Good morning, everyone. As some of you may have heard,
one of our players was impacted by the recent bout of tornadoes
and other inclement weather in the Southern Central United
States, which has affected our ability to meet at a regular
time to play the Quacko Paco campaign.
Their home and belongings and family are fine, so there's no
need to worry. It's just caused a disruption to
our schedule until we can get back into the regular groove.
Please enjoy this previously Tier 2 Patron exclusive infodump
and Q&A from February of this year from around the start of
Season 4. Another source of content to
hold you over is the TikTok channel being managed by Grace.
Her shorts are so funny and are awesome highlights of the
adventures so far that are so fun to listen to.
They are also available on YouTube as Shorts if TikTok is
not your cup of tea like for me. We are looking forward to
returning back to the Quacko Paco's adventures as soon as we
are able. Thank you for your patience.
Hello everyone. It's me, Rich the DM, and I
thought I would take some time today to answer some of the
questions that I've gotten on the Google form from you all.
There's a couple different ways to access the form.
If you're a Patreon listener, which you most likely are if
you're listening to this floating around, one of the
first posts ever posted, it's probably organized by Q&A or
something. If you search in the tags,
there's a way to access that, but it's also in one of the
YouTube video descriptions that went live when we posted a
Patreon, formerly Patreon exclusive 1 onto YouTube.
The link was included there. It's also on the Discord.
There's a lot of ways to submit questions, so I like using the
form. Even though we get a ton of
questions on the Discord, keeping them in in the form
keeps them organized for me. That being said, I think I'm
going to review some older questions that I may have
already answered to just because they're good questions and I
feel like I can provide different context now that I'm
reviewing them in this in the sense.
Also, the last time I answered questions it was with the whole
group. This time it's just me.
If there's any questions that are directed to a specific
player, I'll do my best to answer it from my perspective,
but of course I'll bring it back up in a post show or something
before I get started. Thank you for listening.
If you're listening, you are either a patron or you've been
listening to us for a while and this has come up weeks after
it's already gone live on Patreon.
Either way, thank you so much. We literally couldn't be doing
this without you. I don't mean we couldn't be
playing the game, we would be playing this game by ourselves
regardless, which I mean is great and it's fun, but it's a
totally different experience getting to share with all these
people and inspiring all these other groups.
And I wouldn't trade it for the world.
So the fact that you are supporting us in this means
either by listening or by being a patron is indispensable to our
ability to distribute our gameplay.
So I really, really appreciate it.
That being said, I'm going to answer some questions.
Let's jump into it. This one is almost certainly a
review question, but I just feel like running over it again.
It says, hello, I'm trying to run a Pokémon style game for my
playgroup sometime soon. I was curious how you came up
with the passives for each character.
Was it less from the background that picked and said more about
how they describe their characters to you?
It's a really good question. And I think that's really where
as a dungeon master your flavor can really, really come out,
especially for a homebrew, right?
Because if, if you're playing unofficial system like
Pathfinder or DND, your, your characters, your players are
going to fall into set paths that are already predetermined.
And we're doing a homebrew like this.
You can really probably you. I don't.
It's probably just a mental thing, but I personally feel so
much more liberated to just come up with stuff because the system
we're playing isn't really D&D. It's not D&D like if we're being
technical about it, it's not. We're borrowing a lot of
concepts. We use similar stat blocks, but
the game is not the same. So I think, yeah, you.
It's a combination of what you asked.
I come up with the passives from their background.
Absolutely. Especially from level 1 to 3.
I planned those passes more or less in session 0 based on the
information that the players gave me, what they were
interested in, etcetera. And then from there it just kind
of expands and evolves. It's gotten to the point where
right now at episode 50, the players are at level 10, I
believe. So we're starting to roll into
some passives that are not home brewed, not original.
We just gave Cindy exploding dice because I couldn't think of
anything else. Exploding Dice is a real passive
I think for Wizards in D&D where when they're rolling damage, if
they get a Max roll on their dice, they get to re roll it
until it's not a Max roll and keep adding that damage.
It seemed appropriate for Cindy and I was having a block.
I didn't know what else to give her.
That's probably the first passive that's come up that felt
just like deliberately truly stolen.
It's Schmidt time which was given at Level 3 for Schmidt,
which grants Critz automatic critz on position bonuses and
like having advantage. So like flanking and sneak
attacks automatically crit I, I'm not super familiar with
rogues in D&D, but that's definitely like a rogue
archetype. It's no secret that I'm as the
DM, I'm kind of ushering the party into a traditional
tabletop RPG system as far as their character designs and
really their combat and also the the RP situations.
Having said, they also kind of did it themselves.
I'm not ushering them too hard. I would say the character I'm
kind of ushering the most into it is Schmidt.
That being said, Squids, our player Jacob has the least
experience with tabletop playing games.
Now that he's been playing with us for almost 2 years.
He's he's, he's pretty established.
