PaladinPolecat

I was originally planning on my second journal in this series being on weapon diversity and ways to distinguish classes of weapons in a turn-based RPG. I was also planning on doing so months earlier, like sometime last year. I started having some interesting thoughts on status conditions first, though. One thing that made me think of this was just how overcomplicated they were in a couple of what are, allegedly, tutorial/beginner RPGs. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest has numerous conditions like its SNES brothers, Final Fantasy 4, 5, and 6. It has multiple forms of "you can't do anything this turn" (Sleep, Paralysis, Petrify, and I believe Stop) and no real control of choosing between immunity/resistance to any of them at a given time without being immune to certain ones in a specific predetermined order. Paralysis turns whatever you try to do into a crapshoot; some of the time you can act, some of the time you can't, and it wears off on its own with time. Sleep makes you always miss your

I've given a lot of thought to the way elemental damage type effectiveness tends to work in RPGs and a few other games. I figured a journal to share my thoughts and my recent decision for most of my upcoming game projects. You have your four classic Greek elements of fire, water, air, and earth. This can create a nice set of two pairs of "opposites" for thematic reasons; monsters/characters aligned with one element are the opposite of those aligned to the other. Fire is hot, water is cold. Fire is impulsive, water is restrained. Air is flighty and undisciplined, earth is staid and stable. Where pairs of opposites don't work well is in gameplay fun or balance. If opposites do double damage to each other - fire double to water but also water double to fire - then fights between the two don't really fit elemental differences as a theme, but just get over quicker. If you have eight elements of Fire, Ice, Water, Air, Earth, Lightning, Light, and Darkness but each one only interacts with