Can we have a Pokemon Tabletop United thread?

Game looks fun as fuck but very rules heavy if you have a new group

Want to paly so bad and raise a meowth to glory

>tabletop united
but that is worst pokemon tabletop baka

much better than tabletop adventure

I liked Pokerole.

I'm in three different PTU games, ask me anything

What in your opinion is the most OP class? (Feel free to pick multiples from different splats)
Does your group(s) use the play test packets? Which ones and why/why not?
Do you approve of the changes to cheerleader, mentor, commander, and taskmaster from 1.04 to 1.05?
Favorite underrated Pokemon to use in PTU and why?

>What in your opinion is the most OP class?
Depends. In terms of all around use, telekinetics is extremely versatile.
The Articifer research path is also very useful, though moreso because of how much cash you can get selling stuff crafted out of shards you get for free.
Overall there isn't one class that makes me go "What were they thinking" in terms of power, though the Pickup ability is overpowered.

>Does your group(s) use the play test packets? Which ones and why/why not?
One of my groups does, the September 2015 playtest. The other two don't, simply because it's a pain keeping up with them.

>Do you approve of the changes to cheerleader, mentor, commander, and taskmaster from 1.04 to 1.05?
I had never played with any of those classes in 1.04, so I dunno

>Favorite underrated Pokemon to use in PTU and why?
I honestly have no idea which pokemon are underrated, I only ever use pokemon that I like and the meta be damned.
Absol is by far my favorite though.

On the note of telekinetic, how does your group determine what's fair game to lift? The book just says "objects with combined weight less than your power capability", but do your groups allow Pokemon or people to count? I ask because there's a decent line of questions happening on the forums with no real answer, since if yes, it implies a you can heavily injure most Pokemon/trainers by lifting and dropping them since fall damage is pretty harsh. Not to mention it's basically a better grapple since they can't really move once lifted without similarly niche classes

Eh.
The game I play a telekinetic in hasn't tried that and probably won't, so I'm not sure how the GM feels about it.
Personally, being able to directly lift people and pokemon would be pretty overpowered, so I would probably expect restrictions on it. For that matter though, you can only reach out to a distance equal to your focus ranks, so 6 meters high at the furthest.

Try 8. Virtuoso really pushes classes whose main thing is X ability based off of Y skill (the one you improve anyway) over the top. Speaking of which, the amount of weight they can carry is also based on the skill rank, so it compounds the issue.

Either way I'm glad we share an opinion of it. Thanks for taking time to answer my questions. Might have a few more tomorrow if this thread can make it.

Not him but here's the data::
Assuming 6: thats 3 automatic injuries on top of either a DB:6 attack or a DB:12 attack depending on weight class.
Assuming 8: thats 4 auto injuries and either a DB:8 or 16 attack again dependent on weight.

Never allow telekinetics to grab unwilling targets, if any live targets at all. Even at 6 thats easily 1/2 max hp damage to most things in WC 1&2, upwards of 80% on WC3+.

How are the campaigns going, from a plot perspective?

are any IRL or just online through roll20 and other such means?

Man, I do love the system. My only regret is having trouble regarding keeping games going. My group has had several attempts at the game that fell apart after a couple months/weeks, and eventually half the group lost interest in the system or in tabletop entirely.

We have a small game going now at least (small being two players and the GM), it's pretty slow moving because of schedule conflicts but it's still great to have one at all.

Playing an dragon tamer with Oracle as the character's main class, mostly inspired by Zinnia—or really more inspired by Aster, I made the character under the assumption that Zinnia had powers but then an interview clarified she was a normal person and her deceased mentor was the Oracle, I guess that's what happens when everything about the Delta Episode is so shittily written—in a medieval-style game, with some more recent technology thrown in sometimes for the sake of gameplay convenience. Oracle is a pretty fun class, like a get-out-of-jail-free card to make up for my inability to solve puzzles. The party's quest is pretty simple, unknown bad guy is using type-themed MacGuffins to cause type-themed havoc and possibly end the world, find out who they are and stop them, pretty much a dungeon crawler with some RP thrown in. The game's pretty fun, though I wish I was a less shitty player, I always feel like I'm being That Guy due to my inability to properly roleplay, even if the group says I'm fine.