He's only ever played Schmidt, but at the time, at session 0,
this was his first campaign, so he didn't have a whole lot of
insight into like stat wise, what kind of character he wanted
to play. And so I definitely pushed him
into a rogue archetype. Granted, it's like each
character isn't strictly what they're based on, you know, I
would say Schmidt is roguish. Elody is Bard Ish.
Cindy, Cindy's kind of just a wizard or sorcerer.
I, I think, I think it's, she's a wizard.
She's a wizard. I I don't think it's even ish.
And then Gimli is just kind of a generic tank.
He's kind of Paladin, I suppose, but also not really.
He's got some weird like monk aspects in my opinion as well.
So again, they just kind of formed this themselves, which
I'm super excited about because it's developed to a point where
like we have a melee damage dealer and a melee tank, right?
So that's Schmidt and Gimli respectively.
And then we have a ranged damage dealer and like a ranged tank, a
healer LED has a lot of HP and her Pokémon are really buff,
like as far as healthy, but you know, essentially a tank, a
healer's basically a tank a lot of the time.
And I'm just really pleased with how that turned out.
It makes the combat like really strategic and they're doing such
a good job handling it. And again, they didn't have a
ton of say in the situation because I'm giving them
passives. That being said, and this will
come up with answering other questions is because this is a
home brew and because this is my first time D Ming and because
none of us have a ton of experience with tabletop RPGSI
think CJ Gimme probably has the most.
There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make into the recording
that we're trying stuff out. There's some situations where
we're like, this seems like a good way for this move or
passive to work. Let's see if it feels balanced.
And there's a lot of times where like we do something once and
it's struck we're like, Nope, we're not doing that anymore, We
can't do that. Or like we'll change how often
something can be used, right? It's like you can do this once
per combat and then it's like once prolonged rest feels more
appropriate. You know, there's stuff like
that that comes up all the time, changing things from from free
actions to bonus actions to regular actions because
everything is so undeveloped. Like the team working on this
home brew is just the five of us.
That's really it. There's not any other sources
going on. There's a lot of trial and error
that you just don't notice when you're listening normally, which
I think is a good thing because if we're releasing like a
product of media, I want it to feel somewhat polished.
Even though it's very informal, it's very casual.
We're not editing huge chunks of of outtakes.
Like if you are a Tier 3 patron and you hear the whole thing,
besides what we talk about like before we play and in the post
show, it's pretty much what you get in the edit, right?
Kira's doing a fantastic job. But mostly what Kira does is
trim out silences and umms and ahs and just irrelevant things
because maybe we get sidetracked.
It's like, oh, a cat jumped on my desk and like we put that in
the bloopers or something like that's really what's going on.
At the end of the day, what you're listening to is pretty
genuine. Besides the little notes of
like, you know, there's even been times where like rerun
whole turns, right where we'll say that mechanic didn't work
the way I wanted it to. Let's start again from the top
of initiative and let's reroll it.
If you're a Patreon supporter, you'll also know that there's I
was actually one whole session that we scrapped because it
wasn't fun. I was trying a new mechanic, a
new idea. You probably listen to it if
you're listening to this, but if you haven't, it's interesting.
We were doing, I wanted to try PvP and it wasn't the characters
themselves of the dragon and elders, and I positioned the
dragon and elders to be related. One of them is familiarly
related, but the rest of them like with their their class
somewhat related to the players and the PvP sucked.
It wasn't fun. So we were going to release that
and then at the end of session were like, well, let's redo
that. And my players were all like,
Rich, why don't you just make it a PVE thing because you know how
to do Pve. And I said, OK, so that's when
we introduced the mountain and like the nose pass and all those
other things that you might remember from what episode 4546
or something. I think it was around there.
That was a really long winded way to answer that question.
But Long story short, just make it up.
I keep saying that in the discord, people will ask, oh,
like what do you think about this?
Or like, I'm in this situation, what kind of thing do you
recommend? And I can't understate like
tabletop role-playing in itself is normally very improv heavy.
Like there's a lot of improvisation in general with
your role-playing with situations, right?
I think as a DM that might be your most valuable skill.
Just make it up. If you ever pressed for a
situation, you want to go digging through rules again, if
that's where it feels like home brews really liberate you, there
isn't a rule book. And in my opinion, like my DM
advice, a lot of you'll get different DM advice.
And at the end of the day, the most important thing as Adm is
to make sure your players are having fun.
That's the number one rule. But if I were to make a
suggestion based on the way that my DM style is, is I don't enjoy
being a rules lawyer. I want to do things that are fun
and I want to do things that like make sense and are fair.
I think those are the the the three tenants of my DM
philosophy is fair, fun and logical, right?
If a player was like, I'm going to shoot laser beams out of my
eyes, I would say you can't do that.
