Pokemon Tabletop United/Adventures

Anyone here ever play PTA/PTU?
Thoughts?

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ptu.panda-games.net/
pokeroleproject.wixsite.com/pokerole
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No, the system looks overly complex.

PTU is everything wrong with D&D game design, from the d20 to the useless classes, bloat, trap options, and hyperconvoluted game design. It's everything that's wrong with homebrews, because it tries to make d20 do what it shouldn't be anywhere near, has serious bloat issues, tries to emulate the games instead of being inspired by them, and the worst part of all of this is that PTU is a marked improvement over PTA.

Fuck PTU.

I've tried it once, but while it looks nice on paper, in practice the whole thing slows to a crawl the moment combat starts.

Eh I've had some fun games with it

Whole hell of a lot of bookkeeping

Neat classes, don't exactly deliver though

Trainers are expected to fight with poke but they're super weak and squishy

I like a lot of the ideas truthbetold. Biggest problem is that there are inevitably autistic fucks in it. The guy talking about system bloat really isn't wrong desu. PbP seems to help it flow better. A lot of the intuitive things you can do with your pokemon are op and make it a whole lot less immersive.

All in all, not worth it. I pick my systems based on the quality of the players now desu.

I like the amount of options but boy is it slow, even on roll20. Like
mentioned bloat and useless options are a problem.
It is functional but has too many problems that make it really unejoyable for me. Wish there were good alternatives for PMD type games

Dodge the system. You have to make so much condensations and ridiculous limits such no bloating classes, limit amount of Pokemon trainers have, and limit yourself as a DM to playing wild Pokemon encounters exclusively.

Rivals/Gym Leaders/Team Rocket Clones? Forget it. You'll be spending 15 minutes attempting to resolve one turn because of how much bloated features they stuff into one singular move.

Its filled with so much bad design that you're better off trying some generic system for Pokemon rather than trying to figure out if you should spent 2 hours on one round.

Nicest thing could be said about it is it's generated quality fiction

PTA is super complex. PTU is actually pretty straight forward. My friends and I have three campaigns going.

Completely misses the fucking mark in every possible way. Up to and including barely even being a fucking pokemon game.

A simple game ended up requiring several spreadsheets just for a simple gimmicky trainer battle. Despite its flaws, I much prefer Pokerole for these types of games now.

>check out Pokerole
>hideous Wix website that requires Javascript
>secured PDF
Seriously?

It's pretty gay, and the people behind it are clearly ESL, but it's an improvement over PTU. It goes for the anime, rather than the games. I wouldn't mind running or playing a game of it, but that requires players and such.

>Anyone here ever play PTA/PTU?
Yes and yes.

>Thoughts?
If you're going to run a campaign of Pokemon using either of those systems, the smartest thing to do is to just fudge the rules, because both games are practically unplayable as written.

Alternatively, take five sheets of A4 paper and write down your own rules for your own Pokemon game. If you can't get it done in ten pages (using the front and back of five pages) then your game is too fucking bloated like theirs. Stick to Generation I and once you've got that down you can start expanding.

I feel like PTU was made for online campaign systems like Maptools or Roll20, where you have a machine doing all the math for you, because nobody would actually want to do all that math by hand. I imagine in this context it's actually OK if not great simply because the sheer amount of work you have to do to play is all front-loaded rather than integrated into the game.

It's still not great for all the reasons said, especially the massive bloat issues and trap options.

Even with computer assistance PTU runs slow as molasses. Sure you can automate the math, but you still gotta plug in the variables which wastes time, not to mention the huge logistical drag that is every player and enemy is a fucking swarmlord druid.

Another thing about PTU is how statuses stack. When I played there were a few times when we'd forget a pokemon was supposed to die two turns ago because of everything you need to keep track of during a battle. It could be a cool game and I like a lot of the ideas like underdog training or being a martial artist and punching pokemon in the face, though. I hope PTU 2.0 is better.

my GM has a homebrew which works on a similar principle, the pokemon stats are generated based on level in an app, meaning you can just generate wild pokemon on the fly and transport them to the players version of the app if the player catches them. shame he never finished it.

>I hope PTU 2.0 is better

With the same developers and the retarded ideas they have discussed on their forums, I do not have any hopes left for 2.0

I don't really browse the forums, I just saw that 2.0 is in the works. What retarded ideas have they been discussing?

A lot of stuff, I haven't checked in a few weeks but las time I saw they wanted to make a cap max level at 25, their logic is that players would rather level up 1 level with four meaningful boosts to stats, features etc. Instead of 4 levels with one minimal boost.

