Anonymous asks:

What IS PP? How is it that a Pokémon can’t use e.g. Cut or Rock Smash in battle because they’ve run out of PP but they can still use them outside battle?

Well, there are gameplay reasons it has to be that way – if field moves were dependent on PP you could become trapped in certain areas and unable to return to a Pokémon Centre.  In any case, for a lot of field moves it’s not like the combat and out-of-combat uses are actually the same or even similar – clearly we’re not supposed to imagine that using Surf (a special attack usually depicted as a powerful wave) involves vigorously swimming at the opponent with your trainer on your back.  Even when the two actions are basically similar, I would imagine that doing something in the middle of a fight is a good deal more stressful and difficult than doing it any other time.  Me, I think of PP as a vague measure of a Pokémon’s energy or exhaustion, the same way as HP is a vague measure of a Pokémon’s health or injuries.  Obviously HP was never meant to be a realistic and precise account of the billion and one different kinds of godawful nonsense that can happen to a Pokémon on a daily basis; it’s just a number that answers the question “can I or can I not keep fighting?” and we accept that without thinking, even though it clearly doesn’t make much sense, because HP is an abstraction that literally everyone has been using for decades.  PP is the same kind of thing.

Anonymous asks:

I know you don’t like to speculate, but what would your opinion be on Sun and Moon bringing in facets of the Ranger games / mentality into the main series (as some people apparently think due to similarities between the ranger regions and alola)? It’s pretty unlikely, but what do you think such a thing could add to world-fleshing-outness, conflict, story, et cetera?

Well, I think you’re right about it being unlikely – the fact that Alola is an island region (if that’s what we’re getting at?  Not sure what else there is) seems like a pretty flimsy reason to make a prediction like that to me.  But having said that, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad idea to, say, replace HMs for field moves with a minigame where you convince a wild Pokémon to temporarily join you and help you to clear an obstacle.  HM moves are a pain, and you can potentially get a nice sense of negotiation with the wild Pokémon, show how they fit into their environment, and emphasise that wild areas really belong to them.  Other parts of the Ranger philosophy, like having only one partner Pokémon rather than large teams, seem incompatible with the basic assumptions of the gameplay; you could have characters who live with Pokémon in that way, but I suspect that much of the significance of that would be lost if the player wasn’t the one doing it.  If you don’t actually play from the Rangers’ perspective, they probably just seem from the outside like trainers who only have one Pokémon.  You can’t really make the Rangers the villains either, for obvious reasons, although a faction like that certainly would have been an interesting presence in a story like that of Black and White, just to make things more complicated for everyone – what would they have thought of Ghetsis’ rhetoric of Pokémon liberation?  It would be also interesting to introduce some new mechanics that emphasise the uniqueness of the player’s relationship with the starter Pokémon in the same way as the Ranger games do, but that’s probably something you have to build from scratch to serve the very different gameplay of the core series.

Okay real talk for a minute

I don’t make a habit of talking about current events or politics on here, and I also normally don’t talk much about my personal life or feelings because I see Tumblr as more or less a public place and I’m just not altogether comfortable with that.  However, if you’ve been paying close attention to my rambling nonsense for a substantial period, you might have picked up that I am a gay foreigner living and studying in the United States of America.  And unless you’ve been asleep for the past two days, you’ve probably heard something (perhaps courtesy of this very website) about this country’s new “high score” for mass shootings, which took place on Sunday morning in Orlando, Florida at a gay nightclub.  So this is one of those times when not talking about it feels, in itself, like taking a position, and it’s not a position I like, so you’ll just have to put up with me for a minute.

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