>>54202816Very good post my dude, but...
>If someone wants to avoid trainers, they should have to burn a Repel or deal with the encounters. Risk:reward should be taken into account when designing any route.Pokemon has never had the scope/ambition to expound on this "survival" or "death by a thousand cuts" gameplay. Punshing the player by forcing them back to a Pokemon Center is shitty difficulty, mediated by inconvenience, not meta choices like the grass vs trainer conundrum.
Hacks and fangames have been a massive disappointment in this way, since they rarely experiment outside of fakemons and battle mechanics. Consider some of these gimmicks:
>Trainer classes are associated with abilities/win-conditions, e.g. Jugglers can switch and act on the same turn, ensuring routine battles don't become boring>Pokemon have unique behaviours during random encounters, e.g. Zubat detect and swarm player if they run over loud terrain>Each route revolves around a gimmick, like special weather conditions or terrain>The player's party can be divided to face waves of enemies tower defence style>Building on the last example, some HMs might require the player to keep their Pokemon on the field and out of their party, and HMs can be tied to non-move attributes like weightPokemon rarely does any of this, which is why its levels blend into one another after the first few gens.
