Pig_catapult
Replies: 29

Munch
Replies: 14

Jean
Replies: 7

Munch
Replies: 10

Hex
Replies: 11

Munch
Replies: 5

Jake
Replies: 0

Sophia Blackwell
Replies: 0

Travis
Replies: 22

Pig_catapult
Replies: 3

Drakon, Torby, Giriel

Yeah. With classes winding down, me finally getting used to college, and a tsunami of nostalgia overcoming my better judgement, I'm seriously pondering the viability of another Althea. As usual, everything came to me via shower ideas, and I'd like to run the general idea - setting, systems, plot - by people to see what they think. If it sounds good, if there's some aspect of one of the systems you don't like, whatever, just post, and let's see if we can get a decent discussion going. While I certainly can't promise 24/7 activity like I used to be able to pull off, I think that I can reasonably commit to at least an hour or two a day on busy weeks and a fair bit more most of the time, so take that as you will. Would just continue Arachnos line but I don't think that's really Althea - our gig was always just doing Pokemon RPing, but polished as shit compared to everyone else, and Arachnos was maybe a bit too far off that path. Sort of like 3.epic, but let's not go there.

At any rate, the tentative overview of what I've got so far.

Setting is simply - a city. An immense, living city, covering the entire island it's built on - the island is the city, both above and below-water. Think of it as a hunting ground for trainers; most of it is abandoned, but trainers are being introduced to it constantly en masse, starting very recently, as sort of a social experiment; throw a bunch of trainers in an abandoned city, let them explore, figure out what happened to everyone else, and find out who's the strongest, even if they have to beat the living hell out of everyone else on the island to do it. Partially because it sounds cool, partially because, put frankly, I'm sick and goddamn tired of every Pokemon RP ever - yeah, including oldhea - having an immense world to explore... and no one ever actually going anywhere. Rather than go for sheer numbers and square miles, I'd rather focus heavily on one single large location, one with every bit as many things to explore and able to rearrange itself to uncover new areas to explore, but one small enough that people can - and will - be running into each other all the time, whether for chance encounters, momentous occasions, or just the occasional battle. Or a quick fuck on the counter, I'm not super picky. Point being: social integration is good. Pokemon is immensely social at heart, and yet so few RPs actually encourage that, much less even make a token attempt to build a living, breathing world, full of people with complex nuances, flaws, strengths.

The city proper is less of a city and more of a self-contained existence; tons of large parks, bio-domes, wildlife reserves, nature in the middle of mankind's stark accomplishments. This includes underground - sunken portions of the city trapped underwater - and possibly in some variety of sky island, but we'll see. Maybe a Journey to the Center of the Earth-esque very deep area, or summat. Other major points of interest are that the entire city is malleable and possessed by an Animating Intelligence, which can - slightly - rearrange the city at a whim (to make a bit more room for a Pokemon battle, say, or naturally "heal" from severe infrastructure damage after a spate of Earthquake moves), or in the Labyrinth, control it absolutely; structure is absolutely fluid and constantly in flux, non-euclidian geometry, shifting, changing, adapting. Maybe a nice pleasant sense of boundless malevolence to round things out in there; every Labyrinth has its Minotaur, and there's more to the AI than just the occasional Would You Kindly or discussion of science.

And no, it's not named Rapture. Even if there may be the occasional deserted laboratory drenched in blood and body parts, and dark corners inhabited by inhuman monsters. <3

'sup Lethos

Also, the actual city is deserted. Completely. Of human life, that is. No one really knows why, much less what happened to everyone. Players are part of an exploratory expedition force of trainers, airlifted in to find out what the fuck happened and why. Not that they actually know that much. Support personnel too; NPCs to run shops and actually reclaim the city. So the city is for the -most- part pristine, but... ruins. No life, or at least no human life; plenty of animal and unlife to deal with, especially the farther in you go!

Systems are a bit different. I don't have any of these locked down, so this is more going to be a discussion of what -I- see as wrong with the status quo so to speak, either of older Altheas or Pokemon RPing in general, and suggest alternatives. I rather expect to see a lot of disagreement/discussion here, but we'll see.

• RPan itself is a touch touch to lock down. We know that absolute sandbox RP doesn't work; Althea 3.epic - I rest my case. RRT is equally bullshit, especially given how Althea has always stood for creativity and stronger environmental control. 4.win's system, of Harbingers (for ease of reference, and since I'm discussing the concept rather than Harbingers specifically, I'll refer to the idea as storytellers (STs) from now on) leading but not controlling players through environments through which they share control, though ST's word is law on environmental issues, with players retaining full control of themselves and their Pokemon, worked extremely well... so long as the ST was completely active. It also relied far too heavily on Harbinger intervention; there WAS no way or reason to RP in other groups, at least initially. Rebirth is not nearly as - inherently - structured as 4.win; operatives were organized into heavily segregated ranks, which doesn't really work with trainers. Sure, there will be trainer ranks (expounded upon later), but those aren't like OMEGA ORDERS EVERYONE AROUND so much as "lol I'm better than you, but you can still probably beat my ass with some good thinkin'."
  