If a player was like, I'm going to do this sick trick where I
jump off of total and I handspring in the air and and I
do a flip kick into the team energy boss's face, I would say
maybe roll acrobatics and roll an additional strength check for
the kick, right? So like, I, I think that's
really important because that specific scenario, I just made
that up. But if someone wanted to do a
complicated specific scenario, it's going to be a huge pain to
pull out from a rule book, right?
If if you're going off of D&D or something, then you go in the
five year rule book to get that specific of a thing you're going
to, it's going to take like 30 minutes of research.
So in the sense of just being efficient also for your table,
just make it up. Just just just just make it up.
That's going to be coming up a lot in this chat I think.
For the next question, it was directed to me.
Have you ever played the story before?
Are you just making it up as it go?
If not, how are you so creative to make this story?
I played DND and I was wondering what to do to play a story like
yours. Final question, what do you use
for the Pokémon stat box? Do you copy real ones?
I'll just go one phrase at a time.
Have you ever played the story before?
Nope, absolutely not. I've said this in the Discord
and I want to kind of say that in a lot of ways this campaign
is very selfish to me. I don't think it's selfish in
the way that I'm like putting my own NPCS in and I'm like playing
as them. When I first introduced Symetra,
I didn't think that she would be such an integral part of the
story, but the party just kept hanging out with her and they
ended up getting good information and all of a sudden
she's like really integral, so that's cool.
That being said, I don't think I'm the kind of DMI can be
corrected of course, but I think that there's some tables where
the DM just really wants to be a player.
So they introduce an NPC and they kind of like do everything
with the NPC in my opinion based on my gameplay.
Like in the hideout for example, sure same.
Got access to the computer to get the video logs and stuff.
The party could have done that without her but she was a good
resource because she was familiar with the technology.
But I think like in combat situations and stuff I try and
give her not being front and center just like limited more
limited actions. Not taking the the star of the
show away from the players because that's, that's why
they're playing with me, that's why they're at my table, is to
play the game. And I feel like if I introduce
all these NPC's that I'm controlling that are like the
good guys, then it kind of takes away from the fun.
In my opinion. That's more DM advice regarding
the story. No, as I was saying, I mentioned
this in the discord. This is self fulfilling.
Not in the MPC sense, but in the sense when I was a kid, my most
played game, probably still my most played game of all time was
Pokémon Emerald. I also owned Ruby and I played
that a lot. And at some point my sister gave
her her version of Sapphire when she was done with it.
So I've played a lot of third Gen.
I maxed out the clock on my Emerald version and that was
just on one save. I played multiple saves.
So I as a kid being like, you know, it came out when I was
probably six or seven years old and I played it until I was like
14 years old because I didn't have ADS.
I didn't, I the only generation I missed was the 4th Gen.
I went from emerald and then I had a gap and then I picked it
back up at heart gold silver. So that's a pretty, it's a
pretty big gap. I missed the whole generation.
So I played a lot of Hoenn and I would replay it over and over
and I would read the decks entries and I talked to all the
NPCS and I ended up just having like a head cannon about the
region. It's easily my most familiar
regions because I thought about it so much.
So this campaign is kind of myself fulfilling world that I
dreamed up as a kid as a as a young preteen, I would just play
this game and I had all these ideas about like, Oh, like I
feel like the win streets are like this and like if they had
more of a family member, like it'd be funny if they went like
this direction with it. And a big one was like meteor
falls. Like there's caves in this game,
but meteor falls is like such a bright colored cave.
Why is it white? Why is it so like different
looking That eventually led to me having my own head cannon
about how The Cave itself is a meteor.
So it's it's rock isn't native to Hoen, it's from space and
that's why it looks so weird. And then I got to thinking, oh,
like what would happen if like Pokémon that are rock types that
eat rocks for nourishment ate the rocks from meteor falls?
How would that like influence their body?
And that's how I came up with stuff like the giant Agron
encounter. It might not have been clear,
but in my head, like space rocks probably have more dense
minerals in them and Agron's a steel type and it's decks entry
say that it eat rocks. It eats rocks.
So in it just I just made-up that it would be super big
because why not? Same with the mountain, right?
In my head. The mountain is a Tyranitar.
Larvitar's decks entry says that it eats a whole mountain.
What if that mountain was made out of a meteor?
It probably get really big. So this, you know, I, there's a
lot of moments in this story that that is being made that
yes, a lot of it's improvised, but I'm improvising from a Bank
of all these like made-up fantasies about the Hoen region
in my head. And that is the reason I picked
Hoen. I think I could DM for any
region pretty OK, but I just know Hoen the best and I feel
like it makes the most rewarding experience.
So to any Hoen fans out there, I'm, I, I'm, I'm with you.
I get it. If Hoen's not your favorite
region, I hope I can breed some creativity and some life into
it. I feel like I've included a lot
of little Easter eggs to things that are actually in the region.
There are some NPC trainers that I've plugged that are like real
trainers. The house with all the wingles
in it always stood out to me as a kid on the route that is South
of Four Tree. Like why is there a house that's
full of wingles? And then I had the party stay
there. There.