It's probably a good thing those first couple games ended prematurely, because out of the two players that remained, our main classes for each of our original characters either got removed or neutered to shit with the 1.05 update. RIP Underdog and Mentor.

what are the plot/driving force for your failed campaigns?

The first one was literally just the vanilla games' plot, grab eight badges and catch 'em all, set in Johto. I think part of the reason it failed was that my character (essentially Yellow from Pokémon Adventures) and one other were the only two that were really interested in the badge aspect. Besides that we had a Professor-in-training (the dude was in his '60s, he was going to take over Oak's position in Kanto but Oak refused to die) going to Johto for the first time to discover the Pokémon there as if Kanto only knew the first 151, a Contest coordinator who disappeared after a couple sessions, a roughneck looking for ways to make money (which the Gyms provide) whose player ended up taking over the campaign as GM so the character disappeared, a Rune Master played by the old GM (the other badge-focused character), and a wild girl (think Sapphire from Adventures) who followed the party just because they didn't know anything better to do.

The campaign shakily got along with the rotating cast, but fully fell apart when the wild girl's player got too disatisfied with not giving their character a real goal and left and the professor's player wanted to switch characters to unify the game's goal more; the wild girl was the main roleplayer and without them it just got a bit too hard to build chemistry with the group's characters and it got canned. We were around Level 6.

The next campaign died so quick it's not even worth talking about. We set up the main plot idea as a pure dungeon crawler with all the characters wanting to investigate what appeared to be aliens, but then 1.05 came out and the game stalled out as we tried converting our characters, plus me having to make an entirely new one (I reused the Underdog character from the first game). I think we were only like Level 2.

We've hit Level 9 in the new game so it's clearly going stronger than the old ones.

Whatever happened to the guys making this? mediafire.com/download/ax7tq3erq7r86mz/Pokerole_Core_Book.pdf
They showed up a while back, got shit on super hard for stuff like their character sheets not being clean enough and I haven't heard anything about it since. I also couldn't find the website with a quick google search.

>I also couldn't find the website with a quick google search.
Type Pokerole into Google. I found their site right away.

I tried playing PTU once. Overall, I felt like it was needlessly complex in many areas, featured superfluous mechanics, tried to be several different visions for what a Pokemon tabletop game should be at once, and just overall had too much stuff in it. I feel like I could extract three different Pokemon tabletop games from it and each would be better on their own than PTU is. There are also a few problems with inventing terrible solutions to what may or may not even be a problem depending on your point of view (the injury system in particular).

However, on the other hand, it's the most complete Pokemon tabletop game I've seen yet, and I can tell a lot of work was put into it. If there are any other Pokemon tabletop RPGs out there which are similarly complete but either simpler or just simply more focused and consistently coherent, I'd like to check them out.

I have grabbed players off here before, however it tends to be into existing play by post games. That said, giantitp tends to have interest and a few DM's willing to give it a shot.

Google must be customizing my results really hard or something then.

>How are the campaigns going, from a plot perspective?
I don't want to go into too much detail, even though my fellow players can probably identify me anyway, but one campaign is like a strange mixture of plot heavy and "what plot", because none of it makes sense.
The second is very focused on the plot, to a bit of a negative degree where it comes to pacing.
The last one is playing out more like a standard pokemon game.

They're all online, through roll20

Gotta say im loving some of the buffs weaker pokemon like raticate got in this system. Its hard to find a pokemon that doesnt have its uses, or at least when it comes to land based ones. Pokemon like horsea or wailord REALLY hate being on land, which is usually where most campaigns will be the majority of the time.

Yeah, water Pokemon having such a hard time on land is probably my least favorite thing about the system. The complexity isn't that bad to me, but I'm a full Pokemon autist.

I've GM'd a ton of PTU, I might as well chip in.

