That time when I ran a Pokemon DnD session in school.

Backstory: This was a year before COVID started. I was probably in 5th grade and obsessed with the Pokémon franchise. I used to massage my father's legs and get 10 rupees to buy Pokémon cards so that I could collect them. At that time, I played any game that came out on the Play Store about Pokémon. Games like Pokémon Shuffle and Duel were some of my favorites, but I still had not found a way to play the official ones Game Freak had released. I'll be honest, I wasn't aware of any of the games like FireRed or LeafGreen that Game Freak had made due to limited interaction on the internet. I would get limited time to use the phone, and I would spend it all.

One day, I found an app on the Play Store named "Guide for Pokémon Ruby," which at that time I thought was just a cheap rip-off. I downloaded it nonetheless and started the play button to see what it would offer, and I was surprised to see it was a whole other game! It literally blew my mind. The app acted as some sort of emulator and provided me with 15 trials, meaning once I exited the game, the number of times I could start the game again would be reduced by 1. So I had to perpetually keep the app running. I made it to the 4th gym and unfortunately exhausted all of my trials, so I had no choice but to delete it. I later found out about emulators two months after that incident.

Actual Story: I shared my findings with my school friends who liked the Pokémon TV show. Later on, I had an idea. Since I was bored after going through the GBA versions of each game at least three times, why not start a role-playing session of the Hoenn region with my friends? Since I was well-versed with the game, I could narrate their entire journey and keep track of their progress. We could play every day during recess and in lectures where a substitute teacher was present. (The teacher didn’t care that much since she was just there to make sure the class didn’t make much noise.) She even personally watched over one of our sessions; I guess it must have been fun for her.

I had some trouble calculating the damage and the game mechanics. I was mostly going by how many hits it took to defeat the Pokémon in my playthrough and would add or reduce the damage based on the levels of my players’ Pokémon. I took the liberty of being every enemy trainer in the game. later i started using dice from my ludo set to calculate damage. having rolled the same numbers on 2 dice would give you a critical hit. As for the daycare mechanic your Pokemon's level would be increased by 1 every 2 days and you could only do it on one Pokemon to prevent abuse of this mechanic. I handcrafted kanto gym badges , painted them and used them in my Hoenn campaign ( cause they were so much simpler to make than the Hoenn ones)

Some of my friends argued why Pikachu couldn’t defeat a Pokémon like Onix, like it did in the anime. They were applying anime logic to the game logic, but I handled it somewhat nicely by firsthand showing them in the game that it wouldn’t work. It was a fun experience, and although they couldn’t reach the Elite Four before the school year ended and our classes changed, it will forever be a memory engraved in my mind. Those were some of the best times I had in school.

I wasn't even aware of Dungeons and Dragons in those days. It was only two years ago, when my access to the internet was less restricted, that I found out about it and realized I had unexpectedly become a Dungeon Master for a Pokémon campaign, lol