There's a lot of little things that I'm finally getting to
experience and there's a lot of things that I can't wait for the
party to get to so I can fulfill it for myself.
It's selfish, but I think you have to be a little selfish as
Adm. There's certain things that if
you are passionate about, you will make your players feel
passionate about it. As long as you don't go
overboard and like force it down their throats.
I think if they notice your passion, they will play into it.
So I would recommend that as Adm Next part of this question, how
are you so creative to make this story?
I think I just answered that it's the same thing I played in
DI. Was wondering what to do to play
a story like yours. Get get involved, get interested
if whether or not you're using a home brew or pre-existing
material. If there's something that's
playing out in a way that you don't care about, that you don't
feel passionate about, just change it.
We're just playing make believe, make it cooler, at least for
you. And again, I think the same
logic holds true. If you are passionate about your
game, your players will feel that passion and they'll
reciprocate and it'll be more fun for everyone, I think.
Final question, what to use for Pokémon stat blocks?
So I am more or less lifting from D and D5E just for the core
stats, right? For strength, CON, defense or
defense, strength, CON, dexterity, HP, etcetera.
And I am translating those via the Pokémon stat blocks
specifically on Bulbapedia. I go to Bulbapedia and HP is
kind of a one to one of course. Well not one to one because in
game stats at like level 50 for example are way higher than
something you would have in a role-playing game.
But I scale them relatively. HP in the games correlates to
CON and their actual HP stat. Attack in the games almost
always correlates to Strength. Maybe dexterity in some
situations like Absal. In my opinion I consider Absal
like a roguish kind of character like so I want to give it more
decks because it seems nimble. It's speeds that is low but my
head cannon is that it's like nimble so I would give it's
attack stat more of a direct translation to its deck stat for
intelligence. Because Pokémon are pseudo
animals, it's really rare for them to be particularly
intelligent unless they're psychic types.
Psychic types use intelligence as their primary stats for for
dealing damage. So psychic kind of.
I feel like it gets a weird little buff here in this game
because so many Pokémon have low intelligence.
If you have a psychic type that's forcing intelligence
saves for their attacks, most Pokémon are going to do pretty
poorly into it. So this is might be like a
little Gen. 1 pandering because of how strong psychic types are.
Something to consider when if you're making a Pokémon
homebrew. If you want to use intelligence
as a stat based off of D and D5 E, consider using your
psychotypes a certain way. I guess I don't make them too
strong. I feel like I'm slipping into
that slope. But that being said, in my head
Canon in a real Pokémon world psychotypes would be crazy.
They would be super powerful because they would be able to
influence humans the most in my opinion.
That's what I think is that blocks sometimes.
I reference the now defunct Pokémon 5 E I'll just like take
a look and see what they did. I usually make changes.
There's there's some moves I've taken one for one, I only have
their handbook that was up to Gen. 4 and I'm not interested in
like seeking or distributing their materials because their DM
who I was in touch with on Twitter asked everyone to please
not. So I try to respect that.
But I already have the handbook for 4th Gen. on my computer, so
I look at it. And so I do get some inspiration
from P5E, but most things end up changed by the time that I get
to them. So P5E also use like a
complicated, like loyalty system and like you can't catch a
Pokémon that are of a certain challenge rating and stuff.
And I just kind of scraps a whole bunch of that.
So yeah, that's my thought on that.
We'll move on to the next question.
Is this your first time playing DND all?
If not, how much experience do you have?
So this is my first time DM ING. I've been in three other
campaigns that were never finished.
I did I I I did a 3.5 DND campaign that was my first one.
I fell into the classic beginner trap of being like wow a druid
sounds so fun and cool and then it's your first time playing you
just get overwhelmed with the druid stuff.
Like it's just so much taken. I wish someone talked me out of
it but it was so fun. I enjoyed role-playing that my
second campaign, probably my favorite.
We didn't quite finish, but it was it was in Fairun in D and D5
E, but it was like a homebrewed plot and lore and stuff.
It was just like the there was no module.
RDM was making it up. He did a great job.
I was playing a paladin that was a lot more fun.
I wish that felt like my real first character because paladins
are a lot easy to to interpret to take hold of.
He was really fun. He was, he was kind of a classic
paladin, very fair and just, but I made his little tweak is that
he was raised in a House of like artistic scholars and artisans
and he loved sculpture and he hated seeing like art be
vandalized or destroyed. And that was like, instead of
him just caring about justice, he also cared about like
aesthetic. And I thought that was a really
cool motivation for a paladin. And I want to bring him back
because that was really neat. That was a really fun group.
That's probably my favorite group I've played in.
We did a Lost Minds of Fandelver for a bit.
We didn't finish it. That was fine.
I was playing a barbarian. That was all right.
I didn't like him as much as the Paladin, but he was still cool.
It was fun to just run at things.
