AJ, I wish to address a specific sub-point before we delve back into the main part of your discussion, though I do thank you for engaging in polite debate and will do my utmost to remain civil... which is really what we are supposed to do on a forum such as this anyway, and yet so many of us fail at it so often.
On the subject of coin flips, my real qualm with them boils down to two things:
1) I'd prefer they not be used to offset extremely potent effects.
2) I'd prefer the game switched to a system of dice rolls.
The former is the easiest to explain as it directly impacts this conversation. I touched upon this in my previous post, but in case it got lost I will state it again. Pokemon Reversal
is a broken card. It is not broken because it allows you to pick a new Active Pokemon from your opponent's Bench. It is not broken because it is a "tails fails" card. It is broken because it is a "tails fails" card that when it succeeds yields the classic Gust of Wind/Pokemon Catcher effect, including being a Normal Trainer (a.k.a. an Item),
especially in the current metagame. In a significantly slower one Pokemon Reversal
might be balanced.
It is okay for coin tosses to determine lesser outcomes. The guide lines seem to be "is it broken if someone is crazy lucky and has a game where they always hit 'heads'? If it always hits 'tails' does it cost you the game?" The reason for these guidelines is at a large scale tournament, it is improbable that those scenarios won't come up. Someone might hit
all heads for every Pokeball one match. This is pretty slick, but not broken beyond belief. Likewise they might hit all tails, but it won't ruin them all by itself.
This is due to the exact nature of the effect: searching out a single Pokemon in a game full of draw and search power. Even though Pokeball is the most efficient Pokemon search card
when it succeeds, even when you are unnaturally lucky (or "unlucky") and could even determine who wins the match, it is "how" it does this. You could have been lucky and drawn what you needed instead of the Pokeballs. You may not have really needed them all to work. Other draw/search power probably would have been almost as good. Perhaps the biggest balancing agent is that its not directly affecting your opponent. Still, this is a guess not even at the level of a proper hypothesis, so I could very well be wrong.
The
second point is something that may seem odd to players, but for me is second nature. Still I'll mention that anyone not interested in a tangent won't miss anything terribly relevant if they stop reading with this paragraph: this tangent is meant to underscore how it is the nature of coin flips in Pokemon that causes huge swings in luck, while in many other games where actions frequently rest upon dice rolls there is somehow less of a luck factor!
In Junior High School (for me, a few years before Pokemon debuted in the US) I stated playing traditional role-playing games. By traditional, I mean not "video game" RPGs but "pen and paper, dice and character sheet based" role-playing games.
This let me appreciate that when your game is trying to represent the uncertainty of the real world, rolling dice against an appropriately generated score was most efficient. You can have a broader range of outcomes, including those that are especially good or bad. Games like chess seek to exclude this kind of luck as much as possible... which is unrealistic, but realism isn't the point of chess. Yes,
chess still has luck, it just is "external" to the game system. Take this scenario: a lesser skilled player is playing a more skilled one. The lesser skilled player is just about to make a losing move, but light in the room just happens to glint of a piece, which in turn catches that player's eye. The lesser player then realizes that piece not only has a move available, but that is is a winning move! If the lighting had been different, or the seating different, the lesser player would have lost the game. While these are not truly "random" events (in that a cause can be determined), at the same time life is too complex to prevent them.
Bringing this back to Pokemon, in the RPGs I like, when you design your character you usually spend what is known as "character points" to do so. You can make abilities more likely to succeed by spending points to improve them.
Without dramatically altering the game, I just would like to see a common success/fail system implemented over mere coin flips. Given the simplistic nature of Pokemon, odds are it should merely be based on a single six-sided die. Since many of us already use this in place of a coin toss, obviously many cards wouldn't be affected by this. However having a six-sided dice would allow streamlining of "luck" influenced effects. Some cards might fail on a particular number result (probably the same, standard result). Complicated multi-coin attacks would be simplified into a single dice roll. It might be "this attack does 20 times the result of the dice roll" or it might be "if you roll an even number, this attack does X. If you roll an odd number, this attack does Y. If you roll a six this attack does both X and Y."
Still that last part is a huge change for the game and a proper discussion of it should be in a different thread. I merely broached it to further explain how luck isn't bad for the game if properly managed. The game as is suffers from many variable effects being far to complex to implement. An effect that randomly selects one of your opponent's Pokemon now requires a series of coin flips (and as such simply isn't done). If the effect were based on a single six sided die, the game can easily have basic rules having you assign a specific number to the Active, and then the rest to the Bench slots. If you hit an empty slot, re-roll. Only an improbable worst case scenario is as complex for the die method as the coin method. Plus again, the simple effects we use coin tosses for already often substitute a die already.
tl;dr: Since I was so wordy, I'll summarize by stating my problem is that potent effects shouldn't depend on coin tosses. Even if they attempt to balance things out by having great versus calamitous results, over the course of a large tournament the luck factor then is amplified as the winners will naturally be the players who happened to avoid the calamitous results and/or scored the great results.
Oh, and again, I'll address more of AJ's specific points in a later post. Oh, and can I call you AJ, ajwalker?
