Ideas for a new Affinity System

Sephiroth · (This post was last modified: 09-30-2015, 10:09 AM by Sephiroth.)

(09-30-2015, 01:47 AM)WindStrike Wrote: I feel really dumb all of a sudden. We used to have a simpler system for this crap. The reason it got replaced was cause it didn't scale well, but if that's the case, then we can just stick a x2 multiplier on it, boom fixed. So yeah, this is what it used to be, plus the x2 multiplier.

Affinity Bonus:

If your Affinity is strong against the target's Affinity, you gain Successes equal to your Affinity Level * 2.

Affinity Loss:

If your Affinity is weak against the target's Affinity, you lose Successes equal to the target's Affinity Level * 2.

... who's up for switchin' back to that level of nice simplicity?

And how well does this work for multi-affinity? Plus, then we (as players) would need to figure this out and evaluate it for sending in the action line to the DM during planning phases. Yay more work for planning phases!

WindStrike · (This post was last modified: 09-30-2015, 11:31 AM by WindStrike.)

Uhh, you have to figure it out during the planning phase anyways, no matter what system we have in place, unless we removed it.

Multi-affinity works super easy... it's just both Affinity Bonus and Affinity Loss. No weird out-of-place "uhhh, let's use something different for multi-affinity":

Fire (Level: 5) vs. Water (Level: 2) and Nature (Level: 3)
- 2 * (5 - 2) = +6
Shadow (Level: 1) vs. Light (Level: 2) and Shadow (Level: 10)
- 2 * (1 - 10) = -18

Formula is just "(Affinity Bonus - Affinity Loss) * 2"

Nimono · 09-30-2015, 07:14 PM

I'd like to go ahead and publicly state my support for Lunaria's system, which is to completely cut bonuses and losses out of the base rules and instead apply them directly to the spells and weapons- this allows each individual attack to have its own bonuses and losses against each affinity, allowing their individual strengths to be strengthened/weakened, as opposed to being a flat success increase/decrease for everything.

The only drawback is that it turns affinity levels into just deciding what spells you can get, but I don't really see it as that big of a deal?

WindStrike · 09-30-2015, 08:52 PM

As long as the higher level spells scale that bonus/loss higher, it essentially mimics our current ruleset that scales with higher affinity levels.

I believe there was also a suggestion to split Nature into Earth and Wind, and the Elemental Cycle would then look like:

Fire is strong against Wind is strong against Earth is strong against Water is strong against Fire
Fire is weak against Water is weak against Earth is weak against Wind is weak against Fire

I'm not against this per se, but unless there's a significant benefit to actually switching to this and having enough ideas to support splitting an Affinity into two, then it won't happen. That said, I need an idea list of spells to go for each of those Affinities along with overall themes. If there's not at least 10 spell ideas for each (and we're referring to the revamped spells that have more of a purpose than our existing super situational spells), then we ought just stick with the current number of Affinities, otherwise we'd have to potentially backtrack a bunch of work that turned out to be for nothing.

Sephiroth · (This post was last modified: 10-02-2015, 10:35 AM by Sephiroth.)

Fire is strong against Wind is strong against Earth is strong against Water is strong against Fire
Fire is weak against Water is weak against Earth is weak against Wind is weak against Fire

We could have Wind encompass Storm-style abilities, usually dealing with wind movement and lightning/electricity...
Earth could deal with rooting, thorns, vines, rock abilities, the like..

If Wind and Earth doesn't have color, clear cache and refresh.

Spoiler

Nimono · 10-11-2015, 11:48 AM

Alright, here's a suggestion of my own that I know that NO ONE will ever accept, but discussion, lol!

No affinity levels, you only get two affinities, max. One during the tutorial, the at some arbitrary level like 15, 20, 25, or 30. probably 15 or 20; the second may or may not be optional. Spells could be cast regardless of affinity (though level requirements always apply), but not having the affinity of the spell makes it weaker, such as reducing its damage and/or removing/weakening its effect. Bonus/loss would be either written into the spells, or a flat "damage multiplied/divided by X", where X is some arbitrary number we decide is balanced like 1.5 or 2 or whatever.