I mean, I get the logic behing that, but how does one thing oppose the other? both can be done and still keep the "Level 100" thing from pokemon, just lower the experience curve so it gets easier to level up.

They also argue that they cannot get rid of all the math due to pokemon videogames having a lot of it and that they have no fucking idea on how to streamline their catch system.

Their crippling flaw is trying to translate game mechanics into TTRPG mechanics as closely as possible, which results in bloated rules, requires extensive databases to do anything, and is overall terrible.
If you're insistent on resolving battles as you would in-game, just use Pokémon Showdown for combat, and a generic system for everything else.

Otherwise, you need to come up with a modular, generic system for Pokémon creation—where, for example, you just have a few different basic types of attack (energy, blunt, slashing, etc.), which are combined with a Type, and are then slowly improved through a point-buy feature as the Pokémon gains experience. For example, you could spend 4xp to make the attack +1 stronger, or 5xp for a +10% chance of inflicting some kind of status.
That way, you don't need to come up with stats for fucking everything, and can just fluff these generic moves however you want.

>just use Pokémon Showdown for combat

That actually sounds like a cool idea but I'm not sure how well it would work. Have you done it before?

Nah. A big problem is that Showdown doesn't support multibattles, nor—correct me if I'm wrong—Triples. The GM would have to have multiple tabs open during an encounter, where he battles each player separately—which is manageable, but awkward, and doesn't allow for any kind of teamwork between the players.

If you're still here, which app is that? I'm currently GMing a PTU game and we're all struggling with stat distribution (among other things) . If I could use any tool to streamline this stuff, I would.

its not for PTU sadly, hes made it for his on system based on the in game stats and made the app himself. i hoped to make a TG thread about the system, see if people were interested but hes been working on the app for years and its still very basic.

Not that you have to use the book's setting, but didn't they turn a bunch of legendaries into shapeshifting lolis or something?

Damn. I've been trying to find a good stat calculator (that's not for pkmngo), and it's been difficult, to say the least. I would be interested in what your friend has mostly because I've been toying with ideas of my own and would like to compare notes.

What? There's the Blessed and the Damned supplement, which is fanfiction tier writing, that takes the basic premise of legendary Pokemon as Gods and goes from there. Personally, I think it's pretty dumb. There are legends that can shapeshift, but I didn't think they gave that ability to all of them.

...

I think it was the Uxie trio that had that as their fluff for human appearances. Most of the legendaries had a shows up as something tangentially related to their looks, like the dragons from Black and White would show up as men dressed in black or white, or the seasonal guardians would show up as knights. The exceptions were Regigas(only ever showed up as Regigas, because fuck humans), and Missingo( an Eldritch horror from beyond all things, like Cthulhu). Also, all the legendaries had special feats you could get if you worshipped them, even Missingo.

The problem I had with both games, having tried to GM PTA, and playing in a PTU is that by their nature, encounters needed to be large, and you needed to preplan everything. What I wound up doing was using the default ability for every wild pokemon, and base stats +level until they were captured. Once captured it was determining their actual ability and nature. Trainers were always set up like other players though. My players got mad when I used the rival team, because they were specifically set up to stop each of them, and they forgot the easiest way to deal with that is to switch.

I don't think encounters need to be large, I've found that short, quick encounters can keep the pace well, but I do agree on planning. Like, right now I'm starting the Kimono Girls and their Eevee evolutions because I offhandedly mentioned they exist. So 8 trainers (I'm making it easy on myself and just giving them the relevant Type Ace features), 8 lvl 50 Pokemon, and writing everything down so I don't have to scroll through the pdf. It's not hard, just so time consuming it feels like a chore.

GM is trying for the Final game tonight of our 3 year campaign

10 fucking players means i wont get a turn for a least a hour

>10 players
And I thought I was crazy with 5. Dude, why?

It's good.

I'm friends with part of the design team(no way of verifying, so you'll have to take me at my word here), and have been in a couple sessions with them, it was indeed designed specifically for MapTool, with Roll20 as a last resort, and macros handling literally everything.

When you have a solid grasp of the system, it's not too slow. Grasping it in the first place can be a problem though, there's definitely a barrier to entry.

You'd be surprised how fast it can go with macros and good player knowledge moving things along, but it's definitely slower than other systems I've used.

Tell them they should make a companion app with character sheets and macros and all that fun stuff. I would literally throw money at them.

