First things first, hello you there my dear reader! Hope you're having a good day.

You'll have to excuse me, but I'm not an english-native speaker so please ignore my inevitable spelling mistakes.

Introduction

I've been working on a system able to handle cool "anime-like" 1v1 battles for the last few weeks, this being my New Year Resolution. The lockdown my country is going in and out is also helping me to have enough free time on my hands to do so.

I playtested mechanics with my playgroup and we bounced off each other for new ideas and concepts. Now, I've iterated the dice system here (which ended up performing very very poorly in practice, but I scavenged the good parts of it) and this Initiative-based battle system to marry the two.

My game main inspiration sources would be Fate and Wushu, with Ironsworn/World Wide Wrestling being quite relevant for the Battle System initial design, but Lancer customization is very enticing for later character advancements.

I settled very recently on a TTRPG to play within the Creature Collecting genre (taking inspiration from anime like Pokemon, Digimon and TemTem but also Beyblade to a lesser extent), because it would be easy for the game to have a unique but still understandable aesthetics (*). Anime ttrpg are often designed by people too worried to perfectly emulate their original license and/or too tangled with old traditional mechanics and/or aiming to simulate all the manga genres at the same time, so I wanted to give it a spin and design something that feel new and fresh from the ground up.

(\) Notice that the Creature Collecting theme was an half accident by a joke about how the new basic roll system feels. Why not just embracing it?*

TL;DR I'm making a Pokemon ttrpg.

Design Goals

• Critters Battles are one of the key elements of the game (the other being Journey). They must feel and look like they are in their original animated source: frenetic, clever and cool.
• Battles must be tactile and very involved for the two players that'll take part in them, but not too long to avoid sidelining the other players and/or giving supporter roles to the other players.
• Players should be able to make their own custom Bestiary (such as a Monster Manual) in order for them to be able to pick and play critters from their own list.

The Basic Roll (Opposition Roll)

This is what I wrote now about the basic action resolution of the game. Notice that all the rolls in the system are against an opposition, so there is no such a thing of a non-contested roll.

The Opposition Roll

1 - The active player and the opposition player (often the GM) both declare what Attribute they’re using and their Value.

2 - Both players roll 2d6s, add them together and compare their result with the other player’s chosen Attribute’s Value. The higher the better!

3 - If the active player rolls above the opposition value, they succeed in the action and gain an amount of Flairs equal to the lesser rolled dice. Otherwise, they fail and the opponent get a Complication!

4 - If the opposition player rolls above the active value, they resist and gain an amount of Complications equal to the lesser rolled dice. Otherwise, they yield and the opponent get a Flair!

5 - If there are Flairs or Complications left on the table, the players take turns into spending them one by one to leverage their success and getting bonuses.

Attributes are (for example) Power, Speed or Skill with values going from 5 up to 8/9-ish. I still have to crunch the statistics deeply enough, but intuitively I liked how it felt by rolling the dice during playtest. The term "Hit" is an umbrella term for both Complications and Flairs.

If the opposition is a critter, they share most attributes, but if the opposition is another inanimate or animate obstacle they are named game elements (such as Heavy Rock 6).

TL;DR Opposed roll-over 2d6 system. Players gain hit and they spend them to narrate how things went down.

The Battle System (Clashes)

This is the basic structure of the Clashes (another name for turns, but with a name that should highlight the idea of a frantic sequence of spurts of action).

The Clash Sequence

1 - The player with Initiative is on the offensive and is the active player. The other player is on the defensive and is the opposition player.

2 - The active player chooses a Battle Action, declaring what Attribute they're using and their value.

3 - The opposition player chooses a Battle Reaction, declating what Attribute they're using and their value.

4 - They make an Opposition Roll!

5 - The players take turns to spend hits according to the actions they have chosen until neither have hits left.

6 - The battle ends if one or both contenders are unable to battle, otherwise a new Clash starts.

Battle Actions are things like Strike (spending flairs to deal damage), Pivot (spending flairs to move around and increase momentum) or Maneuver (spending flairs to create Tags to give the player the edge later down the line), while Battle Reactions are things like Parry, Flee or Outmaneuver, but all critters have a list of custom moves/actions tied down to the advancement system. Notice that the Initiative goes around as a result of the hits spent.

With this specific Dice Resolution system, that was born before I opted for a creature collecting game, playtest looked like players declaring their intentions (allowing them to "scream their commands to their critters"), then rolling the dice to see how well the creatures behaved and narrating the results by spending surely but slowly the hits to control the pacing of the narrative. It played like "backward Wushu", where you say what you want to do, roll for it and explain how the action turned out to be with "embellishments" engrained in the system.

TL;DR One character is on the offensive, the other on defensive and they choose actions simultaneously.

Considerations & Questions

• The two bulleted lists are exactly like the version I wrote down in my notes. Outside of context and just reading them, the sequence of actions is clear? Are there things you don't understand or don't like as written?
• Going down on the themes of a Creature Collecting TTRPG (such as pokemon), are there things you think should be included for sure? Are there things you would like to see?
• I broke the game strongly into a "in battle" and in a "out of battle" state, with actions you can access to only in battle and other you naturally can't (or at least, not with the same rules).