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For starters, this is not a single player computer game. It is a table top story telling game, akin to dungeons and dragons. In pokemon conquest you take up the mantle of a character from a fictionalized conglomeration of Edo period and Sengoku period Japan and the Pokemon world, and battle along side your partner for wealth, fame, and honor.
A tabletop RPG is a game where a number of players (generally between two and six) explore a world that is created according to regulations set by the book by the game master. Fighting the monsters and overcoming the obstacles that the game master puts in it to complete quests and accomplish goals.
The plot of this game, like all story telling games, is generated by the game master for the players to play through.
Features:
- 5 character classes to choose from (samurai, monk, ninja, performer, and merchant) when building your character
- Compatibility with all 649 Pokemon and incredible freedom in choosing how and what to train them.
- Combat style and world interaction reminiscent of the Pokemon anime
- Innovative combat mechanics which keep the game moving quickly and support a variety of different play styles, while borrowing from the Pokemon video games and anime.
- Skill system which fosters exciting and interesting ways to overcome challenges while not getting bogged down with numbers on the Game Master's side of things.
- Easy to play with just paper, pencils, a Pokedex, some friends, and a twenty sided dice.
- Compelling world and cosmology based off of Edo and Sengoku Japan.
- Potentially infinite gameplay time without running into the same content, because the content is generated by the people playing it.
- A full dungeon mastering section explaining the ins and outs of developing a story.
More Page Pictures:
Spoiler:
Additional Technical Information
The Combat system:
Spoiler:
Major differences from DnD:
- No attack rolls. Everything hits if it targets the right space
- People move about 1/2 the distance they otherwise would.
- People have to plan out their actions at the beginning of the round, and then play them out when their turn comes up in the round order.
- Saving throws are replaced by effect rolls. Explained below.
Players have six combat stats:
- blood and guard (like hp)
- melee damage and ranged damage (self explanatory)
- cunning (for effect rolls, see below)
- reflexes (for initiative order. Initiative order is way more important here than in dnd)
Writing Actions In Advance
- Combat is segregated into rounds. At the beginning of each round everyone secretly writes down what they want their piece (or pieces in the case of the GM) to do when their turn comes up. (/turns in the case of the GM).
- They write down where they want the piece to move, what toggles they want to turn on or off (see below), and what action they want it to take when they get there. Actions are like standard actions, and are usually used to make a melee or ranged attack.
- When making a melee attack, you don't need to pick the direction and may choose the direction when your turn comes up in the round. When making a ranged attack, you must choose the direction and how far away from yourself you wish to target.
- The players may collaborate with one another on what they will do if they like.
Action Order & Attacks
- When the round begins, each game piece precedes to take its turn in order of lowest reflex highest reflex.
- If, durring the course of the round, a piece leaves a space adjacent to another piece, the other piece gets a free attack (opportunity attack) against the piece that is leaving. They may take one of these per round.
- When a person is hit with a melee attack, the damage that it does (determined by the attacker's melee damage stat) , is deducted from their target's guard until they have no remaining guard, and is then deducted from their blood.
- When a person is hit with a ranged attack, the damage bypasses their target's guard entirely and is deducted from the target's blood. (NOTE: In this way ranged attacks essentially deal twice the damage of melee attacks. The tradeoff for this is their lack of access to opportunity attacks and their greater likelihood of missing because of having to plan their target before they move)
Combat Abilities
- Players get three kinds of combat abilities as they level up: toggles, options, and intrinsics.
- A toggle basically modifies a melee or ranged attack, usually by increasing its damage for some detriment, or decreasing its damage for some other advantage. Often this advantage involves making an effect roll to give your enemy a status condition. You can only have one toggle on at a time, and some toggles lock you into using them for a number of rounds when you turn them on.
- An option is something you can do with your action other than attack.
- An intrinsic is something like "when you are poisoned, your attacks deal more damage" or "when you are hit with a melee attack, the enemy that damaged you takes 1/5th of the damage it dealt to you".
Effect Rolls
- When you are asked to make an effect roll, there is a target number that you have to hit when rolling a D20 which is set by the thing asking you to do it. For example, a toggle might tell you to make an effect roll, and on a 15 or higher you burn your opponent.
- When you make an effect roll, you compare your cunning stat to the cunning stat of the creature you are making the roll against. If yours is higher, roll 2 dice and use the higher result. If yours is lower, roll 2 dice and use the lower result. If they are the same roll one die.
