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Ratoon
Mar 15, 2018 8:16:26 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 15, 2018 8:16:26 GMT
[OOC: What does he want to do at the market?]
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 15, 2018 18:46:11 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 15, 2018 18:46:11 GMT
[OOC: Speak to the janitor employee there. Let him know the Pooper turned himself in.]
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Ratoon
Mar 16, 2018 2:55:29 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 16, 2018 2:55:29 GMT
Cleaner: Wait; he did?! Sounds like a really dumb criminal, then!
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 16, 2018 18:25:26 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 16, 2018 18:25:26 GMT
Wally: Yes, he was easily tricked by myself and my friend. However, it's unclear whether or not he actually received any punishment, possibly because no one here has pressed any charges. He is currently trying to join the police in an attempt to help solve crimes, so if you don't want to see that come about, you might want to go to the station and make a case against it. Anyway, just wanted to let you know how it all shook out. Please forward all of that info to the business owner as well, if you would be so kind. Have a nice night.
Wally returns to the saloon to check on the status of the Leftovers and see if Crystal was able to find out anything about the group of bald men.
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Ratoon
Mar 17, 2018 1:04:32 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 17, 2018 1:04:32 GMT
He finds that Chrome and Scalp have regained consciousness but also been tied up. The Sheriff has come over, too. drive.google.com/file/d/1jB44Y1UwDBEzMa_EWsGfnzPLGVimecYL/view?usp=sharingSheriff: We've been questionin' these guys, and apparently they're part of a gang called "The Roughnecks." Sounds might generic, y'ask me. Scalp: Well, we were going to call ourselves the "Skinheads", but that's got too many bad implications-- Sam: --and it's also too generic. Scalp: Well yeah; so we considered "Cue Balls". We all thought that was too weird, except for Kobe, who made it his nickname. Sheriff: He's the one who messed up the market. I think I'll start callin' him Poo Ball when I get back to the station! Apparently these here hoodlums make their whole lives 'bout bein' naughty for no reason. The one called Whacker is still missin', but I might give y'two reduced sentences if y'all help me find him. Crystal: Good; now I can get back to my research, including catching some local Pokemon. Tapper: Hey Wally; I've got some Leftovers ready for you now!
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 17, 2018 4:33:04 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 17, 2018 4:33:04 GMT
Wally: Nice! Hang on, I'm headed your way. Crystal, you're going out looking for wilds at night? That sounds great, if you wouldn't mind letting Sam and I tag along. Sheriff, what should we do if we run into the missing toughie?
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Ratoon
Mar 18, 2018 21:58:28 GMT
via mobile
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 18, 2018 21:58:28 GMT
Sheriff: You have my permission to use all your Pokemon to bring him in!
[OOC: I'm not home for a few days. I might be able to further the campaign on someone else's computer; we'll see.]
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Ratoon
Mar 21, 2018 8:44:55 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 21, 2018 8:44:55 GMT
[OOC: I am back now; sorry I wasn't able to post any game material. I'll try to get something up soon.]
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 21, 2018 11:33:26 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 21, 2018 11:33:26 GMT
Wally waits for Crystal's answer. Whether she says yes or no, he still needs to go to the bar and obtain the Leftovers from the Tapper before he leaves the saloon.
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Ratoon
Mar 22, 2018 4:37:44 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 22, 2018 4:37:44 GMT
Crystal: I won't stay up too late, but I think I will go out and see if I can find nocturnal Pokemon on the road south of here. If you want to come along, just get what you need and come join me there!
[OOC: That's coming. I need to work on some things, and a goof up with my GMail account delayed them.]
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 22, 2018 11:34:24 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 22, 2018 11:34:24 GMT
Wally: Sounds great. I'm always game for filling out my Pokédex a little more. I just need about five to ten minutes and I'll meet you at the southern edge of town.
Wally heads to the Tapper to check out those Leftovers.
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Ratoon
Mar 22, 2018 19:44:51 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 22, 2018 19:44:51 GMT
[OOC: By the way, I am noticing that when you edited your sheet and took the Psychic class, for some reason it refers to one of the used stats as Intelligence. I reworked it to Wisdom, and that is still coded for in Trainer Class Data; both the text and the math formulas. Not sure why it's displayed that way. Also, as such, Wally can't take the Psychic class yet, since he only has 10 Wisdom.]
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 22, 2018 22:47:45 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 22, 2018 22:47:45 GMT
[OOC: Dude, I've been flying solo as a player since the beginning of December, and despite several teases that I might be getting a fellow player, it's never happened. The original point of this whole thing, unless I'm mistaken, was to playtest your revisions, right? How am I gonna help you do that if I'm all by myself and you don't let me take anything other than what RAW allows?]
