During your Journey in PTR2e one of the questions you’ll undoubtedly stumble upon will be: how are our levels set-up?
While the full answer to this question is still up to debate; for now we have based level-ups around the Experience Tracks as they are in the Pokémon video games, where all creatures are on the "Medium Fast" track. The math for both you can view below, but since you won't be plugging away into your calculator as the math is handled by Foundry, what is more important to know is:
Whenever a character reaches an EXP Threshold they may immediately level-up; a GM might wish to delay a level-up until after a session or event occurs; but realistically due to the timing of when EXP is earned (more later) this shouldn’t be an issue.
Whenever a level-up occurs, the following happens:
However, to be able to level-up we of course must also be able to earn EXP. There are many different types of activities that will award experience; be it from Combat, Exploration, Contests or even Pokéathlons. Realistically; if an activity is something that isn’t “guaranteed” to succeed; it’s worthy of earning experience.
But before we get into the exact details of the "how"; lets start of with the "when".
The primary time to hand out experience will be at the end of any given Scene or Venture.
A Scene is a narrative tool of semi-indeterminate length within a certain context, which can consist of one or multiple Situations. An example of a Scene would be: “Traveling from Pewter City to Mt. Moon”. It’s a situation that likely will take many in-game hours, but it is likely unnecessary to actually spend many play-hours in the scene itself.
Along the road to Mt Moon your players may encounter some wild Pokémon, as well as help a lost kid find their way to the Pokémon Center, these Situations can be played out in many ways; the wild Pokémon encounter may have started off as a Social situation during Exploration Activities but ended up turning into a Combat Situation after the players repeatedly failed their Skill Checks to befriend the wild Pokémon. Meanwhile the players probably had to use their Skills such as Tracking to find the girl, perhaps she was stuck in a cave whose entrance caved in requiring more Skill Checks to complete this Exploration Situation.
At the end the players reach the Pokémon Center and completed the “Travel to Mt. Moon” scene. Surely that deserves some experience!
Meanwhile this scene was but a part of their overall Venture and goal, which is to: “Get to Cerulean City and beat Misty; the Cerulean City Gym Leader!”
A Venture is a narrative tool similar to the Scene; but is different in a few distinct ways.
Firstly a Venture is often associated with a goal that will likely take many IRL Play Sessions or at the very least a good few hours of session time to resolve.
Secondly, a Venture should always move the narrative forward; this doesn’t mean you need to railroad your players of course, your players deciding they want to spend some time at the Game Corner grinding up the required coins for a Dratini is just as valid of a Venture even if it doesn’t move the plot forward in the way you the GM envisioned... But the players are still narratively moving forward!
In a way, Ventures can be seen as a natural point for people who are used to running Milestone leveling, after all usually a Venture is only finished once some major goal has been concluded, be it successfully or not!
GMs are free to choose whether they prefer handing out Experience during Scenes or Ventures; or even both!
When handing out experience exclusively in Scenes, you can follow the guidelines listed below to award experience as normal.
When handing out experience exclusively in Ventures, keep track of the amount of Scenes your players resolve and how they do; the base experience value will be equal to the regular base value for a Scene times the amount of Scenes your players have resolved. All Circumstance Modifiers will be added up together at the end.
Possibly the most natural way to hand out experience is the combination of both; you hand out experience at the end of a Scene like normal. However, whenever a Scene would result in concluding a Venture you add an additional positive Circumstance Bonus for having finished the Venture.
Experience rewards rely on 2 key variables: The Base EXP Reward (BER) and the Circumstance Modifiers (CMs).
Base EXP Reward (BER): This value is at 25% of the amount of XP needed to level up from the Average Player Level, rounded up.
Circumstance Modifiers (CMs): Circumstance Modifiers are modifiers to total EXP earned for an encounter and are based on how players resolve Situations and how well they do so. The more ingenuitive the Player; and the better their results, the higher their CMs will be. However, did a plan fall through and end up in the gutter? It could result in some penalties to your total EXP earned… CMs are all cumulative stacked on-top of each other, meaning if you get a 10% bonus twice, the total bonus becomes 20%. You do not apply BER * 1.1 * 1.1.
The effort of all the players are to be combined together in a single reward: whenever you award Experience, all Player Characters and their Team Pokémon as well as Boxed Pokémon, receive the calculated total (BER * CM). However, Pokémon that are afflicted with Loafing (discussed below) cannot receive experience this way.
You can use the 'EXP Tracker' on the left-hand sidebar in Foundry to easily keep track of your Venture EXP!
As part of the original rule drafting, we had originally looked into restricting the EXP Award to the PC + 6 Team Pokémon, and exclude the Boxed Pokémon.
However it was noticed that this encouraged keeping a set party of 6 and never swapping out team members as you'd fall behind in overall EXP, thus we decided to make EXP All the base rule.
