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Not really...

But I'm thinking we should do away with permadeath/quicksaves and just use a standard savegame paradigm. And maybe also do away with those intricacies of teleportation I had mentioned before, and just say you can teleport to any screen on the map you've cleared (so the villages wouldn't have any special bearing on teleportation). Perhaps you can do it in the middle of combat too, but it takes 1-2 seconds, and getting damaged while attempting to teleport is instadeath. Then if you go back to that screen, enemies you've killed remain dead, but enemies you've only damaged are healed by some percentage of their health (maybe 50). And enemies spawned by other enemies remain.

Do you have any ideas for balancing magic/melee other than the 3 we've come up with so far:
-limited mana
-volatility of magic
-elemental strengths/weaknesses

There's cooldowns, but it's essentially quickly regenerating mana with only a large enough pool for one cast.

You could also have magic require consumable reagents that can be found/purchased (i.e. runes) but that's not a solution I'm fond of.

this evening I probably will, but not now.

Actually, what the hell. Here's my sketch of the magic system:
On Rhas, works of magic are done by channeling the ethr. The ethr is essentially a cloud of potential energy enveloping the planet, presumably set up by the Abr as a kind of global power network. Energy is completely inert while it remains in the ethr, and can only be accessed by living organisms channeling it. Magic is simply the directed conversion of ethr back into operable forms of energy, such as heat, motion, and mass.

While all organisms can and do access the ethr, this is mostly in excessively small quantities and unconsciously. To perform a more powerful working, a concious directing of the ethr is required, and the most powerful workings can only be performed either by those who have dedicated themselves to shaping the energies of the ethr or by those with some kind of magical aid.

Ethr changes back into energy unpredictably*. The more powerful a working, the less predictable its outcome. That is, predictability ∝ 1/power. (This is of course the watt kind of power -- a slow trickle of magic is more manageable than a sudden outpouring of it). Because having huge amounts of volatile energy around is rather dangerous, foci are used to shape magic. This is why things such as a staff of catch things on Fire exist, and exist in such quantity.

Ethr also by nature polarizes into distinct elements. When channeling the ethr, a conscious channeler must choose a particular element to utilize before casting. Otherwise, the opposing elements cancel eachother out and the spell goes piff. The only case in which a channeler doesn't have to decide upon in an element is if they are using an elementally charged focus. Then, the focus tugs on its ingrained element during the casting and brings it out no matter what.

I'm still hashing out the final details of the elemental system, cause that's a wee bit more complicated. Thoughts on magic so far? Is it limited enough withought being stifling?

*Magical unpredictability manifests itself in a few ways. Firstly, spells have an increased tendency to backFire. Secondly, spells are harder to aim. They move from being single-target to being aoe to affecting everything on the screen. Lastly, the exact effect becomes random or commingled. Fire spells can cause damage, inflict motion, or produce light. Uncontrolled (ie, undirected and/or powerful) spells will do any or all of these.

Me gusta, though I don't understand the concept of an elementally charged focus.

I like the idea of opposing elements, which I was thinking of incorporating anyway. Do we want to do the traditional air/water/earth/fire, or something else? I don't really like earth for two reasons: one being that this takes place on Rhas, not Earth, and the other being that it's sort of ambiguous what it means. Though an advantage of AWEF is that it sort of naturally forms opposing pairs (W/F and A/E). Maybe 3 pairs of opposing elements: water/fire, sky/ground, and life/death.

sky could also include lightning/electricity sorts of things. Also non-opposite elements can be combined, i.e. a meteor spell would be like sky+fire, or something involving poison could be water+death.

Elementally charged foci are just shaped to draw their respective element whenever the ethr is channeled. A staff of fire, which is fire-charged, will enhance fire effects (by drawing more fire) or modify the effects of other elements to make them more fiery.

As for elements, my idea so far:

Each element, rather than representing a constituent of reality (like the classical elements do) represents a process and two aspects of that process. For example, fire represents the process of conversion and the aspects of mass destruction and energy production. When chanelling fire, it is these aspects which are manifested, so to inflict damage, the consumptive aspect of fire is emphasized, and to move an object or light the room, the productive aspect is emphasized.

My proposed system of elements contains only Fire, Water, and Bone. Rather than a rock-paper-scissors mechanism, interactions between these elements is based upon their aspects. In any given element, each of the aspects contrasts with an aspect of each other element. When two elements interact, the contrastive aspects cancel, leaving two aspects, which, due to the system, directly contrast with the remaining element. The anti-elements are part of the same process as their corresponding normal element, but with opposite aspects (pretend that the elements are at the points of an equalateral triangle. When one element is used, a vector is drawn from that point towards the center of the triangle. If two adjacent elements are used, the vectors form a net element travelling from the center towards the last element. Ergo, the anti- will have the same properties, but opposite).