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Ratoon
Mar 23, 2018 3:11:38 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 23, 2018 3:11:38 GMT
[ OOC: I will answer those in order. Regarding the other person, I know him personally, and he did seem interested, but unfortunately, he has a job with irregular hours; he goes where he's needed when he's needed, and as such his schedule isn't very convenient for this, or wasn't last I checked. I'd love to have him, or somebody, but unfortunately, PTA seems to be all-but dead. Regarding fudging rules in order for you to test more classes, I'm okay with that, but I think we should fudge in the area of leveling up rather than what the requirements are for a class. That is, I'm okay with characters gaining more levels for a task so they would be able to take on more stats and classes. The reason I say this is I'm also testing how much crossover effective classes can have with other effective classes. For what this is worth, though, the RAW Psychic stats were Intelligence and Constitution; I reworked it into Wisdom and Constitution. That is because the core rulebook defines Wisdom as innate smarts and awareness of one's environment, and Intelligence as more book-learning; the former just seemed to fit more for Psychic powers. However, I'm open to suggestions whether that was a good idea or not.] The Tapper gives Wally some Leftovers. He can head over to the road, now, to look for Pokemon with Crystal.
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 26, 2018 11:42:21 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 26, 2018 11:42:21 GMT
[OOC: What effect did Stark's release of PTA 2.0 have on your goals? The purpose of this playtest is (according to my understanding) to test the fixes you made to PTA 1.0. But 2.0 exists now, so should we be continuing? After all, 2.0 is the new default, so your custom version of 1.0 would need to beat 2.0 in terms of appeal or else no one will choose it and your work will be wasted. Would you like to take some time to see what 2.0 has to offer and make changes to your own system to accommodate?]
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Ratoon
Mar 27, 2018 1:35:52 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 27, 2018 1:35:52 GMT
[OOC: You'll probably want to sit down for this.
In the future, I will probably consider incorporating some of what is in the new vanilla rules into my revisions. As to working the changes into this campaign, that would be rather hard. Prerequisite stats have been shifted, skills don't work the way they do in my and TwilightWings' revivision, and issues with how character archetypes are accessed remain. Time will tell whose system wins out, although given PTU's continued near-total dominance, quite possibly neither will.
Meanwhile, though, I'm not too big on some of the choices Stark has made, and some changes I'd like made, he hasn't. I've never been on board with the idea of throwing out the Dungeons & Dragons stats for trainers; those were made for humans (and elves and dwarves and other sentient beings, but here for humans), and Pokemon stats were not. Both sets of stats are more appropriate to the sorts of things that their users typically do; most humans do not shoot out beams of mental energy and most Pokemon do not use computers or make motivational speeches.
The people who called for unifying the stats have a point in arguing that when you use two sets of stats, you need to provide explanations for how one translates into the other; as in, explain that Wisdom or Intelligence or Constitution are used as Special Attacks stats. However, I will point out that this issue also exists in reverse; now that humans use Pokemon stats, you need a rulebook to explain such oddities as binding the Programming skill to Special Attacks. You wouldn't need to do that if they left Intelligence in and bound Programming to that; then it's self-explanatory. Also, why did they bind the Sprint skill to Attack instead of speed?
Earlier versions of this game system were criticized for lifting the stats from D&D without including the skills, which meant they relied excessively on stats as prerequisites to take classes, along with other classes in the case of Advanced classes, which led to some arguably forced logic as Ace Trainers having to be bodybuilders and Athletes having to have studied Martial Arts and Breeders having to have studied Botany, since skills couldn't be used as prerequisites instead. But in finally bringing in skills at the same time as they threw out the D&D stats and replaced them with Pokemon stats, they have bound skills to stats that often make no sense to bound them to, because they weren't designed to have skills bound to them, as noted above--and the skills are bound to stats; none of them have power independently. Unlike the way Twilightwings and I envisioned them, skills in the latest core rulebook simply modify rolls made against stat ranks; not vice-versa. My understanding of it is skills effectively have two ranks, as they can be taken twice for an extra bonus, and some people may like that simplicity better, but the skills are still never used as a prerequisite for trainer classes so far as I can see, and as such the game is still far from simple to understand. They haven't really fixed anything at all about the arbitrary, stat-based, square-peg-in-a-round-hole character creation of the original, and I would argue that relying on Pokemon stats makes it even more nonsensical. Researchers have high Special Attack and Special Defense, because they said so? I think they can do better.
