How can I nerf a nuzlocke to make it easier?

[alittlechese]

I’ve recently wanted to try my first nuzlocke (specifically in either Omega Ruby or Brilliant Diamond, let me know which one is better!) but to be honest, I'm a bit scared that I’ll just die instantly.

Is there any way to nerf a nuzlocke, while still giving it an element of difficulty (in case you are wondering, no I am not a new Pokémon player, and I have got a decent understanding of the game)

Thanks!

 

[Anya Homura]

First off, there's really only 2 rules that must be followed in a Nuzlocke:

1. When a Pokemon faints, it dies
2. You can only catch the first Pokemon you encounter in an area.

Everything else is an add-on. From the hardcore rules you see all the time on youtube, to the weird and wonderful rulesets no sane man would challenge but people here do regularly, to simply nicknaming your Pokemon to get more attached. None of that is necessary.

And a lot of the more standard rules are, in fact, their own ways of making things easier! As an example, Dupes Clause (a rule where you do not have to catch a Pokemon of the same species you already have) was made probably because someone was just really tired of using rattata and pidgey, and nowadays it's more common to see runs with some variation of it than without. Same thing with something like Shiny Clause, which is literally just "shiny pokemon can be used because like. come on. it's a shiny"!

If you're worried about getting the run off the ground, let yourself ease into it - don't worry about your Pokemon fainting until you first get given Pokeballs. If you're worried about not being allowed items in battle or having to play on set mode, just leave those rules out. They can't hurt you if you are not bound to them. ...if you're worried about the emotional impact of your first death, I cannot help you there, I still feel remarkably bad about mine. You learn to live with it.

As for the "which game" question, I have like... No Experience with BD, but I know Omega Ruby is a game that functions so.

But genuinely though, OR might actually be a good pick for you! It has the early Exp Share (with the toggle that gets dropped in Gen 8), Infinite TMs, and I think a pretty good blend of easy & tough challenges.

In the end, however, just do what you want to do. We can't tell you how to play or what to do - it's your run.

 

[Rubombee]

- overleveling
- amie or whatever the equivalent is in the game (in BD it's fused with friendship)
- lots of healing items
- mercy rules in case of death, such as allowing yourself a certain number of revives, having your starter be immortal, only counting the nth death, whatever you can think of
- damn anya just posted a novel while i was typing lmao

 

[Champ Siggi]

Like Anya said there are only two necessary rules for it to be a Nuzlocke or a variant of a Nuzlocke. Everything else is up to you. You can just play with those two rules and the helpful clauses.

 

[Neotornado]

Everyone's already had helpful tips but I'll add one for every single game that isn't Gen 5: Use Gyarados. It's easily one of the best things you can get your hands on between intimidate (which is a fantastic ability no matter what gets it), weaknesses being pretty easily telegraphed (with enough sp. defense to live random unSTAB'ed shock waves unless you roll bad stats) and a crazy movepool with just about everything you want, Gyarados can hard-carry pretty much every nuzlocke you do and is trivially easy to acquire in every generation it's been a part of. (X/Y is probably the latest you get it, but it's still pretty early on) Make sure you don't get hit by pursuit before evolution and you're set for the reset of the game. If you aren't using dupes clause they're also very easy to regain (outside of regions with lower quantities of fishing routes like X/Y and Gen 8) so losing one isn't a big deal since you can train up another pretty quickly.

 

[greenchu]

Git gud. Unironically. Failure is how we as humans learn and get better, if something is worth doing then it's not going to be trivially easy. If you try and fail your first run, then that just makes the victory even sweeter when you do finally complete a run successfully. And if you win with an easier ruleset, then is it really as satisfying? Did you really overcome the challenge you were worried about? No. Especially since you say you already know Pokemon, then a Nuzlocke isn't really anything overly difficult to fear, you just need to adapt to it. And the best way to do that is jump right in.

Just do it, and git gud at it.

 

[Emperor ServingSpoon]

Yeah, if you're only going in with the basic two rules, provided you have a decent knowledge of the game, you shouldn't have too much to fear when it comes to actually winning. You'll likely have some deaths here and there, but that's just part of the experience (and you should probably look for some other kind of challenge run if that's not your cup of tea!). The games are generous enough with encounters that you'll usually be able to have a full box of dead Pokemon before you'd ever need to worry about not having a full team (provided you've not failed too many encounters, anyway). And personally, I've never come close to a full box of dead Pokemon, even in some of the harder games. And if you're in a particularly tricky spot, you can always ask for team advice in that thread! There's more than a few of us around who are happy to share advice from our years of Nuzlocking experience!

