![]() ![]() Pokemon works as a video game with its large amount of types and typing combinations because a lot of the calculations surrounding it are completely done off-hand by computers. Rule 0 “if it’s broke I can just fix it” isn’t a good defense for lackluster mechanics. Now imagine doing that 5 times over for each of your players.Įither the GM is going to allow level ups every fight, ergo trivializing the value of levels, or they actually go through each and every grindy battle with realistic exp and feed into the time-sink fully.Ī different response to this is to just roll an overall ‘grinding check’ to see how many levels someone gains each day, but even that’s just waving away an obvious problem in the mechanics surrounding level grinding. Imagine trying to equally level up 6-units per person through random battles. ![]() Unless the GM is going to explain to everyone ‘hey don’t worry about it, don’t grind and let’s move on’ each and every campaign, the players are going to be fairly insistent on the grind. Not only does each and every battle for each trainer take bloody forever, but each player is also going to want to grind up each and every one of their Pokemon. I feel the resulting conclusions as to why this is bad are self-evident. In this most standard of scenarios, the best case either way still leads to extended combat encounters with a lot of wait times for everyone. Assuming a decently prepared enemy with 6, and assuming only one trainer fights them at a time, that’s a 6-on-6 fight where the other players are just waiting on the sidelines for combat to finish so they can get back to playing. This doesn’t even include Pokemon trainer battles. Even the most badass of legendaries couldn’t handle that kind of pressure. If we were to take a standard combat encounter, let’s say against a wild Pokemon, with a team of four players, we’re looking at a potentially 24-on-1 encounter. Each poke can also be switched out, healed, and otherwise as the main Pokemon ttrpgs out there have separate trainer and Pokemon actions. In the format folks are most familiar with, there’s a nearly fixed rate of 6-pokes per trainer. Tabletops, unless you play those particularly intimate 1-to-1 games, are ultimately a multiplayer experience. It’s one of those cases where the video game, the source material, works perfectly well /because/ it’s a single-player game. So why did anyone think it was a good idea to give all these players up to 6-units to play with? Gameplay lasts forever and eternity as is. Multiplayer games tend to be fairly slow with just singular players and their characters. ![]() But that might be just because the d20 systems I’ve played have way too many abilities to work with.Įither way, the point is that I care a lot about play speed. For me, this sort of slowdown seems prevalent to mostly d20 systems as I rarely see the same type of slowdown from Powered by the Apocalypse and other narrative-heavy games. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the fault of 5e – I grew up playing D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder and those are notorious for the sheer number of abilities that can paralyze unprepared players. While there are certainly GMs capable of bringing rounds of 7-players under 10-minutes, this, to me, is an exception to a wider epidemic of slow play involving “can I do this? no? what about this?” This is particularly evident to me whenever I play D&D 5e as I typically see rounds lasting anywhere up to 45-minutes to an hour for as little as 5-player games. In saying that, however, I also plan to recommend how Pokemon campaigns could be run.Īs someone that desperately places play speed and action resolution above almost every other aspect of a tabletop roleplaying game, I’m already at odds with most tabletops on the market. It even has a lot of the same devs.īut I’m not here to talk about any specific system and why or why not it works, but instead I want to talk about why Pokemon campaigns – at least with the standard fare of 6 Pokemon trainer teams – just don’t work with tabletops. There’s even a major, highly unique, Pokemon tabletop game called Pokemon Tabletop United (PTU), which is pretty much the spiritual successor to Pokemon Tabletop Adventures (PTA). Point is, I’ve seen a lot of people that want to play Pokemon. I’ve been playing ttrpgs for a decent enough amount of time that I’ve seen numerous Pokemon port attempts to systems such as D&D 3.5, 4e, 5e, FATE, and I think one time Shadowrun. I think it’s fair to assume that most any nerd you come face-to-face with has some stance on Pokemon as to whether or not they like it. There’s a high overlap between nerds that like to roll dice and nerds that like Pokemon. Subtitle: and how to make em work anyways. ![]()
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