Munchkinator
Replies: 2

Nolan
Replies: 3

Guest
Replies: 0

Twitch
Replies: 32

Guest
Replies: 0

Twitch
Replies: 10

Torbylicious
Replies: 17

Twitch
Replies: 44

Twitch
Replies: 16

Twitch
Replies: 9

Word Count Rewards

For those of you who do not know what word count is. Word count is the amount of words you, the role player, have typed up in a thread. It only counts when a thread is complete/graded, and any word count inside of an unfinished thread is ignored. When you are finished with your thread and ask for a grade, the staff member will grade it for you, and add your character's word count to the respective profile. The word count system is an achievement system, and the rewards are only redeemed through hard work. Word count that is deemed inappropriate and/or completely useless can be excused from the character's total word count if the staff member sees fit.

The gist of the Word Count Rewards system, is that by every x amount of word count achieved, the roleplayer gets an award. The word count only increases with the character, not the actual role players themselves. So if you type up an entire thread with say "Jimbob" and by the end have 3,000 word count. And then use another character say "BillyJim" and by the end have 2,000 word count. Your total word count would not be 5,000. There is no total word count reward system! So if you need 10,000 word count for a reward, Jimbob's word count needs to be 10,000, just by himself. BillyJim's word count does not apply at all.

The system is simple, you type useful roleplay and your word count increases by the end of your thread.
The following are rewards and word count requirements:

• 
  
• 10,000 - 2 XP to any Pokémon or $200.
  
• 20,000 - 4 XP or $500.
  
• 30,000 - 4 CP or 2 AP.
  
• 40,000 - 6 XP or $800.
  
• 50,000 - 1, Tier 1-2 TM of any choice.
  
• 60,000 - 8 XP or 3 AP
  
• 70,000 - $1,500 or 10 XP
  
• 80,000 - 1 Tier 1-4 TM of any choice.
  
• 90,000 - $3,000 or 5 AP
  
• 100,000 - 12 CP, 6 AP or 2 TM/Egg/Tutor Moves of any choice or $5,000.
  

List can be changed by an administer at anytime, without any notice. Cap is 100,000 words for now. Also, most of you may or may not have noticed your profiles now having a Word Count section. Those of you with graded topics already have their count added in. When you achieve a set word count, you can pick either or from the list. Post what you want in the staff request thread.

Be safe, there are lolis about.
Althea Administration

ART ATTACK!

Hello Althea!

     Some of you may remember having contests in previous versions of Althea. And we have not have had one in Althea 5.Rebirth, so we felt it was only right to have a contest now! We hope that you will enjoy this contest, and get some form of excitement from it. We urge all of you to at least try and submit a piece of work, even if you do not have any form of art talent! Who knows, maybe we'll pick yours! Now, you're probably wondering what exactly are you drawing. Well, do you see that pretty little empty space to the left of the chat box? It needs to be "artified." And by artified, I mean make a cool looking emblem which represents the Althea tournament. The emblem must:

• 
  
• Be at most 150x150 in length/width. If you wish to make it smaller, or bigger be my guest. But try not to make it obnoxiously large or small.
  
• Needs to resemble the tournament. Imagine if you received a letter in the mail from the tournament, inviting you to attend. What would the emblem at the top center of the page be?
  
• Look like you actually tried to make it. If it looks dull, and possibly created in a minute, it will most likely not be chosen!
  
• Has to be original. YOU must make it. Anyone copying an emblem for elsewhere will be disqualified from the contest. We WILL find a copyrighted emblem.
  
• Contain color. It can contain black and white, just not the entire thing.
  

But most of all, have fun while making it! After all, if you win, you will see it every time you come to Althea! Also, you cannot forget about the possible reward if you win! Everybody likes free stuff! The contest will end exactly three weeks from today. At 11:59:59PM Pacific Time on May 10, 2010.

Enjoy!
Althea Administration

Post your entries below. You can post more than one.

