>>23317819I'll be a sciencefag and just say this even though I'm pretty sure you don't want this long explanation, and that it's taboo to apply logic to games
Your body is mostly water, and thus has high specific heat (higher specific heat means that it takes more energy to raise a certain material 1°C than other materials. Water has a much higher specific heat than iron, and that's why blacksmiths always put their hot iron in water)
Boiling water has way more energy inside it than a flame, and since your body and water have a very similar specific heat, it doesn't take much for the boiling water to burn your shit. Flames have less energy inside them than boiling water, and it (I'm being serious) takes longer for the average flame to heat your body enough for a burn than it does boiling water.
The game animations for flamethrower and scald are near the same length.
Assuming that Flamethrower doesn't use flames of damn near 3,000°F, and about the temperature of the average fire which is near ~600°F, the boiling water does more damage to the supposed cells of the Pokemon.
It makes a bit of sense why boiling water has a higher chance to burn than a flamethrower.
What I don't understand is how boiling water has the same chance to burn as a plume of molten rock, which is hell of a lot hotter than flames and carries more energy than boiling water.
