Make "spells" based on real life liquids and such. A fire spell will be an explosive, a confusion spell will be belladonna, a poison spell will be snake venom or something.

The reason that games keep the same basic spell types is because these are themes from mythology that are almost universal throughout human culture. Japanese culture had elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void. Chinese Daoist culture had Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. European culture had Fire, Earth, Air, Water.

If you want to do something different, draw on human culture as well. I have yet to see a game that pulls strongly from Hindu or African beliefs, culture, or setting. There are a plethora of mythologies you could pull from, just do some research!

Read from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_elements_%28Chinese_philosophy%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_elements_%28Japanese_philosophy%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element

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Original post by Indolence Quote: Original post by TheOddMan What about Dnd-based games? You have: Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy and Transmutation spells. Not to mention different classes with different spell lists. Sounds interesting. It would be good to see this recreated rather than the elemental system.

Lol! Never played Baldur's Gate? Planescape: Torment? Icewind Dale? Neverwinter Nights?

They all do this already!

In response to the others though, perhaps spells need to have more use outside of combat. Every game I've ever played with a 'Light' spell for instance is seriously lacking in dark areas. Levitate is used well in Elder Scrolls games. Lock / Unlock spells are rarely useful, and Find Traps is rendered useless thanks to quick saves (which can also apply to Identify spells).

Perhaps also spells need to have more uses, e.g. Fire can cook food, Water can provide much needed sustenance, Earth can block / unblock tunnels and so on.

The only good example I can think of at the moment is DnD's Light spell, which can provide light or blind enemies, but this hasn't been translated to any CRPGs.

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Original post by TheOddMan Quote: Original post by Indolence Quote: Original post by TheOddMan What about Dnd-based games? You have: Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy and Transmutation spells. Not to mention different classes with different spell lists. Sounds interesting. It would be good to see this recreated rather than the elemental system. Lol! Never played Baldur's Gate? Planescape: Torment? Icewind Dale? Neverwinter Nights? They all do this already!

Haven't played any of them, lawl.

Quote:

Make "spells" based on real life liquids and such. A fire spell will be an explosive, a confusion spell will be belladonna, a poison spell will be snake venom or something. The reason that games keep the same basic spell types is because these are themes from mythology that are almost universal throughout human culture. Japanese culture had elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void. Chinese Daoist culture had Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. European culture had Fire, Earth, Air, Water. If you want to do something different, draw on human culture as well. I have yet to see a game that pulls strongly from Hindu or African beliefs, culture, or setting. There are a plethora of mythologies you could pull from, just do some research!

Mythology, of course.
All the best ideas are based upon mythology. Just a personal thought.

Wow. I didn't expect this many replies.

I mostly wanted to see all of your opinions on the concept, because my own 'magic' system is not yet developed.

I've had a very small sampling of RPGs and MMOGs, so thanks for keepin' me up to date.

I've seen a few games try adding Dark and Light (Evil and Holy) to the basic elements, but that's hardly a change.
Simply not including elementals is a possibility, though you'd have to reinvent some new categories.

One idea, might be to redesign the principles upon which magic itself is based. The people might not draw power from elements, but instead an omnipresent 'force' which takes mastery to utilize. The 'element' or 'flavor' of the spell could be determined by how you tap into this 'force'.

Anyways, great ideas, keep 'em coming.

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Original post by Indolence All the best ideas are based upon mythology.

There is a ton of unused mythology out there. Games commonly feature Norse, European, and sometimes Asian myth, but there is a host of good Native American, African and (I dunno) Australian(?) myth to draw from as well.

And even if that runs out, why not create your own mythology?

Australian myth (Aboriginal of course) is that everything is kinda organic. A river isn't caused by water corroding or rain but by a giant snake pushing through the land and some god-like crying. Doesn't sound a good idea to case spell Cry at Enemy. :D

Doop.

Fire = energy (Lighting, fire, ice, etc)
Earth = solids (Metal, earth, cars etc)
Water = liquids (Water, blood...)
Wind = gas (Oxygen, poison gas...)

That's a simple and easy magic elemental system. A fire elemental could, say heat up some metal and make it molten so that a water elemental can spash it on an enemy.

It also makes far, far more sense and is way more versatile than Fire, Water, Earth and Lightning.

I know the you're trying to get away from the elements. Though I suppose if you're not really able to break away from them you could go the Wheel of Time path and weave them together in 'patterns' to change the effect and/or intensity etc. Wheel of Time used the four elements and then spirit. I suppose you could add some other things in there.

