Pokemon Tabletop United

[KujiUn]

Hey everyone! Pokémon Tabletop United is our homebrew tabletop RPG system for games in the world of Pokémon. It’s designed for playing a variety of different Pokémon campaigns, ranging from a straightforward Pokémon League Gym romp to more exotic settings such as Pokémon Wild West. Our primary inspiration is the Pokémon Special manga, so you can expect a system that caters to a more dangerous Pokémon adventure.

What kind of system is it? PTU is a high crunch, class-based system. Unlike other class-based systems, however, Trainers are expected to take multiple classes and not stick to just one. Examples of the Trainer Classes available in the system are Hatcher, Ace Trainer, and Coordinator, reflecting different specializations and jobs within the Pokémon world.

The included zip file contains:
The Pokemon Tabletop United 1.04 Player Handbook
A Pokedex including Pokemon up to Generation 6.
Two setting Splatbooks for running Sci-fi and Fantasy Campaigns
A Splatbook for handling Legendary Pokémon
Printable Character Sheets for Trainers and Pokemon
A Useful Charts PDF for quick reference during games.

We have an IRC channel on the Rizon network at #PokemonTabletop where we hang out and do most of our discussions about developing the system. Feel free to pop in and ask any questions you might have about the system!

You may also want to visit our forums at http://forums.pokemontabletop.com/index/ where there’s an active community, including play by post games and many community members who create homebrew for the system.

Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ss8xoof408j8swj/PTU+1.04.zip

[Thomar_of_Uointer]

Nice job on the analysis of settings. I'm glad to see that you've considered games that work with plots besides "go fight all eight gym leaders and a gand of criminals", and you've gotten quite creative with it.

[Milo v3]

Nice job on the analysis of settings. I'm glad to see that you've considered games that work with plots besides "go fight all eight gym leaders and a gand of criminals", and you've gotten quite creative with it.

TBH, I think I've only even been in a game that was like that. :smalltongue:

Also, that was a wonderful update. Still haven't found any faults aside from a typo here and there :smallsmile:

[drew2u]

Can you give just a brief rundown of how you came to the conclusion to design the stats the way you are doing them, followed by the same design-theory behind the capabilities?

[castfromhp]

It's a bit hard to fully explain in a really short manner, but I'll try to give the general idea. It's very hard to give stats to 700+ Pokémon at once without drawing heavily from some established basis for them. It's simply too much work to try to figure out stats from scratch for so many of them, and the project never would've gotten off the ground if we had done that. Therefore, we had to use what was the greatest set of information available to us, which was the Pokémon combat stats.

The thing about the combat stats though is they don't translate well at all to ideas like "strength" or "intelligence". They also convey particular ideas like special attack and special defense which don't have equivalences in more traditional attributes and skills. So for example, a Weavile or Qwilfish has a really high Attack stat, but that doesn't mean they'll be capable of lifting much. They're just very good at hurting things due to other aspects of their physiology. Onix, on the other hand, has abysmal Attack, but it really should be capable of lifting a lot of weight given its size. And when you have Pokémon that are particularly characterized by having high Special Defense, there's not really a way to represent that well aside from creating a large class of attacks and saying they are tougher against them...at which point we are just using the Pokémon Attack/Special Attack and Defense/Special Defense split anyway.

Given all this, the easiest route was to separate combat stats on a level of abstraction away from things like Skills and Capabilities. Capabilities like Power are largely there to make it easier to deal with the wide range of Pokémon body types/sizes when it comes to determining what they do. A lot of systems would be using formulas to derive values like movement speed, lifting strength etc. That works well enough for Trainers, but it's hard to come up with a set of formulas that works for both a Pachirisu and a Steelix at the same time. At least not without having a ton of variables relating to size, material the Pokémon is made of, etc that would make it a real pain to do.

So what we did instead was simply assign these values for Pokémon. Admittedly, this means a lot of the Capabilities are somewhat arbitrary, because there are so many Pokémon to make them for. But that's why we decided we needed to ground our work in other places in something well established, and more importantly, well recognized by the fans, in the Pokémon franchise, hence the use of combat stats.

Sorry, this didn't turn out brief at all. It's a complicated subject, and it's something that might be better being explained over IRC at our listed channel.

[drew2u]

No, it all makes sense. Regarding Capabilities, at a certain point they become essentially analogous to Special Qualities: that which defines one d20 creature from another.

[Qwertystop]

Didn't it used to be Pokemon Tabletop Adventures? Something with an A, anyway. Or is that a different system on similar ideas?

[KujiUn]

Pokemon Tabletop United is actually a spin-off of Pokemon Tabletop Adventures, created by former PTA devs.