I got to thinking...

[surfingpika]

I know that many rpgs allow their characters to have a defense commands seperate from it's learned moves. My curiousity is what do you think would happen to the game if every pokemon was allowed a defense command along with it's four moves? For reference, a usual defense command will cut a physical move in half, while having no effect on that game's magic moves, which for pokemon, would be special moves.

[Pikachu3828]

I'm not an expert at Pokémon battling so feel free to correct me on what I say, but you bring up an interesting point.

I think a defence manovuer would totally throw the battling balance. Especially one that cuts any physical damage by half. There are defence boosting moves already in the games, but these up the stat by 1 or 2 points to negate less damage each time. There is also Endure which will always leave the Pokémon with 1HP which is sort of similar. It would make it totally unfair for the opponent if you were to go up against a purely physical Pokémon and your Pokémon already had an absurdly high defence stat, say Shuckle for example. Its defences are hard enough to break as they are, and cutting any damage in half would make it near impossible to destroy.

Pokémon battling is very stat based and has a lot of variety due to the many different types of Pokémon - not only is allowing every single one a defence move monotonous, it also sort of goes against the Pokémon battling formula. Personally I don't think it would be that much of a welcome addition to battlers, but then again as I say I am not a battler and I could be entirely wrong, I look forward to reading some other peoples' opinions on this.