I would break it down like so:

Fire
Water
Earth
Air
Energy (such as Light, Electricity, Gravity, Magnetic, Arcane or etc)
Spirit (this is the living aspect of magic, and complicated to use/learn)
Time (this may or may not work well in a computer game due to difficulty to design)

Then you can combine them as you would like. Perhaps just a fire spell would do damage, but then add in air to add the intensity at which it burns and you could do more damage. Also lets say you have a wizard with a concentrated air shield of some sort, would be awesome to throw a fire net to consume his air shield then use that to attack him. Perhaps you could combine earth with water for things like conjuring quick sand traps. Water and fire to make a steam barrier to provide cover for an army, etc. Combine Air and energy to make loud sonic booms or distracting noises.

People mentioned that most magic seems aimed at combat, too much torwards combat. I agree it needs more uses, and the more you can apply it to something else the better. Like I would see earth being a awesome candidate to learn for people who would like to transmute things. Spirit would be useful for animating elementals, and enchanting/cursing items. I think a cool game would include curses you don't typically see, like Baldurs Gate's gender change. One I could think of myself would be come across a cursed diamond or another valuable item, but when you pick it up it binds to you and becomes really heavy.

My favorite curse from the Sword of Truth series is when the evil wizard makes the main character look like him, and whatever he speaks is transferred into a different language. Though this is curse is only applied to friends. He goes to his friends for help before he knows about this curse and they end up trying to kill him. However it's an interesting plot twist though because he later tries to go to his brother to communicate and convince him he's not the enemy, but his brother immediately recognizes him, revealing his brother as the traitor.

So my conclusion is you don't really need to get away from the elements, just get away from how they are commonly used as damage and shields and a few other typical uses. Get into the more creative side when making effects when you can, and mix and match the elements :) This is a lot of work, but the possibilities are more or less endless :)


Edit: I just thought of another cool item possibility I felt like sharing. It would be interesting to have a shield that was highly magnetic but the magnetic field had a short attraction range. The wielder would have armor/weapons not effected because they don't contain iron or have been magically shielded. Then when fighting an enemy fighter he could block the iron sword/axe or whatever. Then basically take the weapon with the shield as a disarm like move. Removing the weapon from the shield would require some built in behavior such as maybe tapping the shield twice on a certain spot or something. Something quick enough to use on the battlefield.

I once designed a simple magic system for a PnP game. It required to see everything in colored lines, a la Matrix with code lines, and to "tap" these lines to use the energy contained in them to create something useful.

Let's say that it worked a little like MtG's Mana system, but with a twist. You could find both white "threads of energy" coming from the sun, but also red "threads". It meant that you could use both light and heat from the sun to your purpose. The Black energy threads were omnipresent, everywhere, and would not flow in lines or curves. They would mostly lie around, and move snakelike. They represented chaos, and could be used to alter other lines. Let's say that you came across a tree (green threads flowing everywhere, the energy of life itself...) and needed wood. You could try and harness some chaos energy to make the life flee from a branch or two, and then concentrate the heat from the sun or from other living animals or humans to ignite the branches.

A wind would be both white and blue (movement) energy.

But on the other hand, you could create cold by simply moving heat lines away from a point, or temporarily blind someone by deflecting the light lines around his head. You could kill someone simply by knotting chaos lines around his own life and heat lines, or exhaust someone, or drain his "lifeforce", by channelling his red and green lines towards yourself.

And the more powerful or skilled in "magic" you were, the more lines you could use at once, meaning you could create more powerful spells.

On reading what I just wrote, I realize that this is not much use for a computer game system, because the sheer creativity that allows such a system cannot be hardcoded yet, unless you decide to go through a LONG LOOONG LOOOOOONG creational process, and an even longer coding process.

But it may prove useful to someone around here, who knows...

The PnP game Mage: The Ascension has Entropy, Correspondence, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Prime, Spirit, and Time, and is the most open-ended magic system in existence. Good luck implementing that system, though.

Actually, I originally had five schools of magic in my game design, each one based upon the spiritual essence of one of the five worlds in the game. However, now that the game's plot no longer includes multiple worlds, I was forced to discountinue this option. At that point, I began creating my own categorization systems, but none of them seemed as though they could possibly be as intuitive for the player as Earth/Fire/Air/Water, with its culturally-rooted origins. So I went with the classical elements, and I don't think it's a bad decision.

Furthermore, only the Destroyer mage sub-class in my game design is purely damaging. The fact that this name makes that type of mage sound like a gunship only encourages me to keep it.