Common GM Pitfalls

Common GM Pitfalls

Because we’ve all made mistakes, and we want to help you avoid the ones we’ve made! A lot of these will be common mistakes that GMs make when just starting a campaign, when PCs and their Pokémon tend to be weak and limited, but many of these will continue to apply throughout a campaign.

Players Should Invest in HP

This is more of a player-side issue, but a GM should still have their finger on the pulse of their game enough to identify it when they see it.

Especially early on when Levels are low, investment in HP is very important for Pokémon and Trainers alike. If a player is putting very few or no Stat Points into HP, you should probably intercede and tell them that they’re going to have a rough time early on.

Later on, when higher Levels automatically provide a decent buffer of Hit Points to a Pokémon, it can be safer to slack off on HP investment, but it’s almost never a good idea to ignore it entirely.

On the GM side, aside from watching what the players do with their stats, another good idea is to watch the Base Stat Relations of the Pokémon you hand out for capture. Species with HP as their lowest, or close to lowest, Base Stat are very difficult to raise early on. Choosing Natures carefully can help alleviate this problem, as can providing suppressant berries or other means of tweaking Base Stats. Alternatively, simply save these species for later in the campaign.

Beware Flying Pokémon

In the video games, Pidgey and its equivalents are chump-change encounters. Depending on your players’ starter Pokémon, that could remain the case, or they could be terrifying demonspawn due to their simple ability to fly and launch attacks from range while remaining out of reach of melee attacks.

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense to simply remove all Flying Pokémon from your routes or render them pacifistic until your players have Pokémon capable of dealing with them in a traditional manner, but you can make encounters with them less one-sided and boring for your players.

First of all, remind your players that they can do more than simply use the Moves they have. Improvised attacks such as throwing rocks can allow a melee combatant to take aim at flyers, for example. Ambushes with Bait can catch birds off guard before they take off, and Combat Maneuvers like Grappling can keep them on the ground.

Pokémon in the anime and manga often leap and perform great feats of acrobatics to fight their flying foes, and that’s no different in PTU. Create an environment where Pokémon can leap off outcroppings, trees, and other geographical features to reach flying foes with melee attacks. In a pinch, they may even use their Trainers for a boost. A relatively tall Trainer with their hands stretched above their heads will be able to boost a small Pokémon up 2 meters, often enough to help close the distance between them and a low-flying bird.

Be Careful With Homebrew

By all means, we encourage you to make tweaks and modifications to our system to best fit your campaign, and, in fact, we provide optional rules and ideas for doing so throughout this book. However, it’s probably best as a new GM to keep your adjustments and modifications within manageable limits as you learn the system.

Particularly, newcomers to the system often have a hard time balancing custom Trainer Classes or assessing the balance effect of homebrew Classes that others have written, not to mention the possibility that some homebrew Classes haven’t been updated to match the latest official rules. If you’re new to GMing the system, it’s recommended that you have players stick to the Classes available in the official releases, whether in this book or in one of the supplementary books.

Even if you’re an experienced GM, if you have new players, it may be easier to stick to the official Classes until everyone is more familiar with the system and less likely to get tripped up by homebrew Classes. Another place where new GMs often throw a spanner into their own works is by creating more complex subsystems for the game or increasing the complexity of existing systems, such as reintroducing differing base capture rates by Pokémon species.

This kind of added complexity can often slow down the game considerably, especially if it requires looking up data often! We fully acknowledge that PTU is already a rather complex system with many moving parts, and this means the more you can keep things simple, the better off you’ll usually be.

Use Shinies Judiciously

Many GMs and players find themselves drawn to Pokémon tabletop gaming so they can give their Pokémon the quirks and personality they couldn’t in the handheld games. Those with a creative streak have often imagined variations on their favorite Pokémon or “fakemon” species they’ve always wanted to see. With the existence of Type Shifts and Shiny Pokémon, it can be tempting to flood your campaign world with special specimens and make even the mundane species such as Rattata routinely extraordinary or to give such Pokémon extravagent effects that outstrip normal specimens.

