No matter the campaign, creatures will earn Experience (XP) and Level-up to grow stronger. As this is a constant rule we wanted to present guidelines to not only make progression feel good, but to also feel valuable to everyone at the table. This page will detail the overhaul we made to Level-up rewards, give guidelines for granting XP and money, as well as assist with budgeting your encounters.
Starting off are the changes to Trainer Level-up rewards, mainly with Milestone levels. Originally a Trainer would get a choice between a Level-up point reward or a General Feature at level 5 and every 5th level after. We changed Milestone levels to grant both rewards on reaching certain levels, as well as specific Features at levels 20 and 30. The rules for Trainer advancement are as follows:
As part of Character Creation (Level 1) you:
Note: You may select the above Edges and Features and allocate the Level-up Points in any order.
After Character Creation, whenever you Level Up, your character may advance in certain ways, depending on the Level. Trainers have a Maximum Level of 50.
Note: Unless a Feature or Edge EXPLICITLY says that you may take it multiple times, such as a Ranked Feature, then you can only take it once!
In addition to the usual bonuses on every Level up, Trainers qualify for certain Skill Ranks and gain other bonuses at Level milestones. These are listed below.
As part of Character Creation, you:
Note: You may select the above Edges and Features and allocate the Level-up Points in any order.
After Character Creation, whenever you Level Up, your character may advance in certain ways, depending on the Level. Trainers have a Maximum Level of 25 on the Condensed Progression Track.
Note: Unless a Feature or Edge EXPLICITLY says that you may take it multiple times, such as a Ranked Feature, then you can only take it once!
In addition to the usual bonuses on every Level up, Trainers qualify for certain Skill Ranks and gain other bonuses at Level milestones. These are listed below.
With this variant rule, all mechanics that utilize your Trainer Level (TL), your TL is considered to be double for the purposes of those mechanics.
As part of Character Creation, you:
Note: You may select the above Edges and Features and allocate the Level-up Points in any order.
After Character Creation, whenever you Level Up, your character may advance in certain ways, depending on the Level. Trainers on the Extended Progression Track have a Maximum Level of 100. Due to Trainers gaining nearly double the Features and Edges in this Progression Track, Trainers may now take a maximum of eight Classes.
Note: Unless a Feature or Edge EXPLICITLY says that you may take it multiple times, such as a Ranked Feature, then you can only take it once!
In addition to the usual bonuses on every Level up, Trainers qualify for certain Skill Ranks at certain levels. These are listed below.
With this variant rule, all mechanics that utilize your Trainer Level (TL), your TL is considered to be halved (rounded up) for the purposes of those mechanics. For all mechanics that utilize your Milestone count, treat your TL/10 (rounded down) as your Milestone Count.
Nominally, the way to Level Up as a Trainer is from gaining Experience. Whenever a Trainer reaches 10 Experience or higher, they immediately subtract 10 Experience from their Experience Bank and gain 1 Level. If you are using Condensed Trainer Progression, a Trainer needs 20 XP to Level Up.
Trainers frequently earn Experience, or XP, after triumphing over difficult battles alongside their Pokemon. Following the Significance Factors (separate section below), the following amounts of experience are awarded:
Trainers may earn XP for every new species of Pokemon they catch, evolve, or hatch from an egg. For example, a trainer with a Charmander for a starter would have 1 XP. Evolving it into Charmeleon will give another 1 XP. Catching another Pokemon, like Pidgey, will grant 1 XP. If the same trainer catches a second Charmander or Pidgey, they would not gain XP for the capture.
Optionally, you can have your players share Dex XP. This means they would gain XP as if they themselves caught, evolved, or hatched an ally's new Pokemon. This may result in faster Trainer growth but keep your players on the same pace with leveling up.
PTR Dev Note: If you’re familiar with Pokemon Tabletop Reunited over the years (mainly with its predecessor, Pokemon Tabletop United), there’s been a lot of contention and dissatisfaction with Dex Experience. In our opinion, it’s a combination of bad advice and bad experiences of a small number of people coloring the opinions of everyone else inquiring about it. As a GM, do be aware that, if you only use Dex XP, it will take the capture of 500 unique Pokemon species in order to get to level 50. Dex XP can be the most volatile source of Trainer XP, so be cautious if you use it in conjunction with other sources of XP.
Trainers can also earn XP by discovering new locations and points of interest. Finding new locations is a constant in any TTRPG, and so it makes sense to reward your players for discovering the world.
The following are examples with XP rewards:
PTR Dev Note: You can increase or decrease rewards as needed to control the pacing of your game using this method. You don’t necessarily need to make every Route give Discovery XP. But if this is the primary method of regulating XP, do your best to provide this experience at more consistent intervals, and with varied avenues of discovery!
Like most TTRPGS, your Trainers will not have a battle every session. This is where Social XP comes into play. Every important character they encounter will grant at least 1 XP on first meeting. Important characters include villains as well. Successfully allying with an important character will also net an additional 1 XP.