You know, it's like I pop my rage and I run into the fight
like that never gets old, but it it is a little simple.
So and then I started a what, What's the campaign called?
The Wild Beyond the Witch light, like the Fay Wild 5 E campaign
and I was playing a warlock. That was delightful.
We were about four sessions in and that was super cool.
And we were playing a module, but our DM was very respectful
about like, yeah, you can make stuff up.
And we as a group kind of decided we all wanted to do like
pseudo animal character. So I, I pulled like, it's not a
home brew. I think it's third party D&D.
Like they became official when Wizard of the Coast adopted it.
But you want tea race? It's they're like snake people.
We had like a monkey person. We had a bugbear on the team.
Actually, it was it was a really fun group and it was cut short
unfortunately, but maybe we get back into it.
I don't know the the a lot of people involved like really
picked up their careers when we were playing.
So that's just me. I'll bring this up in the next
post show discussion if possible.
Probably episode 52. But Grace Elodie has a good
amount of experience. She's DMDA little bit She
started to DM her own Pokémon campaign, which sounded really,
really cool. I would pull her after her
sessions and be like, tell me what's what's been happening.
But I think she finished her degree and now she's not doing
that anymore. But she's she's pretty
experienced. She, she knows what she's doing.
Yeah. Melissa and CJ, Cindy and Gimli,
they play a lot together, so I'm pretty sure they have quite a
bit of experience. They used D&D Beyond a lot.
I think they're the most experienced in the group.
And then going into this, Jacob slash Schmidt has no experience.
I invited him. This was his first time doing
anything like this, and I think he's doing a great job.
If you're in the Discord, you should let him know.
You should send him a message or paint him or something.
Be like, hey, I found out that this was your first time playing
and you're doing great. So that is that for that
question. Let's move on.
Next question directed to me, I'm Adm in AD and D campaign and
I'm not really sure what to do. I just want to know how to be a
good dungeon master again. I think I just made it up that's
that's applicable in multiple senses.
I just made it up just now saying the three tenants of D
Ming is having fun, being logical and being fair.
If you stick to those 3 rules I don't think it matters at all
what you do. If it's fun, it's logical and
it's fair. Your players are have a good
time and also getting yourself personally invested into it.
You don't want to run a module that isn't yours that you don't
care about. You don't want to run a module
that is yours, that you home brewed that you don't care
about. You need to find a way to be
invested without overshadowing the players and source your
enjoyment off of their enjoyment is something I recommend.
If you're not capable of doing that, if you're DM ING and it's
just not fun no matter what you do, honestly, stop DM ING.
I don't mean that in the sense like you're a bad DM.
I mean that in the sense that the whole point of playing these
games, these silly make believe games where we roll dice all the
time, is to have fun. If there's any other motive
behind it or you're not having fun, stop.
Don't do it if you're still interested in playing and like
you want to have fun but your current table isn't making it
work for you. Whether you're the DM or the
player, find a new table. It's not worth playing and
investing all these hours in this game if you or someone is
not having fun. I can't drill that in enough.
If you are having fun, your players are having fun.
You're a great DM. That's the only thing that
matters in my opinion. Even if you just forgo all the
rules, or maybe your rules are a little strict and your players
like that. It's, it's really, every table
has its own dynamic. And that being said, I feel so
blessed to have the players that I have.
I just invited them out of nowhere.
If you're a member of the Discord and you're familiar with
me always talking about the Cali Rex Game Corner.
It's this little community of friends that developed over the
2020 pandemic where we all met on official VGC commentator
Gabby Snyder's Twitch stream and we kind of all got into like
making her own content and stuff.
The content creation has, granted, slow down a little bit,
but we still stream on Twitch and stuff every now and then.
But among that friend group are these four players that we all
met on Twitch during the pandemic.
And granted, we would have like text chats and we hang out and
voice calls and stuff, and we'd like watch each other streams.
We've all streamed at some point.
But I kind of just invited them on a whim.
I was like, these people seem like they want to play a Pokémon
DND game and it's been great. It's like, I can't imagine
having a better party. So that's really, really
awesome. I want to know how to be a good
dungeon master. What I was saying, just make it
fun. And I do want to say, if it's
not fun, give up. And I'm not saying give up like
you're bad. I'm saying, well, it's not worth
the energy to force it is what I'm saying.
So don't be afraid to pull the plug if it's not succeeding.
Because I'm I'm, I wanted to say we're all adults.
I don't know if we're all adults.
I don't know if you're listening to this if you're adult, but
even if you're not an adult, even if you're a teen, time is
valuable and you don't want to waste your time not having fun
playing a game. That's really what it comes down
to. Next question, how do you treat
player level UPS? I, I feel like I keep it pretty
similar to D&D. The really the straightforward,
most straightforward thing that's exactly like D&D is HPI
let the players roll AD 8 plus their con mod for a new HP
total, or I just let them take five.
I think that's straight out of D and D5 E no question.
