Elemental Ideas. No, really, ideas for elements...
Elemental Forums
I've had it with those bull*censured* nonsensical Helenian elements. Fire/water/air/earth is boring, limiting, and cliched. This thread is where we try to come up with new systems of elements.
As I see it, you know you made a good system where each and every spell you can think of can be neatly categorized. The classic system is rather bad because it works only for spells that deal with said elements, everything else comes out as a sad excuse (I.E. 'Spirit Bending').
Aside the classic system, I can think of only two: the one D&D had, which I think is almost entirely useless and the one used by MoM and M:tG which is unique and thus worth some description.
M:tG had a pentagram of element:
- White - life, civilization, humanity, holy and 'goodness'.
- Green - nature, growth, life and... well, nature.
- Red - chaos, fire, earth, change, chance, destruction
- Black - death, un-death, unholy, 'badness', corruption, decay
- Blue - air, water, thought, meta-magic, time
The problem, as I see it with the system, is that it tryes to include other systems inside it, and thus loses itself. Why would the chaotic and warlike mermen (sea people) be blue creatures and not red? How come a bi-polar system such a 'good/evil' is included in a penta-polar system? What the hell is an angel who is both black and white? Eh... 
Now for the fun part, where i do my best to blow your minds away with my homebrew system.
Or not. I created it as a tool descriptory tool to convey ideas, and it's extremely simplistic.
It goes like this: every spell is definde by four variables: Element, Motion, Force and Chance :
- Element - The stuff you're playing with. Fire, water, sound, time, space, thought, emotions, whatever. If you try to make a lightening storm the Element is 'weather', and if you're trying for a sleep spell the Element is 'psychic'.
- Motion - The direction of the spell is the end result relative to the starting conditions. Basically, 'awake!' and 'sleep!' are the same spell with reversed Motion. In 'physical' Elements, the spell's Motion is the direction in which the Force was used.
- Force - Quite simply, the amount of energy invested in the spell. Can be measured in Mana Points, Joules, Calories or Headaches.
- Chance - Since the caster never has complete and total knowladge of the universe, and our reality is rather chaotic on the micro-scale, spells may not always work exactly as intended. The more complicated a system the caster is trying to alter/create/control, the larger the Chance something will get out of control or just end up wrong. This can be thought of as not giving the spell the proper Motion.
Example time: Fireball.
- Element - Fire.
- Motion - Two phases. Phase #1 - Condense energy in hands. Phase #2 - Release in specified direction; preventing the ball from exploding before impact.
- Force - Phase #1 - The more the better, say 50k kilo calories. Phase #2 - Minimal.
- Chance - Phase #1 - May accidently blow up.* Phase #2 - Actual damage can only be guessed.
*The portion of Chance in the making of the spell is related to the skill of the caster, and inversly proportional to the amount of Force invested. I.E, Expert caster will be able to accuratly control larger amounts of Force without accidents.
Hope you liked it. Now I'm not looking for cryticism (which will be appreciated nontheless), what I'm looking for is to *your* ideas about elemental systems. Share them with us, who knows, maybe the Devs will like one of the ideas enough to adopt it...
