea to get started and it's recommended to expand on your character later. Overall, two paragraphs of good advice. There's a cute little example trainer to go along with us for the ride.
Create Background
This is a fancy way of determining your starting Skill Ranks. Obviously you should make it related to your character's personality or backstory or what the fuck ever, and there's even some example backgrounds to help you out. Some of my players thought that you had to pick from the example backgrounds, but I encourage them to pick the classes they want and make their background match that. This sections recommends reading up on Skill Ranks before going further... I'm not a fan of flipping around like this. Should there be a quick blurb or primer on how they work here, or does it not matter since this is a PDF? At any rate, I guess this is where we should talk about the skill system.
There are 3 categories of skills: Body, Mind, and Spirit. This topic has been discussed around here before - modern medicine has blown the fuck out of mind-body dualism and Descartes can eat shit forever. There are 18 Skills total. There are not 6 Skills in each category. This bothers me, but not all Skills are created equally, as anyone can tell you. Our
Body Skills are Acrobatics, Athletics, Combat, Intimidate, Stealth, and Survival. These skills are all pretty useful and just about any Trainer will make use of some of them rather often. The
Mind Skills are General Education, Medicine Education, Occult Education, Pokémon Education, Technology Education, Guile, and Perception. Of these, three, possibly four matter. Occult, Medicine, and Technology Education are all common dump skills because they rarely come up unless the campaign is focused around that kind of shit. Perception is your typical god skill that lets you see or hear anything at any time. Last, the
Spirit Skills are Charm, Command, Focus, and Intuition. This is a Pokemon game, so Command is heads and shoulders above all the others, particularly because the higher your Skill,
the more fucking experience your Pokemon get when you train them! No, fuck you, you can't use your Pokemon Education to train your Pokemon better, that's Command only. Suck my fucking dick, this is blatantly awful - I'll get into how awful it is later.
Skills have 6 Ranks, from Pathetic to Master rank. For each Rank in a Skill you have, you roll 1d6 when using the skill. Skills all begin at Untrained, or Rank 2. When creating a character, you start off with one skill at Rank 4, one at Rank 3, and three at Rank 1. You can't increase your Skills past a certain rank until you hit certain levels. Interestingly enough, the cap is lifted when you hit level 12... in a 50 level game. This means that high-level trainers are Masters in a shit-ton of skills.
So let's talk about this math: It took me and apparently other GMs a little while to grok setting DCs when skills are set up like this. The way it works is obvious: someone who is Pathetic at something stands literally no chance against a Master. Shit, even an Adept at rank 4 can only compete if the Master rolls below average.. but it's still completely possible for a Master to eat shit in their chosen field. Just really unlikely. I'll get more into Skills next chapter, but I don't think I've seen too many other games work like this. What would be the consequences of moving over to a dice pool system or something? It seems like it wouldn't be a hard change to make since you're already rolling d6s, but I don't know enough about dice pools to work out the math on it.
Choose Edges
What the fuck is an Edge? I get asked this question a lot. I say that it's like a Feature, but not as good so they charge you less for it. The books says they "are used to represent a character's training and development in the broad fields covered by this game's Skills." You will spend most of your Edges on improving your Skill Ranks, because that's the only way to do it. Otherwise, there's a hodgepodge of random shit that we'll get into next chapter - a sneak peak is the Swimmer Edge. It lets you swim faster and hold your breath longer. Woo. Trainers start off with 4 Edges and get one on odd levels.
Choose Features
This is the meat of your Trainer, what makes them stand out from all the other idiots in the party who think hitting a Ghost-type with a sword does anything. There are General Features, which are kind of lame and specific, but not as shitty as the Edges. Then there are your Class Features. Classes are made up of 7-8 Features and each Feature has its own prerequisite. You will be spending most of your Features on your class... es. Trainers have 50 levels and get a Feature every even level, and I'm already running into some serious problems here. 50 level is a lot of fucking levels to chew through - I've been running a game for over 2 years and we have 40 sessions under our belts (please don't laugh). The highest level PC just hit level 14. This should be really obvious: Why not just have 25 fucking levels and let Trainers get a Feature and Edge every level? This is actually one of those things I was talking about that has been homebrewed up, but I don't think it's been tested very much. I think it's a great idea for one big reason: The skill caps don't change, so you unlock the cap halfway through your career instead of a quarter of the way into it, which feels nicer. Having more going on in less levels is definitely a good idea - we don't want to be like 4e, do we?
Anyway, there are too many Features for any one class, so you are forced to multiclass. The cap is 4, but even I don't do that when I make badass boss NPCs and shit, and none of my players have picked up their fourth classes yet. Four classes is a hell of a cognitive load. While I think the cap is too high, I love this forced multiclassing shit. The problems is that there aren't any restrictions on what classes on can get - If you want to combine 4 non-combat classes in a game where everybody fights every fucking day, you can do that and drag your team down. With the way the action economy works, unless you're twinked out it's easier and better to pick up a combat class so you AND your pokemon can dish out damage every round instead of just your little buddy. This is just an overview though - we'll get into the details in Chapter 4. As a side note, the book recommends you not pick up 3 or 4 classes at level 1. Good on you. Trainers start with 4 Features and one free Training Feature - more on that later.
