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Brainstorming remakes for the contest rules. PTU; A central location for redoing that pain-in-the-arse behemoth that are the normal rules
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Topic Started: Jun 7 2017, 09:07 AM (344 Views)
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Sgt. Cookie
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Jun 7 2017, 09:07 AM
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Welcome, welcome one and all. This thread's sole purpose is to brainstorm a way to remake the rules for pokemon contests in PTU. (Sorry PTA fans, you're on your own.)
FYI: I do not currently have regular access to a computer, so please bear with me if these first few posts aren't as updated as they should be.
Here's an infodump of all current ideas and theories. There's no real organisation to it, yet, but that's purely because we don't have much yet:
Spoiler: click to toggle - Sgt. Cookie's General ideas
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Spoiler: click to toggle My current thinking for a simpler redesign is to have Contests done in three steps: Introduction Round, Performance Round and Battle Round.
Intro and Performance function basically like now (Except... simplified) and both of those require judges.
The Battle Round is a little different. It's an idea cribbed from the anime which means it fits perfectly into the PTU world. In the anime, Coordinators have their 'mon duke it out, except stylishly. And with a time limit.
The PTU version would be similar. Except instead of trying to KO the opponent, you're trying to score more points within a certain number of rounds. I'm thinking in the 5-10 range, but that's open for debate.
You do this head-to-head displaying your moves and rolling skill checks, the winner of the check gets points. But there are modifiers. A Blastoise and a Charizard duking it out still has some interesting possibilities, based on how clever their coordinators are.
The Charizard could, say, use Blast Burn, just... as is and try to be as theatrical as possible. The Blastoise, however, could be ordered to have him direct his Hydro Pump theatrics AT the Blast Burn. And we all know how Fire vs Water goes. The Blast Burn gets doused part-way through and the Blastoise gets the win this round.
Battle Stages are going to be the simplest part of this whole process. They are, basically, just ordinary fights with a skill check attached.
And this leads us to something ELSE that's different about the Battle Stage: It doesn't use a judge. This is for an extremely simple reason: the Battle Stage can be done in the field. (That and the Battle Stage is relatively more objective.)
For example, two Coordinators could meet each other on a route and have a little imprompteu dance off, a four-way Battle Stage makes for some excellent entertainment in a market square or (And this is really the primary reason of making it field-usable), you could have Battle Stages against Wild 'mon.
Let's say the party come across a Mightyena and its pack. And this is where the "simple" part of Battle Stages come in: While the rest of the party is fending off the Poochyena, the Coordinator's Houndour is having a Tough Battle Stage with the Mightyena. Albeit with a much shorter timeline. The Houndour wins and the Mightyena submits, calls off his pack and allows the party to pass. (Of course if the Mightyena wins then it's back to good old fisticuffs).
In other words, Battle Stages are going to be simple and intuitive enough that you can engage in one alongside normal combat. Plus it means that Coordinators can do something that makes sense for the tabletop: They can use their Contest prowess to capture pokemon. (That being said, the capacity to do that IS going to be a Coordinator (The class)-specific Feature).
Obviously, since Battle Stages are part of Contests, Coordinators are going to have the edge against ordinary combat Trainers. HOW exactly is still to be determined. But ordinary Trainers can certainly give it a shot.
EDIT: One last thing to mention: I think I know how Skills are gonna fit into this. Each Skill will be assigned a Major Stat and a Minor Stat. Charm, for example, will be Major Cute and Minor Beauty. Guile will be Major Smart and Minor Beauty or something. And so on.
I do also know that the skills themselves will also factor into a pokemon's Contest stats. Not sure how, but I DO know that having a massive Charm score is going to be useful to a Cute contest OUTSIDE of the Battle Stage.
- Laterose13 on streamlining
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One way to potentially streamline things is incorporating the advantage/disadvantage system from D&D 5e. It would reduce the amount of bonuses/penalties to keep track of. I use it in my games and it's worked well so far.
For those who don't know, rolling with advantage is rolling twice and using the higher number, while disadvantage uses the lower number.