Hold yourself back. We’ve seen cases where campaigns can devolve into Shiny Pokémon “arms races” where players feel the need to reserve spots on their team for Shiny Pokémon only and where any normal specimen of a species is going to be grossly devalued once a Shiny version is inevitably discovered. This is no fun for anyone, and it can be especially frustrating to have early game captures or even starter Pokémon that have become important to a character from an RP perspective rendered dull, uninteresting, and weak compared to the plethora of Shiny Pokémon that are made available.

While Shiny Pokémon and Type Shifts are useful for spicing up a campaign, especially for veterans of the handheld games and of PTU, they are, like most good things in life, best in moderation.

Pace Out Item Availability

No, really, be judicious with how available you make powerful items, especially early on. There’s little else that’s less fun in PTU than having every battle become a game of rocket tag, which can easily happen if starting Trainers get their hands on an Earthquake or Blizzard TM. It may make sense in a modern society that just about anything can be ordered online from the equivalent of Amazon.com, but you probably want to sacrifice a little realism there for the sake of fun. More broadly speaking, don’t make every item available in every store, regardless of the item’s power.

First of all, it removes a lot of the incentive to visit new places and the excitement players feel when browsing stores in new towns. Giving different towns different selections of Poké Balls, TMs, Held Items, Evolution Stones, and other items is an easy way to give them flavor, especially if you designate specialties to particular towns like putting a lot of Poké Ball vendors in a town with a Poké Ball factory.

Second of all, players who took crafting Features such as Ninja’s Arsenal will feel their Features are cheapened if their specialty items can be bought just about anywhere.

If you need a stronger in-universe reason for limitations on TMs and other powerful items, it could simply be that the Pokémon League regulates their sale and use, making the powerful selections off limits to everyone without the requisite Gym Badges.

Beware Single ‘Mon Trainers

The Pokémon video games teach players to diversify their teams and not rely on a single Pokémon for everything. The same principle applies to Pokémon Tabletop United.

Pouring a lot of Experience into a single Pokémon will result in a Pokémon that is very powerful in certain situations yet absolutely useless in others. It can be very difficult for a GM to manage encounter difficulty in such a situation. A Pokémon far above the average Level of the others in the party would contribute far more than the others if left alone, but if it’s taken out, the player who had that Pokémon is usually left crippled if they haven’t been raising the rest of their team. Neither situation produces a fun dynamic.

It’s for this reason that we recommend putting maximum caps on the amount of Experience that can be allocated to a single Pokémon after an encounter. Even if a player uses only one Pokémon throughout a large boss encounter, it’s okay to let them allocate some of their Experience to their weaker team members in order to catch them up and to spread Experience among their team.

Don’t be afraid to talk to your players either if they’re trying to pump up one Pokémon to the exclusion of the rest of their team. If most players have Pokémon in the Level 15 range, but one has mostly Level 5 Pokémon aside from one that they’re attempting to shoot up to Level 30 for a third stage evolution, then that’s probably an issue that should be addressed.

Don’t Run For a Crowd

Pokémon Tabletop United really plays best when you have four or fewer players at the table, plus a GM. Once you get into the realm of having five, six, or more players, then combat starts getting bogged down, and overall it can become quite a slow experience.

Keep Combat Going Briskly

There are a number of pitfalls that can cause combat to go slowly. First of all, make sure you and all of the players are well acquainted with the rules in the system. Taking time in the middle of a turn to look up rules is an easy way for combat to slow to a crawl.

Second of all, ask the players to pay attention to combat and decide on their actions while others’ turns are happening. That way, they don’t need to spend time once it’s their turn to figure out what they want to do and can instead announce their actions immediately. Third, keep aids such as the Type Effectiveness Chart and Damage Charts at hand for quick reference. This is especially important if any of your players are new to Pokémon or aren’t familiar with new Types and the updates to Type Effectiveness from the newest video games.

Finally, when you’re roleplaying online via real time text, such as a chatroom or IRC channel, it’s a good idea to conduct the dice rolls and other mechanical parts of a turn in combat first before doing all the fluff and description. That way, everyone can apply damage and other effects while the person attacking types up their description for their attack.