This "Team-Focused Experience" approach is available as an optional rule for parties, especially if you desire a more restricted approach like the oldest VGs or more restrictive campaign settings. In conjunction with the Alternative/Supplemental Experience Optional Rules and the Loafting Affliction, GMs can fine tune their EXP awards at the minor cost of expanded bookkeeping.
So as was referenced a little earlier; realistically any type of situation can result in earning experience, listed below is a list of CMs a GM can choose to add to any given Scene or Venture to award or penalize the total EXP earned by the Party. Realistically there is no limit to how many modifiers you should give; just remember that if the modifier reaches 5 or higher that means your player’s their characters are guaranteed to get a Level-Up!
The following sections depict all kinds of situations you may want to award experience; for your ease of use they’ve been separated in the following categories:
This doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to only awarding experience when these types of scenarios occur; feel free to use the framework provided to create unique modifiers that make sense for the encounters ahead! Some examples of this will be provided below as well.
These following samples are also built with a “standard Pokémon journey” kept in mind; so it may refer to things like ‘evil Teams’. Of course, in a Journey where you’re playing as evil Team members… you’d just have to invert the criteria.
The above should give you a good idea for what types of Circumstance Modifiers can be included when awarding experience; you can use as many or as little of them as you want and heck; may even consider giving the same one multiple times when applicable!
At the end of the day this is a framework that allows you to award experience appropriately; to properly balance your Journey you’ll want to consider the length of said Journey, at the end of the day from a progression perspective the goal will be to reach Level 100. So given the example of a bog standard “Beat the Gym Campaign” you probably want every venture to provide about 8-10 levels worth of experience, one for each Gym, perhaps one for teaching the local evil team a lesson, defeat the E4, and finally of course, win the championship!
One of your trainers is really focused on learning more about Fossils and using Fossil Pokémon; so you introduce a new Exploration Circumstance Modifier for “Finding Fossils in hard-to-find locations” worth +30%. Additionally, one of your trainers has been following a creative nicknaming convention for all their mons, whenever someone picks a creative, fun and or fitting nickname for a Pokémon upon capture: +20%.
While the CM system for Scenes and Ventures is the absolute default for this TTRPG, there are additional options that GMs and players can utilize to overcome potential droughts or mismatches of experience: EXP Candies and Super Training.
EXP Candies, much like they are in the VGs, are rare items that are found in the world - looted, bought, or rewarded - that provide raw experience to Pokémon when consumed.
| EXP Candy | Grade/Rarity | EXP Gained |
|---|---|---|
| EXP Candy XS | E / Rare | 100 |
| EXP Candy S | D / Rare | 800 |
| EXP Candy M | C / Rare | 3,000 |
| EXP Candy L | B / Rare | 10,000 |
| EXP Candy XL | A / Rare | 30,000 |
Notably, EXP Candies may be used on Loafing creatures, though Players should be advised that it is usually not a good idea, due to the negatives from Loafing generally outweighing the positives.
When Players engage in the Resupply Activity, GMs can opt to reward EXP Candy for IP the players had not spent between Resupply Activites. Provided that players meet the Grade of an EXP Candy, they receive 1 EXP Candy (equal to their Grade) for every 2 IP they have remaining and unspent.
While at Camp, much like Tutoring, players can instruct their Teammembers and improve their capabilities through Super Training. Super Training is primarily focused on leveling Pokémon that have lagged behind.
When engaging in Super Training, a player adds EXP, equal to the BER, to up to six (6) Pokémon (including those of another player!). These Pokémon cannot be Loafing in order to be trained via Super Training.
Venture Experience and Super Training, inherently, cannot be applied to creatures with the [Pseudo Affliction] Loafing. Loafing is an Affliction that is placed on a Pokémon if they are two levels or more higher than the player character in control of them.
Loafing emulates the conditions that the VGs' "Obedience" mechanics emulates. While Loafing, a Pokémon accrues penalties through the number of Loafing Stacks they possess. A creature gains more Loafing Stacks the greater the level difference between them and their Team Leader.
Essentially: the stronger a creature is due to its level, the more disobedient it will be, and thus the higher their Loafing value.
The exact calculations for Loafing 2-4 can be found further below, the follow list are the penalties depending on the level of Loafing.
Note: these calculations and thresholds are still being ironed out.
The EXP tracks we use are based on the video game ones, using the Medium Fast track for both Trainers and Pokémon.
This means that mathematically we can identify the experience curve as follows, where n = level.
Note: While EXP Tracks are currently normalized, testing is still ongoing to determine if making them different between Trainers and Pokémon is necessary.
A creature immediately gains Loafing 1 when it is 2 levels above its owner's level. Separately, the 2, 3, 4 intensities for loafing have different conditions, based on a rough approximation of stat differences between levels.
So to illustrate: