Whoa hey look here’s a new Pokemon Journeys playtest packet! And wow look there’s a cool map too to go with the adventure module inside.

The rules are still incomplete, but there’s enough material here for you to run a 5-6 session adventure with pregenerated Level 1 Trainers and Pokemon about being stranded on a mountain in a blizzard. Catch a Wooloo and cuddle with it for warmth! Run from angry Galarian Darumakas! Give all your possessions to Snom!

And of course, hop onto our Discord over in the sidebar and let us know what you think of the system so far and the adventure.

Playtesting is king. It’s a mantra among game designers, who often know all too well the pain of carefully designing a mechanic and then finding that it’s absolutely awful to play with or too hard to understand when playing in a real group. On the other hand, it’s a huge relief whenever a mechanic or idea that looks iffy on paper happens to test really well among players.

We’ve been pretty damn insistent that we want playtest feedback for Pokémon Journeys over untested theorycrafting, so it’s only fair we explain a bit of what we’ve learned through playtesting and what makes for a useful playtest for us. I’m going to be jumping through a number of sub-topics here, but I’ll try to keep each of them anchored to actual playtest experiences we’ve had in PTU or Pokémon Journeys.

If you haven’t gotten a chance to look at our draft materials for Journeys, you can find them at this link.
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Hey Pokémon Trainers, as we get further into testing and development of our Pokémon tabletop RPG, we thought it’d be fun to give you a peek into the design process. So here’s the first entry in our new dev diary series!

I’ll try to keep the preamble short, but first of all, we have a new working title for what we’ve been calling PTU 2.0 up to now: Pokémon Journeys

We’ve heard feedback requesting a new name to better reflect how big of a paradigmatic change the system is from PTU 1.05, and we also feel we’ve long outgrown the “United” label which was originally meant to juxtapose the system with PTA. So that’s what we’re calling the system…for now. Things may change, as always!

If you haven’t taken a look at our playtest docs and drafts yet, you can see them at this link.

Okay, that out of way, let’s talk about how we’re approaching one of the most exciting shifts in Pokémon Journeys: Every Pokémon will have a custom Move list, including many new Moves we’re writing ourselves to fill holes in a particular Type or mon’s repertoire.

It wasn’t an easy decision to commit to curating Move lists for all mons in Pokémon Journeys. On top of the sheer amount of work it creates for us, it also means we hold more responsibility now for the system’s overall Pokémon balance and can’t pass the buck to Gamefreak when a mon has garbage Moves.

But we believe there are astounding benefits to it. The sheer size and scope of some Pokémons’ TM and Tutor Lists in 1.05 was not only unwieldy, but it made certain Moves far too prevalent, such as Ice Beam and Thunderbolt. Early Gen Pokémon could usually enjoy wide coverage from their TM and Tutor options whereas later Gens appeared to have been assigned those Moves with more scrutiny. Extreme disparities existed within generations too. In contrast to the obvious Move lottery winners like Clefable and the Nidos, the Move lists for Pokémon like Electrode would make you think someone at Gamefreak had it out for them.

Let’s take a look at some example Pokémon Move lists, and I’ll explain what we did along the way. But first, a quick disclaimer: everything in this post is accurate as of time of writing, but if you’re looking at this post weeks or months later, don’t be surprised if our drafts look different.
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Not a release, sorry! But we’ve been testing PTU 2.0 for a few weeks now, and we want to share with everyone who isn’t part of our Discord server (but you should join us here because we’re cool).

As of time of writing, a lot of this material is pretty spotty as we’ve mostly been converting over the bare minimum we’ve needed for sessions. In the next couple days you’re going to see more Specializations go up, mostly more Type Aces and some Stat Aces. The Move doc will also be backfilled with all the modified and new custom Moves we wrote in the converted Pokemon document.

Playtest materials here! Have fun!

artwork by inuyaki

It’s been a few months, but here’s our next PTU Playtest Packet. No theme to it this time, just miscellaneous changes to range from rejiggering old Classes to streamlining core mechanics to making balance adjustments. Give us your feedback and suggestions!

Download here and enjoy!
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Discuss this post on our forums at this thread.

artwork by yuza

Annnnnd we’re back! After the exhausting eleventh hour crunch time we took to finish up the 1.05 release of Pokémon Tabletop United, we all needed a break from intensive work on the system. Unfortunately, that for me included working on blog posts, especially with how quickly I burned through my reserve of posts when 1.05 work was piling up.

Now we’re back though, and we’ve come bearing gifts. We’re going to begin releasing occasional playtest packets with material we’re still tweaking and experimenting with. For our first pack, we’re focusing on utility character options. Hopefully, this will give you both interesting insights into our dev process as we make changes over time and another focused avenue to give us feedback on what you’d like to see out of PTU.

Download here and enjoy!
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Discuss this post on our forums at this thread.

We’re still chugging away at 1.05, and today we’ll take a quick look at two of the Classes we introduced in 1.04 which will be getting some tweaking to better accomplish their intended goals. Both the Hunter and the Dancer were well received, but after they saw some play, we they discovered they could be just a bit clunky or disjointed.

Artwork by なるもい

Let’s start by taking a look at the updated Dancer, shall we?
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Hi everyone! This is castfromhp, and you’re reading the first post of the official Pokémon Tabletop United blog. Here, we’ll offer you a glimpse into the development of the system, ideas and content for your campaigns, and much more.

Let’s start by talking about PTU 1.05. Several months have passed since our last release – longer than the gap between any other PTU releases. Why, you might ask? After 1.04 was done, we all took a much-needed break from actively working on the system and thought we could wait a while as the typo reports and other feedback rolled in before getting back into the swing of things.

Once we did, we realized 1.05 wouldn’t be as simple an update as just fixing some typos and copy-paste mistakes. Several of the Trainer Classes introduced in 1.04 needed revision, some core subsystems are seeing tweaks, and we had assembled a small backlog of new Classes we wanted to finish and implement. And that’s just the start of it! Naturally, this means the release has taken a lot more time than we anticipated, and we’re sorry to anyone who thought they’d be getting a quick turnaround on a new version of PTU.

That said, here’s at three things to look forward to in the next version of PTU.

1. Visual Redesigns

Both The Blessed and the Damned and the Game of Throhs supplement will be getting visual redesigns to bring them up to par with the core book and Do Porygon Dream of Mareep supplement. Take a look at the new The Blessed and the Damned cover as well as the WIP internal layout of the book!

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