A while ago I was introduced to the Pokemon Adventures system. Robert, a friend of mine really wanted to play a Pokemon game and was trying to convince me to play it. Sadly, he made the mistake of saying, "This is a really smooth and well-balanced system". If he had said, "The system is clunky, confusing, slows combat to a crawl at times and is very unbalanced... But hey, it's Pokemon so let's give it a shot," then that would have been fine. However, he didn't - and when he showed me the system I was absolutely stunned by how clunky the whole thing was.
An hour of dissecting the many, many gameplay problems with the system later (which involved players basically calculating by hand all the stat-boosting math that the gameboy games usually do for you, only with fourteen moves on each pokemon rather than four) Robert finally just threw up his hands and said, "Okay, the system has tons of problems. I admit it. Why don't you just make a better system Dan?"
Challenge accepted.
I spent the next two weeks in-between my work, school and other projects building a pokemon system from scratch. In my next post or two I'll take you step by step of how I built the core mechanics from scratch and how another friend and I set about making the playtest pokemon.
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