Post by Robot on Mar 16, 2016 2:06:11 GMT
Overview
Hobbyist. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of people that want way too much and have no idea where their build is going. More specifically, Hobbyist is the fifth of the introductory classes from PTU's 1.05 Edition. The class and it's usages are so varied that I'm not going to bother getting into synergy. There isn't that much, but it fits every build, forever. Hobbyist is at the core of any and every well rounded character.
Pros
Perception: Primary Skill. Not only that, but it replaces any skill related rolls for every feature and edge you take from Hobbyist. That's right. You can learn how to fix balls, by having looked at balls. You can learn to identify Pokemon, by staring at Pokemon. It's beautiful.
Filler Thriller: Edge and Feature advantage across the board while also ignoring prerequisites that aren't directly listed in Hobbyist's Features.
Cons
Dabbler: Slow returns are slow. It's one feature though, and really the only thing I can think to say negatively about Hobbyist.
Synergy
Yes.
Base Feature: Trade one Feature for three Skill Edges. Best taken at Level 7 or 13 where you can top off a higher tier of skills without batting an eye. Also viable at Level 5 as a general feature, thanks to an ability of the class itself. Pretty tasty, all in all.
Dilettante: 4 Ranked Feature, meat and potatoes of Hobbyist. Grants one Feature and one Edge per rank, from the lists of general features and edges. Substitutes your Hobbyist skill (Perception or Gen Ed) for any skill rolls required as part of that Feature or Edge. This section has now turned into my review of most of the general options in the game. Way to be 'that guy' Hobbyist.
-Edges
Acrobat: Bonus Jump Capabilities, Tumbler w/Splash, Yes. Everything else, probably no.
Apricorn Balls: Annoy your GM with your sudden rampant interest in massive tree nuts that people can't even eat. Whenever you enter a new area, always ask if there are any Apricorn trees in the forest. Offer to use your Tracker Pokemon to find them, giving your GM the excuse to feed you to a swarm of bearctics. Lets you buy a Berry Grower and invest in Green Thumb to have an endless supply of Pokeballs. Time and rolls permitting. Mulch sold separately.
Basic Balls: Ideally should be produced via funds invested in scrap, and not raw money. Balls made out of raw money doesn't sound too terrible though. Cheaper alternative to buying them from the store.
Basic Cooking: Chef Prerequisite, Only way to make Baby Food since there isn't a list price to just buy the stuff in the book, which Candy Bar has at least.
Basic Martial Arts: You used Rock Smash! It doesn't actually smash rocks though. Prerequisite for Martial Artist. Weak fighting coverage, or a combat option for individuals not planning on taking better.
Beast Master: Intimidate instead of Command for ordering Loyalty 0-1 Pokemon, and for Training EXP purposes. Great for Taskmasters, and other classes or character concepts that revolve around being a gigantic jerk to everything you touch. I suppose feral bonding is a better spin on the edge. So much edge.
Breeder: Take an edge to learn how to make your Pokemon do the do. It's uh... the most convoluted way of getting egg moves onto your Pokemon, which are then level 5. With the way the experience curve works, this edge has less and less usefulness over the Mentor's Egg Tutor feature the longer your game runs. The game could probably do without this feature.
Dynamism: Guile to your initiative's theme goes with everything. No really, free speed (minus the evasion) is great for trainers.
Gem Lore: Make Type Gems or Elemental Stones. Pretty solid choice, free damage boosts for ages. Costs in shards to make, which you'll be bleeding with the right amount of Occult and a Dowsing Rod.
Grace: Coordinator Prerequisite. Probably a selection for forcefeeding enthusiasts. Lets you get poffins into your Feebas faster to get Milotic early. RIP 1.04 Mentor.
Green Thumb: Allows you to grow things in a Portable Grower. Without it, you aren't growing anything, ever. As with Breeder, this feels like something that anyone could be good at, most plants yield half of the time with Green Thumb and all of the time with it and Mulch. Just remove Green Thumb entirely and allow all humans basic growing skills?
Groomer: Allows you to train using Gen Edu, Poke Edu, or Perception because reasons (Hobbyist). Not a bad pick if you're not opting for a Command class, or want to keep your skill spread light.
Instinctive Aptitude: A great buy if you have no real AP spenders to speak of. Increases the +1 to your Trainer's rolls/checks to +2 when spending an AP for a bonus.
Instruction: Assisting an ally's knowledge skill check you can add your full rank instead of half. Kinda meh. Poke Edu is the only skill that doesn't just see niche use in the game as it is.
Intimidating Presence: Roughneck Prerequisite. For when you just have to Leer at somebody.
Iron Mind: The only counter to Telepathy agency other then failed die rolls, in a system where Focus has no real purpose other then skill prerequisites. That and GMs making you roll to see if you remember things your character should, but doesn't, because it's players mind is a sieve. That's oddly specific.
Medic Training: When you use restorative items on others, they don't forfeit their turns. A squeeze bottle of magic healing fluid requires you to hold still. This edge teaches you to squeeze it faster I guess, so that recovery items in combat don't diddle your action economy. Good choice.
Mounted Prowess: Rider Prerequisite. Keeps you from looking retarded, getting on your mount of choice. Gives bonuses to keep mounted. Useful if you like spaghetti westerns.
Repel Crafter: Crafting Edges, oh boy! Cheaper stuff for the hoarder inside of every murderhobo.
Slippery: Stealth to oppose and escape most Combat maneuvers. Great for avoiding being pinned down and made to answer for your stealth-related hijinks.
Swimmer: Hold your breath for longer, bonus swim speed. Good fluff choice, not that useful with rebreathers or swim fins available.
Train the Reserves: Lets you get by with minimal skill investment for training a full team. Conversely, you can blow up to three hours on training daily. Time vs. Benefit, not really worth it with the training cap being six per hour period, and this edge caps out at 16 Pokemon per day.
-Features
Command Versatility: 1/Scene/Pokemon and 1 AP. Allows you to trade a Scene move for a use of another Scene move, or a Daily for another use of a Daily or Scene move. Baller for fueling those high power limited use moves that you want to keep running with.
Commander's Voice: A must for quite a few builds. Not many features burn Swift Actions, and the better orders that come with Stratagems are great to have this option with. Hobbyist also lets you scoot around the fairly high prerequisites as it does with everything else.
Defender: The de-facto Trainer-Tank feature. A good choice if you want to be a meatwall and soak it for your friends, built for it or not. Gives new meaning to the phrase 'take one for the team'.
Dive: 2xScene Shift Action Interrupt to dodge a ranged attack, or an AoE if you can get out of it. Very solid. Like Detect, except with a better frequency and different constituents.
First Aid Expertise: Another really powerful option, a 3x Daily full restore for your Pokemon out of battle, for those times when you want to keep using your lowbies, or starter.
Let Me Help You With That: Welcome to Warper-Lite. Rerolls a failed skill check for an Ally, provided you have the skill at Novice or Higher. Also gives them a bonus equal to your skill rank. 3/Daily.
Pokeball Crafter: Yay more crafting features. Give money receive stuff. Really, Hobbyist excels at this more than trying to grab the slough of features freehand.
Pokemaniac: I'm of the opinion this feature should just be rolled into a basic usage of the Pokemon Education skill with a higher target number. If someone wants to spend their action sizing up an opponent, and is knowledgeable about Pokemon, really that should be enough. Also gives the skill more use outside of giving arbitrary Pokedex information that anyone can just point their red plastic box at.
Press: Required for a Taskmaster feature, but not the class itself. A good ability, but probably one of the least used in the game because of all the negative connotations around pet abuse. Taskmaster, secondarily, is largely avoided by the community for the same reason.
Quick Switch: Juggler Requirement. Expensive at 2 AP, and only works provided your opponent switches or KOs one of your pokemon. No effect in battles against wild opponents.
Skill Monkey: More rerolls! The other half of Let Me Help You With That, except it applies to your own rolls and gives you a +2. Not a bad choice.
Species Savant: I've yet to actually see anyone commit to this, because using one entire line and only one line, with the exception of possibly normal types seems absolutely disastrous. Additionally with the discussion of clarifying experience rules, and removing capture XP to fix issues with party imbalance in future editions, Species Savant may see a hard rework or removal entirely.
Training Features: Are detailed in Ace Trainer, and will not be repeated here.
Tutoring: Extremely good, if restrictive. Once you have three Pokemon that know the same move, you effectively gain the ability to tutor that singular move At-Will to anything that can learn it from any list. I am not sure if this runs under the new Mentoring rules from the playtest packets or not. You wouldn't think it would, given you need to have three things that *already* know the attack in order to learn how to tutor it.
Walk It Off: An extended action self-heal and injury removal for trainers. Not bad for full combat builds, but if you're going Hobbyist, First Aid Expertise is probably a better initial choice.
Dabbler: As stated above, this Feature, like Top Percent, is extremely slow in it's dividends. It's by no means a dead feature, but it is one that will make you stamp your feet and groan wondering when you're actually going to get something tangible out of it. Even then, an extra edge, or a couple of additional stat points every ten levels is a bit piddly.
Look and Learn: A great feature. Gives you an active and a passive Feature from the mid-range of other classes. Many of these options are good, but I won't be detailing them here. Please see the future entries for the associated classes if you'd like to know the strengths of individual picks.
