>>41224570when I used to play smogon every competitive team I made I had to come up with a back story for it. If I was playing gen 3 my trainer had to come from hoenn and beat the hoenn gym leaders, gen 1 had to come from kanto, etc. and each game I played online was a match in the pokemon leage. (in my headcanon there's no elite 4, just a pokemon league. If I won 10 matches in a row I became the champion and retired my team)
But it gets more autistic than that. I had to come up with a storyline for how I beat each gym too, and which pokemon I caught in what order and how I used them in my journey. Usually this meant one of my pokemon had to evolve in battle/before a battle against a tough opponent like a gym leader or a rocket. Also I can't have a pokemon carry me through more than 1 gym/tough battle to keep the story fresh.
Then I assigned each pokemon a score based on how much they helped me in the journey. So if a pokemon evolved twice it gets +2, but maybe if it was hard to catch (requiring another pokemon to evolve to catch it) it gets -1. This meant legendaries usually were +0 since they're harder to catch but can only help me in one gym battle.
The total score had to be at least +7 or I would scrap my team. (+1 for each gym leader except 1 which I allowed an exception for). Also if I couldn't find a satisfying way to beat the gym leader (which meant either I didn't have a huge type advantage or strategy or one of my pokemon couldn't evolve.) I scrapped the team.
