Well, “less is more” is very much a core belief of mine in picking apart this franchise.  I don’t think it’s so much a matter of ‘more clearly delineated roles,’ because most Pokémon do have that down pretty well anyway; the problem is how easy it is to be outclassed by things that have a similar roles, and making moves less widely available might help with that.  The presence of TMs in some ways is a little unfortunate, because the increasing ease with which we’ve been able to teach those moves over the years (first breeding to recycle them, then just outright reusable TMs) sort of devalues the Pokémon lucky enough to actually get some of those awesome moves in their level-up lists.  Panpour is the only Pokémon in the game who naturally learns Scald!  Did you know that?  I sure didn’t.  Do you care?  I sure don’t, because just about every other Water Pokémon who isn’t also an Ice-type gets it too!

This is sort of part of the messed-up incomplete charm of the original Red and Blue – a lot of Pokémon just don’t have access to very good techniques, and with single-use TMs and no breeding, you have to think long and hard about what to do with those precious discs (well… except for the part where the games are so horribly glitchy that you can basically turn them inside out and make them your bitches without any special equipment or expertise whatsoever, but I’m a theoretical kind of guy, so sue me).  It was a little unfortunate that this ‘feature’ of Red and Blue came with little, if any, thought for game balance (something that I doubt was a major fixture in Game Freak’s mind at the time), so some of its victims are Pokémon like poor Sandslash, who will never get any Ground attacks at all unless you spend your Earthquake TM on him, and remains lacklustre even if you do.  Maybe today, though, it’d be a neat balancing factor on a really powerful Ground-type like (say) Excadrill if Game Freak were willing to arbitrarily say “yeah no Earthquake for you lol use the goddamn signature move we gave you” (and, in that particular case, it encourages Excadrill to be more like Excadrill too).  Might also give more of a point to some moves that look and sound cool but just have no reason to be used, ever, like Aurora Beam – every Pokémon that learns it also gets Ice Beam, with the exception of one (Xerneas, who has better things to do with his time).

On the other hand, can you imagine the backlash from the fanbase if that were implemented in a future game and hundreds of Pokémon lost many of their best tricks?  People get annoyed enough by the obsolescence of move tutors and the occasional TM.  I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to announce that.  Accumulating more and more skills and abilities for Pokémon just seems to be the way this franchise typically operates, and I don’t think that’s likely to change any time soon, whatever I might think of it.

Well, if I’m understanding you correctly, you can use two moves in one turn.  You have to give up a moveslot to do it, which is a big sacrifice, fair enough, but in return you’re getting probably about 50% more attack power (being conservative because your second attack might be made without STAB, or be resisted or something).  People happily give up the ability to switch attacks for that kind of power (by using a Choice Band or Choice Specs).  That’s also without getting into the kind of combos you can pull.  You can use Dragon Dance and Outrage in a single turn, potentially giving your opponent no chance to respond if you were already faster than whatever they had out.  Ghost-types can paralyse you with Thunder Wave and follow up with Hex.  Dream Eater is finally viable against human players for the first time in Pokémon’s history.  Basically, you get one attack, which would otherwise be a perfectly good use of your turn, and then you get a second attack with some kind of bonus which would normally require careful set-up or big risks.  It also magnifies the number of possibilities your opponent has to be able to prepare for on any given turn.

I think this would be a very fun signature move on a specific Pokémon, something with lacklustre stats, but an interesting movepool with lots of neat support techniques (something like Spinda, maybe?).  The idea of making it widely available sets off a series of very loud and insistent alarm bells in my head, though.

I don’t know if I want to do a whole thing on it, just because it’s not really a question about Pokémon at all – similar or identical systems are extremely common in RPGs and even appear in other genres.  It’s just one of the basic commonplaces of reducing combat to an abstraction that can be portrayed by a video game (some games actually do try to explain experience points in a way that makes sense in the context of the story, like the Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic II, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth for the writers).  The word “experience” seems to demonstrate that the basic assumption behind it is pretty simple: the more you do something – such as fighting – the better you get at it.  I think it’s highly unlikely that all the growth we associate with levelling is related to the Pokémon getting physically stronger, tougher or faster, although some of it probably is.  They’re learning to apply their strength more effectively, endure pain with greater focus, and move more precisely with better reaction times.  These are all things people can do too.

Evolution’s the weird part, and I’ve always thought that the way the anime portrays it is our best hope for making sense of that; it regularly seems to be a result of diffusing psychological blocks of one sort or another, of strong desire or desperation to overcome a specific obstacle, or of achieving some new sense of self-awareness (my further thoughts on this in some of my anime commentaries, particularly to The Problem With Paras).  Fighting often means using their powers often, and using their powers often means Pokémon better appreciate their applications and limits, and become more in touch with the forces that allow them to function.  I don’t believe we’re supposed to be able to figure out exactly how it works, particularly not biologically – I’m pretty sure on some level it’s basically magic – but I think we’re meant to see evolution as part of a Pokémon’s realisation of its potential, and battles and experience as one of the fastest ways to understand that potential.