- Kajhera on organising skills by contest stat
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I took a shot at this earlier, and there are a few that can fall into either one. I wouldn't actually make all the Education skills Smart as their primary aspect, for one thing; being a Pokemon nerd's actual application in universe winds up pretty cute, with the Mentor and Pokemon Caretaker classes. Here's one possible division based on ways I've watched players use these skills:
Cute: Charm (of course), Pokemon Education
Cool: Command, Acrobatics, Guile, Stealth
Tough: Intimidate, Survival, Athletics, Combat
Beauty: Focus, Intuition, Occult Education, Perception
Smart: General Education, Tech Education, Medicine Education
Needs tweaking I'm sure, but it's a starting point from the ones we have.
- Sgt. Cookie in response to Kajhera's skill arrangement
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Personally, I think that the Education skills and Survival are too... ephemeral to be particularly useful in the practical situation that are contests. I'll throw my own list up as-and-when I have it, but here are my current thoughts: Spoiler: click to toggle With Education and Survival out the way, this leaves us with 11 different skills and 5 stats to assign to them.
I'm thinking that each skill has two different contest stats associated with it.
Now, this is where stuff gets harder to explain, so try to stay with me.
If we "combine" Athletics and Acrobatics into the same skill for contest purposes, that leaves us with 10 skills to assign stats to. And to do that, I suggest we borrow an idea from Magic: The Gathering's Ravnica guilds.
For the uninitiated, M:TG has 5 colours of mana, which has 10 unique pairings for the so called "allied" and "enemy" colours.
Or as Contests describe it, "allied" and "opposed". That gives us the following 10 pairings:
Cool/Beauty Beauty/Cute Cute/Smart Smart/Tough Tough/Cool
Cool/Cute Beauty/Smart Cute/Tough Smart/Cool Tough/Beauty
(Ok, technically speaking, there's 20 if you reverse each of these. But that's actually not relevant.
Why THAT's relevant is because it gives us an excellent baseline to redo contest stats in a relatively simple way:
A pokemon's (Or Trainer's) contest stat can be derived directly from its skills.
For the sake of example, let's say the following skills have the following contest stats and ranks:
Charm, 4 Ranks Stats: Cute & Beauty
Guile, 5 Ranks Stats: Smart & Cute
Focus, 3 ranks Stats: Cute & Tough
Stealth, 2 ranks Stats Cool & Cute
From these, we can derive the pokemon's major skills and minor skills. For the sake of simplicity, we will focus on its Cute stat.
Determining which skills are major and which are minor is quite simple: The two higher skills, Charm and Guile, are its major skills, with Focus and Stealth (due to their lower ranks) being its minor ones. In case of a tie, (for example, if there was a Rank 6 skill and three Rank 5's), the trainer simply chooses which skills are major and which are minor.
Note: Unlike trainers, a pokemon that is "untrained" in a skill has a value of 1 for contest purposes, rather than 2.
From THAT we can then derive its actual contest stats: The total of its major skills, plus half the total of its minor skills. In this pokemon's case, it has a Cute stat of 11:
Charm 4 + Guile 5 = 9
Focus 3 + Stealth 2 = 5, which halved is 2.5 which gets rounded down to 2.
As such, this gives a pokemon's contest stats a range of everything between 4 to 18. Which then gives us six different breakpoints: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18.
As to what these breakpoints, and the stat ITSELF, is useful for... I don't know yet. BUT. This certainly gives us a good jumping off point to start with.
That's all we have for now folks.
Oh, and please wait for the all-clear before posting. I need to reserve the next two or three posts, just in case. This forum DOES have you wait 60 seconds between posts, after all.
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Sgt. Cookie
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Jun 7 2017, 09:10 AM
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Sgt. Cookie
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Jun 7 2017, 09:12 AM
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Sgt. Cookie
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Jun 7 2017, 09:13 AM
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Sgt. Cookie
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Jun 7 2017, 09:15 AM
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[Reserved post 4]
That ought to be the last one. Let the brainstorming... BE-GIN!
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chif-ii
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Jun 8 2017, 03:57 PM
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So...PTU, in general, is very complex, and Contests are even more so. My ideas revolve around simplifying Contests as much as possible, especially when it comes to Appeal rolls and Contest Stats.
Sgt. Cookie, I like your idea of creating a stronger relationship between the skills a Pokemon has and its ability to perform well in a contest. However, I'm going to take it in the opposite direction; rather than basing a Pokemon's skills off of its Contest stats, a Pokemon's Contest stats directly determine its skill ranks. This encourages players who aren't interested in Contests to try out Poffins by letting them increase skills they otherwise could not give their Pokemon; later on, if they decide they are interested in trying out a Contest, they don't have to start grooming their Pokemon for Contests from scratch.
