i'm. probably going to be watching this project from afar since while i love pokemon + panfans, they're the two site genres where i'm very picky about implementation. but. i've been ruminating on it, i have Opinions (tm), so i guess i'll share.

as far as systems go, my advice would... actually be to take a leaf out of digimon's book.

-- give people the option of a team but make that number v limited + something you have to pay to expand (aka buying new 'mon from the shop rather than doing wild threads). i'd personally go with three as the team size max, since it allows for some variety in your "team dynamic" without minimizing the individual characterization of any a single pokemon, but that's just my two cents. also if you do new pokemon as a shop item, it'll reward members who are actively posting + plotting and has the bonus of avoiding having to do mod threads, the bane of any pokestaffer's existence.

-- run starters as something where you can pick the "free" option of naming a type, getting three choices randomized, and picking one (or being able to swap to the other option if you hate all three choices) or where you can pick the "premium" option of naming the specific pokemon you wanted (with a channel of "pokemon suggestions" in the discord so that if you want to go somewhere more in the middle, hey, the community can suggest options to you) - the "easy" way to set this up in the back end is, well, jcink site, registration gives you x amount of currency, built-in store option, registration starting currency is the same price as buying the item to buy the premium starter package, done + done.

-- streamline + standardize the evolution process into a basic shop item. battle threads just to level up to evolve can get pretty tedious after a while, and it'll make things a little less uneven for "difficult" evolutions (like trade-based ones or super-high-level ones) to just do three items for "first evo for 3-stage line", "second evo for 3-stage line", "evo for 2-stage line". plus it can take some of the headache out for getting new pokemon since then, all you have to do is just. buy the lowest form of any evolution line (ie, pichu, tauros, charmander, eevee) and then purchase the next evolution. (and again, y'know, it's rewarding people who are actively posting instead of just. modding out stronger pokemon after supercharging their starter. or trading stronger pokemon from their earlier characters to their new ones.)

i'd also personally recommend going mostly to entirely stat-less for a lot of reasons (new members won't get discouraged from joining due to the power levels of existing members, slower posters won't get left behind in terms of power level, battle + wild threads can get tedious + repetitive in a forum-based format, "teams" can actually be meaningfully tracked in mini-profiles, people don't have to deal with tracking moves + abilities + levels in general, you'll avoid some of the min-maxing crowd by not giving them a lot of places to get a foothold, it lets people choose whether they want to randomize gender + ability or not), but i say that as someone who desperately craves a "real life but with pokemon" site a la detective pikachu so take this recommendation with that grain of salt.



but the reason i quoted dreams was because, well. i do agree that the dynamics of things could get. a little wild when you start throwing in canon power sets and such so. uh. throwing the idea out there as a concept, but it might be a good idea to structure the site to be more in line with the spirits / personified genre that's decently popular in the rl circuit. basically, instead of having light yagami come from the death note universe with his murder notebook + now he has to deal with suddenly having a vulpix in a new world full of aliens and catboys, you can instead adapt light yagami so that he's always been in this universe where aliens and catboys exist and he's the son of a police chief in the city with his beloved vulpix he had as a child but he discovered this strange tm that teaches you how to make shadow pokemon and now he has to avoid being caught by the detective l with his swirlix that definitely is onto him (along with, idk, l's coworkers of luke pearce + dick gumshoes and he's helped out by misa + her cousin ryou bakura).

i know, it's a bit off the wall, but it'd probably make it feel a bit more natural for characters to just have pokemon now (and for pokemon characters to have less than their full teams) and it'd help more niche fandoms get out there since, y'know, cross-fandom stuff is a lot easier now, and it'd also solve the problems from, like, futuristic sci-fi characters trying to exist with high fantasy ones in the same setting, which would also give you more flexibility to create a unique setting too + one that would be able to build off itself. (it'd also be potentially helpful for people who might not be so sure about canons cuz imo now you don't need to have the "perfect" interpretation of any character, you more need to adapt them in a way that's going to get you plots with other people + keep the core of the character's spirit + make a fun base for others to play off of.)

look, i've obviously thought about this a lot, okay, they're both things i would've done myself years ago if i had the energy for it, this just prompted me to go "but what if, and hear me out here, you combine the two ideas so you can let them both tie up the loose ends of each other-"

okay i'm good i'm done, i'll shut up now and leave it all be.