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[PTU] [Class] Pharmacologist
Topic Started: Jan 7 2017, 10:39 AM (880 Views)
Rhydis
Pokémon Trainer
[ *  *  *  *  * ]
Greetings, my name is Rhydis and I have ran a variety of PTU groups over the years, starting all the way back in 2013, i've visited the forums a number of times to read general discussion and get idea and have decided that it is about time I provided something back. So without further ado, the pharmacologist research field!

Reasoning: Medicine education is an interesting skill that I feel is woefully underutilized, it's always either healing or improving healing in some way. (With the exception of one skill in the apothacery field which allows you to create X-Items and vitamins) While this is great there is another side of medicine, enhancement. The pharmacologist class is a futuristic setting research field which can be used to slightly extend the Do Porygon Dream of Mareep supplement. It focuses on creating risky drugs with often non-healing effects (Many of which are a part of the futuristic drugs in DPDoM and some of which are entirely new) they generally have powerful effects which are soft-limited per use per day, in other words if a player take too many of these drugs they get some negative effects at the end of them.

A researcher field focused on the production of drugs and medicine. Drugs produced by a pharmacologist are usually experimental and their effects, while useful, are also risky. Pharmacologists extract components for their recipes from Pokémon, while extracts can be bought or sold like any resource, the prices for them will vary depending on the setting.
While original design intent wasn’t for the Pharmacologist to play like a necromancer or “dark science” class, fainted Pokémon just became a natural, secondary source of extracts outside of the pharmacologist’s own Pokémon team that just made sense. As such, a pharmacologist’s resources will vary based on the amount of wild Pokémon encounters available and their resources will likely dwindle from trainer battles. Violently taking extracts from other Pokémon isn’t the only possible approach either, for example a Pokémon friendly to humans and familiar with researchers might be willing to trade an extract for food but would flee from hostility.

Researcher: Pharmacology
Travel and Investigation 0Crafting 000Trainer Combat 0

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Feedback is highly appreciated!
Edited by Rhydis, Jan 7 2017, 06:09 PM.
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Professor Scamander
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I'll be honest. Homebrew is usually something that I frown on, but I really enjoy this class. It's new and different and brings something interesting to the table. The mechanics are intuitive and not terribly clunky, which is always nice when custom mechanics are introduced. The effects are flavorful and cool.

That being said, there are some red flags that I'm seeing. Do note that I'm not an optimization expert, so these may be way off the mark.

Extracts: It worries me a bit that you can theoretically get an unlimited amount of extracts per day. Between PC abuse (withdraw mons just to get the extract), mutiple party members, etc etc this can get crazy. Especially since these extracts take the place of money in the crafting process. Perhaps limit it somehow based on MedEdu rank (2xskill rank per day maybe?)

Combat Extraacts Power feature, but a good one. Reminiscient of Judgement on Paleo researcher. Perhaps let them use MedEdu x3 as their SpAtk Stat?

Sometimes Biology ... I love this feature. This is a capstone feature at its best. Interesting, desirable, and just powerful enough to matter. It makes this class very versatile in a really cool interesting way. I think there's a bit to much narrative agency given with these capabilities (phasing, amorphous, etc) and some are mechanically useless, but I can't stress how much this is really cool.
Normal: Tracker -
Bug: Threaded - Threaded is fine, although Wallclimber might be a more balanced option.
Dark: Darkvision -
Steel: Magnetic
Ghost: Phasing - This is ... really powerful. I might reccommend another ghost capability. Dead silent might be good, especially since they don't get stealth.
Fairy: Alluring - Perhaps Glow?
Water: Gilled
Psychic: Premonition - This one is strange to me. I'd say telekinesis is more iconic and less of a pain for the GM to prepare for. Possibly Dream Reader.
Poison: Amorphous - Kind of like Phasing, this is a pretty powerful toy to hand to PCs. Maybe port Alluring over from Fairy? Poisonous things can sometimes smell delicious.
Ground: Tremorsense
Fire: Heater - Useless mechanically. I'd either go Egg Warmer or Firestarter
Electric: Wired - Very powerful, since it basically gives them access to the world's electric grid if you think about it. Perhaps Zapper or XRay Vision?
Ice: Chilled - Chilled is useless. I'd move to Freezer.
Dragon: Mountable 1 - Dragon is hard, but this is kind of out of left field. How is an Azurill getting a dragon shot going to be mountable? I'd reccommend a modified Pack Mon that lets it be species neutral but with a +15/20 level difference (treat trainers as double their level).
Fighting: Aura Reader - My big worry is that this really steps on Aura Reader's toes (like, half the reason to take the class). Perhaps Naturewalk (all), but I don't even like that.
Flying: Reach - I'd go guster, or blindsense if you didn't want to do that.
Grass: Inflatable - An odd choice. Sprouter maybe?
Rock: Ground Shaper - this works, but materializer probably fits better.


Sedation Serum is really powerful for characters who don't care about their body skills, and +4 is a pretty huge bonus.

Again, can't say how much I love this class.


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Rhydis
Pokémon Trainer
[ *  *  *  *  * ]
Professor Scamander
Jan 7 2017, 01:57 PM
I'll be honest. Homebrew is usually something that I frown on, but I really enjoy this class. It's new and different and brings something interesting to the table. The mechanics are intuitive and not terribly clunky, which is always nice when custom mechanics are introduced. The effects are flavorful and cool.

That being said, there are some red flags that I'm seeing. Do note that I'm not an optimization expert, so these may be way off the mark.

