Pokemon RP

[HollytheDolly]

I've never done one of these, but they look super fun! I hope this can fit into "video games" even though Pokemon is technically an anime first, I haven't seen any of the anime past the first season. If not, sorry for wasting your time.
......
plot:

The world of Pokemon is a world like no other. It's a world of adventure, friendship, competition, and little creatures called "pokemon". As your region's professor probably told you, there are many different kinds of pokemon of all shapes, sizes, and types. These pokemon are used for battling, but also are companions on your journey to fill your pokedex and eventually defeat the Elite Four - the strongest trainers in their respective leagues!

The Unova region is growing in popularity since becoming known for having rare pokemon that are unattainable anywhere else in the world. Trainers are flocking in from all the other regions to catch these rare pokemon and to take a crack at Unova's gyms and the Elite Four. You are one of those trainers. Hard times may be ahead of you, young trainer, but you must try your best to be persistant if you wish to achieve your goals in Unova. There you will meet some friends, and some enemies, but one things for sure: you'll have an adventure that you will remember for the rest of your life.

A special tournament is being held in the biggest sity in Unova, Castelia City, as a welcoming to the visiting trainers. The Unova Cup will be played as visitors against the residents of Unova, and the two highest scoring trainers from each team after ten battles will face off against the oppsosing two strongest in a double battle for the titles of Unova Champion.

The boats from the other regions - Kanto, Jhoto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh - are nearly at the Castelia City harbour. There will only be a day of rest before the tournament will begin and your journey will begin to unfold.

......
rules:

1. You must follow all regular RP rules.
2. You cannot be a character found in the anime or the video game. You must make your own.
3. You cannot have all your pokemon level 100. Although your character may have beaten the league they came from, for some odd reason everyone starts at a relatively even level. A trainer who has more experience battling will likely beat a new trainer though, simply because it makes sense that way. ALSO, important, don't have all the strongest evolved pokemon (if you want an evolved pokemon, that's fine, but be fair with it and have some unevolved too - and NO LEGENDARIES!
4. You can't always win. Sometimes you will lose battles. It would be no fun if someone was constantly winning. However, say for example "Alex" was in a rivalry with "Steven", Alex could win many times in a row, pushing Steven to train harder and harder until eventually beating him many times later. This, however, depends on how the poster writing Steven's part feels about it.
5. You may only have up to 6 pokemon at once. Also, they may only know four moves. Try to stay to all of the rules present in to game (eg. You cannot teach a Magikarp the move "Fireblast", etc.)
6. You may only have control of up to 3 trainers at a time. I suggest only starting with one or two, in case you want to introduce one later.
7. If you have a character from the Kanto league and who has only been to that league, stick to only having pokemon FROM THAT LEAGUE. Johto may have Kanto and Johto pokemon, Hoenn may have Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn, Sinnoh may have Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh pokemon, BUT Unova may ONLY have Unova pokemon.
8. I can't think of any more right now. Have fun!

.....
character form:

Name:
Age (no younger than 13):
Home Region (Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova) :
Experience (ie. # of badges, are you an Elite Four Champion, or a new trainer?):
Starting Pokemon (Between 3 and 6):
3 Positive and 3 Negative Traits:
Small (one paragraph) Description:

.....
my trainers:

Name: Alana Moon
Age (no younger than 13): 17
Home Region (Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova) : Johto
Experience (ie. # of badges, are you an Elite Four Champion, or a new trainer?): Beat all gym leaders and Elite Four in Jhoto league.
Starting Pokemon (Between 3 and 6): Ninetales, Vileplume, Flaffy, Slowbro, Aipom, Murkrow
3 Positive and 3 Negative Traits: Outgoing, Kind, Creative/Absent-Minded, Childish, Emotional.
Small (one paragraph) Description: Alana was born in Cherrygrove City, Jhoto, but moved with her father to a much larger city, Goldenrod, after her parents divorce when she was only 6. Alana has always been a Daddy's Girl and had a hard time leaving when she went on her first journey through the Johto league. She was only 15 when she beat the Elite Four Champion. Instead of following in the footsteps of most trainers and going into the connected Kanto league to earn more badges, she decided to return to Goldenrod in order to be with her father again. After nearly two years, her father convinced her to go to the Unova region to start doing what she truly love again - adventuring with her pokemon. The tournament came at a good time, and Alana jumped at the chance, after making sure she had her father's phone number for whenever she just wanted to talk.

> I'm going to add another tomorrow. It's late. But I suppose I should ask if I am apporved? Like I said, anime's full, but it kinda fits into video games as well...

[Silent_Wolf]

Holly, we are unable to approve this RP for a number of reasons.

1. Lack of context. You've given us the barest minumum of information as to what the RP is about, but the problem isn't that. Some of our users don't even understand what pokemon are other than they can only speak their own name (except in unique cases, like Meowth), the abilities they have, the history of the games and regions. Even if you can't go super-indepth due to the character limit, links and small anecdotes and as much information as possible is still preferred; we don't mind your opening posts being split over two separate ones because we've had to do this ourselves in the past.

As an example of what we mean by "elaborate on your story," see these two RPs:

{RP} My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The Mystery Of Blanktown.

