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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Undrave" data-source="post: 8006881" data-attributes="member: 7015698">So this is an idea that's been percolating in my mind for the last few days and I could use some brainstorming partners... <img src="https://i.imgur.com/l8WISq1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Now, for those not familiar with the JRPG series of games for GBA and Nintendo DS, Golden Sun, I will go over the basic. In the game you can find these little elemental spirits called Djinn who come into four flavor: Venus (Earth), Mars (Fire), Jupiter (Wind) and Mercury (Water) and they have a very interesting way of being used. It's one of the most interesting system in the games that make the serie stand out(alongside the overworld puzzles) and it basically goes like this: First, your characters can 'equip' those Djinn. The Djinn grants your character a stat boost, and plays into the game's class system, granting you extra Psyenergy (AKA spells). When in battle, however, you can 'Unleash' one of your equipped Djinn as your action for the turn. This grants you various effect, usually a strong elemental attack, but also buffs to the party or heals and status cancelling. Doing so, obviously, negates the stat buff you were getting, so it's a trade off. Then, once they have been unleashed like this, the Djinns sorta floats around you and you can then use them as fuel for summons! Powerful AOE abilities that can use multiple Djinn at once (the more you use, the more powerful they get). After being spent this way, the Djinns are deactivated for a certain number of rounds (or a certain number of steps on the overworld). After that time has passed they gt re-set to your character as equip. Basically, the way I envision it working for 5e is like this: At the end of your Long Rest you meditate and get X number of elemental spirits to 'bond' with your character, granting you passive buffs. The buffs would be on a ladder, basically granting more and more buffs as you get more of them. In battle you can Unleash those spirits to perform a specific action (that would probably be decided by the element instead of individual actions). After doing so, you can bond with them again with a Short Rest, OR you can use the released spirits to do a bigger move, usually reproducing a spell. Doing so, however, would spend the spirit until your next long rest. Seems simple enough, but I run into a few snags... First is that, while all the characters in the game can use Magic to a certain extant, not all of the characters are 'caster' archetypes. You roughly have four archetypes, IMO, the 'Hero' (who is generally more of a weapon user but has a good balance of defense and offense) the 'Bruiser' (uses axes, has strong offense, lesser defense and lesser spell casting), the 'Caster' and the 'Healer'. And the thing is that, aside from the main character always being a Earth user, the other roles can be any of the elements. Furthermore, while it would be easy to just say 'make one subclass per element' (putting aside that it wouldn't work with the idea that each element can be each archetype) , this doesn't take into account the fact that you CAN equip Djinns from whatever element you want. The games' characters have a natural element they can use, and equipping djinn of that element makes them stronger, but you can access special psyenergy by mixing and matching elements. So I was thinking the basic Equip bonuses would be on the base class starting at level 1, and at Level 1 you'd pick an Elemental Afinity that would give you some bonuses as you went on in level, but you'd be able to pick whatever element (or combination of elements) you want at each long rest, and you would also pick your subclass/archetype at level 1. You'd have one that grants you heavy armor proficiency, one that grants you only medium armor but gives you stronger weapons, and two that grants you some more spellcasting... but then I can't just give them whatever, I'd have to make list per elemental affinity for each casting archetype to keep the theme strong... Do you guys think it would be too much work for nothing? Would it be interesting or too fiddly a class? Should I just make a Fightery Elemental Class and Cleric-y Elemental class with two subclass each amd the same Elemental Spirit bonuses? Should I bolt this principle onto other classes instead? Like slap it on the Fighter and the Barbarian or one of the Spellcaster and have multiple subclasses using the elemental spirit system the way we have Psionic classes? This feel like I wouldn't have much design space for interesting effects and I would run into the limited theme thing of the spellcasters. Or maybe I should just keep the idea in my bac pocket and build a whole system based on the world of Golden Sun <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> What's the best path here?</blockquote>

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