Castle Paradox

[Ronin Catholic]

This thread was a very good and insightful learning experience that made me put a lot more thought into how I design and use elements. Thanks to the merging of elements with monster types and the new conditionals for failure (used to only have "fail if monster is X enemy type" and "fail if target is Y enemy type") it's a lot easier do do things like so:

Element name: Disrupt
Attack: Disrupt Undead
Effects: High spread damage, never misses
Elemental Bitsets: Disrupt damage
Elementail Failure Conditions: Fail if target takes less than 101% from Disrupt element

We now have a potent attack that only works if the monsters are specifically weak to it; for example, undead monsters will be weak to Disrupt as an element but we don't have to go out of our way to set every single other monster to have a resistance to it.

Rinse and repeat for a "Pesticide" attack to get rid of mobs of weak monsters like rats, cockroaches, flies, bats, etc.


Examples of elemental systems I've used:
- Wolf's Quest had as its main elements Fire, Ice, and Electricity. Ice extinguishes fire, fire disrupts electromagnetic current, electricity is conducted through ice. I also had a "light" element (used by all healing spells and offensive white mage spells) and a "death" element (used by all spells that force the enemy to save or die; I think Quarter and Demi which shave percentages of health off, too). It was an okay setup, but as it was my newbie game I did a very poor job of implementing it.

- Nintendo Quest had four main elements: Fire, Aqua, Wood, and Elec (named after the four elements of the Mega Man Battle Network series). Each element resists one thing and is weak to two of them (Wood resists Elec but is weak to Fire and Aqua, because Aqua includes ice; this ironically made Nayte exceedingly weak to almost any enemy using elemental attacks). Fire was weak to Aqua and Elec I think? Aqua was probably weak to Wood and Elec. I don't remember, it was bad and not intuitive. I also had a "Clone" element, which would prompt most enemies to spawn another enemy (usually copies of themselves, sometimes my forum avatar from the time as a stupidly weak joke enemy). This was used on the player side for experience/money/item drop farming and on the enemy side for calling for help/spawning minions. Forum trolls and flamers would have a weakness and absorption of Fire elemental attacks respectively, but spawn an angry Castle Paradox forum administrator when hit with said elements (because it's illegal for you as a newbie to fall for troll bait or leave angry posts, but it's A-OK for forum veterans to set up flame bait or to be exceedingly rude and abusive to someone free of consequence).

In most of my games, I just pick how many elements I think will make for a fun variance in player-end options and set elemental weakness/resistance/absorption based on the individual monster's properties rather than on a strict theoretical consistency across the elements themselves. For several games I do something like Fire, Ice/Water, Electricity, Poison, Sugar. Sugar can be easily combined with other elements but casters who use it tend not to be able to cast any spells without sugar (Nathan in OHRodents having the icy Slush Slash, electric Sour Shock, toxic Licorice Whip, and pure sugar elemental Rock Candy Rocket, Bananarang, and Lemon Buster), water mages are often both healers and attackers (Blueberry and Misa both get water-elemental attack spells and healing spells). A creature of candy affinity is naturally weak to being dissolved by water...or healed more by a watery heal spell spreading more easily throughout his body, a fire is extinguished by water; mousetraps, computer mice, and guys in labcoats resist poison attacks; so on and so forth.

In A Quest, I only used three elements of my available 16 for the contest rules: Fire, Ice, and Good. Good element did extra damage to wicked things like the main villains and undead minions, but was resisted by relatively neutral beings like certain fey or wild animals and absorbed by good guys like main characters Eric and Mags or wandering candy fairies. Different monsters had different combinations of weakness/resistance/absorb to fire and ice - enemy wizards resisting but absorbing both, bubbles absorbing ice (because ice is also water, so the bubble just absorbs and melts the ice but adds it to itself), ghosts being weak to fire, and so on.

When you have Fire, Ice, and Lightning as your elements:
- It can be equally validly logical for Fire to beat Ice or Ice to beat Fire
- It can be equally validly logical for Ice to beat Electricity or Electricity to beat Fire
- It makes less sense for Lightning to beat Fire than Fire to beat Lightning, but the two being neutral does make sense

It's probably better to get a different triangle. Though if you're thinking "Fire is beat by Water, Water is beaten by Ice" you may as well swap out fire for steam, make it the Gas, Liquid, Solid triangle or whatever.

The most relationships a human can usually intuitively remember is roughly eight, so having more than five main magic damage elements is probably not a good idea.

You can do multiple layers of three-element triangles and have them intersect:
- Good always beats Evil, Evil uses its dirty trickery to have advantage over all mortal elements, Good doesn't smite morally neutral things like non-sapient animals, plants, and minerals.
(With this setup, Good is always at an advantage against Evil, but without Good to fight it, Evil runs rampant and has the best overall resistances/things that are weak to it. In times of peace, people will wonder what the use of the Good element is, leading people to abandon it, making it easier to slip into Evil ways until suddenly things need smiting again)

- Fire burns air, wind erodes stone, soil extinguishes flame.

- Mineral wounds animal, animal eats plant, plant absorbs mineral.

Are mineral from animal/vegetable/mineral and stone/soil from earth/wind/fire one and the same? Is wind one and the same with the usual plant or water elemental magics?


And most important of all, always keep in mind that balance in how often players will make use of it is vastly more important than hypothetical balance of numbers.

Are attacks of some elements easier to learn? More efficient for MP cost or item consumption? First learned earlier or later? Tend to have higher damage and lower accuracy? All of these can be very flavorful choices that will have a huge impact on players' perceptions of them.

Maybe Earth spells are always strong but miss a lot, sometimes it's worth throwing a rockslide at someone who resists earth just because of how hard it hits.

Maybe Fire spells take very little MP to cast compared to their damage output, but enemies resistant to or who absorb fire are the most common elemental interactions.

Maybe Holy and Lightning are a single element used only by the main hero/cleric to smite evil with - super rare, super powerful, and no enemies can resist it. But maybe also super costly - perhaps since the hero himself isn't without sin, he pays HP of his own, burned by the recoil of his own judgement.
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nor the game you're playing~"

[TMC]

What a writeup! You should publish this in HamsterSpeak.
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