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 Pokémon 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 Pokémon 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. Pokémon 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 Pokémon 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
  
  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! The actual aesthetic varies drastically between areas - some are pristine and untouched, others have hundreds of years worth of old-growth timber and very obviously natural flowering shrubs and trees and vines and ivy growing besides and along and through cracked, broken buildings.
  
  
• The city itself I'm thinking of as actually an odd stark off-white; sorta like the newish alternate theme, it's very much an unusual coloration, but pretty much EVERYTHING obviously artificial is colored that - trees, wildlife, etc are obviously immune. The overall aesthetic is very unnatural though. Actual movement varies between areas; Labyrinth is literally constant, with floors and ceilings effectively acting as more of a solid liquid, since they can flow however the fuck they feel like, fuck gravity, and nothing is especially permanent. Expect a lot of scrambling as the room turns into a pit or a tower. Much of the early city is fairly permanent; it very slightly shifts to stay (mostly) dust and wear-free, streets always look pristine each morning, dust doesn't really settle, despite lack of cleaning. Elsewhere it can be more drastic; city can rebuild just about any damage overnight.
  
  
• People arrive in UnnamedCity(Exire?) by airlift. Only by airlift - helicopter, to be precise, from the company promoting the tournament. They arrive at New Haven, the only section of the entire city that never changes, at the beginning of their narrative/very shortly before. Immediately upon landing, everyone gets a minor headache - nothing serious, not mind-blowing agony or anything, just a bit of a twinge that fades out pretty quickly with no (obvious...) long-term effects. No mind control, brains exploding, no sudden psychic powers, just a bit of a headache.
  
  
• Night is not a good time to be out and about. Pokémon tend to go berserk, wild Pokémon vary from berserk to completely batshit loco insane, other things come out to play. New Haven is the only reasonably-safe place, but also the site of nightly attacks by various things. Corpses are always gone by morning. There's a small police force, or at least professional trainers - effectively mercenaries - hired to keep the area from being overrun, but you get used to sleeping to the sound of vicious battles and a lot of blood, though all evidence is gone by morning. Trainers take turns helping with sentry duty at night, so it isn't - usually - actually dangerous for people in the housing area, but still not a pleasant dynamic.
  
  
• The company that provides trainers has advertised the island as a combination tournament and exploration location; they're a front organization for [REDACTED], who [REDACTED] the entire [REDACTED] and are not Team Rocket god dammit, and you can quote me on that. Or Arachnos specifically - <3 the shitballs out of Arachnos, but they're more or less settled on ANOTHER DIMENSION'S ALTHEA. We'll have to see about android characters, though I'm leaning against it - I think it's reasonable to suspect that the company would generally look for healthy young trainers, male or female being irrelevant though late-teens, early-twenties being preferable, with older trainers rare (but perfectly legal, just not AS common) and younger trainers probably banned, though exact age requirements are up in the air; I'd say 16 personally, though 15 or 18 could work. That does have plot significance behind it but NO I'M NOT SHARING GO DIE. Tournament vs survival of the fittest: combination, but it's obviously not advertised as YOU LOSE, YOU DIE, and it doesn't work that way; the actual reasoning behind the tournament is [REDACTED] because [REDACTED], but it's as much about the journey to the top as who actually wins... because you're all winners. And by winners I mean losers. WAIT SPOILERS.
  
  
• The organization conducts thorough background checks. Yes, of Pokémon trainers. DNA samples, too. Stated reason is simply to keep things safe and crazy-person-free; conspiracy theorists are free to come up with their own solutions. Effectively, this translates to an absolute ban on characters with criminal records, and generally a bit of time with a counseler to try to avoid taking a crazy on board. It's not a foolproof system - murderers and crazies COULD get in, aka no autodeny on those apps, but you'd need a pretty ironclad reason to have not been caught in either a thorough (but not foolproof) background check, and you'd need to have been able to convince the psychiatrist that you're perfectly fine. A bit intense for just a stupid Pokémon tournament, but hey, it's their gig, their rules. And you really can't blame the poor sods for trying to keep murder rates down; I rather suspect that they'd prefer to film glorious Pokémon battles rather than bloody crime scenes, and people DO end up basically stranded in the city.
  
