Into the Oddish
So as the title suggests, I wanna run a pokemon TTRPG. I've seen a couple fan made ones floating around but they tend to either stick way too close to the games and so have really grindy repetitive combat or the rules are just weirdly complicated.
I really wanna run a pokemon campaign where my players get to feel like they're trainers exploring a new region and challenge each of the gyms while taking down an evil team. Do you guys have any suggestions for this type of thing?
Into the Oddish
You might like Shatterkin!
Did that ever actually get finished?
Pokeymanz is my favorite. The others I'm aware of is PokeRole, and then the trio from a single team: Pokemon Adventures/United/Odyssey(previously called Journeys). Pokeymanz started as a Savage World hack and grew into its own parallel system, so anything for SW is really easy to plug and play. It also focuses on feeling more like the anime and manga rather than the games, which means more story freedom and letting your favorite parts shine. The other four try to either replicate the game or just straight up be the game in pen&paper format.
yeah I came here to rec Pokeymanz. it’s so good
I mean there’s https://snowttrpg.itch.io/pokemon-dungeon-crawler
I’m a big fan of Pokéthulhu by S. John Ross, which is free to boot. It's nominally a Cthulhu-themed Pokémon parody, but that's just to sneak through the parody loophole in copyright law. Mechanically, it's excellent, with quick, straightforward rules, so just rename Squamous & Eldritch back to Grass & Fire, and you're good to go.
I love the rule where you can justify your hare-brained actions by citing the show as precedent for what you want to do. If playing straight-up Pokémon, this makes sense. If playing the as-written parody mode, it’s hilarious, because you’re citing a nonexistent show where you also have to make up the fake precedent you’re relying on.
The first TTRPG I ever owned!
I’ve come across quite a few over the years with varying levels of complexity. I think Polemon Tabletop Adventures is a solid one that’s not too busy or complex while still having some depth.
I can definitely recommend Pokemon Tabletop United(PTU) as the best one that i found. It's a bit crunchy, but it has a very deep trainer and pokemon customization: It gives you trainer class options, which influence the abilities you can use on your own turn (Ace trainers will play differently from Hex maniacs for example), and gives a degree of agency over pokemon stats, as well as abilities and moves. The combat is very tactical, and moves have been greatly expanded from the videogames counterparts to adapt them to a tabletop environment (Area of Effects, Frequency per Turn, and further special abilities are examples of what has been added). It's free online so it costs nothing to skim it if the premise interested you.
I made a FATE-inspired Pokemon hack to play with my gf with this same problem in mind. It's a rough draft still but the playtests were fun. If nothing else sparks joy, let me know and I'm willing to share my current version (and the notes on what needs improvement.)
Besides the ones mentioned already, there's a whole lot more: https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-pokemon
It's not literally Pokémon (legal issues and all that), but it's incredibly easy to reflavor it to be suitable. Check out Animon Story; it's a fantastic game overall. The basic rules are more suited to Digimon, however there are optional rules in the back of the book which make Pokémon fully viable to play.
pokeymanz is my personal favorite! it's pretty rules lite and tries to capture the feeling of the anime more than the games; instead of trying to make rules for every move, they do what you'd expect them to do. it's got fun rules for building trainers, too, and ways to do 1v1 battles while still involving everyone on the sidelines!!
While I would point you to Journeymon, someone already said that. So I can say pathfinder and D&D now have a pokemon trainer-esque class with Eldamon Trainer through Battlezoo.
Pokeymanz is truly incredible for how it manages avoid pretty much every pitfall that other pokemon games are completely full of. My only caveat is that in my opinion the game and community expect you to kind of just let players do whatever if they can argue it, and the bar set for arguing by them is rather low. I have found that being as strict and consistent as possible in regards to what moves and players can do makes the game much more fun in the long run because it encourages players to think about what moves their team has, otherwise most players end up with mons that just have a few moves that they try to use for everything.
Journeymon is fantastic