¶ Officially Stable!
After long periods of testing, this is no longer a Playtest but an official rule!
For now it'll be staying in this category for you to be able to easily find it, but you'll soon find it in the official rule section too!
This playtest introduces some changes to the Capturing Mechanic, most notably its AC & DC calculations, as well as some changes to Capture Specialist.
For full details see our News Update based on the poll we ran a little while ago. In the end we settled on these points:
The following solutions have been found for these problems and been implemented into Foundry:
Change the AC for throwing a Pokeball from AC 6 to AC 4.
Most people agree that capture calc is fine as is, but may be a bit too easy early on, and a bit too hard at later levels.
We've elected to make some small changes, and a new addition to the capture rules: (a negative number makes the capture roll harder, a positive number makes it easier)
Before:
New:
This change makes it so capturing fully-evolved Pokemon is no longer as bad, lowering the DC of higher-level Pokemon slightly.
Before:
New:
This change makes conditions matter more in the capture calculation, as it's more likely at higher-level that you're able to apply more conditions, and due to the stats rework longer fights being encouraged, making conditions more valuable will encourage the applications of them as a valuable strategy too.
This addition makes it so that combat stages actually matter during capture, flavor wise; a 'mon with positive status conditions is 'stronger' than its 'normal' state, and thus harder to capture, and vice-versa.
This encourages using stat-lowering abilities (including those from trainers with classes like Provocateur), as well as making it harder to capture bosses (which tend to have stat increases, or at least, it's one of the recommendations)
First of all,
Next to this, all 'situational' balls that used to give a -20 modifier now give a -25, this includes:
We are removing 2 Features from the game, while adding 1 new Edge and 2 new Feats.
¶ Capture Expert
Prerequisites: Expert Athletics or Expert Acrobatics
Effect: Lower the AC for throwing a Pokeball from AC 4 to AC 3
¶ Acquired Knowledge
Prerequisites: Novice Pokemon Education
Static
Effect: Add your Pokemon Education Rank * 2 to any capture check you make
¶ Incognito
[+Speed]
Prerequisites: Advanced Capture Techniques Rank 2
1 AP – Free Action
Trigger: You attempt to capture a Pokémon while in stealth
Effect: You gain a +X bonus to the accuracy check to hit the Pokémon on top of any bonuses from stealth, where X equals (your stealth rank/2)+1. The Pokémon counts as having the Blinded and Vulnerable condition for the sake of calculating the capture DC, if the target was already Blinded, instead they are now also Totally Blinded, this can't be negated by Blindesense
Capture Expert & Acquired Knowledge are two new generic edges/feats that allow for some boosts to capturing.
Next to this we're introducing Incognito to replace Captured Momentum. The issue with Captured Momentum was that it used to encourage capturing Pokemon mid-combat just for the sake of removing them from combat and gaining boosts, instead of for the goal of adding them to your collection.
Incognito instead provides us with a bonus to capture that can be used more effectively out-of-combat (although a savvy user may still be able to benefit from it in-combat!), which is to be used deliberately instead of giving boosts for removing Pokemon from an ongoing encounter.
Using capturing as a means to OH-KO a mon, at many tables this is seen as a oppressive or even toxic strategy ↩︎