[Meta thread] Iron's PokeRole Adventure: The Skull Ruins

[Lord Windos]

Spoiler

And again, that's kinda something I'd like to address in my campaign in the future if at all possible.  As things stand right now, increasing Dex and/or Vit is possibly the best possible thing you could do to make your character much more able to hold their own in battle.  Arguably, I think fast tanks are quite possibly the worst possible thing you could face in our system (discounting fast, powerful tanks and plot deviced stuff), since they can tank/dodge your hits easily and fire back just as many hard to avoid hits as you can, if not more.  It makes pokemon with extremely high HP like Arbok and Gyarados infinitely scarier since they lose some of their major drawbacks that make them (somewhat) manageable (well, a super well trained one is probably still going to be super duper scary even in the base rules, so the point can be rendered rather moot, I guess...).


That's kinda why I want to try out using all the original accuracy rolls instead of using Dex and Fgt for everything, split the offensive and defensive stats into physical and special again, and try to separate HP from Defense.  Being good at (almost) everything is probably going to be a lot more difficult (definitely will be doable, but will require loooaaads of exp.  Not that generalization in a game like this is a bad thing, per se, but...well, there's certainly a little less individuality in a way).  Gonna have to also probably scale exp earned accordingly since there'll be a bunch of extra things to pour exp into...including other things like Surprises and some stuff I can't talk about yet (and those will cost boatloads of exp by comparison to the basic stuff)



Just that alone is going to make my campaign very different from the current ones, even disregarding my other plans for the setting, basic plot, etc.  I think it could be a nice change of pace, tbh.

Does that all make sense?

Yeap, DEX and VIT are the kingmaker stats, but its not something I'm all that opposed to since it simplifies managing an otherwise much more intricate system for an online game to make things more...well, easy and fun. Fast Tanks are the pits, that we can agree on! As for Mega Bulky Sneks, they're going to be dangerous no matter what, well trained or not, but that's the appeal I find in them imo!

Problem with your plan is that the more complexity you insert into a online game, the more you require players to keep track of, manage, and level up, which is a bit of a bugbear to cope with after our ease of use homebrew Pokerole. Contest and the Traits in particular is something I wouldn't mind seeing never be introduced, as those are a Skill and Mechanic that render some good Moves 'bad' for anyone that doesn't spread themselves thin to invest a point or two in it. You'd also have to increase the amount of free Starting Points a player gets in their Attributes/Skills order to balance out that they have more of them, or consolidate Attributes (Like making Insight the Special Defense AND Attack Stat when you separate Defenses/STR, or keep STR as one singular stat while separating Defenses).

There's also the fact that Players can just resort to maxing out their Skills and Fight/Evasion Specialties first to effectively circumvent the Split/Diversification for the most part, or just continue to mainly investing in DEX, since High Initiative + Accuracy on MOST Moves is still plain good. One solution I'd have to 'fix' the Initiative Problem is to award STR 1/2 Initiative as DEX (Up to 3 for it and 6 for DEX at 5), and give Insight users a bigger Dice to Roll for Ini ( 3 INS gives a player a 2D4 to Roll, and a 1D6 + 1D4 at 5). Doing that means that DEX and Survival no longer totally monopolize Ini, allowing for other Builds to have their own methods of 'keeping up' without having to spread themselves out if they don't want/can't. That means a High STR/Low DEX + Survival can still Move fast, and characters that invest in INS get a higher ceiling for Dice Rolls to get lucky and speed ahead, but High DEX + Survival still remains the most optimized way of gaining Ini. Of course, that would mean a fully DEXed, STRed, AND INSed character with decent Survival will totally blow past everyone Initiative wise, but I'd say if they were shooting to just that instead of increasing their Defenses, HP, and other Skills, its a balanced trade off. On the flipside, investing in Defenses and HP would make a character a veritable Stone Wall to take down, but they'd pay for that buy always being close to dead last, unless they exploit After You in Doubles, or have Pokémon that can learn Priority/Quash.

All of it makes sense, and I'd be interested in testing out your game with a couple of characters I've been thinking. Perhaps later on we could test stuff out in an unrelated One Shot session(s) with predetermined Builds, in order to see how effective splitting/diversifying stuff will actually be? Just another suggestion from me, is all!