I have known of PTU for all of 3 months, so I don't have any personal experience to go off of, but Appeal rolls look like a nightmare. First, you have to look up the Contest Effect of each move you know to compare and see what you want to use. Then you have to roll the dice for that move. Then you have to look up what each of those dice rolls give you. THEN you have to decide how many extra dice you want to roll, and THEN you have to look up what those dice give you AGAIN. This sounds like it slows the game down to a crawl, and when I was planning for the game I'm running, I was considering ordering custom dice to eliminate some of the looking up. My solution to speeding this up is two-fold - eliminate bonuses that give you expendable dice, and use the sum of the dice rather than the frequency of certain values to determine how many appeal points you get.
Finally, Contests should be a separate supplement rather than part of the core rulebook. Just as Glitchbenders, Godkillers, and Groundshapers are not appropriate for every setting, not everyone wants Contests and Coordinators. Putting them in their own book gives room to relist every move and its contest type and effect on contests, rather than having to look up separate information each and every time you want to use a move, and also gives room for more custom effects and interactions rather than a cookie cutter combo of effect + type. Plus, the PTU writers are great at providing seeds, suggestions, and jumping-off points, so this new book could be chock full of alternate contest rules and contest-centric campaign ideas.
Those are my main points. Here are the finer details.
- Contest stats range from 0 to 6. Each point in the stat gives you a +1 bonus to Appeal Rolls using that stat and +1 rank in the skill associated with the Contest Stat. Each stat is linked with exactly one skill.
- Poffins have a +1 cost to raising stats (ie, it takes 1+2+3+4+5+6 Poffins to get a stat up to max). You can't raise a stat higher than the highest rank skill you have (or the skill associated with the contest?). Haven't decided if this is for total Poffins or Poffins into a specific stat (ie, could you pay 6 Poffins to increase all stats by 1, or would that cost 21 Poffins?)
- You can't increase a Pokemon's Contest stat beyond the ranks you have in your highest-rank skill [Alt, the skill associated with the given Contest Stat], and your Pokemon can't have a higher Contest Stat Total than its level divided by 4. Thus, a level 30 Pokemon owned by a level 15 trainer could have 6 points in one stat and 1 in another, 2 points in two stats and 3 in another, or any other combination of 7 points.
- Appeal Rolls are expressed in much the same way as skill rolls; the sum of one to five d6 + X, where X is the Contest Stat associated with the move. However high you roll in this is however many Appeal Points you get.
- All bonuses that give you additional dice during the Appeal Stage (
- (not as fleshed out) Each move has both an Appeal value, expressed as Xd6+Y, and a Fumble value, expressed as a whole number. If you roll under this Fumble value, subtract the Appeal Points you would have gotten from your current total instead of adding to it. It should be hard but not impossible to hit the Fumble value with a 6 in the given stat, and far more common, even likely, to hit the Fumble value with a 0 in the given stat.
- Vanilla contests are much like King of the Hill - it's about getting the most Appeal and staying on top. Each contestant's total Appeal Points at the end of the round becomes their initiative value in the next round. A lot of effects either mess with the contestant in first or grant bonus effects if the user isn't doing so well. The rolls you make during the Introduction Phase
Two final ideas that aren't really a part of the above proposal. First, just as Trainers are able to participate in combat, they should also be able to participate in Contests (if the DM so chooses). Something like...a trainer's Contest Stats are determined by the ranks s/he has in the linked skill (rather than the reverse like Pokemon), and there's a basic Appeal move similar to Struggle that all Pokemon and trainers can use. Second, we might want to consider making Contests more like 4e D&D Skill Contests - either make them completely dependent on skills or use skills as the primary way to gain appeal points and Moves as a boost to those skill rolls.
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Sgt. Cookie
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Jun 9 2017, 01:08 PM
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- chif-ii
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So...PTU, in general, is very complex, and Contests are even more so. My ideas revolve around simplifying Contests as much as possible, especially when it comes to Appeal rolls and Contest Stats.