  
• Canon Pokémon universe. Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh. No United States, no Soviet Union or modern day Russia. No Alternia, Akaiyo, etc; might make an exception for Althea-continent, but probably not. Fakemon on a case by case basis; we don't strictly -need- sprites so they're viable, but I think that we need to ease into them a bit if anything. Not that they're not allowed; merely that any fakemon will be a plot point by themselves (wtf why are there new Pokémon here? Did they evolve, or were they put here? Why does this one look like Cthulhu? ...Wait, fuck.). The city is the island; whether it's actually attached to the sea floor or not, or if not, what it's actually attached to, is plot-ey and irrelevant from a trainer's perspective; it's out in the middle of the ocean, couple hundred miles from the nearest area. Absolutely no records of its existence anywhere; public never even knew it existed until the last few weeks, though it's obviously been around longer - how long, and for what purpose, is plot point.
  
  
• Overall setting is sort of a combination of normal Pokémon/survival horror/TTGL depending on where you are and what you're doing. I'm hesitant to fuck up the general Pokémon theme too much, and I mean shit isn't SURVIVAL HORROR FIGHT NEMESIS, GET ROCKET LAUNCHER, SAVE WORLD FROM ZOMBIES - it's still Pokémon, the tournament and just general training is a huge part, and while the plot may very well have survival horror themes, you can just train and do Pokémon stuff and PvP for high ranking. You're still doing what you're supposed to like good little guinea pigs, but suffice to say that there is some dank ass shit going on. Thousands - millions - of people don't disappear without a trace for no goddamn reason, assuming there were people on the city in the first place...

Pokémon Limit also need discussion. Specifically, I am going to break out in hives and SING THE SONG THAT ENDS THE WORLD if I see another Pokémon Master collecting 151 Pokémon, 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 Pokémon 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 Pokémon, or worse, a full team and then a shit-ton of Pokémon in the PC. Given that Pokémon are as much the heroes as the trainers here, I'm leaning towards much stricter limits; 3team/1PC, no quickswaps - have to actually head back to New Haven and log onto the only consistently reliable computer system there in order to change Pokémon. Pokeballs still exist, but tend to be very unreliable - they may not hold Pokémon, or they may decide to not STOP holding Pokémon for a day or two, so most people - if possible - just leave their Pokémon out of the balls as much as possible.

Also, I would like to point out that variety =/= strategy. Strategy is all about making intelligent, effective use of limited assets, whether it be three Pokémon or six. Limiting resources - in this case, Pokémon - doesn't limit strategy, but it does make you get more use out of each one. More Pokémon lets you approach each battle with a different Pokémon; fewer Pokémon generally helps build and develop a few, incidentally inducing much faster overall growth - only leveling 1-3 Pokémon is a fuckton faster than trying to level 6+. Just sayin'. "The point isn't to have 6 Pokémon, or even 3 Pokémon. It's to survive. Having MORE Pokémon is MORE liability."

Finally:

PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT Pokémon LIMITS GOD DAMN I'M ABOUT TO HAVE A FREAKING APOPLECTIC FIT. HARDCAPS CAN BE CHANGED, HOLY SHIT. IT'S PROBABLY THE ABSOLUTELY LEAST IMPORTANT SYSTEM IN THE ENTIRE RP BECAUSE IT'S SO GODDAMN EASY TO CHANGE IT. HOLY SHIT WOO SUDDENLY YOU GOT 3 MORE COMPUTER SLOTS, OR ONE, OR ZERO. IT DOESN'T EVEN NEED A DAMN IN-CHARACTER EXPLANATION. FOCUS ON IMPORTANT THINGS PEOPLE. I LOVE YOU ALL BUT THERE IS GOING TO BE A WITCH BURNING IF THE ONLY RESPONSES TO THIS POST ARE "LOL LET PEOPLE CARRY MORE Pokémon."


