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Feb 27, 2023 22:33:22 GMT
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Post by Seya on Oct 10, 2016 19:50:02 GMT
Forenote from Seya: The entirety of the below post belongs to Elemental Knight and was originally posted on the main Pokemon Tabletop Forums on June 22, 2012. Recently many topics were purged, but us at PBPf still see the value of their messages and/or contents, and seek to revive them here. ( Elemental Knight , if you would like us to remove this post, please PM the mod team and we will take it down as soon as possible!)
Caveat: I'm gonna throw a lot of advice at you here. Take what you like, discard what you don't, and above all, Have Fun With It.
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The First Adventure:
For your first adventure, keep it simple. Don't worry too much about introducing a living world, with massive areas and grand villains and epic plots. Instead, have a very simple story, with one or two clearly-defined obstacles, a bad guy to thwart, solid success for the players at the end, a good (but not too good) reward, and a hook for more adventure next time.
Remember that the first session is when both the players and the GM are getting their feet on the ground for combat. I suggest getting to a simple fight quickly - have the players be attacked by a couple Rattata and Pidgey, or the like. This gives you all a chance to practice the combat rules, gives you an exciting situation, lets them try out commanding their Pokemon and throwing Pokeballs, and so on. Even if the fight itself doesn't sound terribly exciting on paper, it'll be much more so in practice.
And don't think, "Oh, my players won't be entertained if I don't provide a huge experience for them! They'll hate me!" Not only is that outright not true, that's not the point of playing a tabletop game. The point is to get together with friends and go on adventures - and while they'll like awesome adventures more than crappy ones, "awesome" does not always equal "big" or "cinematic" or "complex". A good session taking down faceless bad guys with your friends is much better than failing to navigate a convoluted web of intrigue and plot threads that even the GM can't follow.
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For During the Game:
Don't be surprised if the players come up with new, crazy ideas to overcome the obstacles you set in their path, or they want to do something way-out-there in combat. If they want to try something you didn't expect, and you don't know the rules for it, the best way to handle it (in my opinion) is to speak thusly: "You can try it! Give me a roll and let's see how well it works." Then figure out what kind of roll it should be. For humans in PTA, use a d20 plus an attribute modifier that makes sense; for Pokemon in PTA, use a d20 plus either that Pokemon's Power or Intelligence capability. For either persons or Pokemon in PTU, you have skills and the DC list to fall back on, which I highly suggest using. Tell the player what that attribute is, and then tell yourself, but not the player, a number they need to go over (at low levels in PTA, I'd suggest 7/10/13/16 for Easy/Medium/Hard/VeryHard). If the players go over that number, then they succeed; if they don't, then it was a good try but it didn't quite work. (If they roll a 20, then they have an amazing success; if they roll a 1, then they have a hilarious, but probably not life-threatening, failure.)
For the first fight, I've already recommended having the players go up against 1-2 species of Pokemon, and suggested using the most common of pocket monsters. I'd also recommend keeping fights to roughly 1-on-1 numbers (IE, six players, 5-7 enemy Pokemon). Try not to play too effectively in this fight, either: spread your attacks around, don't worry about who's doing the most damage, maybe let the Pokemon get distracted by whoever hit them last, or if someone taunts them or the like. In short, don't play to win - save that for when you play the intelligent bad guy ringleader, or the like. (As you get some experience you'll figure out just how smart you want your bad guys to be, and when; what I've described here, though, is a good baseline for when you're not sure.)
Finally, perhaps the best way to keep players entertained... is to be entertained, as the GM. Dive into your NPCs, put on funny voices, overact, wave your arms around, and describe actions in combat with gusto. The more energy you put out, the more energy you'll get from your players. And don't be afraid of "being silly" either! Again: Having fun with the people you're with is the point. And like they're going to taunt you, when they're sitting around a table pretending to have adorable monster-fights.
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For The Next Session, and All the Sessions After:
You can then ease into slightly more complex stuff as you go: maybe you remember the bad guy you used in a previous session, and decide he comes back for revenge; or maybe a detail you threw out there just for flavor comes back as a neat idea. This kind of natural growth is great, and it's very rewarding when it pays off - you'll be entertained and the players will love it.
When you get a bit of experience under your belt, you'll want to build more complex adventures with deeper NPCs and long-term plots. The adventure format that's served me best, and is probably the simplest, is the "Five Room Dungeon". I use it all the time, to great effect, and it can be scaled up or down to serve as a framework for individual encounters (fights, puzzles, etc.), to sessions, arcs, and even whole campaigns. Whenever I'm not sure what to have happen on any particular game night, I turn to the Five-Room Dungeon and work from there.
For Pokemon related session ideas, I recommend trawling through Bulbapedia. A Pokemon's Pokedex entry, a town's page, or a synopsis from an anime episode can all have cool ideas for adventures in them.
But seriously. For your first session (and, probably, for a few sessions after that) Keep It Simple.
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Also, if you should decide you want someone else to look over your adventure ideas or notes or whatnot, feel free to PM me. I'm always open to helping a newbie out! ^_^
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