---
I made these decisions because...
- The writing actions in advance thing was because I wanted speed and initiative to be very important in combat
- I got rid of missing because just randomly missing doesn't seem fun to me. In this game, when you miss, it is because you screwed up in your prediction. It adds a sense of responsibility.
- The differences between melee and ranged attacks were because I wanted that dichotomy to be more meaningful. Playing a ranged character and a melee character under this system are very different, and it makes sense a lot of the time for characters to have powerful melee and ranged attacks, because attacking one creature with melee and ranged attacks is inefficient.
- Effect rolls instead of saves and things because I felt like that system in DnD was needlessly complicated, and wanted to devote one stat to statusing people.
The Skill System
Spoiler:
In this game there are six general skills, which the players supplement by taking "field moves" which either help them complete a more specific task, or more often, guarantee their success at a very specific task.
The skills are... Athletics: Self explanatory. Encompasses swimming, climbing, lifting, jumping, as well as things which would require constitution checks in other games. Lore: For basically all the knowledge checks, and understanding Pokemon when they speak to you. Awareness: This is perception, insight, and stealth. Sorry for my parlance, but I am more accustomed to 4e. This strange conglomeration came out of the fact that the game is very rogue and warrior focus. There is almost no magic in this game. Deception: Bluff, disguise, and thievery. Seems like a natural combination to me. Persuasion: Diplomacy & Intimidate. Doesn't seem like much, but in the game's I've been in these two are by far the most useful skills. Tinkering:For crafting tools and structures, disarming traps, picking locks, and forging documents. (I've been thinking of moving the last part into deception)
Players get what amounts to one skill rank at the first level, one at the 4th level, and one at the 8th level. You can use one to move the rank of your skill up one. All skills start at untrained, then go to amateur, then veteran, than expert. Any class can take any skill.
Task difficulties are tiered the same way that skill ranks are. There are untrained tasks, amateur tasks, veteran tasks, expert tasks, master tasks, impossible tasks, and absurd tasks.
When you make a check to do something, what the target number is depends on your training, and the task difficulty.
When you want to do a task one level below your training, you need a 1.
When you want to do a task at your training level, you need a 5.
When you want to do a task one level above your training level, you need a 15.
When you want to do a task two levels above your training level, you need a 20.
When you want to do something higher than that, you automatically fail.
IF the GM wants to show that the task is unusually difficult or easy because of a spesific circumstance, they can give the player an advantage (roll twice and use the higher result) or a disadvantage (roll twice and use the lower result).
So even though the training only goes up to expert, an expert can do something mildly impossible if they get a 20. Absurd is a category for GMs to put things into if they are things which simply could not ever be done.
As for the field moves, players get three when they take a class to completion, and their Pokemon can take none or up to ten (depending on what kind of Pokemon it is). here is an example of one:
Peasant Alibi: (Shuriken mastery tradition only) No one can discover that you are a ninja unless you or someone else tells them, or you attack them. You look exactly like a peasant, and your weapons look like peasant's tools.
When I did this my goal was to...
- Make it easy for the GM to assign a difficulty level to something on the fly in a fair way. (The game contains guides about what each difficulty tier can accomplish for each skill roughly, and lets the GM fill in the blanks)
- Make it so people don't have to fumble with character sheets every time they want to pick a lock.
- Make it easy for GMs to set up players for success at certain tasks, by catering to their field moves, without making it very obvious that they were doing so.
- Stop skill monkeys from permeating, and allow everyone to participate in the parts of the game involving skill checks without feeling like they were sacrificing combat power.
Character Building
Spoiler:
In this game there are two kinds of characters, humans and Pokemon, and each player gets one of each. Human classes each have ten levels, and there is no multiclassing. Here is the arch of a typical class: Level 1: - Miscellaneous information, like the gear and clothing you wear, a way for you to acquire small amounts of money dependably, and directions telling you to choose a skill to have at the amateur training level, and which table to take your stats off of. (these will be covered in the combat section)
- Choice of two different traditions, and a combat power based off of that tradition. Usually this power radically alters the way that the class plays in combat. An example of something akin to this in DnD would be sneak attack dice. Levels 2, 6, & 10: - A choice of four different field moves at each of these levels, two of which are exclusive to a tradition (one for each tradition available) Levels 3, 5, 7, & 9: - A choice of two combat powers, one of which is exclusive to a tradition, essentially forcing each tradition into choosing the one available option on two of these levels, and giving them a choice of two on the other two. Levels 4, & 8: - A skill point. (If you haven't read the skill section, these are a big deal)
The classes are Samurai, Monk, Performer, Ninja, and Merchant. The order goes from simplest to use to most complex to use, but the classes are approximately equal in power. It is just that samurais are at their full potential when they are spamming basic attacks (sort of) and merchants have to do a lot.