Condemned: Sonic Destruction

Both of these RPs are very specific fan RPs; the former is a popular one and much information can be found thanks to Google, but that doesn't excuse a short post and as a GM, you should be offering up as much info as possible. Here, Miranda went to no end to explain everything - Equestria, the ponies there, the plot itself, what Blanktown means. It's set within the set My Little Pony universe, which explains everything about it. The latter was a very complicated one and I went to extreme lengths to explain as much as possible within the first post or two, long with the rest of my posts in the game up until it was closed due to inactivity. But as you can see, the plot itself takes up a majority of the post, the main plot point - stopping the Oro, a cult, is the key point - is explained in-depth as to what it means to the city of Metro and to the players themselves, who could be a part of it if they so wished.

Something else as well, what is the point of the plot at all? You have nothing but a tournament for your players to play with, and it's really quite boring. Even the anime and games had Team Rocket for you to fight with and make things interesting - here, there is nothing mentioned at all. With plots, you must be thorough and extensive. If you're not a huge fan of something, it might be best to not try to run an RP based on it. We've had several Resident Evil RPs here for example that succeeded because another user and myself were huge fans of the series and knew all about it, and were able to communicate said information to players who were not so familiar (or even not familiar at all). If you're going to run a game based on something, you need to be fairly knowledgeable and having just one season of anime under your belt is not sufficient.

One other thing: I had a friend who is a major fan of Pokemon look at this, and he's very irritated with you for one reason: Your plot is essentially a copy-paste of every other Pokemon RP/Game ever. Also, your rules for pokemon use make no sense: The way you have your pokemon set up, if you're from Unova, you can only have Unova pokemon even if you've been to other leagues - at least, that is the way it looks from my perspective.

2. Your character is a Sue. Tragic pasts are not a requirement for a great character, and to be frank I'm extremely iffy about her beating the whole Johto league. Ash might do it in the anime, but that's the anime and as such is a special case due to being the main character. Miranda will likely elaborate more, as she can explain it far better than I.

Also, you have not stated the level of your pokemon, which breaks your own rule of it.

I am sorry, but we cannot accept this as it is now. You may repost this later once you have made the mentioned changes (fix the plot, fix your character, make your rules clearer), but you'll need to run it through Miranda or myself to approve it.

This thread is locked.

[Miranda_]

Holly, your character simply will not do. What your character is is what is known in fanfiction and RPing as a Mary Sue. A Mary Sue is a character who is too perfect, and often overpowered and/or beautiful. I'll break down in parts what's wrong with your character so it's perfectly clear.

Experience (ie. # of badges, are you an Elite Four Champion, or a new trainer?): Beat all gym leaders and Elite Four in Jhoto league.

This is the first warning sign of Sueishness in your character; for a character to be the best at everything and beat everyone in her chosen field. For one thing, it's simply not realistic and puts everyone else's characters at an instant disadvantage. For another, it makes your character vapid and uninteresting. There can be no challenges for her to overcome, no goals to work for, no shared experiences to share with other characters. While in the anime Ash beat all the gym leaders, it's never a good idea to base your character on him too much. He was the star of the show, and for an RP owner's character to be the star of the RP makes it so that other people don't really want to play if your character is written to outshine them at every turn.

Starting Pokemon (Between 3 and 6): Ninetales, Vileplume, Flaffy, Slowbro, Aipom, Murkrow

As Wolfie said above, you need to give more information about the different types of Pokemon available to trainers. Also, six is too much really. I know that in a lot of battling RPs trainers do start with six, but that RP is best suited to a forum exclusively given over to it. For our RP forum, we generally prefer character driven RPs as they are easier for people to join and RP in.

3 Positive and 3 Negative Traits: Outgoing, Kind, Creative/Absent-Minded, Childish, Emotional.

Being absentminded does not count as a fault, nor does emotional. So you have just one fault right there that counts; childishness. Proper faults are those which cause the character problems. For example; selfishness; greed; laziness; bad temper; arrogance; vanity; spitefullness or envy. These faults should also tie in with the strengths, and can also tie in with each other. For example, a character who is lazy and doesn't like to work on training her Pokemon could also be spiteful towards other trainers and openly show her jealousy of them. She could be a loyal friend, but her behaviour tends to drive people away. These traits are character forming; you could have her, later on in the RP, end up in bad trouble as a result of her faults and it could be a learning experience. This sort of thing makes your character far more interesting to RP with and for others to RP with you.

Alana was born in Cherrygrove City, Jhoto, but moved with her father to a much larger city, Goldenrod, after her parents divorce when she was only 6.

While it's fair enough that not every character can have a non tragic past, having one put in flatly like that derails the character. There's no need to go overboard, but adding in a bit of detail about how the character was affected by it works to round out the character a bit. In the anime in any case, families are rarely mentioned so it seems a bit weird for you to throw one in.

She was only 15 when she beat the Elite Four Champion.

Another Sueish characteristic laid bare. Most trainers don't beat champions at age fifteen.

All in all, your character is very flat and two dimension and also a Mary Sue. Since you need more help in creating characters, I would suggest joining the Newbies RP, which can be found here for more help in making decent characters before you start another RP. Plus, as I stated in the rules, it's best if you find at least one person to RP with before starting one, cuz if no-one joins then you're left with an inactive RP.