Anonymous asks:

What would you do to give Beheeyem a bit of a boost? Do you think widening its movepool to give it a niche that’s not already filled by Reuniclus is possible, or is an evo (mega or otherwise) the only way to save them from the metaphorical Tartarus that is forgetabiity?

Let’s see… at the moment, what Beheeyem is good at is slow, powerful special attacks, often within a Trick Room, which Beheeyem himself can set up. Which is fine, and Beheeyem’s not even bad at that, really; if he can get a power bonus from Analytic, stacked on top of an item boost, his attacks seriously sting. It’s just that Reuniclus, as you note, is significantly better at exactly the same things, being tougher, and protected by either Magic Guard or Regenerator, which makes spamming Calm Mind a solid option. And to be honest, I don’t really think movepool stuff really changes that. You could add Focus Blast, I guess, but that’s just copying Reuniclus more; Dazzling Gleam or Flash Cannon might be justifiable, but I’m not convinced they would help much. Zap Cannon would be hilarious, but of questionable value. Beheeyem’s support movepool already has just about everything you could ask for, except maybe Hypnosis (…come to think of it, why doesn’t Beheeyem get Hypnosis?). The trouble is, being as slow as Beheeyem just doesn’t work for a Pokémon that physically frail. I think at minimum you have to rejigger his stats… swap his special attack and physical defence, maybe? Dunno if that makes him better; I mean, it helps on the “different from Reuniclus” front, I guess, but those souped-up Analytic special attacks are most of what he’s got going for him at the moment. To make matters worse, Beheeyem’s base stat total is at an awkward spot where getting another evolution seems really unlikely… I don’t know. Mega Evolution might be the only way to go with this one.

RandomAccess asks:

I was thinking about Pokemon not being classified by sex but their internal gender, and that pokemon are sexless. But then I was thinking how these genders are classified by male and female which are classifications for biological sex, not one’s internal gender, which would be man, woman, or non-binary. It’s probably because the word sex is a bit too PG for an E rating, so they just used gender instead. Though male and female can be used for gender. Would the original Japanese reveal anything?

Oh, that is almost certainly what they really mean; I don’t even think there’s any doubt about that (although I can’t read Japanese, so I’m afraid you’re on your own there). I just think it’s more entertaining to make wild speculations based on their poor word choice.

Anonymous asks:

Could you try to fix carnivine for me? I quite like the concept as a beginning but wish there were a bit more…

Like, mechanically speaking? Eh, I can give it a shot, but no promises…

So, what’s wrong with Carnivine? Um. Well. Just about everything, to be honest, but the short list would be rock-bottom speed, mediocre defences, and a terrible offensive movepool (which does a brilliant job of mitigating the one useful thing about Carnivine, its good – but by no means excellent – attack stat). So, um… what do we do with that?

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ThatsWhatEllieSaid asks:

How do you think the government functions in the pokemon universe? I don’t think there’s ever been any reference to any higher powers in either the games or the anime.

Well, Ash and his friends do occasionally encounter local government, in the form of the mayors of a few of the towns they visit. The mayor of Trovitopolis, in the Orange Islands, is preoccupied with reelection when they meet him in The Mystery Menace, which implies that this particular city’s government is democratic, and in the absence of any further information I would assume that this is true across the board. To be honest, I think this is one case where, if they don’t tell us anything, it’s probably because they just assume it works the same way as it does in the real world.

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Anonymous asks:

How do you get the inspiration for the Nuzlocke character’s personalities?

I had a procedure, actually. I have ceased to follow it, because it got restrictive and I pulled better ideas out of the aether, but I used to have one. What I used to do was every time I caught a Pokémon I would use a random number generator to roll a D&D-style alignment for them (Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic + Good/Neutral/Evil) and that combined with their nature was their personality. Like, Ruby is Bold and Lawful Evil, which hopefully makes sense, and Spruce is Rash and Chaotic Good. Melissa was Jolly and I had no idea what to do with her until I rolled Lawful Neutral for her and thought “well, okay, obviously she needs to be in fanatical service to a terrifying amoral entity.” It made sense at the time. Luna was Impish and Chaotic Evil and come on that writes itself. Now though I mostly just do whatever works in the context of the story, because there’s enough already there that it’s a better source of inspiration than a random number generator. Usually I pester Jim the Editor about it and we talk about it and eventually I come up with something that’s at right angles to whatever either of us originally had in mind.

Behold: the Snateor!

So a classics teacher friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that a student had made an amusing misspelling on an exam, saying that Julius Caesar was murdered by a group of ‘Snateors,’ and asked me to draw one because ‘Snateor’ sounded like a Pokémon and one of her other friends thought it should be a Fire/Rock-type combination of a snake and a meteor and I AM SO SORRY

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.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think evasiveness and accuracy should be actual stats rather than just background stats that are the same for every pokemon unless altered in-battle by some sort of move.

I’m going to go with “no.”

Partly this is because I think the game is just better with ‘safe’ attack options, stuff you can always rely on to hit, which wouldn’t be possible with accuracy and evasion as base stats. Mostly, though, it’s because this would make risk/reward calculations impossible and utterly invalidate a lot of the strategic thinking involved in the game. Think about it. If accuracy and evasion are base stats, then both will have EVs and IVs associated with them, and there’s no way you can know how much effort an opponent’s Pokémon has invested in accuracy or evasion. With most of the other stats you can often make a rough estimate after seeing an attack or two, because if you know approximately how much damage your Pokémon tend to deal or take from different opponents (which you can get a feel for by spending time in the Battle Subway or whatever), you can say things like “well, that’s a lot more than I’d expect; he must have trained very heavily in special attack.” For accuracy and evasion, though, a single hit or miss tells you nothing; you’d probably need to observe one Pokémon over several battles. This being the case, not only can you no longer be sure an attack will hit, you can’t even know how likely an attack is to hit! There is no longer any such thing as a calculated risk under those circumstances, and I just don’t think that’s an improvement.

EDIT: I suppose it might be nice to add a level factor to the equation that determines whether attacks hit or miss, so that Pokémon of high levels are more likely to dodge attacks from Pokémon of low levels, and so forth, but I’m not totally sure about the actual value of doing that – and it would make AI opponents who rely on their inflated levels to compensate for their lack of effort training, like the Elite Four, incredibly frustrating.