Pokemon isn’t OSR (but I wish it was)

Warren over at Prismatic Wasteland recently made a post titled: “Pokemon is OSR”, and in the storied tradition of bloggers everywhere I am writing a response to say “the fuck are you talking about, man?” 

(note: Warren actively encouraged this)

To start, I am going to open with the ways that I think Pokemon could fit into the broad and increasingly dissolved umbrella category of OSR:

1. The damage calculation formula is the work of a madman

Using an over-complicated rule for one of the core verbs of the game isn’t OSR directly, but it is in line with the source material the OSR was based on. Actually, now that I say it, this is actually evidence that it isn’t OSR, because that formula hasn’t gotten any less insane in 3 decades.

2. Thirty years without meaningful change

OSR, not NSR. Pokemon the series is a self-devouring Soroboruo, eternally retreading the same ground with either minimal nonstructural change or immediately abandoned mechanical additions. There was a new Pokemon game announced yesterday and once again it’s another fire-water-grass trio. Fighting-psychic-dark is still right there. 

There's also the matter of fangames and spiritual successors, which I say are more OSR than the mainline because they're all about hacking the weird old kludged-together spaghetti-code of an elder game series and seeing what can be done with it in novel ways.

There’s the reasons for, here’s the reasons against as I see them:

1. Screaming into the Void

Pokemon battles don’t exist in a place. I think this is easily the most damning argument against their OSR-ness; the battle screen is a featureless void (or may as well be) that only takes into account the broadest environmental factors (weather) and simply doesn’t contain anything like positioning, cover, or environmental objects. There are no lasting effects on the environment after a battle. Creatures do not exist before or after the fight. There are ambushes, but not mechanical ones; a trainer might jump out from behind a tree or a rock, but that doesn’t have any impact on the fight. Pokemon battles are incredibly fair - a good quality in a game for children, not so much in a genre where the approach to combat is “cheat like a motherfucker with every tool at your disposal.”

2. 1-v1 me IRL

Further reducing the tactical considerations is the 1v1 default of most combats. Benched Pokemon can’t do anything, they have no active effect on the battle. If this was a dungeon crawl, it would be as if you were playing as a doppelganger flipping between impersonated adventurers on the fly (this is cool idea, gonna make a note of that); 2v2 battles and the long-abandoned 3v3s add “some moves can hit both enemies, and some can also hit your partner”, but there’s nothing beyond that in terms of what choices you are making in a given moment. Roles do not change during battle, non-battle actions can’t occur during battle, and you can’t coordinate the different members of your team into a cohesive unit. 

3. A Sequence of Repetitive STABbing Motions

Last of the issues in the battle system is Pokemon’s default winning strategy: you spam a high-damage move with Same Type Attack Bonus at anything not resistant to it until the bar hits zero. Surf, Earthquake, Crunch, Flamethrower, Psychic, Icebeam, game, set, match. This only gets shaken up when variant rules are thrown in (Battle Frontier) or you’re playing against your local psychopaths I mean competitive Pokemon players. Maybe sometimes you’ll use a status effect, or end up using something off the wall, but for nearly every fight in the game it’s just a DPS race.

4. A World of Limited Applications

But what about outside of battle? There are, according to Bulbapedia, 19 field moves, which can then sort into the following categories:

• Obstacle removal: Cut, Rock Smash, Strength
• Movement: Fly, Surf, Dig, Dive, Teleport, Rock Climb, Whirlpool, Waterfall 
• Healing: Softboiled, Milk Drink 
• Encounter Triggers: Sweet Scent, Headbutt
• Environmental: Flash, Defog, Secret Power
• Teaching your Chatot curse words: Chatter

Two of these have appeared in only one generation, and two more have appeared in one generation and its remake. They are quite limited in terms of their effects, with each move being applicable in one specific scenario each. (Strength can only be used to move rocks, you cannot pick up a car and use it as an improvised weapon, for example) Several are essentially slightly-modified reskins of each other. 

Early generations required the use of the “HM slave”, the pokemon you dumped all the field moves onto so as not to waste slots on your A-team; later games have gotten rid of this with just allowing you to use it at any time so long as the HM is unlocked; neither system allows for any usage outside of the predetermined pacing and location. 

5. Random encounters are one cool thing and 99 stupid birds

It feels good to stumble on a rare Pokemon while out in the wild; every other encounter is nothing. A fight with a wild pokemon contains no meaningful interaction with the world - there are no factions who will take notice, no spoils to take home: unless you catch something useful, you get some XP and that’s it. The drain on your resources will be minimal, since a type advantage + level parity basically means you’ll be 1 and 2 shotting everything, and you likely have more than enough ethers to get to the next town (or you can just fly back to a Pokemon Center at no cost to you.) 

 

But What if it Was...

So, if you wanted to make Pokemon OSR-ish, how could it be done?  I’ve got some ideas.

Most of these are going to involve re-doing the movelist.

• Give every Pokemon an inherent basic attack that upgrades its damage die as they gain experience. All the flat upgrade moves (Scratch and Slash, for example) are now the same move, separated by type and physical/special as appropriate.
• Attacks that trade self-damage or lower accuracy for higher damage are now just mechanics that you can invoke whenever (Take Down is merged with the Tackle series, Fire Blast is merged with Ember-Flamethrower)
• Most status moves can be kept; most stat changing moves will probably be tossed 
• We now comb through the adjusted list and see which ones have a clear use-case outside of battle. If one isn’t obvious but we can make up something for it, still works.
• Merge and dump moves until satisfied; ideally, only a few of the most basic attacks will have no additional use-cases, and even then that’s what rulings are for.
• For funsies, start incorporating Pokedex entries

This will solve most of the issues I listed above - the environmental aspects are solved by moving it out of a video game and into the theater of the mind where you have multiple players and an environment to interact with.

One final note: if we’re doing OSR Pokemon, it's going to inevitably become OSR Shin Megami Tensei. We've got the Ars Goetia and the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō right there.

Also you don't need a dedicated class, these are just wizards and their spell weasels.