Anyone have good experiences running pokemon tabletop games?

Anyone have good experiences running pokemon tabletop games?

Fuck of questfag

What? Pokemon has nothing to do with quests.

Pokemon Tabletop United is a hell of a drug.

...

use a rules lite system or freeform rp, look into converting DtD or some such
actual pokemon intended systems like pta and ptu are burning trash heaps that progress at a glacial pace due to the devs directly converting all the math your Gameboy computed in microseconds to the tabletop for humans to do 12 times a turn every round

Yeesh looks pretty fucking nightmarish when it comes to mechanics.
I think you have the right of it.

I once played a pokemon tabletop game where the GM introduced guns.

And then all we did was shoot members of Team Rocket before they could actually throw their pokeballs. It was really fucking stupid.

My rule was that if your Pokémon is out and available, they will get in the way of whatever will do you harm

Pokerole any better? Seems to have a hell of a lot less book keeping and maths.

never tried it, ptu/pta traumatized me from the thought of any more pokemon tabletops

I've had plenty of fun with PTU, but only use it if you're good at the kind of bookkeeping it uses.

Pokethulhu is nice and lightweight, but still has fairly solid battle mechanics.

Obviously the theme might not be your cup of tea, but it's not really tied to the mechanics: just rename stuff and you're good.

Isn't there a google spreadsheet doc floating around that someone made that does most of the math for you, you need need to plug in the numbers?

At that point, why not just use an online pokemon battle simulator instead?

Because then you can't play special snowflake trainers that are psychics and can throw fireballs.

Not only have the devs said "no fuck off that doesn't work", even if they did it's no different than D&D charops fags and their bullshit. Nice strawman bro.


Yes the game is complex. Yes there's a lot of bookkeeping. Yes the game is going to be glacial if no one knows what any of their abilities do, but that's true of any RPG as well.
If your players understand their sheet, a combat action should take 10 seconds to decide, 5 seconds to roll, and 10 seconds tops to calculate damage. Bang, done.

I saw Poke no Tabi the other day which is a homebrew of Ryuutama that looked pretty interesting.

>game is so badly written raw that the devs need to constantly use word of God to make minor corrections, and still haven't made a directory of all their corrections
sounds like ptu alright, lemme know when they write in the book that Bounce Cases and Bounce Shot don't synchronize despite it making perfect sense and allowed in the rules as written

I like it better than the rest, but some people don't like it because it relies a lot on storyteller's discretion, so if you have a bad GM it probably won't be as good.
But it is open to many forms of play, from the regular " Traveling from town to town getting badges" to complete different settings and PMD.

Anyone tried used Pokemon as monsters? I feel there's a lot of potential there.

did you know that Dragon Ace's, a Type Ace that exclusively uses Dragons, is only mildly and barely effective against other Dragon Types
meanwhile other Type Aces like Flying Ace let you attack 3 times a turn, which is very similar to being able to action surge multiple times in 5e because action economy murders everything in ptu
did you know that Warper is a popularly banned class despite not being very combat capable because being able to teleport 4 meters every 10 seconds is seen as having too much agency because PTU GMs have all their puzzles ruined by it
did you know that you can be a max level 50 trainer who's capable of leaping 12 meters in the air and knocking out charizards but if you didn't invest any of your skill edges into athletics, you're incapable of moving any faster than 4 or 5 meters every 10 seconds
take note that there are 17 Skills in the game and you only get 28 Edges to rank them up with, those rankings starting from 1 to 8, with 2 being the average level
and those 28 Edges are also competing for non-skillup uses from other areas such as extra Moves or Capabilities
did you know one of ptu's skills is Focus, which is used for absolutely nothing but keeping mindrapists out of your head
however you have such a limited supply of skill edges that you can never afford to place enough skill edges in Focus to give you a fighting chance against mindrapists
coincidentally, mindraping also uses Focus to do it good
and mindrapists will max out their Focus to make sure they do it good
so since you can't afford maxing it out unless you're a mindrapist, you'll never be able to defend against the mindrapists
did you know ptu calculates damage exactly as according to the games
the games which use computers to compute said algorithms and math in mere microseconds
the tabletop game expects players to computations of 2d8+10+20, subtracting the target's spdef and then dividing by 2 to account for resistance every attack every turn every round nonstop every combat

>pokemon as monsters
>pokemon
>as monsters
>pocket monsters as monsters
Gosh you are retarded...

I played pokérole with a couple friends for a few months, did a lot of house-ruling with regards to learning moves and leveling up, and how defenses and HP were calculated but it was pretty functional. I felt, however, that pokémon didn't really suit a tabletop format since each player has 7 characters with varied levels within the party, you can easily get torn between "well it works like this in the video game" vs "it'd be cool if you could do it like this instead". One on one battles are kind of pushed by the setting (especially like, gym leader battles) so players will sit on the sidelines whilst one person challenges a gym leader.

We eventually decided to do a different monster taming game (where each player has a single monster partner) using mutants and masterminds

Also, I forgot to mention I had to set up numerous spreadsheets to help make statting up pokémon and referencing moves, abilities etc. quicker.

>not using Mystery Dungeon as a base
The only problems would be the massive amount of starters (21 with just the Fire/Water/Grass starters from the main games) and switching out for other species, but at least you won't be using all of them simultaneously.

They've been working on streamlining the rules for 2.0, though who knows when that's gonna come out.

This is actually a good idea. I think a lightweight system that focuses on simple generation of monsters rather than books and books of tables for the hundreds of pokes might solve a lot of the problems

>Pokemon as D&D encounters

I should do that. Have a Bulbasaur show up and beg the party for food.

I ran a pretty fun game of PTU, there's a lot of mechanics to be sure, but we handled that just by setting aside ten minuets at the beginning or end of the session to handle all the "paperwork" of leveling up or stating out newly captured pokemon, after that the game went surprisingly smooth, everything the players needed was right there on their sheet to the point that when the players had training battles amongst themselves I didn't need to anything, except occasionally look up a what a status effect that hadn't been used much yet did.


The most important thing I'd say is to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to tone and genre stuff. Of course that's true of any game, but seems more so with Pokemon because there's a lot of stuff that common sense dictates should be exploitable, such as throwing out a bunch of pokemon at once and telling them to "just attack" when not in an official match, but just "isn't done" in the source material.

Another thing is figuring out how the League is going to work in your game if you're going to do the standard "I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was" plot. You probably don't want to spend all session with the whole party just taking turns fighting Brock for the boulder badge after all. Related to that is having different goals in the group, kind of like how in the anime for a while they'd have Ash going for the Gym Badges, and May or Dawn focusing more on the Pokemon Contest Ribbons. That's assuming you're doing it in a sandboxy style game of course, you can always do it more structured "You're all members of Team Rocket/Pokemon Rangers/Whatever, go do missions for your boss"