Tempera said:
See AlsoAnd All The World Turned To... (A Pokémon Quest)App Roundup: Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery, iTunes Remote, iPastels 3, Pokemon Quest, more... - iOS Discussions on AppleInsider ForumsPokemon Sleep: Summer Festival Event GuidePokémon Go Slumbering Sands Collection Challenge, research tasks and Pokémon Sleep Timed Research quest stepsNo, actually, I firmly disagree.
From a writing perspective, there's not much that can be worse than a boss getting status-locked into doing nothing in a fight. There's very little you can do with that as a writer that doesn't undercut the tension of your fight scene; there's only a couple of ways to frame it, and neither of them convey any significant sense of danger or tension into the fight. And if you don't have any tension in your fight scene, why the f*ck are you writing it?
It would be a fantastic way to undercut all narrative tension to the first arc's climactic encounter, but that's not actually something positive. The best you can do is showcase how effective a strategy the team was able to come up with, but you can both do that elsewhere and you can do it with strategies within the fight that don't undercut the entire fight scene.
I trust Arvis to do something to prevent a boss getting status-locked to death, though. They're a better writer than that.
Let me put this another way: this is a game as well as a story. Not like, a real video game or anything, but important battles in this particular thread are handled through a game-like system that has rules, similar to a tabletop RPG. Not all Quests are like this - IAWWMD is a great example of a purely narrative quest where things happen because they logically would in the story, and the agency of questers is in choosing what story they wish to see play out. Just to complete the "please follow more than three quests" from me here, Asphodel in Mourning is a middle ground where there's rules and dice rolls that can change the exact events of the story, but it's all still pretty zippy and narrative. Tera Steel, though? It needs the consideration that a game of, say, Dungeons & Dragons would, because its format and the very concept of the current vote invites the quest voters to make strategic decisions and influence the very game-likemechanics, and that means a certain level of trust between the voters and the QM.
Now, if Arvis were to say, before opening the vote, "yeah actually for [insert reason here] this particular Pokémon is immune to non-volatile status, or has an increased Effect Roll difficulty to inflict them, or can't flinch, or automatically cures them at the end of the round", that'd all be fine and make perfect sense (probably not all of those, though). Like, that's a basic consideration most games of this type have to preserve some kind of gravitas to major enemies (Pokémon usually doesn't but it's different in both tone and combat style from most other RPGs). I would just expect, as a matter of courtesy and transparency, to be told about this before the vote opens, because it heavily informs the strategy behind how this will play out, and isn't something that can be directly gleaned from knowledge of Pokémon mechanics (other than Vigoroths generally being immune to Sleep).
On the other hand, if Arvis doesn't want to do that, I personally think that's fine too, because like...this is a really strong opponent. If it gets an unmitigated hit in, it's probably going to put one of our team's Pokémon (EDIT: or upon consideration of the narrative, one of us, the trainers) straight out of the fight and into the hospital, and even with the maximum possible level of shenanigans, it is still going to get hits in. There's plenty of tension inherent in restraining the murder machine, mitigating the damage of its attacks, interrupting its windups, playing a deadly balancing act that's a knife edge between "do you block her move or do you watch one of your comrades eat sh*t because of an unlucky roll", hoping that the times its attacks get through are on a turn where Reflect is up, etc. There's still plenty of tension available simply because this opponent is that dangerous. In my opinion. Obviously, we disagree here and I don't expect to persuade you just by stating my perspective. Again, I'd be perfectly fine with "you can't flinch this guy" or "you can't paralyze this guy" for even the flimsiest in-universe justification, I'd just want to know about it beforehand, and if I don't, I trust Arvis to play around the mechanics that Arvis has set up in an interesting manner.
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