This feels like they gave Sakurai carte blache and I’m here for it! Kirby Air Ride was an absolute gem and probably the best showcase of Sakurai’s design sensibilities. Definitely my most anticipated game of the year!

Feedback is always more than welcome!

I might just change Paralysis at this point, it’s been a bit annoying to track in playtesting and if it’s apparently hard to understand as well it may not be worth it. The general goal of conditions was to have them go away as quickly as possible to keep things simple, which is why Paralysis disappears at the end of the start of turn, but having it just be no-movement for 2 turns is probably the better option. I’ll have to do some playtesting first, though.

And capitalising Move is probably the easiest option. I’d have to check if that causes anything weird, but probably not.

Hmm, techniques might work, but space is often limited and it’s quite a bit longer than “move”. I’m aware of the issue, but didn’t have a clean way of solving it. I couldn’t use “attack” since there’s already an Attack die and abilities are also a thing in Pokémon in general. If it was going to be confusing regardless, I figured I might as well stick with the name used in the games. Basically, move as a noun is an “attack”, move as a verb is movement. I may have to try to fit that clarification in somewhere…

The thing to keep in mind with Paralysis is that every round starts with determining turn order, any Paralysed Pokémon move to the end of the turn order and then loses Paralysis. The not-being-able-to-move bit is only relevant if the Paralysed Pokémon hasn’t acted yet that round.

Thanks!

I have never actually run a Pokémon TTRPG I didn’t make myself, but having read through a few, I was always struck by how much work they demanded from the GM. Having to basically design each Pokémon the players will face seems like such a daunting task. On top of this, enemy Pokémon usually have to be run the same as those of the players, which again means a lot more work for the GM. I’m a lazy GM at heart, and that just would not be possible for those games.

I tried my best to make things as easy on the GM as I could. With some experience, you should be able to start a battle from scratch in less than a minute, and you don’t have nearly as many decision points as the other players during the battle.

Feedback is always welcome!

The issue is that for out-of-combat actions, the move die has the same function for both types of moves, so giving it a different name could lead to more confusion. Additionally, any number mentioned on the move card always refers to the move die, so having different names might again be more confusing.

I hope I made it clear that special moves have a very different procedure, and as soon as you realise that, knowing that the “move die” is the die on the move card should hopefully make things fairly clear.

Part of the impetus behind the combat rules was trying to make a singular “Special” stat not just functional but logical. If it was just going to be SpA/SpD combined, there’d be no reason not to split them. Having the split be damaging moves and effect moves solved that issue nicely, but it did necessitate very different mechanics.

Thanks for the feedback, though!