Battle System is going to be the target of a lot of discussion, I fear. We have a perfectly competent one already lying around that I motion we use, simply because it's pretty simple, avoids math with large numbers, and is pretty easy to learn, tying into the whole "simple" thing. I'd probably change No Effect to -2 tiers of damage rather than complete negation, similar to PMD's take on it (just because Bone Club is much less effective on a Pelipper doesn't mean it didn't happen, though I would expect logic to apply - EQ has absolutely no effect on permaflying Pokémon anyways). Tiers have never been a problem (that I know of) to keep track of, at least not the commonly used ones - I have no idea what exact damage range T5 is, but whatever - so we can keep them too. No need to fix what isn't broken (yet).

For PvP, I'd like to introduce something a bit more, though. Seph's rampant MMEXE-style RPing/borderline godmodding was painful to watch, given that even with like zero agility he was constantly avoiding attacks from people with more. That said, I would like to avoid being too harsh (ALL DICE ALL THE TIME) or too light (cheese it), so I think that a combined system might be useful. Arbiters would run said system - no reffing, just putting in the numbers and cranking them out as necessary - so it wouldn't be any work for the players, just keep people a little less fucked.

Sssso. There are a couple of ways we could run with this, depending on whether we really want Arbiters, and how much of a job they need to do. There could be a basic system they run for to-hit calcs (the attack's accuracy out of 100 + 0-20 for good RPing + 0-20 for good tactics versus a d200 roll; roll below the number to hit, above to miss - very low scores (say 0-20) = critical hits, very high (say 180-200) = embarassingly horrible miss), or opposed rolls (acc+RP+tactics+d200 vs opponent's acc+RP+tactics+d200; highest roll wins), or something else if anyone has a better idea. Maybe players each roll separately, with the Arbiter rolling for each player's attack and the opponent's chosen defense, or something.

I really don't want to get too harsh/arbitrary, but at the same time, I think that PvP could really benefit from having a referee (no relation to tohea-style Referees) slash judge slash arbiter to keep things fair and add some randomness/critical hits. Hell, even if Arbiters ONLY roll for critical hits and keeping things fair, and calling bullshit if the 0-Agility guy dodges his 150-agility opponent too many times in a row. I'm totally open to suggestions, but I need to get some feedback on where people stand on this. Keep in mind that since PvP will be a fair portion of the RP, you WILL end up having to deal with this system if you want lots of free XP, so it's in your best interest to pay goddamn attention and let me know if you don't like what it's turning out as so far and have a better idea.

(I do want critical hits/glancing blows, though. Those are awesome and we've never had them before.)


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 Pokémon 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.

Suggestions on HOW to have STs do that would be good, too, since we don't know exactly how people will be split up/how many will strike out in pairs. Fuck going out alone though, I dunno if it should be illegal per se, but definitely discouraged.


Rankings. Tentatively, we could just jack the old Alpha<Beta<Gamma<Delta<Epsilon<Omega system, but rank by PvPoints, or Honor, or Severed Ears, or Foreskins Stolen From Fallen Foes, or whatever the fuck. Point being, we could just go by like, say. 0-1 is Alpha, 2-4 is Beta, 5-10 is Gamma... etc, or something simpler. Or more complex, honestly I don't really know. Or care. I'd say that each rank above Alpha should get a 5-10% discount on purchases or something, just 'cause I'm a bit leery of giving them, like, huge stat boosts or anything.