But between those two games, you'll *definitely* want to be picking Omega Ruby. In my opinion, Brilliant Diamond's Pokemon League is the steepest difficulty spike the series has ever seen, and I think it would be *very* easy to have a full team wipe there. And even as a veteran Nuzlocker, I'm still not sure I want to deal with it... On the other hand, Omega Ruby is very friendly to the player, with many potential Megas (including your starter and [email protected]) to pick up that can help you get past some of its harder bosses easier.

But yeah. Just have fun with it! Start with the basic rules, and if you find that too easy, then you can always add other restrictions as you go along to suit your taste in difficulty more. Nuzlockes have really good potential for scaling the difficulty up if you ever want to, but sticking with the basics to get a feel for it to start off with is better than going in with too many restrictions and never finishing a run.

 

[King Smorgascake]

Generally speaking, aside from the main two rules, the only other rules I've ran with is Dupes Clause, and even then applied it to the point where it's strictly no dupes, even if it's a second chance at a pokemon I want. I haven't attempted a great many Nuzlockes (probably no more than about 15 in total as of right now) as I only first attempted one when COVID first broke out, and have only twice wiped before the later stages of the game. The first against Maylene's Lucario in what was probably Platinum and against Skyla in Black; both games are notoriously hard and in both occasions I suffered the unfortunately loss of a good counter.

I wouldn't worry about a team wipe, if I were you. Inevitably, you will fail a Nuzlocke run, but part of what makes Nuzlockes so enticing is that prospect of failure and lack of margin for error. It makes each experience unique.

 

[Brendan Rizzo]

As long as you allow yourself to use items in battle and play on Switch mode, I wouldn't worry about the difficulty. (Seriously, when I played the game casually as a kid I would never have any trouble with any battle, but now that I have always banned battle-items and always play on Set mode, I have actually wiped to most bosses, even on non-Nuzlocke playthroughs!) You'll still likely fail the first attempt, but as the others have said, that is a prerequisite to learning how to succeed later.

 

[MixnMatch]

Just remember that it's ultimately a self-imposed challenge and unless you plan to document and/or publish it, nobody will chase you for not always sticking to your rules.
Obviously this put in question sense of doing Nuzlocke but this that you should figure out - how much you can ignore rules before you'll feel like it's not fun Nuzlocke experience anymore and just normal play-through.

 

[Champ Siggi]

Oh another thing, don't document your first, second, or third nuzlockes. You are going to want some practice before you start publishing runs. Also if you ever make a new one of those _____lockes make sure to give it a test run first before you share the ruleset on the forums or/and publish it.

 

[Rubombee]

my ultra moon storylocke is my first-ever nuzlocke lol

 

[aegagrusScholarship]

you can document whatever nuzlockes you want, dude
my current one is very likely the first one i will ever finish

also my run is literally my test run of my ruleset. a ton of documented runs here are test runs too. there is literally no restriction, you can post anything and it’ll be interesting so long as you make it interesting.

anyways. yeah. as previously stated, the main thing about nuzlockes is limited encounters and permadeath, and no one can kill you for cheating if no one sees your run. i would also recommend omega ruby, brilliant diamond has some real scary trainers in it while OR just. gives you a ton of free wins if you don’t restrict yourself (and it looks like you’re not levelcapping/banning mechanics/etc). so yeah.

 

[Champ Siggi]

anyways. yeah. as previously stated, the main thing about nuzlockes is limited encounters and permadeath, and no one can kill you for cheating if no one sees your run. i would also recommend omega ruby, brilliant diamond has some real scary trainers in it while OR just. gives you a ton of free wins if you don’t restrict yourself (and it looks like you’re not levelcapping/banning mechanics/etc). so yeah.

