In a fantasy RPG, or any RPG that even generally involves magic, it is very frequent that there is some sort of mechanics driving elements of magic. The most common variant of this would be elemental weaknesses and resistances. Of course, it makes sense that an fire elemental would take less damage from any fire damage the player throws at it, and on the flip side, take more water damage.
However, although this system is engaging in its own right, I feel that it has become so commonplace that just ending a game’s mechanics at that is not nearly enough. At least, for veteran players of the genre, many need to go through more thought processes than “I see fire, so I’ll shoot water” in order to stay engaged. Whether you decide to add more depth through tight resource management or other means, there needs to be something more to keep the game fresh.
What then, did I decide to do in Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War to keep magic elements engaging? I came up with what I eventually called the “Primer and Detonator” system, but more on that later. First, I came up with the goal, “I want to make each magic element feel unique.” As in, I wanted each spell choice to have a different effect on the battle. Additionally, at this point, I knew I wanted to have spells to chain off each other to give the feeling of and order and flow to magic combat. After messing around with what I could do, and ultimately deciding to cut the elements of “light” and “earth,” (let’s be honest, earth is just another form of physical damage if you think about it, right?) because I couldn’t quite fit them in a cohesive way, I came up with the following seven effects for my seven primary elements:
- Wind: Primer) Persistent Effect – “Downwind” – Reduces target evasion stats by 40%, doubles fire damage taken and “burning” application chance.
- Fire: Detonator) Persistent Effect – “Burning” – Damage each turn based on luck. Reduces target hit chance by 15%.
This pairing is themed around messing with the overall chance to hit of attacks. As fire is one of the primary elements of one of the player tank classes (Draconic Knight), causing the enemy having a reduced hit rate allowed that class to actively mitigate some incoming damage with fire spells. The narrative explanation of these two elements working together is that the wind riles up the oxygen in the air around the target and fuels the incoming fire damage. Also, because dragons are central to the plot of the game, and these are the two elements I feel they would primarily have, it was necessary to pair them together to make the dragons even more threatening.
- Water: Primer) Persistent Effect – “Wet” – Doubles cold and lightning damage taken and “freezing” application chance.
- Cold: Detonator) Persistent Effect – “Freezing” – Reduces speed by 50% and physical defense by 34%.
- Lightning: Detonator) No Persistent Effect, but it is the only magic element that allows for critical hits.
This little family of elements may seem a bit strange, but honestly it works out quite well. Water may seem lackluster because “Wet” doesn’t do anything more than the standard doubling damage, but it serves a versatile option for many situations. The player can follow up with cold magic, and even follow up with some physical attacks after that, or attack with lightning damage and potentially fish for some critical hits that already have a x2 damage multiplier applied to them. At first, this element family was shaped by purely the narrative means of water freezing over on the target or zapping a drenched target for even more damage. It’s quite simple, but it actually had an impact on some enemy designs. Very roughly, later in the game where I decided to give enemies frequent access to spell synergy, warriors usually have some water-enchanted weapon attack and a cold attack to help them do even more damage, and thief-like enemies, or enemies I thought should generally be trying to fight with critical hits, used lightning magic with their critical hit buffs or water spells.
- Dark: Primer) Persistent Effect – “Hopeless”- Reduces strength and magic power by 25%. Doubles psychic damage taken and “fractured mind” application chance.
- Psychic: Detonator) Persistent Effect – “Fractured Mind” Forces the target to only use basic attack at friend or foe at random. Reduces TP generation to 0.
Here, the mechanical theme of this pairing is “Stop doing damage for a bit.” Psychic may seem quite powerful, especially if you know that most psychic spells ignore some of the target’s magic resistance stat during damage calculation. However, frequent use of it is walled by the TP system (a resource that needs to be generated through participation in combat) and most usable psychic spells being accessible only through the one party member that can consistently heal. On the narrative side of things, the dark magic amplifies the target’s doubts and worries to throw it into despair, then if it is hit with psychic magic, that despair is exploited to temporarily drive it into insanity.
That’s the basics of my primer and detonator system for you, and some of my reasoning behind why the primers: wind, water, and dark, interact with their respective detonators: fire, cold, lightning, and psychic. That’s of course, just my result. It may be beneficial to describe briefly some of the earlier stages of this system that didn’t even come close to being implemented.
The first iteration was ambitious. I thought it would be a good idea to have every single element interact with the other with some narrative reasoning or another to increase damage and create a unique effect. Then I got to thinking, “Wait, if everything is doubling everything else’s damage, what’s the point?” The game’s balance is just going to be designed around always doing double damage, effectively making that mechanic entirely null, and divorcing it from any feeling that the player is doing anything special. In other words, if everything does double damage, then that becomes the new norm, and it wouldn’t feel special. Furthermore, could I realistically design a unique feeling and narrative effect for every pairing in the set of 7 elements? (That’s 21 for those of you like me who recoil at the thought of doing extra math). And at that point, I hadn’t decided to cut “light” and “earth” yet (That would make the target 21 actually 36). I’m sure it’s possible, but as it stood at the time, as a fledgling developer, I didn’t want to sprint out of the gate to fall face first in the mud.
Thus, I started pairing down the elements and spreading elements across the different party members and classes so that the player could explore different spell combinations, and in doing this setting a distinct flow to combat. The result was the primer and detonator system I described above. More so, as primers only last the turn they are applied and the following turn, changing even one party member’s speed stat to be faster or slower than another causes the player to adjust what type of spell combinations are optimal in this system. Although the system is a bit simple, ultimately I think it provides a dynamic experience where it provides many risk-reward situations with varying degrees of risk based on the circumstances. As such, situations like the following come into being naturally from this system.
“Do you wanna get that double psychic damage on the boss? Yeah you do, but damn, your tank is low on HP. But that “hopeless” effect is only going to last this turn. So, you wanna risk it?”
Not only that, but also this system keeps randomly encountering the same enemy pack somewhat fresh, as primers are not guaranteed to be applied. Even if the player opens the encounters with the same spells based on the enemies’ weaknesses, the application of primers will change the circumstances of the fights, and the players will have to adjust their battle strategies accordingly.
Well, that’s everything I can think to say on my primer and detonator system. As I’ve mentioned before in a previous post, I think it’s very important for a turn-based RPG to have active mechanics for the player to manage if it wants to stay relevant in a market with a higher demand for action games. This system is definitely one way I designed my game around that philosophy. Magic element systems are used frequently, but they’re by no means close to being completely developed or iterated upon. I hope to see many more unique magic element systems implemented in games in the future.
If you’re curious about how all my nonsense actually plays out in a game, check out Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War on Steam!