Since this is also the world of Pokemon, defeating an important character in battle can grant an additional 2 XP if desired.
PTR Dev Note: for GMs that are more familiar with very socially-heavy systems (and wishing to run socially heavy campaigns in PTR), we recommend possibly changing these up and diversifying. Consider providing experience after important social events (like an interrogation in a Poké Noir campaign, or after navigating the social niceties at a gala in a Poké Bond campaign).
NPCs or companies may provide quests or challenges for the players to complete. These should reward a bonus to experience rewards based on the difficulty of the quest. A typical bonus reward is between 1-3 XP. Failing these quests will grant no bonus experience as they typically have little weight to the narrative.
PTR Dev Note: Historically, GMs have been advised to engage in “per battle” Trainer Experience. For some campaigns (especially battle-lite ones), this works well! Others, not so much! If you’re planning on having your players be required to beat up every little Pidgey they find to get their Pokemon leveled up, we recommend only awarding Quest Experience for only the more important battles (your Team Admins, rivals, colosseum quarter-finals/semi-finals/finals, etc.) your Trainers participate in.
A Milestone is the equivalent to 10 XP, which will allow a Trainer to immediately level up. This is rewarded when Trainers complete certain challenges or complete a sub-plot in a campaign. The most common event that awards Milestone XP is defeating a Gym Leader.
For campaigns not running a Gym Challenge, consider the following examples for rewarding a milestone:
Milestones can also help pace out a campaign narratively. If you expect your players to be at a certain level before a specific encounter, you may want to offer them a side quest that will reward a Milestone reward before they advance as normal.
If the players fail an event that normally grants a Milestone reward, they should be rewarded with 1-2 XP. Failure itself is also valuable for growth.
PTR Dev Note: More abstractly, a GM could consider Milestones to be a good denouement to a particular story arc, or a method to control player progression more rigidly (such as gating progression to a handful of key events, such as the party’s victory over a Gym). Like the rest of these Trainer Experience options, gauge which fits your group and your campaign the best!
Obviously, every GM and every group will want a different flavor for their campaign, and different goals for the story they share together. With that in mind, we (the PTR devs) want to emphasize that there’s no one right way to handle Trainer Experience. Even though two campaigns may be doing Gym Challenges, there may be different side stories and optional quests/objectives between them, or perhaps the story takes a turn and the Gym Challenge is thrown to the wayside by a Region-ending threat!
So yes, we advise GMs to pick and choose which Experience Methods they wish to use. They all have their strengths and, in a variety of combinations, accommodate different groups and campaign types. There’s no “one-size fits all”, since Pokemon (in general) allows for an extremely diverse dearth of stories.
Scenarios, quests, battles and even negotiations are called Encounters. These are situations that set the Scene and provide players an oppurtunity to use their Character's skills to the best of their ability. Encounters can be a Social Encounter where your players are talking and roleplaying with NPCs. On the other side are Combat Encounters, which can range from fairly insigifigant to highly challenging. This section will cover everything involved with budgeting your Combat Encounters to rewarding money.
A quick and direct method to determine how formidable your encounters should be to your players. Our recommendation is to take:
Example: 4 player party with 6 level 10 or so Pokemon apiece. Battle is against a lesser boss trainer, Significance Factor 3. So the total budgetable XP for this encounter is 10 (APL) x 4 (number of players) x 3 (Significance Factor), which, is 120 levels to budget for the encounter. This could look like: Boss trainer TL8, their two lvl 14 Pokemon each being 2-turn Bosses, with four grunts at TL2, and each having two Pokemon at lvl 4.
Note: if your encounter is featuring something beyond the ordinary, such as a battle with Trainers who use “regional phenomena” (Mega Evolution, Dynamax, etc.) in their teams, or perhaps fights with unconventional and powerful foes (such as using robots/vehicles, Legendary Pokemon using Legendary Auras, or some alternate powerset, such as Shadow Pokemon), the level budget of the encounter as described above will likely not reflect the power of these opponents, often being a fair bit stronger than the numbers normally indicate.
In these situations, based on the number and intensity of these additional mechanics, it is recommended to consider the level budget as being higher when determining the total amount of Battle Experience to award to players. Depending on the difficulty imposed, this could range from x1.25 more XP, to x2, or even more.
In every journey, money is important. This allows your players to afford items from a shop as well as services from NPCs. Granting monetary rewards uses the following formulas.
Where Base Total is rounded to the nearest 100. Then you perform the following formula to calculate Reward Total:
Reward total is the total amount of money/item value to give to your players. Please note that this is only a recommendation, and you can deviate from this as you see fit by changing the Misc. Mult, which is by default 1.
The Significance Factor ranges from 1 to about 5, and there’s many things to consider when picking this value.
First, consider narrative significance. This will inform your “base” significance factor.
An encounter against wild Pidgeys probably doesn’t have any significance; an encounter against a rival trainer has more; and an encounter for the championship title has lots!