As an example of this interaction, consider the interaction between Bone, which is absorbative and sturdy, and Water, which is generative and weak. Sturdy and weak cancel out, and the remaining aspects are generativity and absorbativity, or the creation of matter and destruction of energy. This still represents the process of conversion, but in the opposite manner.

The six elements (three primary and three opposing) are:<pre class='basicprint'>
Bone Loam (anti-fire) Water Wind (anti-bone) Fire Fel (anti-water)
Sturdy Generative Generative Energetic Energetic Sturdy
Absorbative Absorbative Weak Weak Consumptive Consumptive
</pre>

This is all much more under-construction (particularly the sturdiness/weakness aspects and Fel), but I think it has the general esence of something interesting.

A thought I've had which hasn't been written up nicely yet is that the fire/loam process represents the conversion between mass and energy, the water/fel process represents the conversion between one type of mass and another, and the bone/wind process represents the conversion between different types of energy. If this is the case, sturdiness/weakness REALLY needs to be revised, but that was always just a placeholder.

<span rel='lightbox'><img src='http://i.imgur.com/UsYjU.png' alt='Posted Image' class='bbc_img' /></span>

You have 4 things for creating/destroying matter/energy. Maybe you need 2 more things for creating/destroying something that is created by bone and destroyed by water. I was going to suggest life, which fits with bone, but not really with water, as it creates life. Maybe water should be replaced with something that turns life into matter. Also, water and bone aren't really "processes" like fire is. Bone could be changed to "body" which sort of implies bodily functions, but it still isn't really explicitly a process, and "metabolism" just sounds clunky.

The element names/physical forms would represent processes, not be processes in themselves, so while water certainly isn't a process, it nicely represents the process of, say, erosion.

I like your idea of introducing a third thing that gets created and destroyed, as that would make the system a wee bit neater. I'm toying with the idea of this being focus/consciousness/mana, because I'm not sure how spells would distinguish between matter and life. (Take, for instance, a damage inducing spell. Would this rely on life destruction or matter destruction?

Other miscellaneous ideas I've had (which probably won't work out) is to have the water/antiwater process be erosion and growth/sedimentation. The main problem with this is that water (and similarly, time) constitutes both halves of this process, making it kinda like a neutrino (it's own anti-particle). I was also considering making the bone/wind process about either defense/offense or motion/stillness, but neither of those are particularly neat or interesting.

Maybe we could eschew the process thingy for elements if it doesn't work out nicely and instead give them two adjectivy properties which govern what their magic does. This would yield something like what I had originally, but we could replace sturdy/weak with something more interesting.

Do you like this type of system of elements at all or do you think a more classical one would work better? There's also the idea of having the combined elements represent a cycle, rather than each individual one represent a process.

Maybe water could be equated with time

Whatever we do, there should be some sort of pattern/structure to the elemental system, partly because it's cool, and partly so the player can be reasonably expected to figure it out based on the limited information available.

I'm writing up an intro/prologue thing, and when I finish it (probs this evening) I'll also post some ideas for elemental thingies.

new idea! (sorry for spamming this ever so slightly)

So I was thinking it odd how fire and water are generally considered natural opposites when earth and fire just seemed a nicer fit to me. However, making earth and fire opposites left a gap in what the opposite of water could be. My thought, then, was to have fire have TWO opposites, and what more natural way to do this then inscribing each of the elements on the corners of a pentagon?

So my pentagon of elements was then (clockwise, thought it doesn't really matter) Water, Loam, Bone, Fire, and Wind. This gives each element two opposites, Water having Bone and Fire, Loam having Fire and Air, Bone having Air, and Water, etc, and also two neighbors (strengtheners?), making it so that it had a relationship with each of the other elements.

A natural step from there is to say that any element is the product of its two neighbors; Loam is the combination of Bone and Water, Fire of Bone and Wind (maybe the bone of the Abr is carbon based?), Wind of Water and Fire, etc. This only leaves the slightly awkward Loam + Wind = Water, but things could be shimmied a bit to make that make more sense.

One could also give each element a primary opposite and a secondary opposite, so Fire and Loam are primary opposites, as are Bone and Air. This leaves Water with two secondary opposites, but that kinda makes sense, as Water (and Time!) is its own undoer. It creates, but it also erodes. This could also set water apart as an object of worship, as it is different from all of the other things.

So yeah. If you think the pentagon is a better organization then the double triangle, the remaining questions are:

1) How do interactions between neighboring elements work
2) Do we keep the process/two aspects thing? Just the two aspects? What do the elements represent if not processes?
3) How does this tie into the magic system?

Okay. That's it. Thoughts?