Pokemon as D&D monsters

[Koumei]

Well in the video games, damaging attacks tend to become obsolete pretty quickly until you get your favourites roughly midgame (Dragon Pulse, Flamethrower, Psychic, Shadow Ball, Nightslash, Thunderbolt, Ice Beam - good luck finding something to replace these with). But shit like Hone Claws, Spore and Thunder Wave are keepers all the way through. Likewise specialist attacks like Spikes/Toxic Spikes/Stealth Rock, and Rapid Spin.

So I can see plain old "deals damage" becoming obsolete really quickly, until mid-game where you start going "Okay, Fire Blast deals more damage and hits a huge area, but it's a weird splashy area that makes targeting much more of a pain in the ass than Flamethrower and has an accuracy penalty, so I might just keep Flamethrower" (but if you want to you can totally go for Fire Blast at that stage), with status moves only being made obsolete when you get better status moves (AoE or more likely to trigger or whatever).

Also, if we do indeed continue this, the new generation of pokemon means another XXX amount to add to the lists there. I don't care for many, but some are cool - and it introduces new moves that we probably want to include (like Smackdown, Shell Smash, Venoshock, Hex and Scald), so it's be weird to go "We're adding 5Gen's moves... but not the Pokemon."

And yeah, that means re-jiggering some lists, or indeed flat-out adding new lists. Probably the former, for the most part.