Do the elements that you prefer using in RPG based games reflect your personality and/or personal ideals?

Water magic most versatile, counters the most common element.

I always found it intriguing how her blue fire sometimes acted like a blade or a concussive blast than regular fire.

Never by themselves.
I do have a tendency towards Ice or Electricity, since they tend to have secondary effects I value, but this isn't anything about the elements themselves. I do also believe that lightning magic tends to be the most well animated in vidya.
If it fits my need, I'll gladly use anything. I'll be the Love wizard if it suits the situation.

I dislike elemental systems like the one you posted, because there is always, ALWAYS some bullshit going on between Wind and Earth. Is Wind weak to fire in this game? Does Ice arbitrarily loose to Earth this time? Does Wind erode earth in this world, or does a stone bring down a bird?
Light/Dark circlejerks also suck. I prefer multiple triangles to that garbage, or even better, webs.
Asymmetric webs are even better. Have Fire both beat and loose to a lot of stuff, have water resist a bunch, but only hurt a few, have Thunder form nonaggression pacts with most of the web, except it trumps Light and Dark, but gets shitstomped by Earth.

I've used all the elements, so not really. You can find a way to make all the elements relate to yourself, because hey: people aren't so flat that they can be defined by a single element.

That's kind of the whole POINT, really. A person is a balance of multiple aspects. Believing yourself to only be aligned to one is merely a tool to solidify the image you present to others. It'll never be ALL of you.

Light element is the way to go, desu senpai

Should lightning/electricity be its own element or should be it be coupled with either air or fire? Air because storms and fire because high energy and heat.

Personally I despise the association of elements to personality traits.

The meme hurts storytelling more than helps.

I usually go for dark since I'm a fucking edge lord

I always try to go with lightning. It's powerful, wild, gives no shits, and is super intimidating compared to most of the other elements. I'd like to be, but I don't think I'm any of these things.

Lightning is a combination of both Air and Fire. Just like Ice is a combination of Air and Water. Not sure if that makes them sub elements or super elements though.

Does it matter?

What's the personality of a semen element-aligned person?

Semen is a sub/super element of Earth and Water, like mud and poison. They're calm and amicable, but if you get on their bad side they are unwavering in their vengeance.

Why designed this picture?
Water ascends into fire instead of ice.
Fire ascends into ice? whut?
Wind ascends into earth. I mean really?
Wind the element of change, freedom, unbound and movement ascends into the element of earth.
Earth the element of stagnant, strength, unmoving and enduring.

It's obviously and elemental rock paper scissors chart. There is no ascension.

I usually just pack as many elements as i can. I guess i'm stuck in videogame mentality, wanting to prepare for anything. Outside that, though, i'll just pick one depending on the sort of effects it provides. Usually all or non-elemental.

At least it's better than having one element which doesn't link at all with any other element.

It literally says Ascendant in the picture.

Ascendant means this thing beats that thing, not this thing turns into that thing.

So Pokemon?

...

Mostly depends on the system and setting.

I prefer the holy/light magic because of healing, started as liking the Idea of paladins being knights in shining armor, and turned into my go to from being able to do ridiculous things just because I have healing in WoW.

Second choice going Fire/ice, mostly due to whatever monstrosity of a talent tree my Vanilla/TBC mage had, which worked surprisingly well. Something about being able to render someone immobile before melting their flesh off.

I tend to lean towards whatever is holy. If there is no such thing I go with the most resourceful element, usually air/wind earth.

You got the 101 one as well?

retrohelix.com/2013/08/super-ultra-ultimate-rock-paper-scissors/

Thank you senpai!

I love playing with Earth magic. There's a lot you can do with it, whether it's tremors, sand, ore, magma etc.

no prob moe blob

Should really have Light and Dark as complementing powers
>no shadows without light
>without shadows, nothing can stand the light

of course you'd then have to have a counter pairing of two other elements maybe >no chasitity without semen
>but what is semen without chastity to give it spice?

I just realized that is a shitty use of the word "ascendant"

How the fuck does gun beat tree?

By shooting at it, dummy

Guns are made of wood.

Explanation of some of these would be nice.
Sponge>Devil?
Wolf>Lightning?
Paper>Gun?
Snake>Air?
Rock>Sponge?

cleansed of sin
howling something
make a mask
breathing
and rock is tougher i guess

No.