Seriously like 33% of my player's PC were raised by Pokemon. Why is that so popular and why do these grown ass adults always play children who ran away from home or some shit?
Assign Combat Stats
Thank fucking god, the combat stats are completely separate from skills. They're ripped straight from the games - you've got
HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, and
Speed. Interestingly enough, Speed is your typical dump stat for Trainers and Pokemon alike. Why is that? Let's go over the stats to determine why:
HP is not the same as your Hit Points. Oh boy. Trainers and Pokemon actually have separate formulas for HP. Yes, I said formulas. They are similar, but different, which has caused endless confusion for my players after a few drinks. But you'll find about about that in the next step! Don't skimp on your HP stat or you're fucking dead, kiddo.
Attack and Special Attack are basically the same thing: You add one to your Physical attacks and the other to your Special attacks. Yup, you just straight up add it onto your damage roll. This is countered by...
Defense and Special Defense. These straight up subtract the relevant damage when hit, to a minimum of 1 damage. These also affect your Evasion stats. You have three of those: Physical Evasion, Special Evasion, and Speed Evasion. Each is increased by your Defense, Special Defense, and Speed stats respectively, and for every 5 points in those stats, you have +1 in the corresponding Evasion, up to a maximum of +6. People roll a d20 to hit in this game, so you want as much Evasion as possible. The neat thing is that you can use Speed Evasion to evade any attack, while Physical can only evade Physical and Special can only evade Special. Problem with that is...
Speed. It determines your initiative in combat. That's it, initiative is static for everyone and the players have complete control over it. It sure makes starting fights easier. But that's really all it does, outside of the badass Speed Evasion. If you focus on Speed, then one day a big hit WILL slip through your Evasion and fuck your 5 Defense ass up.
Speaking of which, the default stats are 10 HP and 5 in everything else. Trainers start with 10 stat points to distribute and gain +1 on every level up. They can't put more than 5 points in a single stat when starting.
Find Derived Stats
The hard part is done, now we just... plug in the numbers. Fortunately, all of this shit is located on the character sheet so you don't have to look at this page every time you level up.
Trainers have Action Points, which they use to power features. For example, a Musician must spend 1 AP in order to sing a Song, which buffs nearby allies. AP comes back at the start of each... Scene. It says to refer to the Playing the Game chapter for more. In a post 4e world, this isn't as contentious as it used to be, but it still has its own problems. We can bitch about that later. Trainers start with 5 AP and get +1 for every 5 levels.
Hit Points are not HP. If you hit 0, you get knocked out and you can't do shit anymore.
Here's the formula for trainers:
Trainer Hit Points = Trainer’s Level x 2 + (HP x 3) +10
And here's the one for Pokemon:
Pokémon Hit Points = Pokémon Level + (HP x 3) + 10
You may note that these look very similar, because they are. Trainers have 50 levels while Pokemon go to the full 100, but for some reason, the developers felt the need for Trainers to have as much health as their Pokemon. I find this decision questionable, but I guess it depends on the tone of your game. Either way, this highlights another problem with the leveling system: Trainers and Pokemon should operate off of the same fucking level scaling, especially if you're going to have formulas like this to even the gap. And guess what? Some Trainer Classes give out combat stats so they can keep up even better. In my heartbreaker, I'd make both of them go to 25 levels and be done with it.
Anyway, there's a Power stat. It doesn't say what the range is, but Trainers start at 4 and get +1 if they have Novice (Rank 3) Athletic and +1 with Adept (Rank 4) Combat. Power 6 is what Rhyhorn and Typhlosion has. To give you a sneak peak, that means Trainers at peak strength can lift up to 230 lbs and drag 460 lbs. Not exactly impressive... and Power goes all the way to 16. What on earth has Power 16, you may ask? Just one form of one pokemon: Zygarde Complete. The massively overpowered planet guardian gundam thing. It can lift up to... 1500 lbs.
There are two jump stats: High Jump and Long Jump, and each are measured in meters, which is the size of a square in this game. Trainers start at 0 High Jump and have to make an Acrobatics check to jump up at all. At Adept Acrobatics, you get +1 High Jump. At Expert (Rank 5) Acrobatics, you get another +1. If you have a "running start", you get another +1. There are also other ways to increase this stat, but being able to do a leaping 9-foot flip sounds pretty badass. Long Jump is just half your Acrobatics Rank, so that maxes out at 3 normally. The world record in long jumping is 9 meters, so I'm very unimpressed here.
Next, we arrive at our Overland movement speed - this is how many meters you move in a round, which is 10 seconds.
There is a formula for this.
Overland = 3 + [(Athl + Acro)/2]
The astute will notice that means the minimum is 4 and the maximum is 9. Moving 9 meters in 10 seconds is a, uh... casual pace, to say the least. Is everybody in this game geriatric or something? Where's the MOVEMENT?