Like I said when you made a thread about this on /vp/ (assuming it's you and not someone else with the same OP image), I really enjoy PTU, but the system was really hard on my GM. Balance is wonky and there's a lot of bloat.
Also the Oracle's Unveiled Sight feature is fucking useless, to go over a pet peeve. By RAW it only works on Zorua/Zoroark and a trainer with the Ninja class. The only way it would get any use is if the GM deliberately creates an encounter meant to be solved by a player using that ability, or to give to an NPC explicitly to counter a PC with a Zorua/Zoroark or the Ninja class. This only bugs me because it's a prereq for the Oracle's best feat, and I really hate the concept of useless feats existing just as a tax for better ones later.

>10 players
Fucking why?

I still maintain that the best systems for Pokemon are Fate and BESM with the Cute and Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters splat.

I dont know. Been playing 3.5 hours. had only 2 turns so far

Heck, a lot of the looser Point-buys are good. I've been eyeballing M&M myself.

...godspeed, you crazy bastard.

PTA is the d20 system, PTU is d6 dice pools like system

>PTU
>Ten Players

For what purpose

PTU can be fun, I didn't like PTA because it was d20 and I've stopping having a lot of fun with d20 systems. There's a lot of bookkeeping on the GMs part, and there are several classes that are useless, it's not perfect. But nonetheless it's a system that can be fun. Especially if the GM puts in combat encounters that also have trainer combat, with limits on the number of pokemon on the field.

The GM wanted to run two parties not realizing that at the end he wanted both parties to meet for a grand final

>5 players per party

Thats still fucking rediculous for PTU. When I ran games, I maxed out at 3 because more than that gets unbearable.

Still uses d20 for accuracy rolls, which i hate since getting evasion is piss easy compared to accuracy

What makes a pokemon game (or any monster collection game/monster companion game) for you? Is it the monsters, exploring an unknown world's ecology, creative and unique ways of using your monster's powers, what?

Definitely the feeling of being on a childhood adventure. Lots of wilderness and exploring.

ptu.panda-games.net/
This has some nice tools for random pokemon generation and stat math.

Why is this allowed?

Pretty terrible experience. Too much shit to keep track of, too much having to correct the players and constantly having to start up battles and keep track of all their crap because they'd rather roll around in the grass than to deal with trainers and other situations.

Have any advice or guides on making wilderness and exploring interesting?

I haven't played PokeRole but it seems like the actually reasonable choice amoung the three.

pokeroleproject.wixsite.com/pokerole

Anybody have experience with it?

I don't have any experience with it, but it looks better than any other pokemon system out there.

That's not saying much considering the competition.

Game ended after 6 hours and 40 mins. We STILL havent reached the final BBEG. We got through 1 encounter and 1 room. Oh well maybe next weekend

>Game ended after 6 hours and 40 mins. We STILL havent reached the final BBEG. We got through 1 encounter and 1 room.
Yeah that's just how all games of PTU go.

Why people keep falling for this shitstain meme of a game I have no idea.

Design the entire system aruond it.

While we're talking about running Pokemon in general, what would be the ideal way to handle pokemon teams regardless of system? How many pokemon should a player have on their person at a time? How interactive should they be/does the GM npc them or the player? How do you maintain the battle structure when there's no law of the universe that says a player can't send out their full team to take on one wild pokemon?

That's the sort of question that has made the idea of running a pokemon game hard, for me.

I think there are a few ways to tackle the problems. One is arbitrary and "for the sake of the game," where you just limit people to, say, three pokemon. I feel like that's a good number and people won't have disagreements with it. Three players, each with three pokemon, is nine total NPCs you have to worry about at all times, which can quickly become tiresome, much less six pokes for three PCs.

The good thing about pokemon is that they don't have to be complex actors. The 25 natures let you easily roleplay them. The problem is how many are active at a time. Speaking of many being active, this is how I will run my game, or at least it's an idea for it: The player gets to control their pokemon as long as their character is taking the time to lead them during battle, giving orders and support. If a player joins the battle, then the pokemon is on autopilot and does what it thinks is best (should be simple, again - natures come in handy here). Commanding multiple pokemon gives a penalty to your trainer skill, and giving orders to more than three in a turn is just impossible unless you give a generic one, like "everyone defend."

I would give up on the battle structure outside of trainer battles. However, I would penalize trainer skill rolls to befriend new pokemon if they're ganged up on, because it's less about displaying your worth as a trainer at that point and more about being a bully.

bump

As a GM who has run and played multiple games in each system, PTA is trash and is missing about half the rules needed to run a Pokemon game. PTU can be a fun system if your players have good memories and you use Maptool.

PTU suffers less from system bloat and more from level bloat. The amount of Classes isn't much of a problem, since everyone is going to have 2-4; this isn't DND where multiclassing is some big endeavor. It's required here past the early levels, and that many Classes is a sort of necessary evil so as to keep everyone feeling unique.