Elemental powers are shit and darkness and light aren't real elements.

The real question is what do you even want the elements to do, in relation to each other?
Is it just to give damage bonuses and penalties?
Is it to stop other powers from functioning?

>hotblooded readhead fire guy

It's like I'm a teenager again.

Neither are fire or water.

I've really been digging the Chinese styles lately
Do any RPGs make good use of them?

>Asymmetric webs are even better. Have Fire both beat and loose to a lot of stuff, have water resist a bunch, but only hurt a few, have Thunder form nonaggression pacts with most of the web, except it trumps Light and Dark, but gets shitstomped by Earth.
I like this. Good job user.

I kind of want to implement the DC Lantern Corps color spectrum as an elemental system. Any Ideas how you'd go about doing that?

I'm drunk

Point in case, there was an image to go with that post.

From the vidya Gemcraft they have the different colors add different effect to your attacks. It would be less of a x>y>z>x system and more of this one is better for this and that one is better for that. For example, the yellow crit gems are great when supported heavily but pretty trashy when solo covering a path or with low cash investments. The green DOT gems are pretty much the reverse where they can clear weak waves with next to no investment but will never be the late wave murder engine stacked with 9 amplifiers. Then you have stuff like cyan, blue, and purple that strip max hp, speed, and armor but are not big damage dealers themselves.

Something like that might make more sense for a spectrum of emotions than rock, paper, scissors, mushrooms.

What the fuck is this Tumblr shit level post?

You pick whatever element is build around a play style that suits you the most, mechanically speaking, not because "green goes well with my eyes".

I use Green because when I shoot green lasers from my mouth, it looks like I'm puking.

It's FFXI

>Elemental powers are shit

If you got a better way of doing I'd love to know.

Shadow and light don't really fit into a straight scissor paper rock element system system. But you'll be remiss to forget them all the same.

>personality wise
Pretty asocial, live-and-let-live type, so I guess earth would be the best type, maybe with a bit of wind thrown in.

>favourite Element
Fire and Darkness. Darkness mostly for the aesthetic as I really dislike blatently having a Good/Evil element you can just tell by looking at.
Fire for the Phoenix imagery, I prefer it as a force of progress, a symbol of passion etc. rather than blind destruction.

Those playstyles are usually based in the concepts associated with the elements, and some us like to worldbuild so we actually get to decide those playstyles.
I. e. Light is more likely to have a bunch of anti-evil spells and healing because it is strongly associated with holyness. Fire is basicly guaranteed to have a damage-over-time effect that actully sets stuff on fire.

Not him, but i do have an idea.
Add two other elements and separate shadow from darkness in the process.
Light creates shadows, and supports it.
Shadows take down, we'll say void, since the presence of shadows implies a lack of complete void.
Dark destroys shadows since there's no light to make them.
Light prevents darkness from being there.
In shorthand, Light>Dark>Shadow>Void>Light

>light is goodness, life, happiness and merciful justice
>dark is evil, death, insanity, suffering
BUT BOTH MUST EXIST AND LIGHT IS NOT ACTUALLY PURE GOOD AND IT'S GREY MORALITY

WoW just pulled this. First they released a new lore book establishing the above beyond doubt (and not from the PoV of any in-universe source) then they went ahead and wrote some shit about how the light is selfish and evil in its war against demons

>Light>Dark>Shadow>Void

Hmm... I like you're thinking but having Dark and Shadow as two different elements seems redundant.

What about this, if Dark is Evil and Good is light, you added an elemental stabd in for chaos and order?

Warcraft's "the light" is a different thing than light. The light is more like a positive energy plane in D&D than electromagnetic radiation.

>Dark is Evil and Good is light
How about going yin and yang instead of the billionth iteration of "dark bad?" I would strongly suggest at least thinking about hot-cold as another complementary pairing of dissimilar effects using the same source. I find this a more straight forward pairing than ice vs fire, which separates cold water and hot air from other water and air.

>WoW just pulled this
So you just gonna ignore Lothraxion who got light-corrupted?

Yin isn't "bad" but it is "dark". So it's kind of covering the same ground. Hot & Cold isn't bad, but it's little too close to Ice & Fire.