Besides that, I kind of copy a level up chart from 5 E not
exactly, but every level I let them get at least one new move.
Well, sorry, they can only pick one new move, but they have
access to a whole bunch of options and I increase the pool
as they level up. I guess that's Pokémon up
trainers The yeah, I guess the question was player level UPS.
So they don't learn new moves, but every three or so.
So like there's different. How do I explain this?
Every upgrade is cyclical, so we'll say like at level 2, I
don't know if this is accurate or not, I don't have my notes
open. But at level 2 we'll say they
get an ability score increase. At Level 3, they get a new
passive. At level 4, they get nothing at
level 5, they get an ability score increase at level 6.
Like it just repeats. I have AI have like a series of
three things that happen at their levels and they just
repeat. They get HP every time.
Whether or not they get a new passive or something depends.
Sometimes I grant passives based on their gameplay regardless of
level up. Sometimes they get a passive
because they've been doing a thing for a while, right?
Or sometimes I give them mastery over and over proficiency rather
than just, Or maybe I grant a new proficiency, right?
I feel like it's good to be in tune with how your players are
handling their characters and if they're doing something
consistently. Just logically it means two
things. One, the player enjoys doing it.
2, the characters probably getting skilled at it.
So I would keep that in mind. I think there's also something
to consider that I haven't done for my party very much, but
something interesting is items or situations that permanently
alter stats, either raising them or lowering them, like getting a
magical item that raises A stat or becoming cursed and like
losing stats. I think that's really
interesting. I haven't played with that much,
so maybe I'll get into that in the game play in a bit.
And if you notice that, you'll be like, I remember when Rich
talked about that in the behind the screen.
That's something really interesting and fascinating that
I want to want to think about a little bit.
I think it's pretty neat. I think that answers that
question. Next one directed to me
mechanically, how do you handle different battle scenarios, gym
challenges versus boss fights versus trainer battles with four
players each with multiple Pokémon?
This has been a work in progress, but I think it's
finally at a point that like I, we all agree on every combat.
We've been adjusting this, but in my head we, so there's,
you've described two different capacities.
There's official battles like versus trainers and gyms, and
then there's battles against wild Pokémon and criminals and
like bosses. They have very different rules,
trainer battles, gym challenges. Pokémon are never in danger of
dying is the way that I see it. It's an official capacity.
I imagine there's judges, I imagine there's like medics, you
know, there's like Nurse Joy and stuff around.
So those are always just kind of puzzles to be solved and there's
no existential threat. Wild Pokémon don't care about
the rules, boss Pokémon and like team energy or other criminals,
villains, they don't care about the rules.
So that is when it enters kind of more into like, there's real
stakes. I think it's good to have a
balance because winning gyms is important for this party and
like it's satisfying for them. And the stakes are that they
lose and they waste their time potentially, right?
So I think that's an interesting thing that you don't have a
whole lot in DND in like regular DND, but Pokémon battles are
regulated is the way that I see it generally.
As far as using multiple Pokémon, what I sourced was
honestly, we all play VGC. If you don't want VGC is it's
the official Pokémon format. It is not singles is actually
double s. It's a double battles where you
have a team of 6 and you have a best of three and you bring 4
Pokémon. It sounds complicated and
convoluted, but it's not. Instead of doing best of threes,
I'm kind of thinking double battles in my head, like they're
managed in a way that like if you how do I describe this?
I don't know. I'm going to stop trying to
compare it to the game and talk about what I do because double
battles are official to me. I do not penalize the players
for using 2 Pokémon at once. If we are considering the lore
of like certain tables, certain tabletop RPG methods, that a
turn for each individual person is 6 seconds, or maybe that's a
round, I don't even know. Either way, I feel like you can
give a command to two Pokémon in a turn.
That sounds right to me. And those Pokémon would be able
to do 1 main thing and maybe one bonus action and the trainer
probably wouldn't be able to do anything.
So that's where I have it balanced.
Now let me actually pull up exactly what we are currently
using. So right now how we have it is
that if a trainer sends out one Pokémon, that Pokémon and the
player character gets full use of their actions.
There's no restrictions at all. If they have two Pokémon out,
both of the Pokémon get full use of their actions, and the
trainer must either sacrifice their own action or their
movement, which I think is pretty realistic for a turn
right. The trainer's given commands and
if they're speaking, they might not be able to do other things
that they want, or maybe they don't move around.
I think that's fair. With three Pokémon, the trainer
is completely restricted because all they have time for is giving
commands. So there's no action or movement
from the trainer if they're using three Pokémon.
And the trainer also makes saves at disadvantage slashes easier
to target by their enemies. So if you're using three
Pokémon, it's effective, but your trainer can't do anything
else, which I think is a really good way to balance it if
especially like you're not going to have three Pokémon out in an
official battle capacity, it's always going to be against
villains or wild Pokémon or something.
So in my opinion, that's pretty fair.
