Category: Reader Questions

Anonymous asks:

Lately I’ve been learning about xenophyophores. They’re quite fascinating. Have you ever heard of them?

I have not.  Go go gadget Wikipedia.

Huh.  So they’re… kinda like great big deep-sea sponges, but actually more closely related to amoebas?  And… single-celled?  Wow.  That’s one heck of a cell.  But multiple nuclei, which strikes me as cheating somewhat.  I mean that’s essentially just a whole bunch of cells that really don’t have their $#!t together.  Like Reuniclus.  But yeah, that’s all pretty neat.

Anonymous asks:

Going off the post about giving natures secondary effects, wouldn’t adding those effect make them too similar to abilities?

Well part of the premise of that whole discussion was that I rather liked the idea of having multiple abilities anyway, so I don’t know if that really matters to me.  Just use the natures for low-key and general bonuses, and make abilities more powerful and specific.

Anonymous asks:

Seeing that you did a post about Pokemon Uranium, have you ever heard of or played Pokemon Reborn or its sister game Pokemon Rejuvenation? These games also play with darker themes and provide an additional challenge of 18 gyms. They also added the mechanic of interacting with the environment through field effects, Terrain abilities and expanded on them greatly to create many interactive fields from forests to icy surfaces, and even a chessboard. Would you consider doing a post about them?

Well, I’ll finish this one first.  But maybe?  We’ll see.

Anonymous asks:

How do you feel about reworking natures entirely? Half of the natures are useless (neutrals and – Defense / -Sp Def). Some examples would be Hasty – Slower Pokemon take 10% more damage from the user. Brave – Critical Hit damage increases by 50%. Bold – Both defenses increase by 15% before the user attacks. Aggressive – Both Attacks increase by 20% if the user was attacked this turn. Certain Pokemon would only have access to some natures too, like Shuckles can’t be Hasty.

Hmm.  So instead of just giving a flat bonus and penalty under all circumstances, each one confers a situational bonus?  I think I quite like that.  It’s less obvious which one is the “best” for any given Pokémon, it helps to avoid the situation we have now where there are some that are just clearly far more useful than others, and it reduces the number of individual Pokémon who just get thrown out without a second thought because (e.g.) Impish is a garbage nature for Alakazam.  My biggest concern is that I think it’d be tricky to come up with 25 of them and make them all roughly balanced (balanced enough so that for any given species there are at least five or six good choices that you can argue for).  Other suggestions: Modest gets larger bonuses from stat boosting moves; Impish gets an accuracy bonus for moves in the “status” category; Lonely gets bonuses to everything when it’s the last Pokémon standing on its team.

RandomAccess asks:

You’re running out of gen 6 Pokemon. Are you confident that Sun and Moon will be out by the time you’re finished?

What, these things?  Nah, I’ll just stop for a while and pick them up again once I’ve played the game.  Might even post them concurrently with my reviews of the 7th generation Pokémon, since I probably have to do those.

…wait do I have to think of something else that I can post on a daily basis now

is that how this works

$#!t

VikingBoyBilly asks:

What if pokémon could have 2 natures and/or 2 abilities? The neutral natures might actually get used if they have to be 2-dimensional, and get stats boosted by 20% for an extra nerf.

Hmm.  Well, multiple abilities (heck, why stop at two?) is an idea that I like a great deal in theory; I think it could be particularly interesting for combining very powerful and very strongly negative abilities on a single Pokémon (say, Truant and Sheer Force, or Speed Boost and Defeatist).  In practice I think you would have to run through almost every Pokémon that currently exists and give some careful consideration to how this kind of thing would affect their power levels.  Some Pokémon like Zubat just have two crappy abilities and kinda get dicked over by this; other Pokémon have two really insane abilities and become significantly more powerful – imagine Reuniclus with Magic Guard and Regenerator, Yanmega with Speed Boost and Tinted Lens, or (gods forbid) Excadrill with Sand Rush and Sand Force.  You’d need to be careful with it.

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VikingBoyBilly asks:

If you could add one or more new stats to the game, what would it be? (My first inclination is Luck, Accuracy and Evasion stats)

Well, I’ve talked about accuracy and evasion before here, and luck here, and my general inclination is that I don’t like any of them; I think the game is actually probably worse, not better, if you make those things into trainable stats.  I’m honestly not sure I would change anything unless I were rebuilding the entire battle system to function in a different way – like, I’ve vaguely toyed with the idea of having more of a 2D tactics-oriented system on an isometric or hexagonal grid, sort of like what Conquest has, and in that case you might, for instance, want separate stats for movement speed and initiative (for determining turn order).  Or you might ditch the idea of separate defence and special defence stats, and instead split HP into toughness and will, where low or zero will doesn’t actually knock a Pokémon out but does impose steadily worsening penalties.  There’s a lot of different things you could do that might be interesting, but I don’t think any of them would necessarily involve just slapping on an extra stat without reshuffling a bunch of other things; the basic system is pretty solid, I think.