>What in your opinion is the most OP class?
You can't beat the supernatural classes for sheer narrative-bending capabilities and utility. Special shoutouts to Channeler on that front.

Other than that there's not any big standouts apart from Artifice researcher IMO.

>Does your group(s) use the play test packets?
Can't comment, my main games ended before they started being a thing for the most part.

>Which ones and why/why not?
I'd endorse all of them if you plan on starting a game though, possible exception for Cheerleader because the new one is shit.

>Do you approve of the changes to cheerleader, mentor, commander, and taskmaster from 1.04 to 1.05?
Cheer great (rip cheer that was worth a damn), Mentor great (earlygame changes for tutor in the packets suck though b/c 99% of ptu games die before you even get Master skill ranks), Commander bluhhhh (fuck battle conductor being a swift, fuck mobilize, fuck), Taskmaster great.

>Favorite underrated Pokemon to use in PTU and why?
Vivillon. CompoundEyes is god tier in PTU and it has a great stat spread to abuse it. Other abilities are also good.

As I also agree with Channeler being great. I took it as a side class, only grabbed the base feature and Shared Senses, and have probably used it more than Oracle. Hopefully it doesn't get nerfed to shit in the next version.

Same. I've been GMing IRL with the assistance of docs and such, and it's still abysmal to GM. My player (it's a solo campaign) has been avoiding combat in favor of roleplaying, which is nice, but I worry it's because the combat is just too much of a drag.

So right now I'm running a game at lower levels and prep is a pain, but not that bad. How bad is it to prep encounters at level 25+

Depends. Are you using the random pokemon generator?

The newest cheerleader version is fine. In 1.04, having cheerleader on the team meant your teams combat stages are never being lowered, no one gets statuses, and everyone gets some buff every single turn. The changes they made definitely nerfed it, but when its base feat is better than ace trainers critical moment, it was asking for it.

Nah, just throwing Pokemon I feel make sense for the area.

I meant for generating stats.
ptu.panda-games.net/
It makes setting up the battles a lot easier.

Huh, thats neato. Don't think I will use it much though for wild pokemon. I don't want my players to feel like they got a poke with super shitty stat spread and they are forever away from evolving.

Even if you mess with them afterwards, it's worth using as a start.
And besides, that's part of catching wild pokemon. If you want a perfectly optimized mon, start breeding.

I don't give them perfect stats, but in the case a Pokemon has special attack when it never naturally learns any I feel like thats just weird.

Is that a new thing? When I ran my game with friends I remember the rules going by a system where the player re-statted a pokemon after capture. (our game did run late 2013 into late 2014 though, so it's been a while).

Have you seen pokerole?
It's pretty much complete and uses ST system.
It doesn't focus on character classes, the Pokemon and overall feeling of that world is what the focus on the most.

Last I heard was that they made a mystery dungeon module.

After wild is caught, the player is suppose to restat it as they want (base relation allowing). As far as i know thats been in the rules for a long time.

Moves on the other hand they are stuck with until it learn more, however that happens.

I've been wanting to DM this in a fantasy setting but also keep balking at the insane math. I wish I could figure out a way to make combat stages irrelevant and make for less insane number crunching. I already know if I do this for real players aren't going to get 6 pokemon because fuck doing that six cycles an encounter.

Do you know where that is in the core book? I can't seem to find it and might be blind.

Literally in the first paragraph of the pokemon section. Page 196 in 1.05 book

Ah thanks, I wish they put it in alteast one other fucking place in the book.

Yeah. Not gonna lie, I couldnt find it for a solid 10min when checking, but i knew it was in the pokemon section.

Any cool gym battle gimmicks/teams?

Nope, we only got to two Gyms before the game got canned, one was standard 1v1 and the other was done in sets of 2v2 using two players at a time. We might have seen more gimmicks later when we were higher level, but we were just keeping things simple while we got gud regarding the system.

Gym leader: Joe Averash
Type: Normal
Gimmick: everything looks unimpressive, or is solved with pretty average puzzles.
Team: Wreck their shit with normal types.