Move Learning needs a bit of a revamp, I think. Maybe not, but I did like the idea of automatically gaining moves at certain levels/ranks/XP totals/whatever. ...Do we want levels? Ranks? Did XP totals work alright? I'm not as worried about gauging Pokémon via levels as some might be, but it might be nice. Regardless, XP wil lwork the same - 1XP = 1 stat point - so the major difference is in how we give out moves. Could just stick with a simple approach, a la every 10 XP you get a level up and your choice of 1 free move, and every X levelups you get a new skill. Or something. Buying moves with XP fucks over anyone who tries to get smart early on - better to spam stats - and figuring out major/minor effects was always a bitch anyways. Free at certain breakpoints sidesteps that, though we... might... want to add in a secondary function, of levelup moves being cheaper than TM/egg moves. Thoughts?

Customizing Moves... well, hurm. Could be worked into the major system. Might be easier to toss the system and let people modify their moves on the fly, aesthetically rather than mechanically. Definitely need feedback on this one, I'm ambivalent on the whole thing.

Custom Moves I honestly still kinda like. Maybe fudge with the XP numbers a bit, but I think we should keep them. Probably toning down stat boosts a bit, though.

CP System is... well, fuck, I'm torn here. I DO like the idea of CP rather than just lol self-spawn whatever deciding things, but I don't really like how they ended up getting system-ized; too math-ey, when something simpler might have worked. Or maybe it's just goddamn fine, I don't know. Honestly, could use some feedback - the severe team size cap might work well enough for limiting, or CP could just be used to give starting XP to Pokémon - as in, you can catch any Common (aka everything that isn't banned/legendary/pre-evolved) at 0XP for free, but CP lets you give them starting stats. That might work a bit better given the new shit, but I don't really know how that would be explained in-character.

Wait, fuck that, I DO know. Pokémon catching works the same way, but you can burn CP to have your Pokedex (sponsored by [REDACTED] Laboratories) basically run the energy-form Pokémon through GRUELING VIRTUAL REALITY TRAINING like fuckin solid snake YEAHHH. So you still catch Pokermanz at 0XP, but stick them in the magic box and they can catch up pretty quick - just changing CP's function to essentially stored global XP that can be used on any Pokémon, or maybe only those under X XP, or at full effectiveness on Pokémon under X XP and at half effectiveness on stronger Pokémon.

POINT BEING, CP = BETTER. Still doesn't solve the shit about Pokémon starting with X xp regardless of how tough they were when fought, but the other main option is matching your team's, and we all know how well that worked on Tohea - speedlevel one Pokémon to 30+, catch a ton of 30-40 Pokémon, rape everything. Not good. If ANYONE has a better idea I am 100% eyes and ears; best I can think is maybe that new Pokémon get [1/2 team's average XP], rounded down, but even that rewards people for focusing on powerleveling a single Pokémon rather than several, and makes trade-selling far too powerful a tool. Again... thoughts needed. I'm honestly completely lost here, though I love the new version of CP.

Evolution is fine the way it is, I think. Item/stone/trade/move-based evos always seemed gimmicky as hell to me, so I'd rather that we either A. only keep stone evos and have everything else work through XP, or B. just have everything evolve via XP. Anything else is just complicating the matter unnecessarily. We MIGHT want to play with the XP needed, I don't know what rates we're talking yet, but I think 30/60 is still a good baseline. COULD sell evo items in shops as a money drain, but honestly I'd rather money was just used for something... useful, like jet penises or moves/TMs without having to level up. Hell, maybe normal move learning can only work on stated levelup/egg moves, and money is the ONLY way to get TMs. That works decently I think.

Stats are fine, though I might suggest a cap on the difference between stats - maybe you can only get or avoid X bonus damage from stat differential. Say, five; no matter how much difference between your atk and the target's def, or vice versa, the effect caps at five damage added/subtracted. Five is just an arbitrary number, but given the shortage of HP, it should work well enough early on. We'll have to see. Feedback would be great, of course, but if it isn't broken... I don't think we need to play with stats much. Agility is a great catch-all stat, though it MIGHT warrant a better name (reflexes? Bullet Time?)

