Aroma ladies and gentlemen, youngsters and lasses, we have our squid, courtesy of Adam.
For anyone late to the party, I’m trying to co-ordinate a community effort to design a Pokémon. For some reason. It’s very rare that I have a coherent plan behind anything on this blog. Anyway.
We decided to create a Water/Fire Pokémon, and chose this as the concept brief for the thing, submitted by reader Chewiana Jones:
“What if we had an enormous squid/oil lamp hybrid that lived deep in arctic oceans, getting most of its nutrients from volcanic vents and small deep-sea Pokemon prey and burning oil (for warmth) in small amounts inside its body, which could look somewhat steampunk furnace-ish structure with more organic parts like the eyes and mouth mixed in and a body made of translucent, durable membrane with golden light shining through, supported by a skeletal framework. However, when it starts to run low on oil, it flares up its flames and rises like a hot air balloon to closer to the surface. There, it hunts pokemon like Walrein and Dewgong by expelling oil like squid ink and then lighting it on fire, then eats them and uses the oil for more power.”
I think the thing to do now is decide what we want this thing to do in battle, starting in very general terms, e.g. ‘sweeper.’ The problem that faces me with this step is that I’m not sure what an exhaustive list of generalised combat roles would look like. I will tentatively suggest the following list, but I’d like to wait a day or two before I make a poll on it so people can suggest other roles that can be important, or point out to me that some of these are too similar to separate.
- Sweeper
- Tank
- Supporter/Disruptor
- Revenge killer
- Wallbreaker
None of these options, I feel I should note, necessarily ties us to a particular stat spread or movepool – if, for instance, you think that a Pokémon with a base speed of 70 and an awful offensive type combination can’t be a sweeper, Agility Metagross would like a word with you – and, of course, the lines between them are often blurry, some Pokemon can be more than one, often simultaneously (have you seen Gallade’s support movepool?) but I think it’d be nice to pick at least a vague semblance of a direction before jumping into a complete stat sheet.
Pokémaniacal 