With Pokemon, they have an experience cap of 25 effort value (EV) times their trainer's level. (so that a trainer could quickly train up another pokemon if it wanted to switch, pokemon get their EVs much quicker than trainers get their levels, but have a cap on them set by their trainer's level)
Pokemon can spend EVs to get toggles (which add effects to their basic attacks), options (which are non-damaging things they can do instead of attacking), and intrinsics (which are constant benefits applied to them, such as immunity to a status condition of one kind or another). They can also spend EVs to evolve (which changes their statistics considerably) and improve their stats. (essentially, they can spend experience on just improving their damage, or improving their hit points) The options are all more or less gated by stat requirements, and usually also by the type of the pokemon (think fire water earth air, if you are unfamiliar)
When I did this my goal was to...
- Make it so that building a trainer and a pokemon at the first level was dumbfoundingly simple and quick (to do both, it takes about five minutes, and can be done without the GM helping you by a first time player) because complicated set up often deters people.
- Make it so training pokemon could be very easy if you didn't want to invest lots of effort (just spend all of your EV on improving attack and HP, or whichever other sat) but complicated if you were inclined to make it complicated.
- Have human characters be at a sort of set power and balance while the pokemon varied in power. (The GM is given options to nerf and buff particularly powerful and weak pokemon in specific ways)
- I changed a lot of stuff about how the combat worked to make melee and ranged attacks more even to eachother.
- Many options from the performer and Ninja classes have changed to reflect the change made to reflex and cunning.
- I added like an entire other section on how to build a dungeon.
- I've started building a strategy guide section, but have not yet finished it.
- Lots of pages are edited for spelling and grammar, and very minor tweaks have been made to some field moves and options.
I added the strategy guide section, and tweaked the combat a little bit. There is now an awesome chart to help people select what to train their pokemon.
Also I reduced the number of training levels a pokemon can take in a stat, boosted the amount of bonus that the one that is still there gives you, and reduced the cost of taking them. Because at the last update the players were too powerful as compared to the pokemon.
Honestly, I never read the full rulebook for these things. xD It is just sort of a reference once you get the game going. The players only need to read about their class, and the GM only really needs the skill, combat, and GMing sections.
This is a cool idea, I'll have to give it a read. There are some more general Pokemon TRPG's already out there, Pokemon Tabletop Adventures and Pokemon Tabletop United (sister systems), so you may want to check them out if you're looking for more ideas for updates or expansions or whatnot. From what I've seen so far your system seems tailored to a particular kind of campaign. I'm running a game in Adventures now, so I may add some rules from your system if I think they'd be helpful. I may post again after I read if I have more thoughts.
Thanks a lot! I'd love to hear about it. And yes I've heard of those systems, but they are far more comparable to dnd 3.5. I was looking to rethink a lot of the core mechanics of DnD, not simply to port it to pokemon.
Not to disparage their work however. Pokemon Table Top adventures is expansive and detailed, and I'm sure lots of fun to play.
This is some pretty impressive stuff you have here. Really detailed; despite some spelling flaws and other weird stuff you've obviously put some considerable effort into this. And I'm loving the fabulous artwork... I'm not really into this kind of game, but it looks pretty fun.
This is a story telling game. You use the rules in the book to play it with your friends. It isn't a computer game. The PDF and some dice are what you use to play it.
Well i first off have to say this is a big feat to do and I really like it. It has that d&d feel but without the mountain of text to read just to play. I do like to atmosphere of the game's time setting. It is very simple to play. I was able to make a character and pokemon within 30 minutes because i was trying to start at level 2 and have a few abilities. But here is my question. In the rules, i read it says that you have to have min stat require and the app. type or have the other min stat requirement to take that ability. Well i have a aron with levitate giving him a great immunity to a nasty 4x ground weakness but people in my group say that i can't have that because it can't learn it naturally but the rule say i can have it. So who is right? Me with my levitating aron or my group saying that it can't float or is it a GM call of common sense to not let me have it. I hope i have not skipped over a rule saying what should happen.
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