Next, consider the challenge and threat being posed. Even if a wild Pokémon doesn’t have much narrative significance, a very strong wild Pokémon may be able to inflict serious damage to Trainers and their Pokémon. Conversely, a fight against an unskilled Gym Leader might hardly be a challenge at all. For these situations, lower or raise the significance a little, (±0.5), based on the narrative difference. Of course, don’t use this to punish particular party members if they have an advantage due to type or similar factor – this should be used to consider more sweeping advantages based on numbers or Level differences.
This value is used to calculate the total amount of Experience rewarded in a combat, and used to calculate monetary and material rewards. The Significance Multiplier as used to calculate monetary and material rewards is equal to:
After a battle, the GM will reward Pokemon Experience to the party equal to the Encounter Budget of the encounter, divided by the number of players. From here, each Pokemon in the player’s active team receives half of this amount. Then, the player banks the full amount in their Experience Pool. The Experience in the Experience Pool can be saved and allocated later to an owned Pokemon of the player’s choice (in the party or not) during Daily Prep, or may be spent immediately if desired.
Example: Jeremy’s party completes an encounter, earning each player 16 XP. Jeremy used his Totodile and Pidgey in the fight, with his Geodude in reserve. Totodile, Pidgey, and Geodude all earn 8 XP immediately at the encounter’s conclusion. Then, Jeremy stocks 16 XP in his Experience Pool, which already had 54 XP saved from a few prior encounters, bringing the total to 70 XP. Later that session, Jeremy catches a Pineco. Jeremy then opts to dole out 10 XP to his Pidgey, 40 XP to his Pineco, and 20 XP to his Geodude, exhausting his Experience Pool in the process.
Note: this may cause discrepancies early on, benefitting players with full teams over those that only have a few Pokemon. This is intentional! Pokemon, the video games and the TTRPGs, thrive on having a full roster. So having that full team, even if it won’t be your final team, is greatly recommended.
Every day when you do your daily preparations, you will frequently commit your Pokemon to an exercise regimen. Rather than being significantly challenging training to break the limits of your ace Pokemon, this exercise is meant to bring your newest partners up to speed with the rest of your team, and keep your partners sharp.
During your Daily Prep (the hour spent applying apply [Training] Features, teaching Poke-Edges, triggering Class Features), you can choose to apply 6 instances of Experience Training to Pokemon (either in your party or your box). These 6 instances can be focused onto one Pokemon, or spread amongst multiple party members.
This amount is equal to your Trainer Level x your Milestone Multiplier. The Milestone Multiplier is equal to 2 + 2 x every Milestone you’ve earned. So an Amateur Trainer has a Multiplier of x4, Elite Trainer x14, and Champion x18.
You may only raise a Pokemon up to its EXP Training Level Cap.
Starting in Version 4.2, the Training Cap will be listed alongside the regular Level Cap in the Spirit Tab of a Pokemon Sheet. Additionally, you'll be able to use the Daily EXP Training Macro which has this cap included!
Also in Version 4.2, the Train the Reserves and Trainer of Champions will be marked "Obsolete', as they are functionally obselete and pointless for this reworking of Experience Training.
In addition to Baby Food, there are other options to bring your weaker Pokémon up to speed. Unlike the Core Rules’ Rare Candy, Experience Candy does not have a restriction on its lifetime use for any Pokémon. These candies are described in the below table. Please note that the costs are a basic guideline, and can be changed based on campaign circumstances.
| Experience Candies | Exp.Yield | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Exp. Candy XS | 30 | $600 |
| Exp. Candy S | 80 | $1200 |
| Exp. Candy M | 190 | $2500 |
| Exp. Candy L | 420 | $4400 |
| Exp. Candy XL | 900 | $6800 |
Dev Note: While these items have an associated cost, they are not intended to be purchasable or crafted in any way. The intent is for these XP items to be given as alternate rewards instead of money for Wild Pokemon battles.
The level cap for a Trainer’s Pokémon (before Friendship penalties begin) is modeled with:
where LT is the Trainer’s Level, and F is the Pokemon’s Friendship Level (from 0 to 5).
Calculation can be found here: Calculations
When you exceed the Level Cap, there are a number of negative modifiers:
If your table is looking for a less bookkeeping-intensive experience, a long-time recommendation is to couple Pokemon Experience alongside Trainer Experience. This way, the GM and players do not need to worry about playing catch-up, as newly-obtained Pokemon are raised to and all Pokemon locked at EPL, which is equal to double a Trainer’s Level. For those using Condensed Levels, EPL is instead equal to quadruple a Trainer’s level. And for Extended Levels, EPL is equal to a Trainer’s level.
Note: this does mean that your Pokemon are still subject to Friendship restrictions if they would be over your Level Cap. Due to how the numbers work out, there should only be issues for Pokemon at 0 or 1 Friendship at mid or high Trainer Levels.