  My solution is to provide a couple methods, depending on the player's preference and what they're doing; the obvious of self-led journeying, though probably still limited mostly to pairs if they're going anywhere dangerous; Storyteller-led reffing, basically like a ref taking a harbinger's job - possibly with some sort of XP bonus, like 1.3x XP; Referee-led. Referee (Arbiter?) deserves a bit of clarification; their only job would be to... well, referee player vs. player battles, run the basic battle calculations (aka roll dice or whatever; I'll hit on that more when we get to discussing the battle system), and generally keep PvP from turning into the kind of clusterfuck from MMan EXE or any other halfass freeform site. A group for each; ST could be a position for anyone imaginative enough to run these topics for fun and profit, referees (arbiters?) would generally be picked more from people who can run a simple calc and keep things fair, since the focus is still on freeform, albeit within constraints - they aren't actually reffing (tohea-style) battles, just doing calculations as necessary and calling fouls, which will doubtless eventually become necessary.
  
  
• Battle System I'm thinking of a bit of a departure on. We could probably just use 4.win's for PvE shit, I don't know; was that one simple enough, too simple, what? Link's in the RPG Rules if you need to review. More importantly, PvP; I had an idea to keep things similar but fair, at the cost of requiring a bit of math on the arbiter's part. Hopefully I can find an add-on so that all they'd have to do would be input the correct numbers and roll the dice; we'll see.
  
  Anyways, the proposal: PvP battles use the same basic system for damage, but a combination of skill and luck to actually land hits. There would be three actions; Evade, Defend, Attack, with Attack doubling as a counter. Each action has a set accuracy, with Attack's accuracy depending on the move used - Evade might always be a base 100acc attack and Defense 70, but Hyper Beam is 80(ish), Tackle is 95, etc. Tack on XX points for good RPing - up to say, 20 - and YY points for good tactics - up to say, 20 again - to account for RPan' skill, use any other modifiers we're crazy enough to come up with, and roll each player's attack on a d200 as opposed rolls, which iirc Dev remembers how to install on ZB; the higher roll succeeds and the lower one fails. Possibly with thresholds (1-50 is a glancing blow for 0.5x damage, 51-150 is normal damage, 151-200 or maybe even only 180-200 is a critical hit for 1.5x damage), we'll have to see. Defenses counter attacks, and even if they fail the roll they still subtract some damage; Attacks can be used as proactive defenses, battering away someone else's water gun or actually countering a foe's Hyper Beam with your own. Used as such, the loser of the roll subtracts their attack power (100 from Defense, 50 from Evade, Variable from attack) from the winner's, with the disparity being the final attack's power. So, you hit me with Hyper Beam; I Defended rather than do shit that turn, lost the roll, but still soak up 2/3 of the damage from your attack, leaving you doing 50 power worth of damage to me (which is what, T2 damage?).
  
  The point of throwing in numbers is twofold; one, it adds a bit of randomness to keep things at least ostensibly fair; two, it keeps people from just dodging everything twenty posts in a row. Overlap a bit with Arbiter's job, but an impartial system so as to keep the Arbiter from having to actually take sides unless necessary, hopefully. Also rewards good RPing/tactics, obviously, so it's not JUST attack attack attack.
  
  Exact numbers and counter systems obviously need to be seriously discussed assuming we do actually go with the idea, but that's the gist of it,
  
  
• Pokemon also need discussion. Specifically, I am going to break out in hives and SING THE SONG THAT ENDS THE WORLD if I see another Pokemon Master collecting 151 Pokemon, or even eighteen. Or ten, for that matter. Huge teams are retarded; from an in-setting perspective it's not good business to have people with six Onixes running around your city; from an objective perspective, it dehumanizes each Pokemon drastically. A lot of the time people just catch everything they find and hope to eventually trade it; you see all these teams that have ten or more Pokemon, or worse, a full team and then a shit-ton of Pokemon in the PC. Given that Pokemon are as much the heroes as the trainers here, I'm leaning towards much stricter limits; two or three Pokemon on hand at any given time - possibly limited by trainer rank; only two until you accomplish X, at which point you have earned the right to carry three - and a similarly heavily limited number in PC; maybe 3 hardcap there, no unlocks needed, with on-the-fly switching not possible.
  
  While I appreciate the general idea of versatility, having six weak, poorly-characterized Pokemon is not a good thing, and the system is pretty much "yeah whatever" when it comes to typing anyways, with Pokemon able to learn any number of moves from their moveset and type advantages only adding minor damage. Better to work on a few highly-characterized, versatile Pokemon that are as much characters in their own rights as the actual trainer than an endless storm of early-evolved Beedrill, I say. Thoughts? Feedback on that? Different soft/hardcaps?
  
