[Discussion] What would you do in a tabletop Pokemon game?

[jbarron81]

Hi I'm new here. My friends and I are trying to make a Pokemon style tabletop RPG. We made our own system. We had tried using generic systems like Big Eyes Small Mouth and GURPS, but we didn't feel that it was Pokemontastic as it could be. We've been playtesting it for a while now, and we're even going to try and put the system on kickstarter in 2015.

So my question to everyone is, what would you want to be able to do in a Pokemon type RPG?

 

[TBM_Christopher]

Firstly, not to discourage you or anything, but I am going to recommend you don't bother with Kickstarter. You're not going to be able to legally publish it. No ambiguity there; you can't profit off of an IP such as Pokemon without getting into HUGE legal trouble.

That said, it's a fun project, and one I have put a lot of thought into. The big trick is that you'd want two categories of abilities: The ones your character can do and the ones your Pokemon can do. The former is very easy to define, as you can have different categories for skills suck as athleticism, knowledge of various topics(Pokemon biology, physics, geography, etc.). The latter is much tougher, and you could write volumes of information and still not have a working system. I'd honestly look into making a "spell list" much like D&D's and then treating them much like a Pokemon's moves. (For instance, instead of a bunch of combat moves like Razor Leaf, some moves more like Plant Growth which would be primarily for their field effects)

 

[jbarron81]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention we're making our own original IP. We talked to some lawyers and they feel confident that as long as we're not using Pokemon characters or blatent rip off characters of Pokemon we should be fine.

We have definitely played around with monster abilities vs trainer abilities. Our first draft we went way overboard and each trainer had a ton of skills you could use out of combat. We found the majority you never really used, so we culled the list a little.

The world we're building is more of a fantasy setting and the monsters are much more scary then Pokemon. The whole reason people started catching monsters is that human weapons seem to have no effect on the monsters anymore.