Hobbyist. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of people that want way too much and have no idea where their build is going. More specifically, Hobbyist is the fifth of the introductory classes from PTU's 1.05 Edition. The class and it's usages are so varied that I'm not going to bother getting into synergy. There isn't that much, but it fits every build, forever. Hobbyist is at the core of any and every well rounded character.
Pros
Perception: Primary Skill. Not only that, but it replaces any skill related rolls for every feature and edge you take from Hobbyist. That's right. You can learn how to fix balls, by having looked at balls. You can learn to identify Pokemon, by staring at Pokemon. It's beautiful.
Filler Thriller: Edge and Feature advantage across the board while also ignoring prerequisites that aren't directly listed in Hobbyist's Features.
Cons
Dabbler: Slow returns are slow. It's one feature though, and really the only thing I can think to say negatively about Hobbyist.
Synergy
Yes.
Base Feature: Trade one Feature for three Skill Edges. Best taken at Level 7 or 13 where you can top off a higher tier of skills without batting an eye. Also viable at Level 5 as a general feature, thanks to an ability of the class itself. Pretty tasty, all in all.
Dilettante: 4 Ranked Feature, meat and potatoes of Hobbyist. Grants one Feature and one Edge per rank, from the lists of general features and edges. Substitutes your Hobbyist skill (Perception or Gen Ed) for any skill rolls required as part of that Feature or Edge. This section has now turned into my review of most of the general options in the game. Way to be 'that guy' Hobbyist.
-Edges
Acrobat: Bonus Jump Capabilities, Tumbler w/Splash, Yes. Everything else, probably no.
Apricorn Balls: Annoy your GM with your sudden rampant interest in massive tree nuts that people can't even eat. Whenever you enter a new area, always ask if there are any Apricorn trees in the forest. Offer to use your Tracker Pokemon to find them, giving your GM the excuse to feed you to a swarm of bearctics. Lets you buy a Berry Grower and invest in Green Thumb to have an endless supply of Pokeballs. Time and rolls permitting. Mulch sold separately.
Basic Balls: Ideally should be produced via funds invested in scrap, and not raw money. Balls made out of raw money doesn't sound too terrible though. Cheaper alternative to buying them from the store.
Basic Cooking: Chef Prerequisite, Only way to make Baby Food since there isn't a list price to just buy the stuff in the book, which Candy Bar has at least.
Basic Martial Arts: You used Rock Smash! It doesn't actually smash rocks though. Prerequisite for Martial Artist. Weak fighting coverage, or a combat option for individuals not planning on taking better.
Beast Master: Intimidate instead of Command for ordering Loyalty 0-1 Pokemon, and for Training EXP purposes. Great for Taskmasters, and other classes or character concepts that revolve around being a gigantic jerk to everything you touch. I suppose feral bonding is a better spin on the edge. So much edge.
Breeder: Take an edge to learn how to make your Pokemon do the do. It's uh... the most convoluted way of getting egg moves onto your Pokemon, which are then level 5. With the way the experience curve works, this edge has less and less usefulness over the Mentor's Egg Tutor feature the longer your game runs. The game could probably do without this feature.
Dynamism: Guile to your initiative's theme goes with everything. No really, free speed (minus the evasion) is great for trainers.
Gem Lore: Make Type Gems or Elemental Stones. Pretty solid choice, free damage boosts for ages. Costs in shards to make, which you'll be bleeding with the right amount of Occult and a Dowsing Rod.
Grace: Coordinator Prerequisite. Probably a selection for forcefeeding enthusiasts. Lets you get poffins into your Feebas faster to get Milotic early. RIP 1.04 Mentor.
Green Thumb: Allows you to grow things in a Portable Grower. Without it, you aren't growing anything, ever. As with Breeder, this feels like something that anyone could be good at, most plants yield half of the time with Green Thumb and all of the time with it and Mulch. Just remove Green Thumb entirely and allow all humans basic growing skills?
Groomer: Allows you to train using Gen Edu, Poke Edu, or Perception because reasons (Hobbyist). Not a bad pick if you're not opting for a Command class, or want to keep your skill spread light.
Instinctive Aptitude: A great buy if you have no real AP spenders to speak of. Increases the +1 to your Trainer's rolls/checks to +2 when spending an AP for a bonus.
Instruction: Assisting an ally's knowledge skill check you can add your full rank instead of half. Kinda meh. Poke Edu is the only skill that doesn't just see niche use in the game as it is.
Intimidating Presence: Roughneck Prerequisite. For when you just have to Leer at somebody.