Sgt. Cookie, I like your idea of creating a stronger relationship between the skills a Pokemon has and its ability to perform well in a contest. However, I'm going to take it in the opposite direction; rather than basing a Pokemon's skills off of its Contest stats, a Pokemon's Contest stats directly determine its skill ranks. This encourages players who aren't interested in Contests to try out Poffins by letting them increase skills they otherwise could not give their Pokemon; later on, if they decide they are interested in trying out a Contest, they don't have to start grooming their Pokemon for Contests from scratch.
I was actually thinking something similar, actually, except Poffins can be used to increase a pokemon's skills, at least for Contests. If Poffins can be used for a more general purpose like that, then it becomes a no-brainer to stuff your pokemon with a variety of Poffins.
Since my (Probably flawed) vision has 10 (effective) skills as far as Contests are concerned and each of those stats has two associated skills... hmmm... actually I think the "two stat" idea is flawed from inception, instead, keep the 10 skill thing and instead have 2 skills per stat, that gives us a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 12 for a stat... hm... yeah... that could work...
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I have known of PTU for all of 3 months, so I don't have any personal experience to go off of, but Appeal rolls look like a nightmare. First, you have to look up the Contest Effect of each move you know to compare and see what you want to use. Then you have to roll the dice for that move. Then you have to look up what each of those dice rolls give you. THEN you have to decide how many extra dice you want to roll, and THEN you have to look up what those dice give you AGAIN. This sounds like it slows the game down to a crawl, and when I was planning for the game I'm running, I was considering ordering custom dice to eliminate some of the looking up. My solution to speeding this up is two-fold - eliminate bonuses that give you expendable dice, and use the sum of the dice rather than the frequency of certain values to determine how many appeal points you get.
Eyup. Like I said in the thread description: They're a behemoth.
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Finally, Contests should be a separate supplement rather than part of the core rulebook. Just as Glitchbenders, Godkillers, and Groundshapers are not appropriate for every setting, not everyone wants Contests and Coordinators. Putting them in their own book gives room to relist every move and its contest type and effect on contests, rather than having to look up separate information each and every time you want to use a move, and also gives room for more custom effects and interactions rather than a cookie cutter combo of effect + type. Plus, the PTU writers are great at providing seeds, suggestions, and jumping-off points, so this new book could be chock full of alternate contest rules and contest-centric campaign ideas.
That's actually what's going to happen in 2.0.
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Those are my main points. Here are the finer details.
I'll go over these point by point.
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Contest stats range from 0 to 6. Each point in the stat gives you a +1 bonus to Appeal Rolls using that stat and +1 rank in the skill associated with the Contest Stat. Each stat is linked with exactly one skill.
That... seems like a bad idea. By having only 5 relevant skills for contests seems... I don't know... I just think that a Machamp should be able to use it's own prodigal Combat ability in a Tough Contest. Instead of needing to eat a cake to make them more intimidating.
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Poffins have a +1 cost to raising stats (ie, it takes 1+2+3+4+5+6 Poffins to get a stat up to max). You can't raise a stat higher than the highest rank skill you have (or the skill associated with the contest?). Haven't decided if this is for total Poffins or Poffins into a specific stat (ie, could you pay 6 Poffins to increase all stats by 1, or would that cost 21 Poffins?)
That... is an awful lot of poffins. The core rules have 8 poffins max for a pokemon. To raise all stats to 6, a pokemon would need 126 poffins costing 63,000 to make. Which is beyond ridiculous.
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You can't increase a Pokemon's Contest stat beyond the ranks you have in your highest-rank skill [Alt, the skill associated with the given Contest Stat], and your Pokemon can't have a higher Contest Stat Total than its level divided by 4. Thus, a level 30 Pokemon owned by a level 15 trainer could have 6 points in one stat and 1 in another, 2 points in two stats and 3 in another, or any other combination of 7 points.
This... hm... I dunno. On the one hand, Contests are a little different than regular battles as a pokemon's level has less real meaning on its overall success. On the other hand, PTU already has limits on how often a pokemon can eat Poffins.
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Appeal Rolls are expressed in much the same way as skill rolls; the sum of one to five d6 + X, where X is the Contest Stat associated with the move. However high you roll in this is however many Appeal Points you get.
In my version, you roll the skill itself to determine appeal points. So it's not too dissimilar.
