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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 3772668" data-attributes="member: 32536">I would prefer to see greater unity between the ideas of elements and energies... If the base cosmolgy of D&D assumes four inner planes of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air, then why does magic ignore those elements completely, instead focusing on the elemental triad of Fire, Lightning, and Ice, with a few Acid and Sonic types thrown in randomly? It doesn't make much sense to me...The energy types and the elements should match. Whether that means changing the energy types to fit the elements, or changing the elements to match the energy types, or finding a suitable compromise, I don't know, but something needs to be done.There are two good archetypes for handling this... the historical system approach, or the game system approach.The historical system approach would be to take one of the two or three main elemental sets, such as the classical Fire, Air, Water, Earth, the real Aristotalean Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Aether (which matches the Japanese fifth element of Void/Sky very well), or the Taoist set of Fire, Water, Wood, Earth, and Metal. From the chosen set, create the inner planes and associated energy types.The game system approach would be to find a decent set of elements that are easy to design spells for, and then build the elemental system upon that. Like the common Fire, Ice, and Lighting set seen in countless videogames, the Fire, Lighting, Wind, Light, and Dark set from Fire Emblem, the Fire, Earth, Water, Wind, and Lighting set from Suikoden, etc. In this situation, you either design the iner planes according to what works best for gameplay, or the elements as a whole are not referred to outside of the energy types.Regardless, there are a few things that could be done to simplify things. It would probably be best if, like in most videogames, there is no distinction made between Water and Ice elements. Also, following the pattern set by Avatar the Last Airbender, mixing Fire and Lightning is a good idea if you don't want lightining to be its own element. Lightning doesn't work well as the Wind energy, simply because wind is more functionable than many classical elements as an attack type, and thus Lightning would be crowding out something interesting. Acid as an energy type is ridiculous, and Sonic is also rather strange, especially with how it is named and portrayed right now.Earth, Metal, and Wood are all tricky elements because people tend to question how they would be different than a normal physical attack. I guess Wind and Water are similar (even the obvious thought of Ashyxiation attacks is no different between those five elements). Of course, by that logic, Fire, Ice, and Acid are all the same, since in the end all they do is burn and destroy living tissue... The point of elements is determining how a creature reacts to particular attributes of an attack, so I say even having Earth as an element is important. Though in this argument, Metal weapons should count as metal-elemental, wooden weapons would count as Wood elemental, and stone weapons would be Earth elemental.Ugh, I hope my arguments come across coherently...</blockquote>

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