Move Damage & Accuracy Chart

Pokemon Tabletop Adventures does some things right, whilst others are a bit of a mess. Move damage is one of these issues that I wanted to try and streamline.

Transferring all the Pokemon moves into a dice-based tabletop system is a herculean task; something PTA has actually managed to accomplish, much to the designer's credit. The problem is that there isn't a whole lot of consistency - moves that don't seem to deal a lot of damage in game now deal massive damage, and moves with the same Power rating in the games have different dice rolls to determine damage in PTA.

I knew streamlining and organising this system was going to be a huge ask. Instead of trying to fix what had been done, I instead resolved to start again from scratch.

What I wanted to do was try and figure out a way to convert the Power ratings of in-game moves into a dice-based system. This way, instead of trying to stat dice rolls for every single move, I could simply figure out a conversion chart that would be easy to use based on the move's Power rating.

I'll admit, it took quite a few days of head scratching to figure it out, before the final, and surprisingly simple, solution dawned on me yesterday.

I didn't need to try and figure out dice rolls for Power ratings from 10 to 250. I only needed to figure it out for 10 - 100, and then add them together for moves higher than that. I jotted down all the dice in a standard rpg set, and next to them put down their lowest and highest values to give me my damage ratios. Then, I set about allocating them to the 10 - 100 scale, and this is now what we have:

10: d4 = 1-4

20: d6 = 1-6

30: d8 = 1-8

40: d10 = 1-10

50: 2d6 = 2-12

60: 2d8 = 2-16

70: 2d10 = 2-20

80: 3d8 = 3-24

90: 3d10 = 3-30

100: 3d12 = 3-36

Now, calculating move damage is simple! Tackle has a Power of 40? That's 1d10 damage, + the Pokemon's Attack stat. If a move has a larger Power, like 150, then it's 3d12 (100) + 2d6 (50). Easy!! I'm looking forward to testing it out this weekend in our first proper play test. 

As for Accuracy, this can simply be divided by 10 to give a d10 roll to hit. Accuracy 60 = 6, so you'd need a 6 or under on a d10 roll. Hopefully that system will work just as well, we'll wait and see. 

I'm forgoing PP in favour of the D&D system of At Will, Encounter and Daily frequencies. PP is simply another stat to keep track of, and I'm trying to minimise that where possible. I think the D&D system will work well. 

Until next time!

- Jamie