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All bonuses that give you additional dice during the Appeal Stage (
I... think you meant to flesh this one out.
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(not as fleshed out) Each move has both an Appeal value, expressed as Xd6+Y, and a Fumble value, expressed as a whole number. If you roll under this Fumble value, subtract the Appeal Points you would have gotten from your current total instead of adding to it. It should be hard but not impossible to hit the Fumble value with a 6 in the given stat, and far more common, even likely, to hit the Fumble value with a 0 in the given stat.
So, basically the Contest version of an Accuracy Check? ... I like it!
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Vanilla contests are much like King of the Hill - it's about getting the most Appeal and staying on top. Each contestant's total Appeal Points at the end of the round becomes their initiative value in the next round. A lot of effects either mess with the contestant in first or grant bonus effects if the user isn't doing so well.
Huh. That actually makes a lot of sense. The Introduction stage actually has a bit more of a role to play as it would determine the initial order. Of course, each pokemon in the contest needs to spend one round as the center of attention.
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The rolls you make during the Introduction Phase
I separated this sentence out because I think you meant to write more. But I'm like 60% sure that you meant the same thing I did.
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Two final ideas that aren't really a part of the above proposal. First, just as Trainers are able to participate in combat, they should also be able to participate in Contests (if the DM so chooses). Something like...a trainer's Contest Stats are determined by the ranks s/he has in the linked skill (rather than the reverse like Pokemon),
PTU core already says that Trainers could participate in a different sort of contest.
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and there's a basic Appeal move similar to Struggle that all Pokemon and trainers can use.
All moves in the game have SOME sort of contest effect, so a Struggle-analogue wouldn't be required. In addition, since Contests are (In many ways) an alternative way to show off moves, a Trainer who hasn't devoted much to moves shouldn't really be Contest-capable.
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Second, we might want to consider making Contests more like 4e D&D Skill Contests - either make them completely dependent on skills or use skills as the primary way to gain appeal points and Moves as a boost to those skill rolls.
Rolling skills to determine how "appealing" moves are was actually the inception of this entire thing.
But I'm with you on the last part, Moves are really just vectors for (and modifiers of) the skill rolls that determine who the victor is.
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MrRasputin
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Jun 9 2017, 07:43 PM
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So I have my own revised version of Pokemon Contests that I use, it hasnt gotten much play time as players are more murder hobos but I think it works pretty well. The idea is based on a rock, paper, scissors concept for the performance part of it. Positioning does not mater and as such there is no center or attention. The only thing I would like to adjust about it is to make it more related to your Pokemon's strengths. To give a bigger benefit to a Zapidos over a Pichu in a Cool contest. Anyways this version has more strategy involved since you need to form alliances and harm the biggest threat without putting yourself behind too much. The idea is Performance beats Sabotage, Sabotage beats Hype and Hype beats Performance.
Contest decided by 1d5: (1-Cool, 2-Tough, 3-Beauty, 4-Smart, 5-Cute) Pick a Pokemon to enter, the Pokemon's Type is linked to a Contest Stat Beauty- Fire, Ice, Water. Cool- Dragon, Electric, Flying, Dark. Cute- Fairy, Normal, Psychic. Smart- Grass, Ghost, Poison, Bug. Tough- Fighting, Ground, Rock, Steel. If using a Pokemon that is related to the Contest Type you get +10 Points If using a Pokemon that is opposite to the Contest Type you lose -10 Points
Introduction Phase: Introduce yourself & Pokemon and give a Skill Check that corresponds to one of your Pokemon's Contest Stat(s) and gain 1/2 of that roll as Points (Pick 1 if you have 2) Command-Cool, Intimidate-Tough, Intuition-Beauty, Guile-Smart, Charm-Cute
If your Pokemon has been fed Poffins for the specific Contest Type, gain +1 for each of those Poffins
Contest Phase: Each Contest lasts for 10 Rounds In each Round you can choose to do a Performance, Sabotage, or Hype
Performance- Gain 3d6 Points Sabotage- Gain 1d10 Points, Target loses 1d6 Points, and if they use Hype this turn they get 0 points and it resets their Hype counter to 0 Hype- Gain 3d6 Points, if its the (2nd, 4th, 6th...) successful use, gain 6d6 Points The Winner is who ever has the most Points at the end of the Contest
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