However, at those higher levels, it can be a major pain to remember just what all your character is capable of, and some people might have those problems earlier on. But, if you can handle a spellcasting/gish class in DND, you can probably handle a PTU character. As a GM, though, it's practically impossible to keep combat both interesting and quick, because anything with trainer levels is hell to keep track of without having played them as a character for many sessions, as a player would have. God forbid you have multiple Trainers as enemies. Literally(here meaning literally) every single combat I ever ran that featured a Trainer, I forgot about SOMETHING. Be it bonus damage, or something like Protect, or an Ability, or a triggered Feature, something inevitably slipped my mind because there was so much shit to keep track of at once.

If by some grace of god you CAN keep track of everything, you have one of the most anime tabletop systems of all time. There's always so much going on, there are so many unique effects, so many 'reaction'-type Moves and Features and so much acting out of turn that combat is always a hectic shitshow. Personally, I find that sort of style fun, but it just doesn't work that well here because of how slow combat ends up being.

All that said, the devs are currently working on a PTU 2.0 which aims to cut down on feature bloat and levels in general, so we'll see how that goes.

At least you're making progress. How did your players go about doing things in your game and get pokemon?

I have some experience with it, after years of failed campaigns of PTU my group finally agreed to try pokerole.
Now we have been playing it for three months and I have to say that it is definitely simpler and easier to run.
Battles can take some time, specially for larger parties as the level starts to increase and more actions are being done by the pokemon, it took me a while to get multiple actions but for now it runs smoothly if only a little slower than I would like.
I have four players with 3-4 pokemon each, they are not all out at the same time since the system discourages it, but you have to create your enemies considering they have other pokemon as back up or else the battle can be too easy.

Advantages
>Gives a lot of room for trainer/pokemon interaction even to the point of being able to quite effectively have human vs Pokemon combat, something that takes extra work for Pokérole.
>Traits avoids the issues of the games such as a bird not knowing how to fly or lapras not being able to give you a lift because it doesn't know a move.
>Detailed Pokédex means you don't have to guess anything about a pokémon

Disadvantages:
>Crunchier that a burnt nacho
>Each player could conceiveably have 7 character sheets they need to maintain at any one time, not including pokémon in storage
>Character creation takes years

Im a PC, not the GM.
The GM made a alternative world where Team Rocket took over the world and we were resistance fighters. No one was allowed to train or capture pokemon so we as PCs had to learn in secret with the resistance.

Through our travels we learned to how to interact with pokemon. My character(s) had a full team of 6 and a team of 4 respectively. Overall its been a fun experience when it was only our party doing stuff and not a joint game

So what do you do in Pokemon tabletop games, anyways? I watched the anime and played Red many years ago, and it was mostly 'go from one gym to another, meet and capture pokemon on the way.' People mentioned wilderness stuff, do your players kit out for a month-long expedition to some mountain to capture rare Pokemon? What's the average campaign/adventure focused on?

Why do you want human vs Poke fights? Ash never beat the shit out of some Weedles. Gary might've, though.

Hey anons, I'm working on a Pokemon tabletop game and I'm wondering what advice you could lend for making unique trainer classes without repeating the issues PTU has.

I ran a pokemon campaign recently using a homebrew system. My setting was literally Vietnam, before the war broke out, being pulled into a fight between a few USA officials, and proto-Viet Kong.

I mostly structured sessions around certain mini-adventures, travelling between cities, catching a mon, battling for a gym badge, exploring a destroyed pokeball factory, battling Team Kong officials, and following character development related quests.

The last session I was able to run before having to back down from GMing due to outer concerns was essentially walking into a deep rooted life or death battle between two expert trap makers, a Kong pyschopath, and one of the PCs' father. Lots of pungi pits, swinging death ball traps, and a rat nest, with a bunch of dangerous pokemon attacking them with hit n run tactics.

No, but Ash does tend to punch powerful legendaries on a fairly regular basis, though. Or tries to, at least.

That's one way of getting around players scrambling around in the grass while talking about how 'pokemon they really want that would make things tedious at this point of the game' should be around the first route.

What were the player characters? Why were they getting pulled into this fight and not nopeing the fuck out to do pokestuff?

>gym badge
And why this, if they are getting into the Vietnam War? Why were they going for basically a sports trophy?

I'm running a "medieval fantasy" styled PTU game, basically what the Game of Throhs splat is for. This is my first time ever GMing anything, so it's a learning process. I'm only 2 sessions in, with the first one being 'session 0 character creation'.

I'm going for a simple JRPG aesthetic, Dungeon Crawling, Job Boards, etc. With Pokemon replacing the generic monsters and animals of the world. Limited the number of Pokemon per player to 3 on hand, 3 in storage, and only one in combat at a time. That way players aren't tempted to catch fucking everything, and focus more on interacting with the Pokemon they have and the world.

