Presentation! : a Pokerole Contest Brew

A Contest is judged by three Judges. Each Judge is assigned two Social Attributes that they rate higher than the rest. The first Social Attribute is given 3 Hearts, the second 2 Hearts, and the rest for that Judge are zero Hearts. Players do not know what Attributes their Judges care about at the start of the contest!

Serena is contest judge. She values Beauty at 2 Hearts and Cuteness at 1 Heart, but doesn’t award Hearts for Clever, Cool, or Tough Appeals.

A Contest has a Rank that determines it’s difficulty. When contestants make Appeals to the judges, they’ll have to get a number of successes equal or greater than the Rank of the Contest.

A contest round consists of 5 Appeals per contestant. Each Contestant goes in order based on their Perform skill. During an Appeal, the Pokemon and trainer make use of one of the Pokemon’s talents to impress the judges. Mechanically, this will always take the form of a Social Attribute+Perform roll. Compare the result of this roll to the Successes required for the rank of the current contest. When you succeed, you earn points from the Judges! Rolling higher than the number of successes lets you earn even more points as well.

GMs can award modifiers to an Appeal check if they so choose. Good reasons to do so might be a great description that leverages both the Trainer and Pokemon’s strengths, the Appeal is on theme with the Pokemon’s costume, or the Pokemon using a Move as part of their appeal. This modifier can be higher than +1 if the GM chooses, but a +1 is generally fine.

Appeal Scoring is determined by what Social Attribute your Pokemon used in their Appeal. Each Judge awards the number of Hearts they have for that Attribute when a Pokemon successfully Appeals with that Attribute.

Lily is a contestant in a Super Rank contest. Lily wants her Vulpix to Appeal using Beauty, so Vulpix makes a lovely haze of embers using Fire Spin. Lily rolls Beauty+Perform and gets 4 Successes, impressing the Judges (since it’s higher than the difficulty of 3). If Serena is one of the Judges (see above), Serena would award Vulpix two hearts for the Appeal.

If the Pokemon failed it’s roll, it loses Confidence equal to the number of Successes it needed to get. For example, in a Super Rank contest, a failure means the Pokemon loses 3 Confidence! A Pokemon with no Confidence cannot make more Appeals in the round, so it’s important to keep your Pokemon enthusiastic as they compete.

At the end of the Contest Round, the Pokemon with the highest Hearts is the winner! But simply impressing the judges isn’t all there is to contests: you also have to deal with your competition!

Once during a rotation through the Contestants, a Pokemon can perform a Trick to throw off the competition during their Appeal. This isn’t easy though, so your Pokemon will need to succeed on their own check to successfully perform the trick. Some tricks benefit the Pokemon performing them, while many hinder the opponent.

Tricks are performed AFTER a Pokemon performs an Appeal roll, but BEFORE scoring is done. Any number of Contestants can perform a Trick on a single Appeal roll, but don’t forget you won’t be able to do any other Tricks until the turn rotation restarts!

If your Pokemon fails to perform a Trick, they mess up in an embarrassing way! The Storyteller will do one of the following things when a Pokemon fails their Trick.

• Add 2 Hearts to the Appealing Pokemon’s Score as the Judges are impressed with how they continued despite your interference
• Remove 2 Confidence from the Pokemon performing the trick
• Remove 2 Hearts from the Pokemon performing the trick as they Judges take note of your mischief

A term you’ll see in the Trick table is Trick Strength. Trick Strength is one plus one for every success more than the DC of the Trick you have. (EX: A roll of 4 on DC 3 trick has a strength of 2.)

Peyton is trying to play a Trick on Lily while her Vulpix is performing the Fire Spin we read about above. His Sylveon rolls Clever+Stealth and gets 4 Successes, which gives it a Trick Strength of 2. This reduces Vulpix’s Appeal from 4 successes to 2, and in a Super Rank contest that won’t be enough to impress the Judges!

• Add more tricks!
• This can easily adapt to a multi round structure. I’d still set a max number of rounds and go that long.
• Increase your confidence by the amount you roll over a successful Appeal.
• Give Pokemon the chance to trick twice a turn rotation, or even more often