okay so.

i'm not ready to do a full on interest check or anything yet, but as you can see from my signature and the connecting interest check post, i am back on my bull as i get back into pokemon for a new site concept.

i'm building out the site well enough right now (or at least, i have a lot of ideas for directions i want to aim towards in terms of establishing systems and such) but right now i've hit a roadblock that i'm looking for some feedback for.

to summarize the situation - i'm hoping to structure the site so that players will be able to make their character either a warlord, a warrior, or a foreigner (if you aren't familiar with pokemon conquest, basically the warlords are kind of like the purebloods from harry potter or the noble families from game of thrones, the warriors are..... basically any other ransei native, and the "foreigners" are just anyone who doesn't originally hail from ransei) as well as be able to either make an entirely original character, adapt a "normal" pokemon canon (so like either explaining how ash decided to move on to the ransei region or shrugging loudly and making misty a water-type warlord who has always existed in the region), or interpret one of the pokemon conquest warlords into a "modern incarnation" (aka you're kind of taking some of the core ideas/concepts of the characters and crafting them around a brand new character with a new fc and fleshed out backstory and all that). like.... i know it sounds a little messy but i think i can make it work out fairly well for everyone (especially since i'm hoping to take some leaves out of the post-potter or au-got playbook in terms of vastly fleshing out "canon" families so they're easy to slide in ocs and allow for additional oc families and such) so i'm not super concerned about that.

the reason it's all relevant is because i'm hesitating over how this dynamic is interacting with another part of the system. aka i was kind of doing something where you can challenge a "champion" from each given type / warlord family and if you win the battle, you can increase your "esteem" which can be used to do things like expand your max team size or unlock mega evolution or seek out legendaries (and like imo yeah you can "rechallenge" a given type for more benefits and stuff like that). in other words, it was meant to be kind of an adaptation to the "gym leader" system, mostly to give gym leaders something to do beyond just "be nobility" and give some sense of progression / improvement beyond just completing mod threads and catching/evolving pokemon.

but i'm hesitating over a lot of different aspects of the whole thing. like i'm not sure i'm really fond of how dependent the entire system is on people actually picking up those champion positions / being willing to take on that role, and along similar lines, i'm also struggling a little bit on how to make those challenges fair for everyone (since imo i don't think it's fair for a gym leader with four middle-of-the-road pokemon to take on someone with two basic starter pokemon or someone with six fully-evolved pokemon). i'm also a little leery of having the entire thing veer a little too close to your stereotypical trainer-focused pokesite experience and kind of.... wrestling a lot with what rewards might be cool to offer (since for example, i think it might be cool to make it so each champion / "significant figure" you defeat would offer you a pc expansion but i'm also understandably wary of people being super turned off by having a limit to their pcs even if i intend to make it fairly easy to expand and set a high or no max limit to those expansions).

ordinarily i might just. make the site and try to figure this all out later on with a staff team (or with a wider member base after i see where all of the interest lies and all that) but like. imo i think you can understand why i feel like i need to hammer some of this out so that people can know where they stand rather than just "i don't know if we're gonna do this method or not good luck" (or y'know when saying "things are coming soon" is in a small way making a decision on the whole thing).




just. i'm really stressing about this and it's giving me a headache, and since i don't really have a staff team to bounce this off of, i'd really like to get some opinions on the whole situation in terms of like..... whether it seems like a good idea given the site concept, if there's some low-maintenance ways to minimize some of the drawbacks of the system, opinions on some of the offered rewards and such.

imo i'd like to give a little bit more weight towards people who might be actually interested in the site itself over like.... people who genuinely have little or not interest in the site or wouldn't join it (just because imo i'd much rather build the systems out to compliment my intended demographic than i would actively detract from them) but i'm also not going to just dismiss advice out of hand because it's coming from someone who has no interest in pokemon or simply isn't interested for the site concept at hand. so. yeah.