Extracts: It worries me a bit that you can theoretically get an unlimited amount of extracts per day. Between PC abuse (withdraw mons just to get the extract), mutiple party members, etc etc this can get crazy. Especially since these extracts take the place of money in the crafting process. Perhaps limit it somehow based on MedEdu rank (2xskill rank per day maybe?)

Combat Extraacts Power feature, but a good one. Reminiscient of Judgement on Paleo researcher. Perhaps let them use MedEdu x3 as their SpAtk Stat?

Sometimes Biology ... I love this feature. This is a capstone feature at its best. Interesting, desirable, and just powerful enough to matter. It makes this class very versatile in a really cool interesting way. I think there's a bit to much narrative agency given with these capabilities (phasing, amorphous, etc) and some are mechanically useless, but I can't stress how much this is really cool.
Normal: Tracker -
Bug: Threaded - Threaded is fine, although Wallclimber might be a more balanced option.
Dark: Darkvision -
Steel: Magnetic
Ghost: Phasing - This is ... really powerful. I might reccommend another ghost capability. Dead silent might be good, especially since they don't get stealth.
Fairy: Alluring - Perhaps Glow?
Water: Gilled
Psychic: Premonition - This one is strange to me. I'd say telekinesis is more iconic and less of a pain for the GM to prepare for. Possibly Dream Reader.
Poison: Amorphous - Kind of like Phasing, this is a pretty powerful toy to hand to PCs. Maybe port Alluring over from Fairy? Poisonous things can sometimes smell delicious.
Ground: Tremorsense
Fire: Heater - Useless mechanically. I'd either go Egg Warmer or Firestarter
Electric: Wired - Very powerful, since it basically gives them access to the world's electric grid if you think about it. Perhaps Zapper or XRay Vision?
Ice: Chilled - Chilled is useless. I'd move to Freezer.
Dragon: Mountable 1 - Dragon is hard, but this is kind of out of left field. How is an Azurill getting a dragon shot going to be mountable? I'd reccommend a modified Pack Mon that lets it be species neutral but with a +15/20 level difference (treat trainers as double their level).
Fighting: Aura Reader - My big worry is that this really steps on Aura Reader's toes (like, half the reason to take the class). Perhaps Naturewalk (all), but I don't even like that.
Flying: Reach - I'd go guster, or blindsense if you didn't want to do that.
Grass: Inflatable - An odd choice. Sprouter maybe?
Rock: Ground Shaper - this works, but materializer probably fits better.


Sedation Serum is really powerful for characters who don't care about their body skills, and +4 is a pretty huge bonus.

Again, can't say how much I love this class.


Many thanks for the feedback it's really handy, i'll go over a bit more of the design decisions when making a few of these.

Combat extracts: I absolutely agree with you here, using med ed is a great idea for this and more things that can be used with virtuoso is great in my eyes.

Extracts: Again I absolutely agree that there needs to b limited use, though I will admite having too few uses limits the class significantly, I think just the med ed rank (Not even doubled) is perfectly fine for this, and again is effected by virtuoso!

Extracts
Bug extracts: A decent shout, I can't actually remember why I went for threaded in the end, but I did consider both of them
Ghost: In hindsight I definitely agree with this one, dead silent is a much better idea
Psychic: Similar to what you are saying about the fighting extract, this sort of steps on the toes of Telekinetic (And if telepathy it steps on the toes of telepath), since Premonition exists I feel like it's fine and I personally really like cryptic messages and feelings.
Fairy: This is an odd one, I personally feel like half of the point of fairies is their alluring nature, like clefable, togekiss and florges for example, glow is actually added for another custom type which hasn't been discussed here (Light type (Original I know)) which I will be possibly posting in the future along with a matching light ace and light elementalist class.
Poison: Poison was a relatively tough one, amorphous is a powerful toy to play with yes, but you have to remember that this only lasts for an hour so it's a limited use thing (Before they start having side effects by using them again) I don't think alluring is necessarily the right call for this one, perhaps shrinkable?
Fire: Heater is absolutely not useless mechanically, if for whatever reason the player goes to a super cold area they can use this to avoid having to roll survival or wear special clothes and such, it's niche but useful in those niche situations
Electric: You're right, no two ways about it. X-Ray vision is a much better idea.
Ice: Same as with fire, still niche, but still super handy in those niche situations.
Dragon: Yeah this was a super tough one, dragons don't have a specific capability for them, mountable was my last resort choice, I like the idea for the modified pack mon, i'll look into it.
Fighting: Again another really difficult one, I didn't want to step on the aura guardians toes, but this is for an hour while aura guardians can pretty much have it activated as much as they like (For the remainder of the scene, with no frequency drawbacks) so I think this is alright honestly.
Flying: The main reason I avoided the struggle attack based capabilities is because I didn't want to make the class much more combat versatile, more so situation versatile (If that makes sense) giving guster and not firestarter, materializer, etc would kinda fix it but be a crying shame type wise and would feel like a cop out, I found that reach was a decent (not too broken) idea but I will admit it is a combat based capability, though at the very least is only one major combat ability. I definitely didn't want to grant a sky speed and also feel like blindsense is a flat out upgrade to darkvision, making it more desirable in every way to dark extracts
Grass: These capabilities only last an hour and as such would make sprouter completely useless, this is the case with 95% of the grass based capabilities. Inflatable was the most common grass type capability that I could find, also granted by growth, which is used most often by grass types.
Rock: Same as flying with guster, I think ground shaper is fine.

As for the sedation serum, sure its not going to overly affect people who don't rely on body skills, however if they have to roll athletics for something out of their control, it is suddenly even more negative, so either way it's a downside that will affect them. Maybe a +2 bonus will be better though.
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