Choose Your Own Adventure: How to Fill Out Character Sheet
Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?
Have you ever considered mixing Dungeons and Dragons with Pokemon? Have you ever played a Choose Your Own Adventure game or a visual novel?
We have a text-based Choose Your Own Adventure game on our website. You can learn more about the project on our other blog post, “Choose Your Own Adventure: Kanto Edition”.
Below we’ll be covering how you’ll be filling out the Character Sheets for this game if you want to make your adventure more fulfilling and exciting.
What is the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet?
The Choose Your Own Adventure character sheet is an optional document that you can use while you go through your text based adventure. Unlike the Pokemon games you are familiar with, this text-based adventure will not be keeping track of what Pokemon you catch, what badges you earn, or what items you have found.
While you could naturally just go through the text based adventure without the help of this sheet, or just choose the option you like best, having this sheet will help you make decisions. After all, how would you know if your starter can beat Brock’s Onix if you haven’t kept track of what moves it has learned?
No one is going to be looking over your shoulder to make sure you “play fair”. You could theoretically breeze through the adventure by clicking whatever option you want.
However you will lose out on creating an adventure
By downloading and using your character sheet, you’ll have a record of what has happened to the protagonist of your story. The PDF (or sheet of paper if you print it), will be your manual ‘Save’ button that you will use. If you forget to update your form, it’ll be similar to when you shut off your game without saving.
Where do you find the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet?
We have a sign up page for all trainers to sign up for their form. This sign up page will ask for two things: Your name, and your email address. Having this information will guide you to the download page where you can have your Character Sheet.
The reason we want your email address is because we want to be able to keep you up-to-date on whenever we add new routes on the story, updates to the sheet, or if want to ask for your feedback to make the experience better for everyone.
We do not plan on giving your information out to anybody, after all, we aren’t Team Rocket!
If you do experience any issues with downloading your sheet, tweet at us at PKMNDailies on Twitter so we can get it to you ASAP.
How to Fill out the Basic Information on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
The top portion of the Character Sheet is where the ‘basic information’ of your protagonist goes. You can fill as much as you want, but we highly recommend you at least pick your Character’s Name and their Hometown so you can give your protagonist some character.
Character Name: Here you can put your character’s name. If you are unsure of what you can name your character, we suggest you try the 120 Crayola Color Challenge random generator if you’d like to keep the theme of ‘color-based’ character names or one of the many random name generators online.
Age: Most people trainers start their journey when they are 10 years old, however you can pick whatever age you’d wish. We recommend sticking with 10 or above so that your character can be an official Pokemon trainer who is eligible to participate in the Pokemon League.
Height: Here you put the height of your character, feel free to list it in feet/inches or meters/centimeters. There are generators online to figure this out if you can’t figure it out, but one I can recommend is Alderon’s Tower Generator.
Weight: You fill in your character’s weight here. You can once again turn to some online generators if you are unsure of what to fill in.
Hometown: While in most games, your character’s hometown is the same town that you start the game at. However in this game, you have the choice as to where your character is from. Have some fun looking at the map of the region you want your character to be from and pick a town.
Player Name: Here you can put your name or your username. This is just in case you decide to carry this sheet of paper around and misplace it at your friend’s house. After all, you wouldn’t want all your progress to be lost if you misplace this form.
How to Fill out Your Progress Trackers on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
We title this section the “Progress Tracker” since it shows your overall progress with the game. Depending on how much gym badges you have, you know how close or far you are from being a Pokemon Master.
Once again, this is all optional, but we highly recommend you keep track of your Badges and Money.
Pokedex: Here you can fill in how much Pokemon you have caught/evolved versus how many you have seen out in the wild. This is especially important to track for any self-proclaimed Pokemon Researchers, Scientists, or Collectors.
Badges: Here you will check off a box for every badge you obtain. This is important for those who want to become Pokemon Masters.
Money: This is how much money your character has on hand. We recommend you keep track of this so you can know how much to spend at PokeMarts.
Ribbons: If your character encounters any Pokemon Coordinating competitions, here is where you keep track of any ribbons you get. We recommend Pokemon Coordinators to keep track of this box, or even Pokemon Breeders if you want to brag about how quantified you are.
How to Fill out Your Pokemon Party on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
This section is a bird’s eye view of what Pokemon you have on your Pokemon party. Similar to the main series games, we encourage that your protagonist have up to six Pokemon with them at all times. Any other Pokemon will be sent to the box (which we’ll cover later).
In order to make the most out of this section, we highly recommend you keep track of your Pokemon’s species and level.
Empty Box: Here you can doodle your Pokemon, write down what type your Pokemon is, number your Pokemon, or simply leave it blank.
Species: Here you can identify what Pokemon your partner is. Is it a Pikachu? An “undefeatable” Charizard? This is the most important box in this section.
Nickname: If you enjoy nicknaming your Pokemon, then here’s where you can put in their nickname.
Level: Here you keep track of what level your Pokemon is. The level affects things such as learning new moves or evollution so don’t forget to keep this updated!
HP: Here you can write out how much health your Pokemon has. When it reaches zero, it is considered fainted (or dead!)
How to Fill out Your Items on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
The center of the character sheet is where you keep track of your key items and your items. Throughout your adventure you may want to do actions and do to some of those actions, you need to make sure you have the right tools. Like if you want to catch a Pokemon, then you should make sure you have a Pokeball.
We recommend you keep track of items such as Pokeballs, Potions, and Key Items (PokeFlute, Bike, etc) so that you’ll know what actions you can take when prompted by the game.
Remember what Professor Oak says when you try to ride your bike indoors, “"There's a time and place for everything, but not now."
How to Fill out Pokemon Box on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
This is a section that gives you a bird’s eye view on all the Pokemon you have sitting in your Box. Each individual box represents one Pokemon. This way you know, if your Pokedex says that you caught 15 Pokemon, but you only have two checked Boxes, then something is not right.
How to Fill out the Background Information on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
This small section is a highly optional section that gives you the freedom to write a brief history of your character. This is for those storytellers who like to go above and beyond when it comes to character creation.
If more room is needed, feel free to tweet at us at PKMNDailies on Twitter This way if we find that multiple . people encounter this issue, we’ll respond to demand and create a dedicated page for backstory.
How to Fill out the Notes on the Choose Your Own Adventure Character Sheet
Throughout your adventure you may want to keep notes on what choices you made or if there was an interesting NPC that you want to remember the name of. This is optional and for those of you who need extra space to write anything that wasn’t covered in the sections above.
Do you have ideas on how to improve the Character Sheet?
This Create Your Own Character Sheet is a work-in-progress. So we appreciate any constructive comments and suggestions to further refine it. The more insightful and helpful your comments, the easier it’ll be for us to implement those changes.
