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?

Firstly you are allowed to mention your project name, you're just not allowed to push people to play your project, only discuss it's aspects.

Personally the system sounds fine. It seems rather standard and balanced. Only problem is it's still in a generic stage.

Throw me some concepts of skills you're working on for different categories to illustrate how they're different in the game. Maybe different ways you want to use them strategically in your game. How will you keep them interesting and relevant to the gameplay?

Further, why are the 3 main types split? In what way will this affect your gameplay?

My first goal was to make sure that ALL skills stay useful all throughout the game. The very first skill you gain burns all of the target's Mana and deals damage relative to the Mana burned. It has a cooldown however, and some enemies (Mostly bosses) will have a way to counter it. Like their own Mana potions. The other early Seraphi spell inflicts a sleep status on a single target, a very long sleep status. Of course, it does no damage. Another removes all buffs from the enemies, doing damage for each beneficial state they have (got to finish the formula for that), and doing nothing to enemies without beneficial states. It can be very powerful against buff reliant enemies. So the theme I am going for Seraphi Magic is control.

Gray Magic is more varied, but is mostly focused on reliable damage and some control with Ice spells. The Gray Magic user is going to be your heavy hitter early on. Gray Magic is about versatility: with all three elements available, any resistances the enemies would have are not a problem. So the main theme with Gray Magic is adaptability.

As for Inferni Magic, I am yet to create one spell for that. But the idea behind them will be stronger than average, but completely random spells. You cannot target them, random status effects. It may take a while to balance them so that the risk is worth it.

And then you got the Primary and Secondary classes and SP for learning new skills. Early on, after the introductory (tutorial) dungeon, players will gain the Mind Sync command, which scans enemies. It will allow you to see the enemy's stats. But if you scan a bandit, you might gain Bandit as a subclass for your Rogue (even if you don't have one yet). But if you scan the bandit leader (the boss), you will gain a new Primary Class for your future Rogue. The Primary classes determine the base pool of skills you can learn, as well as your primary skill type. Secondary classes add on specific Primary classes to add new useable equipment types, or a new skill type. You may have Gray Mage as your primary class, and Life Mage as secondary. You will have two skill types. Or you may Battle Mage as a secondary class, which allows you to equip heavier armor. While this whole idea is a subject to change, on paper it looks good to me.

All Primary classes can "evolve"� after reaching a certain level with them and Mind Syncing the correct boss; unlock a more powerful version of them. They have more Secondary classes available and they offer better stat growth and higher tier spells. Each skill type has 3 tiers of spells. For primary skill types, you unlock new tiers by "evolving"� your Primary class. For secondary skill types, you find a scan it from the enemy. Of course, a T1 primary class cannot equip a T3 secondary class, though a T3 primary class can equip all of its secondary classes.

Essentially, I want "Class Hunting"� to be a major part of the game. Though all of your party members will have their own separate classes to hunt and choose from. Your Knight just switching to a Mage Primary class just does not make sense to me.

The unmentioned skill type is Weapon Arts. Each weapon type has 3 Weapon Arts for it, not tiered. These skills vary greatly and can be learned early. Some equipment, mostly shields, give you some skills too. Early shields give you Shield Slam, while the later ones might give you some more specific skills.

And finally, there are ultimate skills. Each party member and a boss have one. They are only usable when your TP (Zeal in my game) reaches 100. What it does depends on its user. Your knight has Divine Retribution, which deals AoE damage, which increases with every health % the knight is missing. Your mage has Omniscience, which gives a MASSIVE boost to INT and Mana regen for a few turns. The rest are a WIP. There are some skills that use small amounts of Zeal, like that Shield Slam. All Zeal using skills share the fact that they are far quicker to use.

As for generic thing - the whole thing is in an early stage of development. At the moment I am mapping the second game dungeon, where you unlock the Mind Sync and are able to learn skills and classes. Once I am done with that, I will test it and see how it feels, and make adjustments accordingly.

Gee, I did not intend for such a wall of text.

Sounds like a very interesting and thought out system. Have you made any visual organizers for your system? I find those to be a big help in designing and explaining the ideas to others. I'm glad you're thinking about how the system would tie into the story, as I think that is super important.

Since only certain classes and learn certain subclasses, does the player who can learn a subclass have to scan the enemy to learn it from or can any character scan it? As in, if you have a knight and mage and the enemy you are fighting carries a mage subclass, can the knight scan it and the mage learns the subclass or does the mage have to scan it?

On the topic of making elemental skills "make sense", I've had some thoughts on that in designing an element fusion system. Wind wouldn't do anything by itself, but adding wind to fire would make a fire spell that hit the whole field, wind + water + thunder could make a thunder storm, healing + wind + water could make healing rain, fire + earth + gravity could make a comet or something. It doesn't sound like that'll fit into what you're designing, but just thought I'd share.

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.