Pokémon Tabletop Adventures!

Okay, so I'm pretty sure I've told everyone about this already, but I'm going to blog about it anyway cause, hell yeah.

Pokémon Adventures! It's a tabletop roleplaying game where you play Pokémon trainers! The rules for putting together a trainer are, as of yet, not complete - but the rules for designing, catching, and duelling with pokémon are finished! Trainers are easy, you can use almost any game system to cobble together an ordinary dude - so it's basically playable with a bit of conversion work!

I already tried putting together a Squirtle, it's easy as pie; just look up a Squirtle's statistics, adjust for personality, and then when your pokémon levels up you have to observe certain rules (like, Squirtle, Wartortle and Blastoise must always have Defense as their highest stat) - otherwise you're good to go! Pokémon duels follow the same basic rules as they do in the Gameboy game; attacks almost always hit, and deal damage or inflict certain special effects on enemy Pokémon. When rolls are required, they're handled with d20s or d100s. As usual, the most difficult part of strategizing is choosing which pokémon to use.

This rocks and as soon as there is free time for it, I am going to design an adventure. The only problem I can foresee is what happens if you should ever need rules for Pokémon vs. Human or Pokémon vs. Environment, as they never really address that in the game, and not much in the TV series. Presumably, though, humans are just plain screwed against even a basic Pokémon, and the environment causes serious problems for any Pokémon without an affinity for it (like, don't try to make Diglett swim, and don't leave your Bulbasaur in a rockslide).

When (not if) we eventually play this, I will only use the basic 150 Pokémon, and starting trainers will get to begin with one of the following: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, Geodude, Machop, Abra, Pidgey, Caterpie, Gastly, Zubat, Oddish. For balance reasons, the game doesn't allow you to start with Pikachu, only Pichu - but Pichu is not part of the original 150, so sorry dudes.