[Interest?] Pokemon-style game in Fate Accelerated

This is a long rant I initially posted in another site, but I didn't get any answers there. It seems like that one is mostly dead nowadays... well, I'm sure that this post's length really didn't help at all.

Anyway, read this if you'd like some thoughts on how to adapt a Pokemon(-like) setting to Tabletop RPGs. I'm posting it unedited.
_______________________________

I just discovered this site and dunno if people are still playing in here nowadays, but I thought I might try my hand at running a Fate game in here. I have never done PBP or ran a Fate campaign before, so I'll probably take a bunch of time getting ready for it before I do a *real* recruitment post. I'm already searching the web for relevant information, but if anyone would like to give first-hand advice or some links that could help me run a Fate PBP, I'd be pretty grateful. I'd be specially grateful for advice in dealing with turn combat/Conflicts...

Should I require that the players be active in specific periods of time, say 18:00 to 21:00 (in my time zone), like you would in a chat-based RP, or is "post whenever" fine for PBP? Or, "post at least once a day"... although surely the latter would not work in turn-based combat... ?

Well, about the game...

It would be a kind of "Pokemon with the serial numbers filed off", taking inspiration mainly from the Pokemon anime rather than games (I have read little of the manga), because Fate is a perfect fit for that. It's made for simulating dramatic action rather than videogame mechanics. We'll be using How To Train Your Mutant Fire Dog as a supplement to the base Fate Accelerated rules.

As to the details...

I was thinking that Monster species won't have distinct made-up names like in Pokemon, so we don't have to bother coming up with these. That would mean training an Electric Mouse rather than a Pikachu, or a Water Steel Emperor Penguin rather than an Empoleon.

I might or might not allow two Aspects per Monster rather than just one, in order to allow for more detail while avoiding having a single but very long aspect. Perhaps this is the wrong choice for Fate, specially since we'll be writing and not speaking, I'd enjoy your thoughts about that.

That might mean a Fire Dog that is also Loyal But Paranoiac rather than just a Loyal Fire Dog. Or one that is an Overly Enthusiastic Battler (a Blood Knight?), or Born To Be Wild.

Anyway, although I spoke of mainly emulating the anime, I would expect that every player is going to want to participate in the League Challenge and defeat the Champion. Everyone wants to be Ash Ketchum (maybe)! Except that...

The Pokemon anime, despite all its differences from the source material, is based upon the Pokemon games. And those are single-player games, and moreover single-player games where each Pokemon battle (excepting Dual Battles and other types, which are all rarer that Single Battles) consists of 1x1 battles where the defeated participants get replaced with others as they get knocked out or switched, until one of the humans run out of Mons.

And that would be an horrible setup for a normal team-based TTRPG! Having to watch each player duel a Gym Leader, one by one, Mon by Mon, would be a special kind of torture for the rest of the team, multiplied by however many fellow players you have at the table.

Now you are thinking, "but in the anime Ash always has 2-or-so Trainer companions, each with a Pokemon team of their own, and they're always fighting Team Rocket all together." And that's much better for a TTRPG! Except that it's always only Ash challenging the Gym Leaders, because those follow the games in having 1x1 battles as the norm, and having to show each Trainer main character challenge a Gym one by one would make for very boring, repetitive television. So, the TTRPG equivalent of that would be having a single player hog more of the screen time than the others, while the rest participate in the non-Gym parts of the game... still far from ideal.

So, what's my solution?

Make every player fight the Gym Leader at once! Maybe the Gym Leader commands all his Mons at once, or maybe he collaborates with subordinate Gym Trainers, but the important part is that all players fight together as a team, made up of one or more members of each player's Mon team. So each member of a team of 3 players who all have 1 Monster each would field a 3-Monster team to face whatever number of NPC Mons I decide for the battle, each player controlling his own Mon, obviously... but what happens after one or more players expand their Mon teams?

How To Train Your Mutant Fire Dog, or at least its SRD version, doesn't have rules or guidance about when to allow players to expand their teams, or how many Mons to allow per player. There's a cheap paid version available at DriveThruRPG that might include that stuff, but I haven't bought it to check. Which unfortunately means I'll have to decide that stuff myself...

I was thinking maybe a maximum of 3 Mons per player, half of Pokemon's 6, with each player only fielding one of their Mons at once in official battles. Outside them anything goes, except that extra Mons would not give extra turns, so you could field 3 but only command 1 per turn (or take an action with your human character).

Perhaps even 3 is too much. Why?

Because multiplying the Mons means multiplying the time which each battle will take. Perhaps this makes a monster taming game in a Fate PBP an horrible idea, but I'm willing to try...

As to when to allow new Mon captures, maybe I could take a cue from Pokemon fanfics and give them according to Badge amount: probably 1 extra "slot" per Gym Badge. That is, 2 Mons total after the first Gym, 3 Mons after the second, completing their team.

In the spirit of not needing 10 years of real time to finish the campaign, I might also halve the number of necessary Gym Badges to 4 (although there would be 8 or 10 Gyms to choose from, total). Then there might be a huge tournament at the end for the chance to battle the Elite Four equivalent...but possibly finishing the League Challenge would not even be the main focus of the campaign. Why?