That would certainly make things more interesting!  I think there is a sense with the games at the moment that players should be able to do anything the AI opponents can do, which is fair enough in principle, except that players can also do some important things the AI can’t do – we can use items more freely, our Pokémon gain effort points, we get free switches after knocking opponents out, we actually make switches to gain the advantage and not just to escape completely hopeless situations, that sort of thing.  Partly this is just to do with the limitations of what the AI can handle – knowing when to switch, for example, is often built on having an intuitive understanding of a Pokémon’s general capabilities in totality – given that I don’t know my opponent’s moveset, what could it do to me if I stay in, and what could it do to me if I switch out?  That’s not really an easy thing to program an AI with.  That being the case, I think it makes a lot of sense to let powerful enemies have extra advantages, the trouble is that it’s easy to go overboard – Cynthia’s Garchomp with two moves every turn would be a nightmare, sub-par moveset notwithstanding!  Maybe a feature like that would work well in a sort of ‘challenge mode’ setting like what Black and White 2 had?  Personally I think a single player difficulty setting was an awesome idea and I’d hope to see it return in future games, just without the aggravating nonsense of Black and White 2’s key system.  Increasing opponents’ levels is great, but it also causes your Pokémon to level up faster in response, so the step up in difficulty isn’t as significant as it should be; giving certain opponents special ‘powers’ like this would go a long way towards making a run like that more interesting.  What else might you do?  Gym Leaders could have thematic advantages like damage bonuses with their favoured types; some trainers might be able to use Pokémon with both their abilities… there’s a lot of cool stuff you could mess with, if we lose the idea that the players have to be able to do it too.

Hmm… I sort of feel like regular poison is sufficiently underwhelming to consider taking out or reworking completely.  It’s strictly inferior to the burn status, and arguably helps the affected Pokémon as much as it hurts in some cases by making it immune to more dangerous conditions like sleep or paralysis.  It’s also kind of a slap in the face to the poor Poison-types, who don’t have much else going for them, that most of their attacks are associated with this condition that doesn’t actually help the user much.  Just give all poison the Toxic effect.  Not sure about what to do with the attacks that currently cause severe poisoning.  Maybe have them cause poison as well as something else nasty on top of that, like confusion?  Freezing is also sort of pointless the way the game is now – no attack has more than a 10% chance to cause the effect, and when it does come up, it sometimes wears off before even a single turn has passed, having no actual impact on the battle.  Why even bother with it?

As for adding something (since I am apparently being required to)… dunno.  A lot of games have blindness and deafness as status conditions; blindness would basically just be an accuracy reduction, which is something we have already, but maybe Pokémon could be temporarily deafened by exposure to attacks like Hyper Voice?  Deafened Pokémon would be at risk of mishearing their trainer’s instructions and using the wrong attacks until they were recalled to rest.  Basically the condition would cause Pokémon to ‘disobey’ (if a Pokémon is already disobedient, well, now it has an excuse…).

Dunno.  I actually like having a certain amount of luck involved, because it means you have to be able to think on your feet and deal with stuff that, through no fault of your own, just doesn’t go your way.  There’s also a few Pokémon that can make a strategy of it by manipulating luck – I’m thinking of the Serene Grace Pokémon – and it might be interesting to have more Pokémon that play with luck in different ways.  Obviously how beneficial these things can be is a matter of degree, though, because most people agree that stuff like Double Team, Brightpowder, one-shot moves and the Moody ability are just a pain – at some point it stops being about calculated risks and starts being about random long shots.  So I don’t know.  Constant sleep duration seems reasonable enough (and could open up a different way of balancing various sleep moves – some might last longer than others).  Confusion I’m in two minds about because, although it’s annoying (which I think is its purpose), it doesn’t get used very much because it’s actually just not consistent enough to be effective – honestly, I could get behind either removing it completely or making it stronger.  I’m not sure what your PP suggestion has to do with accuracy or randomness, I’m afraid…

Um.  Do you mean, like, in terms of how the damage formula works?  Hang on; I’ll have a look… Go go gadget Bulbapedia…

“Type is the type effectiveness. This can be either 0, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, or 4 depending on the type of attack and the type of the defending Pokémon.”

Now, I don’t know whether the game has a lookup table for every possible value of that Type factor or just calculates it each time based on the type chart.  I suspect the latter, in which case if a Pokémon for some reason did have the same type twice, I suppose it would stack.

I can tell you that it would not get two doses of STAB.  The only possible values for that term are 1 and 1.5, so the bonus to Fire attacks would only apply once.

What… exactly would a Fire/Fire type… you know, be?  Something more fiery than a regular Fire-type?  That would be quite an achievement compared to the likes of Magmar, Entei, Reshiram, Volcarona, Heatran and Mega Charizard Y…

Not really, no.  I actually felt like we had enough to cover most any design even before Fairy was added, and I tend to prefer parsimony in these things.  The only thing I felt could be missing was something along the lines of a ‘Holy’ type, and Fairy is probably close enough to cover most designs that would fall within that.  If anything I feel like the game would survive with fewer types, not more (do we really need Ground and Normal?).