Correction, BD is pretty easy to Nuzlocke until after you beat the last gym. (As in a new player probably wouldn't get too too many deaths, it's got a few hard trainers but that's just like any normal old but not to old game, probably gens 3-5) Because the elite 4 is way higher leveled then him and they also will PP and potion stall you, inflict you with statues, and have actually competitive teams which will cause deaths before you fight Cynthia who is an absolute monster who has min-maxed her Garchomp (I don't remember about the rest of her team since it's the only absolute monster), has the best competitive abilities on each pokemon, has competitive items on each pokemon, and has competitive movesets on each pokemon. BD is an okay first game until later in the game. But I also don't know everything about BD since I played SP first and am still going through BD, and I haven't even finished my own undocumented Nuzlocke of SP. Also if you aren't documenting nuzlockes then you should be playing them for fun, for a challenge that can make you want to replay the games you've already played. That's the point. Not to impress people with your skill or knowledge of Pokemon games. John Locke the creator of the Nuzlocke decided to make a challenging ruleset to have fun with since it's a bit boring to replay these games normally so he created the Nuzlocke for fun and made his Nuzlocke comic for fun.

 

[Emperor ServingSpoon]

That's a strange way to start your agreement that BD has some real scary trainers in it. :P Yes, they're almost exclusively at the end, but unless you're gonna glitch past the Champion, then the end is every bit as relevant as any other part of the game! And I'd argue that with a difficulty curve this steep, it's even more relevant than any other part of the game.

I'd agree that you can start documenting runs as soon as you want. If anything, your earlier runs are more likely to be your more eventful ones, while you're still adjusting to the Nuzlocke mindset and haven't learnt where all the most dangerous fights are (many games have a few dangerous fights that aren't even boss fights!). I've had a few deathless runs now (even in runs with stricter rules), and I imagine it would be much harder to build suspense for my audience without at least one random death in there to remind them that the stakes actually exist.

That said, you also may not want to bog yourself down with one of the more time consuming formats for posting your run if you're just starting out, as that could potentially cause you to lose interest in even finishing the gameplay (if you take the play, post, play, post approach, anyway. If you simply take all the notes as you play and then post about it after you're all finished, that's less likely to be an issue, though the former approach likely develops the attachment to your Pokemon far more strongly.). But that all depends on the kind of person you are, so none of us can tell you what your best method of doing that is, since you know yourself far better than any of us know you!

 

[Chess]

this is gonna be a weird assertion but the hardest part of nuzlocking is just getting into the mindset of approaching the game as a nuzlocke, and I think the best way to do that is to kinda just throw yourself at the game with as few rules as you can until what you should be doing starts to click. You're going to wipe early and often if you're just starting out, and you can use those to calibrate your playstyle until you start to figure out how not to. Just kind of play the game until you get your rhythm down, and don't be bothered by any losses you have; it's a self-imposed challenge and whatever happens is between you and the game

 

[Muscular User]

Bumping but in case anyone besides OP comes looking to this thread for advice, just to add on a bit to what other people have said:

When starting out, you probably will have a better time just keeping it very simple (if it faints you can't use it + only catching first wild encounter in an area), and adding more rules in an attempt to gentle the experience may make it harder to get into the nuzlocking headspace. So then it's a matter of finding how you can make the experience easier without actually tampering with those rules too much. With that in mind, nuzlocking a game you've already played will make the experience a lot easier since you'll more or less know where the difficulty spikes are, what items to buy, where the legendaries are, etc. Doing a blind nuzlocke (ie playing one of the games you haven't before and also not looking anything up) is, I think, the most instantaneous way to up the difficulty, so playing a familiar game is a nice means of self-defense. This is also very true for mods, which tend to be even more punishing than the base games.

I think also it's worth remembering you do want to enjoy the experience. Tacking on a weird rule that isn't actually meant to make the game easier/harder isn't a bad thing if you think you'll get a kick out of it. A good example of this is the Dupes Clause (normally some version of "you can't catch the same pokemon more than once, so if you first encounter is a pokemon you've already caught, you can keep looking"), which I think people mostly use to make the game more interesting. It can make the game situationally easier/harder, but I think it's mostly used when people want to have more variety in their runs. Whatever rules you do use, I'd advise against adding new ones once you've started. The biggest challenge really is committing to the premise, as has been said.

 

[pikamewphlosion]

Easiest way: Spam healing Items and X items. Early game, that’s going to be harder to pull off, but if you can make it a couple badges in, you will generally find ways to get more money, and the ability to buy the very cost effective vending machine items.