Any more mods than that and the penalties to the trainer and the
Pokémon get more and more strict.
That's how I currently have it balanced.
I think it works well. I have no idea what other
Pokémon tabletop RPGs do. That's just kind of what I have
and I like it and I recommend it.
I think it's pretty fair. I think if a table wanted to
just say no, just do one at a time, that's also realistic too.
Because honestly, as Adm it gets, there's a lot to track for
sure. So next question, if you could
add any legendary beyond team typing to your team, which would
you want? This is this is to the players.
I don't think I really have an answer to this.
I don't know. They'd have to they have to go.
I'll have to bring this up to them when we have the next post
show discussion. So I can't speak for them.
I really don't know. I'm thinking about who their
favorites might be and like obviously like Schmidt would
probably want like a flying type, right?
But yeah, who knows, Can't answer that.
Up next, do you play other video games?
If so, what ones? Are there any not out yet that
you're excited for? This is directed to everyone.
Again, I'll bring this up to everyone when the time comes.
Yes, Pokémon is definitely my favorite franchise, but there's
a lot of other games I like as well.
Another Nintendo franchise. I'm a big fan of this Fire
Emblem and I say that and I've only played Three Houses in this
new one, but it's just the game plays really satisfying and I
look forward to exploring other games in the series, other
Nintendo series I like. I'm a pretty moderate fan of
Zelda. I'm not like the biggest fan.
I didn't really grow up with it, but I like the games.
They're fun. I love Pikmin.
Pikmin is a ton of fun. I had a big League of Legends
phase when I was younger, probably like in college I
played like a lot of League of Legends.
Mobas are really addicting and hard to keep up with.
I, I put 9000 hours in the league and I put $1000 in the
league and it didn't really do much for me.
So I'm, I'm kind of good on it. I play Pokémon Unite now with CJ
and some other people from the discord, which is fun.
It's fun its own right. It's, it's easier to not feel
like your life is getting sucked away because the games are
limited to 10 minutes, which I think is probably a good thing
overall. But mobos are, they're so fun,
but they're so bad. But they're so good.
It's if you play mobos, you know what I'm talking about.
I've really like Metroidvanias. That being said, that includes
Metroid, that includes Castlevania, that includes Halo
Night. I'm really into that kind of
thing. I used to be really big into
RPGs Earthbound is probably my favorite game ever.
I love that game. I haven't played as many RPGs
lately, like turn based ones, but I'm curious about them and I
feel like I want to get into more of them, like Final
Fantasy, stuff like that. So maybe someday I'll get back
into that. Everyone, everyone likes
Pokémon, obviously that's how we all met.
But I will let them speak to their own subjective opinions.
I want to ask them that question.
Next question directed to Gimli. So I'll see if I can answer it.
What was your reaction to hearing that Gimli son was
hanging out with Champion Red? I think he's spoken to this a
little bit and it's in the post show discussion.
So yeah, that's a plot point I will not speak to.
So I I will move on. But we will see if if, if CJ has
anything to say about it. This one's directed to Schmidt.
If Team Energy hadn't attacked Marvel, would you have continued
solo? That's kind of interesting.
That is a thought. I don't want to speak to this
too much, but yeah, that was a decision that I fully supported
for Schmidt to make. I felt like it made sense in
character, the player and the character.
We're just had not having a good time.
Part of that was circumstances outside of the game.
I'm aware, but I don't want to go too much into detail into
that. But I just, I felt like it just
made sense. It made sense for Jacob as a
player. It made sense for Schmidt as a
character at that time. There was no real strong bond
form with the party yet like the he basically Schmidt as kind of
like again, this the size of the rogue archetype that I forced
him into. So it kind of works.
He didn't really, I want to say he didn't care about the party
at that point in the campaign, but Schmidt was still he wanted
to get home. He had no real ties to these
guys at all. He just happened to be traveling
with them. If anything, they put him in
danger that he didn't really need to be in.
He just wanted to go to the gyms and go home and that was his
primary motivation. He wasn't missing a family
member. He just wanted to leave Holland.
And the best thing for him to do was just to ignore the funny
business that was happening. He just went through an awful,
evil trick house where he died and had to fight Hoopa.
And then he goes back up north and there's these villains that
are like, trying to, you know, take over a city and he's and
like, no, he doesn't. Yeah, He doesn't want to be part
of that. I don't blame him.
I think. I think that situation rubbed a
lot of people the wrong way, but I think it was perfectly
executed. But it was a lot of bullshit.
And I think Schmidt and Jacob were kind of like, yeah, this
sucks. But that being said, you know, a
year later after that happened in real time, I think Schmidt
has legitimate reasons to be with the party at this point.
And oddly, I think that's a really common thing with rogues
and people that play rogues, right?
They're generally rogues aren't really team players, which is
what makes them strong in fights, right?
