Category: Reader Questions

Vikingboybilly asks:

What do you think abilities are? I have a grumpig whose signature move is Skill Swap and his ability is Thick Fat. So when he swaps his ability, does that mean he loses his body fat and the other pokemon gets overweight? What if the other pokemon had flame body, does Grumpig suddenly burst into flames (let’s say the other was rapidash; it’s just a plain unicorn now)? What about steel types? They suddenly get biological fat on top of their alloy? Why can they only have one ability?

Well… abilities cover such a wide range of concepts that it’s sort of difficult to talk about them as a group – what can you possibly say about a category that encompasses physical traits like Thick Fat and Flame Body, psychological traits like Oblivious and Rivalry, skills like Technician and Sniper, magical properties like Levitate and Wonder Guard, and whatever the hell Mold Breaker is?  Looking at stuff that interacts with abilities, like Skill Swap, might be more productive than trying to deal with abilities themselves, but let’s see… Continue reading “Vikingboybilly asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

“I am a fish”, is this due to the fish ancestry of tetrapods with very similar bone structure? The gills became the modern ear…I believe. Fins became limbs with digits, we did lose the lateral line system but we gained access to land.

Ding ding ding ding DING!  We have a winner!

‘Fish’ is, strictly speaking, not a taxonomically meaningful category.  Tetrapods – that is, all amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – are descended from lobe-finned fishes, an incredibly ancient class of fishes that includes the coelacanth.  This means a) that the coelacanth is actually more closely related to humans than it is to salmon, goldfish, etc, and b) that, in the same way as all birds are dinosaurs, all land-dwelling vertebrates really should be considered fish.  The fact that they’re not is really just due to the scientific community choosing to bow to common sense in this instance.

If that paragraph made sense to you, you should probably be able to appreciate why asking “are Pokémon animals?” is actually a fiendishly intractable question.

Anonymous asks:

How do you feel about a “Luck” stat being added, something that can contribute a small boost to critical hits, dodge chance at no evasion stacks, possibly a side effect that works like the move Endure, you get a small chance that an attack that would KO your Pokemon will leave it with 1 HP, but only if it has more than 1 HP. The percent chances of these things would be determined by your opponent’s luck, and could be given to weaker Pokemon like Farfetch’d and Furret

For the most part, I think my reaction to this would be basically analogous to what I said here about the idea of making accuracy and evasion into concrete, trainable stats rather than just bonuses and penalties.  More to the point, I’m not sure the effect on Pokémon who would receive high Luck stats would be terribly beneficial, overall – it would encourage a perception of them as Pokémon best suited to inferior players who value luck over skill, and perhaps ultimately lead to even greater marginalisation than they experience now.  Luck is always a tricky thing to play with in games of skill and strategy – the possibility of calculated risks for greater payoff is an interesting concept that can make games more varied, but adding too many luck-based elements just makes every move a risk, and then you lose the whole point.  It’s… awkward.

RandomAccess asks:

There’s something I’ve been wondering about lately, and I want to get your opinion. Do you think the Flygon line are reptiles with an insect motiff, or insects with a reptillian edge? I myself lean toward the former, but I’m very much interested in your input.

Does it matter?  Trapinch is basically an insect – it’s supposed to be an antlion or something – and Flygon looks basically like a reptilian western dragon, with Vibrava being somewhere in between (and, appropriately enough, a dragonfly).  Since they’re in the Bug breeding group, I’m inclined to say that they’re biologically more like insects, despite Flygon’s appearance.

Anonymous asks:

Some Pokemon like Eevee have evolutions that act like an actual evolution, some creature adapting to certain living conditions. However, most Pokemon don’t actually evolve, they just grow up; hence baby Pokemon. Bulbasaur isn’t adapting to a new environment or anything it’s just getting older, thus the bud on its back blooms and its body grows. Does this bother you at all, or do you not mind it?

Well, Pokémon evolution is sufficiently different to real-world evolution anyway that details like whether it’s ‘adaptation’ or not kind of go over my head.  Darwinian evolution has no effect on individuals.  Organisms cannot ‘evolve’ within their own lifetimes.  Only populations can evolve.  What Pokémon are doing – dramatic change within the lifetime of a single creature – is really metamorphosis; it makes more sense to compare Bulbasaur to, say, what a cicada or dragonfly does.  Evolution is a bit of a silly thing to call it, I suppose, but I think I’ve been desensitised to it over the sixteen years I’ve been playing Pokémon.

