"Idea: Utilize gyms as opportunities to teach players about advanced strategy"

Pokémon's battle system as it is has a ton of depth -- picking out your team, selecting moves, status and secondary effects, type advantages, combining them into strategies, figuring out how to counter strategies, etc. Unfortunately the design of the games themselves don't lend themselves at all to teaching the players about this kind of depth. Most of what is taught by how even the tougher challenges are structured is just mastering type advantages and getting your levels higher. By the time post-game comes around, for those who bother doing Battle Tree / Battle Frontier / World Tournament / etc. unless they've studied from external sources (cough Smogon cough cough) odds are they don't really know anything but switching for type advantage, and consequently get rekt by competitively-designed teams.What I propose is that gym leaders in the next game should ditch the theming around type advantages and go instead for specific strategies and make an active effort to teach these strategies to players.New proposed structureEach gym begins with a welcome by the gym leader and a two-sentence explanation of the gym's goal/strategy.If the player asks for it (through dialog option), the gym leader can begin a lesson on the strategy, with a guided example battle between the gym leader and one of the gym students. The gym leader narrates the steps of his strategy and steamrolls the student with it. This is entirely skippable for players who've done it before or aren't interested, and re-playable for those who skipped it then get trashed and are looking to understand why they got trashed.At the gym there is a move deleter, a move re-teacher and move tutors teaching moves relevant to the strategy, so that rather than just being a challenge, the gym is a place for players to actually learn and set up their teams to implement these strategies.When the player feels ready, there's a trial-like challenge waiting for them, with the gym leader waiting for a battle at the end. Battles in the trial revolve around the strategy, giving the player a chance to get familiar with how it works and what to expect.The gym leader himself/herself masterfully deploys the strategy, making for a real challenge that the player will have to understand what's going on in order to win. The leader's team is type-diverse enough that the player probably can't get by just relying on type advantage.To balance the more difficult challenge of the gym leader, instead of the player whiting out and dropping money and running back to the Pokémon center, if the player loses, the battle ends and the gym leader immediately heals the player's Pokémon. The gym leader then gives words of advice on how to beat him.And here's another opportunity to let the gym leaders have unique and interesting personalities, because if you lose, when you come back they'll say something different than the first time you battled them.A few specific ideas on what I mean by teaching strategies:Buffing up and getting momentumThe student battles feature Pokémon with moves like Work Up, Growth, Fury Cutter, Rollout, etc. -- moves that don't do quite so much damage now, but are dangerous and devastating a few moves later.The gym leader has a much more devastating set of both moves and abilities built around this class of strategy. He could open with a Ninjask with Swords Dance, Protect, Fury Cutter and Baton Pass, and the ability Speed Boost. His first moves are Protect and Swords Dance in order to build up speed and attack power, then Baton Pass over to another Pokémon with better defense and more high-caliber buffing moves like Power Up Punch and abilities like Moxie.Defensive stallingStudent battles involve defensive Pokémon like Onix, Aron/Lairon, Bayleef or Mimikyu - tough to knock out in one hit (sans multi-super-effective), employing moves that slowly hurt your Pokémon over multiple turns, moves that recover their health and moves that make them harder to deal damage to.The gym leader dominates with this strategy, with an Umbreon with Moonlight, Curse and Payback (and ability Synchronize, holding a Flame Orb), another Pokémon with Toxic, Leech Seed, Substitute, another with high defenses, the Regenerator ability and the move Heal Bell (letting him pull back Umbreon and undo the self-burn so that Umbreon can be sent back out and burn another victim, bwahaha).Weather synergiesStudent battles will each focus on a single weather condition, setting up weather with Rain Dance, Sunny Day, etc. and have teams that primarily use the weather advantage to boost certain-type moves.The gym leader is a master of weather, employing multiple types of weather on the same team and maximizing weather synergies -- abilities like Drought or Snow Warning to immediately change the weather, moves like Hurricane and Blizzard for maximum damage in the corresponding weather, and abilities like Water Veil and Photosynthesis to add more weather-related advantages.Other strategiesThere are plenty of other interesting strategies to build teams around -- type coverage, weakness mitigation, matchup control (i.e. U-Turn/Volt Switch + Dragon Tail/Roar + trapping moves), all-out offense, entry hazards, etc.The point is for the more challenging stuff to be more direct opportunities to teach the player how to do more than just level up and deal damage. There's a ton of depth in the mechanics, but the game itself hasn't been a decent source to learn about that depth. via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/2vJc9lY