Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5752950" data-attributes="member: 32536">The concept of Blue Mages is that they learn the skills of the monsters they fight. In the earliest incarnations of this ability, this meant either getting hit by a learnable attack or merely watching the attack be performed. Later versions of the concept introduced the idea of learning a monster's abilities by eating either a part of the monster or the whole monster itself. The most recent version of the Blue Mage (from FF11) features the idea that Blue Mages become rather monsterlike in the process of mastering their art, requiring them to conceal their appearances as a result. What is more, most of the major Blue Mage attacks tend to utilize a monsterous physiology (breathing fire rather than conjuring it up, shooting eye lasers rather than firing a magic missile, hardening the body rather than raising a magic shield, etc). As such, Blue Mages are best seen as mages who partially transform themselves into the monsters they learn from in order to use their skills.Personally, I think it is better to take more from the flavor built up with the later Blue Mages rather than copy the skill-stealing implementation. It would be extremely difficult to create any way to sort through monster statblocks and figure out which skills can work when used by the player and which skills can't. It would be a nightmare of rules to make it work. It would also be difficult to keep some of the classic flavor of Blue Magic that way. It would be better to have a list of powers like any other class, with a few special mechanics to emphasize the "becoming a monster" aspect. For example, borrowing FF11's mechanics of Blue Mages gaining potent passive bonuses based on which attack skills they have learned might work.</blockquote>

Verification