Lest it seems like I'm tooting my own horn here, I wand to note that I had once gotten very bullheaded in defending the Ace Trainer as it existed in the vanilla rulebook, despite other people arguing it needed massive revisions. But they convinced me I was wrong, and now I'm on board with the idea of revising it in the way TwilightWings proposed. Stark, unfortunately, has not been. The vanilla Ace Trainer seems to be based on Sapphire Birch from Pokemon Special, although that's assuming they thought at all about Pokemon media when designing it; for all I know it could be based on Dar from The Beastmaster. A strong and tough human who inspires Pokemon to be strong and tough in turn is certainly a valid archetype, but to make it the archetype for people who want to be good at training Pokemon, in a universe where many different people of many different physical attributes are good at training Pokemon, that just feels wrong. That's why when TwilightWings wrote his revision of the Ace Trainer and I wrote my revision of the Athlete, I actually transferred some old features from the former into the latter; I like characters like Sapphire, but they aren't the core Pokemon trainer archetype. Oh, and again with these questionably applied Pokemon stats; the new vanilla Ace Trainer requires a high Special Attack stat despite none of its features enabling a trainer to do Special Attacks, because overwhelmingly Special Attacks isn't Special Attacks, it's a forced stand-in for Intelligence! Does that seem right?
Other bits of note: The new vanilla rulebook finally takes some steps toward explaining how human attributes compared to the Pokemon capabilities listed in the Pokedex, but only some; Twilightwings, RockstarRaccoon and I took a lot more steps. Also, they still have the too-random damage formulas, which made early-game combat so hectic that we devoted a long time to revising it to lean more on stats than on dice.
So my answer as to whether we should keep going with this? Well; I'd like to. Should we keep going as is? You're welcome to express your own thoughts on how you think the new vanilla rulebook measures up, and if you think there's good in it that I missed, by all means you can tell me. But I still see more bad than good in the way they did it at the moment, and I currently think the revision team I was part of had more of the right ideas.]
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 27, 2018 3:16:59 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 27, 2018 3:16:59 GMT
[OOC: Oof. Yeah, that's a lot. Well, I do not feel qualified at all to make suggestions, but I do feel like this current system should take a good look at the new PTA and incorporate whatever works about it. If we need to put things on pause for a little bit that would be okay.]
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Ratoon
Mar 27, 2018 5:29:23 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 27, 2018 5:29:23 GMT
I certainly intend to take closer looks at the new vanilla rulebook in the near future, and to be fair, on some things its writers and my team came to the same conclusions. I approve of how they got rid of stat penalties for taking classes, as well as getting rid of the "You lose the feature and can't get it back" penalty on features like Study Break. It seems they also got rid of features costing money; I'm hot-and-cold on that decision. It felt lame to have so many classes use money as their form of PP, creating something seemingly from nothing in the field, but for the occasional class, provided shops were accessible, money made sense. Although I should note, part of the problem here is there were never, to my knowledge, official rules on determining starting cash or earnings. Maybe there are now; we'll see. Beyond that, maybe they've balanced the Psychic better, but it seems pretty close to what it is in my current WIP revision.
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Sept 25, 2020 1:54:22 GMT
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Ratoon
Mar 28, 2018 21:20:10 GMT
Post by DJW on Mar 28, 2018 21:20:10 GMT
[OOC: So what's the final decision? Do you need to make some changes to the one we're playing? No sense continuing as we are if you already have plans to make further changes, after all. As for my opinion on qualifying for Psychic, I've thought it over and I've found mine - I think that Intelligence and Wisdom are both just two different sides of the "smart" coin. Whether studious or sage, a person is considered knowledgeable. They're working their brain, exercising their mind, and if you treat it like a muscle, then the mind gets stronger whether it's used for book-smarts or cleverness. Since Psychics' powers are assumed to be mental in origin, I think that either Stat should qualify. So instead of choosing between Int or Wis, I say make it where either one is good enough. This will allow for more branching builds, and if Psychic gets properly nerfed (the goal anyway), then it shouldn't cause a problem that more diverse builds able to class into it.]
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Ratoon
Mar 29, 2018 7:24:05 GMT
Post by bradvandarn on Mar 29, 2018 7:24:05 GMT
[OOC: For the purposes of testing in this campaign, I will let you use the Intelligence stat, for the reasons you noted. For the actual, final revision...we'll see. That depends upon how well the Psychic can be balanced, in general. While your argument about the Psychic being able to use either version of smarts makes sense, so far as I can remember there are no other classes that let players choose between more than one stats to buff to enter it; I could be wrong, though. I will check on that, but part of the problem here is that when the Psychic is already so overpowered, more lax requirements to get into it are just rubbing salt in the wound. Also, if mental stats are interchangeable for Psychic, that strikes me as a possible slippery slope towards them being interchangeable anywhere else, too, but we'll see. You can use the Intelligence stat, once I get something satisfactory made, which hopefully will be by this weekend. Meanwhile, if you want to participate in catching, without using Psychic features for the moment, I can indulge you there.]
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