I have a feeling that the show might have to be totally reworked due to shifts in the casting.
I say that as a man who wasn’t a fan of brandon’s character concept.

Going to end up reiterating some of what Cap said earlier, but here we go. Some of the obstacles so far have included:

-Time and not having enough of it. I went from having a really time consuming and mentally draining job to being a full time college student, and Pokeballs isn’t the only thing I’m working on for Nerdy Show.

-Building the rest of the campaign and world from almost nothing. Mike’s death put a huge dampener on Hex’s enthusiasm for running the game. When I took over I got very little in the way of notes from him other than a general outline of what he had planned for the overarching story. This meant I had to listen to the series start to finish so I could take extensive notes to make sure I didn’t overlook anything, do a lot of research on the world the anime created to keep things consistent (to the extent I want to anyway, the anime retcons itself several times), start planning the rest of the story and come up with explanations for various things that have happened in the story so far.

-Transitioning to a new system. Previous episodes used Pokemon Tabletop Adventures, which is stupid broken. As an example, the rules as written allow a low level character with psychic powers to throw characters and pokemon hundreds of meters into the air, easily killing them with fall damage. It’s also needlessly complicated. Trainers use traditional D&D stats while pokemon use the stat system from the games, so you have to do convoluted conversions to make them capable of interacting within the game mechanics. Pokemon Tabletop United, the system we’ve transitioned to instead, is a much more streamlined and balanced system. Pokemon and trainers use the same stats from the games, and trainers use a system similar to the one in the Ghostbusters tabletop system for skill checks.

-Translating Characters. Since some features and aspects didn’t carry over from PTA or survive subsequent versions of PTU, I’ve had to translate the characters in such a way that they retain the abilities they’ve used or demonstrated in past episodes. For Martin and Jamesy this was pretty simple since their classes retained similar functionality to the PTA ruleset. For Jumanji this was a little trickier. Rangers under PTU are now considered NPCs similar to Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys, and aren’t player classes anymore so I had to look at what was available to allow her to do things she should be capable of and matched with what she did previously in the series. Tark was a headache and a half. Absolutely none of the rules worked for him, including the leveling mechanics for trainers, so he had to be built completely from scratch along with some new rules devised specifically for him. I also had to double check everyone’s pokemon.

-Deciding how to handle Jumanji. Like Cap said, Jonna doesn’t live in Orlando anymore, and her schedule makes her harder to schedule than the rest of the cast, so we struggled with how we were going to proceed since we didn’t want to write her off the show if we could help it. Turns out that’s what we’re going to have to do, so we’re adding a new cast member and getting them caught up and creating their character and pokemon was something that needed to happen.

I’m still working on it when I can, and now that I have all the hard stuff out of the way I’m shooting for being able to start recording new episodes within the first quarter of 2017 barring unforeseen circumstances.

@ouij, welcome to the fold. You’ll do well here.

If you really want to thank me, you’ll relay something else to Brandon:

No updates about Pokeballs of Steelix or Call of Cthulhu 2? So excited.