Thematic skill and effects Options

[Laue]

Usually in most RPGs, well, turn based ones anyway; most skill types or spell categories are like: fire, ice, etc. But their only difference is their animation and interaction with resistances. While in action RPGs, like Diablo 2, ice slows and freezes, but does less damage. Fire does more damage, but little else. You get the point.

My current project is built open the latter idea. At first I created a lot of different elements, 15 in total I believe. And then it hit me: how do I make every skill unique? How does the Wind element differ from the Slash or Blunt “elements”? It’s not the wind that harms the target; it’s the resulting concussion or a wound. And so, my elements were cut down to 8. Three of them are different physical attacks: Blunt, Slash and Pierce. Then we got Fire, Ice, Lightning, Life and Harmonic (a sort of super element that manipulates matter itself.)

And then there are skill types. At first I bound each element to its respective skill type. But that did not make any sense with the story of my project. In the end, every skill type had spells and skills of various elements. Well, sort of. In my project, there are three main factions: The Seraphi (Absolute order), The Inferni (Absolute chaos) and The Grey (Freedom fighters). And so there are three main skill types: Seraphi Magic, Inferni Magic and Gray Magic. The first focuses on disrupting and disabling enemies, the second are all about randomness (High variance, random targets, random effects) and the third is Gray Magic. Here lies all the pure elemental spells. There are some secondary skill types like Life Magic (Aka necromancy): healing, draining, resurrection, instakills, that kind of stuff; Blood Magic (Vampires! With a twist!): buffs and debuffs. The last and most simple is Weapon Arts. But I don’t think there is much to explain about that.

As for pure elemental spells, fire is all about damage. Some spells leave the targets burning (DoT). Ice does lowest damage of them all, but has heavy crowd control. And then you have Ice Lance. Lightning is mostly about fast, if a bit random spells, heavy on the AoE.

So, what do you think?

This post has been edited by Laue: Apr 4 2012, 11:12 PM

[amerk]

I've fancied the idea of mixing status effects with elemental spells, similar to your own concept but a bit different. Like:

If you are hit with Ice it does damage but has a chance to freeze you. While frozen, your now immune to Ice spells. If you were once immune to Fire spells, now you take double damage; however, an attack from stone could have a 10% chance of an instant kill.

If you are hit with Fire, you have a chance to go into a burn status, where HP slowly depletes. However, your strength increases as a result. Water attacks will now damage you, however they also have a chance of removing the burn status for you.

The idea behind it is, mixing these up instead of sticking with the norm will help create strategy, but they do need to be mixed well or they could wind up creating confusion.