Pokémon Ranger Paradigm
We love to chase the idea of tabletop Pokémon, or Tablemon if you will. It’s like Pokémon but with your imagination. Who doesn’t want to escape the pixely grid of the video games (or the nasty-looking worlds of all the 3D ones except Arceus my beloved), step between those two-by-two trees blocking the world, and do fun things with those simultaneously cute/cool/lame creatures that only the realm of language can allow? Many such cases, of people trying to capture that feeling or outright adapting Pokémon (in its setting or even its rules) to a tabletop format. It just unfortunately never really pans out. I think this is because Pokémon is structurally difficult for a cooperative game. Pokémon is generically speaking a classical JRPG: you as the player control a party of characters in various situations (especially turn-based combat). Where Pokémon differs from similar games in its genre is that the player themselves has a representative outside of the party of characters: the Pokémon ...