HeavenlySpoon

I don’t know of any television series, but Maple from Zelda Oracle of Seasons/Ages eventually swaps out her broom for a vacuum cleaner:

Weird, I don’t know how that happened, but it should be fixed now. And I’ve had a few projects now where someone just did a thorough proofreading and it’s been awesome every time. The helpers of the internet don’t get nearly enough credit, so it’s the least I can do!

Version 1.2 is up! It should include fixes for everything you pointed out. There's a short overview in the Version History.

Some design clarifications:

• Amnesia doesn't work out of battle, I've added a clarification to the move.
• I hadn't actually considered Transform out of battle, that one's on me. It now gives you that entire Pokémon's moveset, but every move uses a d4 Move die to balance out the lack of PP.
• It's deliberate that some Pokémon have more than one Basic Move. It felt kind of arbitrary for Poison Sting to be one for Weedle but not for Nidoran. I have removed Transform's Basic status for Mew, though.
• There’s no benefit to catching higher-stage Pokémon, the catching rules mostly just make it a bit harder to get higher-stage Pokémon early. By making excursions into higher-difficulty areas more costly, it should hopefully keep trainers within their intended zones without explicitly forcing them to. But yeah, if you want a Machamp, you should probably try to find a Machop instead.
• MissingNo.'s size difference wasn't intentional, but I'm definitely keeping it.

Thanks for the thorough read-through, I really appreciate it!

And lovely to hear that you've got a group together! I'd love to hear how it goes!

Oh wow, thanks a lot! I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend.

I myself only ever visit chewbac.ca!

I figured out what happened, apparently the Vileplume sheet snuck onto my Pokémon sheet template. It should be fixed now.

Weird! I don’t know how that happened, can you give a page number for where it shows up?

And yes, please share any typos you find!

Just replying to let you know that I’ve changed move to Move whenever it’s not referring to movement and that I’ve changed Paralysis to the easier option of not being able to move this round and next round. It definitely plays differently, but it’s quicker and should hopefully be easier to understand!

Feedback is always more than welcome!

I might just change Paralysis at this point, it’s been a bit annoying to track in playtesting and if it’s apparently hard to understand as well it may not be worth it. The general goal of conditions was to have them go away as quickly as possible to keep things simple, which is why Paralysis disappears at the end of the start of turn, but having it just be no-movement for 2 turns is probably the better option. I’ll have to do some playtesting first, though.

And capitalising Move is probably the easiest option. I’d have to check if that causes anything weird, but probably not.

Hmm, techniques might work, but space is often limited and it’s quite a bit longer than “move”. I’m aware of the issue, but didn’t have a clean way of solving it. I couldn’t use “attack” since there’s already an Attack die and abilities are also a thing in Pokémon in general. If it was going to be confusing regardless, I figured I might as well stick with the name used in the games. Basically, move as a noun is an “attack”, move as a verb is movement. I may have to try to fit that clarification in somewhere…

The thing to keep in mind with Paralysis is that every round starts with determining turn order, any Paralysed Pokémon move to the end of the turn order and then loses Paralysis. The not-being-able-to-move bit is only relevant if the Paralysed Pokémon hasn’t acted yet that round.

Thanks!

I have never actually run a Pokémon TTRPG I didn’t make myself, but having read through a few, I was always struck by how much work they demanded from the GM. Having to basically design each Pokémon the players will face seems like such a daunting task. On top of this, enemy Pokémon usually have to be run the same as those of the players, which again means a lot more work for the GM. I’m a lazy GM at heart, and that just would not be possible for those games.

I tried my best to make things as easy on the GM as I could. With some experience, you should be able to start a battle from scratch in less than a minute, and you don’t have nearly as many decision points as the other players during the battle.

Feedback is always welcome!

The issue is that for out-of-combat actions, the move die has the same function for both types of moves, so giving it a different name could lead to more confusion. Additionally, any number mentioned on the move card always refers to the move die, so having different names might again be more confusing.

I hope I made it clear that special moves have a very different procedure, and as soon as you realise that, knowing that the “move die” is the die on the move card should hopefully make things fairly clear.

Part of the impetus behind the combat rules was trying to make a singular “Special” stat not just functional but logical. If it was just going to be SpA/SpD combined, there’d be no reason not to split them. Having the split be damaging moves and effect moves solved that issue nicely, but it did necessitate very different mechanics.

Thanks for the feedback, though!