  
• League bullshit is another major issue, and one dear to my heart. As cool as the idea of gyms and Elite 4 is... it doesn't work. Look at Tohea. Who actually beat gym leaders there? Elite 4? Alternia is no better off, though that's not surprising given that they're just a poor rip-off of what Nick reduced Tohea to anyways. NPC gym leaders and E4, with set or variable levels, is... kinda fail. Okay, a lot fail. It doesn't work - never has, and without insane tweaking, probably never will.
  
  So fuck them - let the players be the league.
  
  It's not complicated; if STs have players bump into each other all the time and there are actual mechanical benefits for achieving a high ranking, it's probably not going to be too hard to get players engaging in friendly matches with each other; just one or two Pokemon apiece probably, rather than full teams, much less 6-Poke herds, but they're still pummeling the crap out of each other. Add on a sizable XP modifier (1.5x at least) for PvP battles with similarly-ranked players and possibly some sort of wins=rewards system (Honor or something, I don't fucking know), and don't penalize the losers much if at all - having funds for winners come from city funds, awarding losers full XP based on how well they did, etc - to encourage jumping in headfirst, and we've partially solved social integration and advancement at the same time. Not flawlessly, for those who don't like PvP, but I know that I wouldn't mind some battles with people here and there, and knowing Torby he's probably already wet himself halfway through the sentence before this paragraph.
  
  
• Skills also need discussion, possibly alongside auras. Point being: further customizing Pokemon, with skills learnable alongside attacks, with a hardcap of 1-2 per Pokemon. What exactly those skills might be, I'm not sure; needs discussion. Probably stuff like Expert Guard (Defense has +10 accuracy) or Antithesis: Fire (+X damage to Fire-type Pokemon) or Cybernetic Augmentation (+x -y), stuff like that; mostly passive skills for Pokemon to learn. Would like trainer skills too in some variation, potentially bulwarked/created as an effect of the city; not so much Agility (3) to let you urn fast as maybe just handy stuff; discounts, slow lobal energy regen for Pokemon, stuff like that. Same idea as Pokemon skills probably, just whatever we figure out. Needs moar feedback, obviously.

You get the idea. So. Thoughts? Interest? Pretty much all of that stuff is up for discussion except maaaaaybe the overall idea of the setting, though all specifics are indeed up for change, and I'd also like to gauge interest. This would be a bit more open than 4.win, and in theory actually ADVERTISED and mass board PM'd and such, so there could end up being a community again. Eligibility and willingness for various staff positions would be good too, though I'm not setting anything in stone yet, and same as with 4.win, trying to shy away from actual staff in favor of ST kinda stuff.

Come a little closer. I promise I won't stab you.
Well, okay, maybe a little bit, but what's a sucking chest wound or two between friends, right?

---

I think this makes us the first Pokémon RP site to have its own moe personification. Not sure about the first RP site in general to have one, but it's possible, at least on the English-speaking side of the intertubes.

She is, incidentally intentionally, a pixel-art that fits inside an 80x80px square, just like 4th-Gen Pokémon sprites. She's also a loli wielding a bloody knife, but, really, were any of you expecting her not to be?

open for beta shit. You get to keep one TWO THANKS TO PIGGY BITCHING Pokemon from 3.epic, but FFFFFUUU translate it to...

shit what are we at now?

uh, let's say we're at like, 4 or something, 'cause that magic shit was sort of a 3.5, 3.6. So anyways. yeah. we're on 4.win now, and since there are no GRs, and there's totally a HP stat (that I still need to explain...), you would probably want to give your doods some HP so they don't die instantly to a Ember. So you keep the moveset, keep the total XP, but you get all the XP to redistribute. to getting stats and moves and shit.

Oh wait, I still need to do move customization. Fuck. Well anyways. I didn't bother advertising this, so just post here with your profile and whatever the fuck Pokemon you want to keep, and I guess I'll eventually get around to it. Oh, and if you want to be an admin, just... you know... apply for it, I guess. In the reg. We need admins anywa-

oh and they're TR Admins, aka a IC rank. Not like, site administrator. Anyways. Just say you want the admin job and if you aren't a fail I'll just pretty much say yes.

If you're carrying over a character, though, you DO NOT get bonus XP a la normal start. You can pick between same-Pokemon and same-XP or same-pokemon and base-XP (20 and 80 respectively for grunt/trainer and admin), but you can't have your old 40XP pokemon AND get 80xp from getting admin.

anyways, this is sort of a shitty announcement and I'll probably delete it when we open officially, but fuck. it's 11pm, I want to get back to work, and you can all fuck off anyways, I already know you fags want to join back up so I don't have to pretend to be nice

anyways

tl;dr: keep 1 TWO THANKS TO PIGGY BITCHING pokemon with same moveset/total XP but redo the XP without GRs. You don't keep anything else. If you want TR Admin position, say as much in the reg, and I'll end up picking like ~3-4 of them initially. Grunt is easier to RP though - less demanding.

THAT IS ALL

and may TEAM ROCKET FUCK YOUR SHIT UP AGAIN

all hail hypnotoad