They're really good at sneaking around and doing their own
thing. But yeah, I didn't expect the
rogue archetype that I kind of was pressing, not railroading,
but encouraging Schmidt to take to really form itself in that
way. And again, part of that was for
circumstances be on the table that we were stressful for
Jacob, but I think that it worked in a narrative way that
was honestly really successful, despite how many people took it
negatively. And in my opinion, maybe Jacob
will speak to this, but maybe not.
Next question for me. Hi Rich, I've been watching your
show for a while and it inspired me to try my own Pokémon
tabletop game with some friends. My question was, how do you go
about as the DM planning what Pokémon you'd have your players
fight cats or interact with, given that they're over 900
Pokémon now? Yeah, now there's over 1000.
If this was asked previously, I apologize.
I only got access to Patreon content today and haven't seen
all of it yet. Hope you and the rest of the
group have a great day. Slash week, slash month.
Thank you for asking, great question.
This is ties in again to in the past when I was a kid and I was
playing the game and I was just like this Pokémon should be on
this route. Why is this Pokémon not on this
route? I think this makes sense.
So that's part of it. There's been situations where
I'm coming up with encounter tables.
The one that comes to mind immediately is the fishing table
outside of Meteor Falls. I didn't know that if for sure
if the players would fish there but I just they hadn't fished
yet. I just felt like I wanted them
to fish. So I would propose it.
If they took the bait, pun intended, then it would work.
And they did. They did take the bait that
table. I went to a separate Discord
server with some friends that I have that are Pokémon fans and I
was like hey, and making an encounter table, you want to
give some suggestions And they all did and it was great.
And it's the Pokémon that were caught were all Pokémon that
were suggested. So like sometimes I outsource
it, right? There's also a tool online for a
random Pokémon generator. I forget exactly what website it
is, but if you just click a button and it shows you one to
10 random Pokémon, and sometimes I would click on that until I
was inspired, I would see something like like Gumi.
Actually, the very first encounter of the campaign, I was
trying to come up with like a rare encounter on a 20, which
Cindy happened to roll, which was awesome.
And to think how integral Cookie is in this campaign now too,
which is so cool that it was the first encounter.
It was a crit. I just I love cookie cookies, a
really awesome Pokémon character.
That aside, yeah, I was trying to come up with something that
would be like a really cool encounter for the party and
didn't feel too strongly aligned with any other type specialties.
At that point. Schmidt was still a normal type
trainer, or like thinking that he would be, but he's definitely
evolved into flying, although normal is really closely related
to flying. Anyways.
Yeah, I use the random generator until I saw something and I was
like Goomy. Goomy seems like a treat, like
it takes some investment to evolve, but it's a pretty
powerful dragon and it's cool. So and then that evolved into
getting regional form, which was just also extra cool and just,
yeah, there's so much cool stuff that happened with Cookie.
I'm really pleased with that Pokémon Final question.
This series has inspired me. Took my own Pokémon tabletop
role-playing game called Balls and Besties.
Great name, fantastic name. I was wondering how you created
it. How do you create the health
pools for each Pokémon, etcetera?
Yeah, again, I kind of referenced the stats.
I've actually both on the Patreon, which I'm assuming
you've been on if you were asking this question and pinned
in the Discord. I gave an example creation of
apps. All I think that's why I brought
it up earlier is because it's just what came to mind.
I thought it was a good example because the stats, you can
clearly see how they translate from the end game, like the
video game from the tabletop RPG that I'm doing, but they're also
modified. Like Appsol has a high attack
stat in the video games and it's slow.
And it's like to me and based on the lore and me, I haven't seen
the anime in a long time, but how I imagine it would look in
the anime, I don't think Appsol would be slow.
I think it would be like a fast assassin.
So that's why I gave it Dexterity, because in the system
that we're using that's based off of D and D5 E, that's what
makes the most sense. So I think again, based on this
topic, if I have any advice, it's like use all the source
material that you have, use your head to be creative a little
bit. Like if you see apps all like, I
don't think it's a tax that's very high.
I think it's dex, Dex stat is its main stat, Stuff like that.
Just like make conclusions on your own that you think are
interesting, that might be interesting to the players and
just wean it. This is the last question, so
I'll reiterate this. If you've been in the Discord at
all and you see any questions get asked to me directly, it's
always, always make it up. Just make it up.
Make up something that's cool. That's the spirit of D&D and is
my opinion. It's not all about the books.
It's not all about doing everything the right way.
It's about doing it the fun way. And sometimes you don't have
time to reference the books or sometimes it's a home brew that
has no actual information like the one that we have.
So sometimes you just, you just got to make it up.
I hope that helps. If that answers your question,
please ask me more questions. This form is going to stay open.
If you are P question asker, that's totally fine.
You can also ask me questions directly in the discord and if
they're good ones, I'll try and include them here the next time
that we do it. Once again, thank you for
supporting. Could not be doing this sort of
thing without you. Very we all very much appreciate
it and I can't wait for the next one.
Thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you later.