In the games I always personally enjoyed more the parts of the storyline about taking down the Evil Team (Rocket, Plasma, etc) than fighting the Elite Four and Champion. I was always disappointed that Ash didn't take down Team Rocket in the original series, for all that he fought the Rocket Trio all the time. Eventually I'm going to read more of the manga to see its take on that.

This means I'm going to put a spotlight upon the Team Rocket-equivalent and other forms of organized crime (youth gangs, Yakuza?). Which also means I want to take a more mature tone than the Pokemon anime does most of the time (excepting maybe the likes of the Mewtwo movie), alternating between that and a lighter tone. I also plan on adding other mature aspects to the setting and themes: the story will be set some 15 or so years after the end of the equivalent of WW2 (yes, I'm inspired by the "Great Pokemon War" theory), organized crime is going to have some connections to the government... firearms are probably going to exist in the game's world, although rare compared to Monsters (because of being heavily regulated).


If you have read this entire post, CONGRATULATIONS. Are you interested?

(Not that I'm going to launch this thing right now...)

Okay, that is A LOT to digest and comment on but it's good to get everything you're concerned with out in the open. That's how things get resolved without getting pulled down rabbit holes or lost in the weeds discussing irrelevant minutiae.

1) PbP is inherently a SLOW gaming process. Concurrent live posting is incredibly difficult to pull off and usually better handheld by things like Roll20 or other VTT.
>>>The GOOD thing about PbP is that it's slow enough to really let the players and the GM handle a lot of info, action and exposition without being overwhelmed. With three players all posting at once, you have a day or two to think about what's happening, plan a response, look up rules or other information before sitting down to type out a reply post. PbP does take a time but that's okay, you usually get a better quality game out it.
You can't (and shouldn't) treat it like a Tabletop game and expect instantaneous progress; instead, treat it like a collaborative writing project and have some patience with it.

2) The premise of your game is totally do-able and gas green proposed a number of times on GamersPlane. The work involved with bringing it to play is pretty daunting. I've put in A LOT of work on some of the games I've brought to GP and it can get to be a chore at times. My advice would be to avoid trying to put everything down at once and just concentrate on the things you know you'll need to bring the game to its starting point. You don't need every Mon there is, just have a good handful available at first. You don't need every Gym detailed, try for an overview of the ones you're not going to immediately use, etc...

3) Running detailed Combat with multiple players, enemies and NPCs can be done but it can be a lot to handle if you don't prep and use shortcuts. I've run combats with a pretty big casts fairly regularly and it can be done. FATE, iirc, is a pretty flexible system that isn't super crunchy so combat can be streamlined yet still engaging.
>>>I use Theater of the Mind as far as combats go, so there's no real map to fiddle with. Some people use maps but I've always found it to slow things down rather than move them along faster, but that's just me. I do use a combat summary table at the end of my posts to keep track of damage, resources and consumables so I can better keep track of big combats:


>>>Those summary tables really help everyone keep on the same page and let's you track what's been done by who. It's not strictly necessary that the tables be 'player facing' if you don't want them to be. You can totally hide them so only you, as GM, can see them but that cuts out player input in case something got missed. They only have to track their own info so it's more manageable for them to spot if things are off.

4) What you're wanting is definitely a more cooperative game than having one player be the MC. There's a good mechanical and story hook with having Teams or Stables of Trainers be the norm. Cooperatively building up their reputation and selection of Mobs alongside maybe an HQ , Staff and the like. There's no need to put one player in the spotlight all the time if it's the Team/Stable doing the winning instead of one MC and a couple of support characters. The set-up for the Pokemon anime, if it can be called that, is more akin to what in TTRPG terms would be a 'Duet' game (one player, one GM). Whereas what you're trying to do is a more traditional TTRPG experience with one GM & multiple players. White Wolf's Street Fighter TTRPG went that direction by having the players be part of a Stable and having it become almost a character in the game as the players 'grew' & expanded it.

I don't have time at the moment to get to all my thoughts so I'll just sum up and say I'm intrigued by this concept and if such a game were launched I would like to be considered.

Thank you for your insightful feedback, witchdoctor! I'll definitely be readjusting my expectations of game speed. My knowledge of Fate mechanics is quite rusty from lack of opportunities to play, so I was already going to read again a lot of stuff before actually trying to run a game, but now I'll be specifically looking out for ways to streamline things. I hope I can still use the Conflict mechanic without slowing things down to a crawl... maybe only using it for specially important fights...

Maybe I'll take a look at this Street Fighter RPG, but I don't think I'll be giving an HQ to the PCs, because they'll be traveling around a lot. I suppose I should still look into whether to add money/resource management to the game (in a Fate-y way if I do, of course. Not tracking individual coins or anything like that).

Greel, if/when I get this thing started for real, I'll PM you.

Well, an HQ doesn't strictly speaking, have to be a physical place. It could just be a shorthand for resources & renown accumulated from Mon battles, badges/patches/medals won, etc... An abstracted principal of resources, reputation and accomplishments.