About Pokemon Stories

Pokémon Stories is an attempt to capture the spirit of Pokémon within a roleplaying game, to let players experience the joy of exploring, battling, forming a bond of friendship with their Pokemon, and everything else that you would expect to do in the world of Pokemon.

What Is a Roleplaying Game?
Roleplaying games are a type of storytelling experience where you and your friends work together to weave a story. It is a game where you play a role. Like all games, it has rules. There is a person called a GM, or game master, whose job it is to interpret those rules. In that way, he or she acts like a referee. But the GM is also like the narrator of a story. As a player, you’ll be playing the part of one of the characters in this story, saying what you want your character to try to do. When necessary, you’ll roll dice for random chance, and base success or failure on how well you rolled and how good your character and your Pokémon are at the task at hand. The narrator tells the rest of the story based on your actions, and also takes on the roles of the people and Pokémon you meet along your way, describing the places you go and the things you see.

What Do You Need?
You need a copy of this manual, and should make a least a half-hearted attempt to get people to read it. You also need some regular dice with 6 sides and a few others with 20 sides. The game refers to d6’s, d20's, d60's, and d200'ss. If you’re told to roll a d6, that’s just asking you to roll a 6-sided die. If you’re told to roll a d60, in this context, that simply means to roll a d6 and then multiply the result by 10. Similarly, when the game calls for a d200 you’ll take a 20-sided die and multiply the result by 10.

The game is designed to function best with one game master and 3-5 players. You can pick these up at your friendly local game store if you lack them.

What Inspired This Game?
It won't surprise you to know that this game was built from a love for the Pokemon franchise. It obviously draws heavily from the console games and anime. However, there were some other inspirations.

On the Game Boy games, almost everything was solved with a battle. You battled to make money, to advance your Pokemon, to earn badges, to catch wild Pokemon, etcetera, etcetera. Obviously, we wanted to make battling a significant part of this game, and we took inspiration from Pokemon Conquest in that regard, where groups of trainers use interesting tactics and terrain and moves to have a much more strategic play. We also took a bit of inspiration from the trading card game in that we included Pokemon on the bench.

A major bit of inspiration from the way Pokemon Go makes sure that gameplay is more than one fight after another. In this game, you don't have to battle Pokemon to catch them and battles happen in arenas where there's more on the line than just money.

We also tried to make the world come more alive by giving each Pokemon a personality that's tied to how strong a bond of friendship it shares with its trainer. And forget a small sampling of field moves like Surf, Headbutt, and Cut: you can use each and every move in the game out of combat to help you with any task you come across, meaning that the next time a small bush blocks your path you can fireblast that sucker out of the way.