Getting near the end, we have Throwing Range - this is important because it includes throwing Pokeballs and shit. It's 4 + your Athletics Rank and putting your Pokemon out far away is sometimes an excellent tactical decision.
Trainers are Medium size and nothing else, fuck you. You playing a kid? Medium size. Fat giant man? Medium. There's also Weight Classes in this game. They don't come up very often, but some Moves rely on them. 55-100 lbs is WC 3. 110-220 lbs is WC 4. 220+ is WC 5. Weight classes actually don't go higher than 7, and 7 is specifically only for Pokemon with the Heavy Metal ability, and that's it. I'm starting to realize the scaling in this game is kind of all over the place, isn't it?
Basic Descriptions
What is your fucking character like? I think this all should've been rolled up into the Background or Concept or something, because this just tells you to name your character and maybe come up with a backstory or something. Or maybe talk to the other players about already knowing their PCs. I mean, this is useful stuff, but it seems out of place.
Choose Pokemon
OH YEAH THERE ARE POKEMON IN THIS FUCKING POKEMON GAME I FORGOT BECAUSE I JUST SPENT 3 HOURS LOOKING THROUGH CLASSES AND EDGES TO FRANKENSTEIN A CHARACTER TOGETHER
Stat your Pokemon out before the game starts, for fuck's sake. People who don't do this are worse than Hitler. It says it's up to the GM to decide how many and what Pokemon are available, it recommends level 1 Trainers start with a level 5 or 10 Pokemon. Low level play in this game is suffering - more on that later! The GM's chapter will tell us how to determine starter pokemon and the like.
Money and Items
You know what would be nice? Some kind of table that stated how much money a PC would be expected to have by a certain level so that novice GMs had an idea of how to progress their games... instead, we get this:
Fuck these people. And fuck Lisa, too - she forgot to buy bandages!
I'm a dumbass and I almost forgot that this chapter also contains...
CHARACTER ADVANCEMENT!
Lay it on me! Trainers level up in two ways: by gaining a Milestone or by getting 10 Trainer Experience. More on that in the GM chapter. There are certain Level milestones that you get bonuses on, and I'm not sure how I feel about them.
- At Level 2 you can rank your skills up to Adept and you gain a free Skill Edge. Notably, this Edge can't be used to rank something up to Adept.
At Level 5 you become an Amateur Trainer and you have two choices: on even Level Ups from 2-10, you gain +1 Attack or Special Attack. This is to help out lagging fighters. You can also get a General Feature, so nothing in your class.
At Level 6 you unlock Expert skills and get another Skill edge. Same as before.
At Level 10 you are a Capable Trainer and can get the same stat boosts as before or two Edges for which you qualify.
At Level 12 you unlock Master Skills and can hit the Skill cap in whatever you want.
At Level 20 you're a Veteran Trainer and get the same bonuses as a Level 10 Trainer.
Level 30 makes you an Elite Trainer, and you can get the stat boost, two Edges, or a General Feature.
Level 40 brings you to the level of Champion, and you get... the same bonuses as level 30.
I think this has some issues. You cap out skills way too early and the bonuses are kind of lame. However, this serves to almost split the game up into different Trainer tiers... but nothing is ever explicitly made of this. This section was almost like an afterthought, more stuff to pile onto your character as you level to patch holes in your build or whatever. You can and will be rocking
a ton of shit if you ever hit level 50, which you won't.
RETRAINING
This is pretty straightforward - spend 2 Trainer XP to retrain a Feature, 1 to retrain an Edge, and 1 to move one stat point to another stat. You have to keep something if it's a prerequisite for something you still have. If it has a permanent effect and you've already used it, you can't retrain it. Generally you should ask your GM if it's okay. There's a tip from "Doxy", one of the devs, saying that the GM should give the Trainers a few chances to retrain without spending experience, whether it's just fiat or through visiting an NPC.
TIPS FOR NEW PLAYERS
It's only a single page - it says to pick an Introductory Class, since they tend to be neutral to any kind of battling style or Pokemon preference, and pair that with a Battling Style or Specialist Team class, to beef up your Pokemon. If that's too rigid for you, just try and match 2 classes that look like they'd go well together. You should focus your build rather than trying to do a bunch of different shit. It says you can support your pokemon or directly fight with them, but it neglects to mention that the latter is usually the best option. Combat Trainers want stats from their advancement while others want the Edges or Features... they generally seem to support specialization, which is odd since the skill system facilitates everyone having 4-5 maxed out skills.
BUILDING TRAINER ARCHETYPES
Holy shit, I do not fucking care about this part at all. This is just 9 pages of different builds that are based on characters from the games or anime. Does anybody actually give a shit about this? Please say no.
Next up: Skills, Edges, and Features.
This post didn't have enough cute pictures in it, so:
Opposed Checks are 95% of the time against Perception, but kudos for bringing up Technology and Occult Education if you're trying to sneak past cameras or ghost eyes or whatever.