I don't know, maybe instead of being treating light and dark philosophy, it's literal. Next to Noise and silence

Hmm. In addition to light and dark, we'll have time and life.

With time, light fades away and gives way to dark.
Life spends, consumes and wastes time.
Darkness twists life (see: deep sea species, some mushrooms, endives)
And again, light drives the dark away to shadows.
Dark>Life>Time>Light>Dark

This is something that I have been messing with. Thoughts?

>So it's kind of covering the same ground.
Only if you make it. You can go full Taoist. Something having a front and a back tells as much about the observer as the observed. Walking up and down a hill doesn't imply up or down are better or more useful, they can't occur without the other, and where the slope up and down are depend on the direction you walk.

Hot and cold is close to fire and ice. That is the point. The point is also to separate thermal energy from implied states of matter or composition. Particularly if there are other elements being defined by states of matter or compositions. Water is normally what gets most abused by this. Depending on how hot water is makes it a solid, liquid, or gas. This is true for most matter as well but in different temperature/pressure ranges. Is water vapor part of the element water or air? If you want to make the water element cover liquids, does it now cover molten metal and lava? Is ice cold stuff or solids? Or literally just solid water? Iron is a solid at 1500C. Is hot iron fire, ice, earth, or metal? I feel any element system is flawed if they can't answer the above self consistently.

Missing a season? Might want to figure out a way to rename your seasons into something that makes sense as a trio.

That's a good point.
I didn't mention that my campaign doesn't have a winter, just a rainy season that roughly correlated to autumn. If I wanted to adapt it to a more universal setting, I should probably rename it.

More like casters have a set amount of either "charge" they can build up - casting dark magic builds up dark charge and they start to become darker, their shadows thickers, their edges more defined, and cast too much and they are consumed by it and disappear into their shadows.

Similarly casting light magic builds up light charge and the caster becomes less substantial, more transparent both physically and in terms of deed and word, overly earnest and their thoughts become simpler until they are consumed by the light and vanish.

A caster thus has to balance their use of both magics, carefully using dark magic to counter their lightness, even deliberatelly over using one or the other so that they can use its opposite more in times of need.

in mechanical terms, they have two meters representing their maximum amount of "darkness" and "lightness", and every time they cast a spell they add points of the relevent "ness" to that meter UNLESS they have some pre-existing points of the opposite "ness" which they instead lose before adding lightness, so someone with max 4 points of light or dark would only be able to cast two 2 point spells of either in a row, but if they cast a light spell for 2 points, then a 3 point dark spell, they'd have only 1 point of darkness afterwards, because the lightness from the spell is subtracted first before adding any darkness.
one side effect of this is that a particularly emo, dark & edgy character with large max darkness and average lightness maximum can cast light spells far in excess of someone with the converse maximums - similarly a character who's sweetness and light is a truly awesome negromancer

Shadow > Light > Darkness > Shadow
You can't have shadow without light
Light removes darkness
Darkness is a greater form of shadow, and shadows do not exist in darkness
You can't remove shadows with light because you just create more shadows.

Fuck me someone pay me a million dollars.

Hell this even works in making Light evil because Light wants to delete everything so that there are no more shadows, it's only weakness.
Darkness is neutral because it just exists, kind of dislikes light but it's not interested in a war because Darkness will eventually win even if it does nothing at all as long as Light doesn't destroy everything but itself.
Shadow is caught between a rock and a hard place having to preserve balance to continue existing.

That is terrible and you are terrible. Shadows are just darkness next to light. You can, in fact, remove shadows/darkness with more lights.

Yeah and cold is just a lack of heat which is a lack of energy.
There is no such thing as "wind" it's just molecules in the air moving.
There is no such thing as "earth" because "earth" is made up of the same atoms everything else is made out of.
Remember that we are talking about fiction and magic, sperg.

>Yeah and cold is just a lack of heat which is a lack of energy.

COUNTER POINT: nudity is just a lack of clothing, so if cold can be a magical element so can nudity.

That's true. Something for my muscle wizard to specialize in.

actually makes sense in D&D that Armor/Nudity might be elemental powers, given how many mechanics and how central to class dynamics that dichotomy is.