Iron Mind: The only counter to Telepathy agency other then failed die rolls, in a system where Focus has no real purpose other then skill prerequisites. That and GMs making you roll to see if you remember things your character should, but doesn't, because it's players mind is a sieve. That's oddly specific.
Medic Training: When you use restorative items on others, they don't forfeit their turns. A squeeze bottle of magic healing fluid requires you to hold still. This edge teaches you to squeeze it faster I guess, so that recovery items in combat don't diddle your action economy. Good choice.
Mounted Prowess: Rider Prerequisite. Keeps you from looking retarded, getting on your mount of choice. Gives bonuses to keep mounted. Useful if you like spaghetti westerns.
Repel Crafter: Crafting Edges, oh boy! Cheaper stuff for the hoarder inside of every murderhobo.
Slippery: Stealth to oppose and escape most Combat maneuvers. Great for avoiding being pinned down and made to answer for your stealth-related hijinks.
Swimmer: Hold your breath for longer, bonus swim speed. Good fluff choice, not that useful with rebreathers or swim fins available.
Train the Reserves: Lets you get by with minimal skill investment for training a full team. Conversely, you can blow up to three hours on training daily. Time vs. Benefit, not really worth it with the training cap being six per hour period, and this edge caps out at 16 Pokemon per day.
-Features
Command Versatility: 1/Scene/Pokemon and 1 AP. Allows you to trade a Scene move for a use of another Scene move, or a Daily for another use of a Daily or Scene move. Baller for fueling those high power limited use moves that you want to keep running with.
Commander's Voice: A must for quite a few builds. Not many features burn Swift Actions, and the better orders that come with Stratagems are great to have this option with. Hobbyist also lets you scoot around the fairly high prerequisites as it does with everything else.
Defender: The de-facto Trainer-Tank feature. A good choice if you want to be a meatwall and soak it for your friends, built for it or not. Gives new meaning to the phrase 'take one for the team'.
Dive: 2xScene Shift Action Interrupt to dodge a ranged attack, or an AoE if you can get out of it. Very solid. Like Detect, except with a better frequency and different constituents.
First Aid Expertise: Another really powerful option, a 3x Daily full restore for your Pokemon out of battle, for those times when you want to keep using your lowbies, or starter.
Let Me Help You With That: Welcome to Warper-Lite. Rerolls a failed skill check for an Ally, provided you have the skill at Novice or Higher. Also gives them a bonus equal to your skill rank. 3/Daily.
Pokeball Crafter: Yay more crafting features. Give money receive stuff. Really, Hobbyist excels at this more than trying to grab the slough of features freehand.
Pokemaniac: I'm of the opinion this feature should just be rolled into a basic usage of the Pokemon Education skill with a higher target number. If someone wants to spend their action sizing up an opponent, and is knowledgeable about Pokemon, really that should be enough. Also gives the skill more use outside of giving arbitrary Pokedex information that anyone can just point their red plastic box at.
Press: Required for a Taskmaster feature, but not the class itself. A good ability, but probably one of the least used in the game because of all the negative connotations around pet abuse. Taskmaster, secondarily, is largely avoided by the community for the same reason.
Quick Switch: Juggler Requirement. Expensive at 2 AP, and only works provided your opponent switches or KOs one of your pokemon. No effect in battles against wild opponents.
Skill Monkey: More rerolls! The other half of Let Me Help You With That, except it applies to your own rolls and gives you a +2. Not a bad choice.
Species Savant: I've yet to actually see anyone commit to this, because using one entire line and only one line, with the exception of possibly normal types seems absolutely disastrous. Additionally with the discussion of clarifying experience rules, and removing capture XP to fix issues with party imbalance in future editions, Species Savant may see a hard rework or removal entirely.
Training Features: Are detailed in Ace Trainer, and will not be repeated here.
Tutoring: Extremely good, if restrictive. Once you have three Pokemon that know the same move, you effectively gain the ability to tutor that singular move At-Will to anything that can learn it from any list. I am not sure if this runs under the new Mentoring rules from the playtest packets or not. You wouldn't think it would, given you need to have three things that *already* know the attack in order to learn how to tutor it.
Walk It Off: An extended action self-heal and injury removal for trainers. Not bad for full combat builds, but if you're going Hobbyist, First Aid Expertise is probably a better initial choice.
Dabbler: As stated above, this Feature, like Top Percent, is extremely slow in it's dividends. It's by no means a dead feature, but it is one that will make you stamp your feet and groan wondering when you're actually going to get something tangible out of it. Even then, an extra edge, or a couple of additional stat points every ten levels is a bit piddly.
Look and Learn: A great feature. Gives you an active and a passive Feature from the mid-range of other classes. Many of these options are good, but I won't be detailing them here. Please see the future entries for the associated classes if you'd like to know the strengths of individual picks.