It's 3 Players. With all the characters being combat characters, and each having a Pokemon out it comes to 6 total 'PCs' in combat which is my absolute max. I'm using the Excel generator to randomly generate encounters within certain parameters, and various procedurally generated dungeon maps as well. It takes a huge load off my back, only having to stat up Boss encounters or special encounters. This makes improvising easy and quick for on the fly encounters.

We did several playtest sessions to learn the mechanics, and with everyone having cheat sheets for their moves everything is going pretty smoothly. We had a Boss fight wrap up in around 45 minutes, with 2 of the players still learning what they were doing. I imagine it will get even better when everyone is familiar with their own shit.

One of the players ordered some Pokemon minis to use this coming session.

Village kids. Main reason is many of the PCs had familial connections involved personally. Pokemon is a war economy. Gym Leaders in games are the closest thing to mayors, Champions have a lot of pull politically on top of everything else. Badges are a sign of mastery and have a lot of perks.

More importantly I'm balancing familiar territory with badges, pokemon professors, a sleep Snorlax that has to be woken and battled, an evil team, and dozens of other iconic things from the games with personal character arcs and a gritty setting.

That sounds like exactly the type of game I've always wanted to run or play in a Pokemon setting.

>That way players aren't tempted to catch fucking everything, and focus more on interacting with the Pokemon they have and the world.
They didn't complain about that at all? You lucked out.

>Not playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
Top sad, fampies. There's so much you can do with that stuff.

Is there a passable tabletop system for it?

I wanted to, but was immediately called out for being a furry when I suggested it.
Seems like it'd actually sort a fair amount of PTA/PTU's issues, if you go with the "used to be a human" storyline to explain why you can have trainer classes, then ditch capture systems, & refluff/remove some of the features.

Pokerole is good for PMD, it has a fun random dungeon system and fast character creation.

Pokerole's main issue is that the stats are too streamlined, causing certain Pokemon to be weird.

Why is Blissey less durable than a Magnemite for example?

Also size bonuses for HP are fucking retarded.

My average battle took about 20-30 minutes.

I've had some pretty good success with PTU, although since I'm terrible at handling NPC's in general I more or less created a setting to justify having none. Three of my four players know nothing of the system and are learning quickly, the last is a dev and helping us all when we forget shit. Combat has gotten pretty good, to where it's about 35 minutes per round for 4 players, 4 mons, and anywhere from 1-4 wilds. What's helped the most, I think, is that I've gotten my players to write down everything they can do in combat on flash cards, and refer to them instead of tabbing back and forth between discord and 3 books and whatever else they're doing.

Blissey's softboiled is automatic so it can cure itself For as long as its will points last, that means it can technically have 30 HP extra

According to where?

No accuracy roll, you just roll to see how much you heal and that can be up to 3HP per round, Moves that heal HP make you spend a Will point and pokemon can have up to 10 Will points, so that can be up to 30HP extra for Blissey.

That's cool and all. But it still will get blasted down with only 2 vitality.

Not much different from the video game...

What is peoples obsession with converting everything to d20 when other systems would be way better for the IP in question?

Pokerole is entirely d6, and PTU is d6 with a dash of d20

Oh you mean the Pokemon with the highest HP and good special defense?

The point of a tabletop is not to fall into the same traps of the videogame where you use a pokemon only by its competitive viability, but because you like it and it is your f ourite, besides there are many roles to fit into a party and Chansey and Blissey have always been seen as nurse pokemon in the anime, not as special walls like in the videogame.

Favorite*
Dang mobile

I mean the devs certainly played favorites when they were making stats for some Pokemon.

Also it just doesn't make sense when the Pokemon with the highest HP in the game has the same max HP as a Pokemon in the bottom 10 lowest.

I have seen some conversions for HP posted around for to set the stats closer to the video game, personally I have no problem, when I started playing I feared everyone would pick the biggest and strongest mons in the book but all of my players settled for pokemon they liked on the games but couldn't use regularly because they are NU and UU.

>can't use because NU or UU
Use them in those tiers.

But for the most part Pokerole fixed its biggest problems with 1.2 which I'm glad to see. I hope PTU's 2.0 does enough to fix trainers, since I'm glad the devs added tons of abilities to make trash pokemon better.

Bump

I want to do it, honestly, and my group's down for it, but I'm too lazy to gather the materials for it.
I planned on just saying the Pokémon in PMD are much more intelligent than normal, feral Pokémon (and that would be a plot point to the campaign) and can have skill proficiencies like classes that way.