Anonymous asks:

Nice and informative goodra fact, but why you referred to it as a “she?” It seems the community wants to make goodra a female only Pokemon for some reason. Still, thanks for the insights, I liked them!

I offer no explanations, justifications or apologies for my brain’s subjective gendering of Pokémon designs (which often makes little sense even to me), nor do I expect such from others.

Anonymous asks:

I don’t know if you’ve been following the VGC world championships, but if not (or still if so, I suppose), there’s a guy named Se Jun Park who just won the video game Masters’ division with a surprisingly effective Pachirisu on his team. While it is admittedly still a rather redundant Pikachu clone, does the fact that it’s actually somewhat competitively useful make you feel any better about Pachirisu?

Well, that was really quite spectacular.

See, this is the thing that’s quite nice about Pokémon.  In a lot of games that have… shall we say ‘issues’ with balance, the inferior option is completely and unarguably inferior all the time.  Pokémon just has so damn many attacks and abilities that practically everything has some skill or combination of skills that nothing else can imitate.  Se Jun Park has found Pachirisu’s: only a bare handful of Pokémon can learn Follow Me, which is an incredibly easy attack to screw up but very dangerous if you’re good with it, and of those, Pachirisu is the only one who can actually restore health while using it (via Volt Absorb).  Super Fang also means that her nonexistent attack scores don’t really matter, while her defences are actually pretty solid – not great, but she only has one weakness anyway.  Stick a couple of powerful Electric-weak, Ground-immune Pokémon on the team – Gyarados and Talonflame – to force your opponent to bring out powerful Discharges and Thunderbolts while messing up their Earthquakes, and you’re all set.  I mean, she’s still useless in singles – it’s just not the same game, and you’d never pull off that kind of $#!t without the right partners – but hey, it’s something Pachirisu’s good at!  This calls for celebration!

GrayGryphon asks:

What would you think of someone starting a Pokemon Tabletop RP using concepts from your “If I Was In Charge” series?

Hmm.  Well, I mostly intended that stuff to apply to the core series, and I’m not really sure how it would work if you turned it to a different mechanical framework, but if you think there’s something you can get out of it, please, go ahead!  I’d be flattered, in fact – let me know how it goes!

Anonymous asks:

So what do you think of the mystery dungeon games?

Well, I only ever played the first one and have incomplete secondhand knowledge of the plot of the subsequent titles, so anything I say here applies only to Mystery Dungeon Red/Blue and should be taken with a grain of salt.  I like the feel of them a lot.  It’s nice to have Pokémon games that are just about Pokémon, without any of those pesky humans to get in the way (even if the plot felt it was necessary to have humans exist… somewhere else… without ever really explaining their relation to the world we were actually playing in…).  It’s just cool to have Pokémon working together to solve their problems and protect each other, although some more effort could have been spent on explaining why exactly their problems seemed primarily to be “other Pokémon” (“they’re really mad at everything because of the natural disasters, okay!”).

The gameplay was… flawed in a number of ways, though (and here I will remind you that I’m going purely off the first titles in the series; many or all of my complaints may actually have been addressed later, I don’t know).  Adding new Pokémon to your team happens entirely at random, which is frustrating.  The dungeons themselves very quickly start to feel like they’re all the same – you wander through a randomly generated maze hitting anything that gets in your way until you reach whatever it is that you’re there for.  Tactical positioning doesn’t play nearly as much of a role as you’d think.  Sometimes your companions’ AI just does incredibly stupid things, like running off down a long corridor in pursuit of… something… and not being able to find you again.  Some moves are either crazy overpowered or completely useless: Silver Wind just damages everything on the screen (in addition to its side-effect of sometimes raising all the user’s stats), so sometimes you just die before you can even get close enough to attack whatever is using it, whereas your companions’ AI has no clue how to handle some support moves like Reflect, and will spam them every time you take a step until they run out of PP, which is not really helpful.  Each Pokémon’s level-up move list seems to have been directly copied over from Ruby and Sapphire without any consideration for how the strengths and purposes of the different moves are changed by the radically different demands of the battle system – I can understand not wanting to review every Pokémon, but surely it would have made sense to tinker with the ones available as player characters (I played as Psyduck, whose level-up list is appalling compared to what most of the starter Pokémon get, with no real advantages to balance that).  In short… there’s a lot of evidence in there of a general lack of effort in adapting the existing material of the Pokémon franchise to the game mechanics implied by the new concept.  Maybe it got better; I don’t know.  I hope so, because it was a very cool idea.