Status Effects are... hrm. Most of them are fine, stat boosts I'm a little torn on. Since all of them - especially evasion/accuracy - directly affect the dice rolls/damage done, they have a HUGE effect; if we go by the old rules of +10 each you'd lower every attack's accuracy by 50 out of 200 by spamming +eva, etc. Honestly we (obviously) need to hella work out the PvP system much much much better before playing with this too much.

I propose that a given stat-boosting move raises stats for two turns. Repeated uses either adds +2 turns for each use, or [move's bonus] in stats for two rounds. so say you used Howl for +1 attack on round one. On round two, you have one round left of the first boost, and you Howl again. You have +2 attack for the rest of this turn; the next turn your first Howl wears off, but the second one is still going strong, so you still have +1 attack. Leaning towards the first, personally, just to avoid huge stat boosts and keep things simple, but either would work. Same with custom moves, except they would be able to make the choice up front; you buy the +1 Attack stat boost twice to stat out the custom move for approval, and it's either +2 attack for 2 turns, or +1 attack for 4 turns - decided at time of purchase. 2turns=2 of your posts of course, don't want to super complicate things. Would make +2 stat moves more valuable, too, and much more powerful than their +1 brethren... but also more energy to use.

Proficiences might need a tidbit of balancing - we might end up going by XXXX words or posts instead of by page or something - but the idea is fine.

Squads I actually really like, and definitely think that they should stick around. Trainers instead of Arachnos, obviously, but same idea. Significantly altering the Support section, obviously, but wwwwwe'll have to see about that. I kinda like the idea of changing them to activateable abilities; say, if you're in a squad that has the Battery ability, once per battle each member can instantly fully recharge (or half recharge, or add 4 energy, or whatever) your active Pokémon's energy gauge, but only in the presence of most/all the rest of the squad. Stacking with any trainer abilities I suppose. Squads requiring 4 players. Thoughts?

Skills also need discussion, possibly alongside auras. Point being: further customizing Pokémon, with skills learnable alongside attacks, with a hardcap of 1-2 per Pokémon. 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 Pokémon) or Cybernetic Augmentation (+x -y), stuff like that; mostly passive skills for Pokémon 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 run fast as maybe just handy stuff; discounts, slow global energy regen for Pokémon, stuff like that. Same idea as Pokémon skills probably, just whatever we figure out. Needs moar feedback, obviously. And I totally want to hax together Auras, if I can find my old writeup... -_-

Legends should also get an official policy. I do actually have ideas for a few of them in the plot, including possibly some originals - Jean may remember what I'm talking about - but I've always been against common use of them: their sheer unadulterated world-changing power makes them the stars of the show, completely overshadowing trainers and normal Pokémon as long as they're around. Thaaaat's kinda gay for an RP that's supposebly based around characterization and character interaction, in the "gobbling cocks" kind of insulting way, not the simple factual "homosexual" way. While I don't mind minor non-uniques or in someone's team too much, I'm still not sure that we need to be using them beyond what's necessary - though I am very, VERY seriously tempted to have the Regis be New Haven's guards. It just seems perfectly fitting, given that they're guardians, non-unique, and it's a good use of their skills, plus I find the juxtaposition of powerful legendary and menial work endlessly amusing, as Xatni can doubtless attest to having read my fics. Shit like Arcueus, Palkia, etc... not so much. They're basically living deus ex machinas, and while deus ex machinas can be fun to play with, they are by design sort of a bitch to fit into legitimate plot, much less a player-controlled one.

So, thoughts would be appreciated. Besides Regis being Haven's guards - and possibly showing up elsewhere, very possibly even captureable via plot hax though I'm just dropping thinly-veiled hints here - and a VERY few plot-relevant ones, I don't think that we should focus on them any more than we normally do. Which is to say, not at all except mmmmmaybe in plot.

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.