Super Duper Forum Role Play Idea 6000

Ok so I've been trying to come up with a concept for a forum role play recently; Or more specifically, with a combat system that relies more on skill and strategy than luck. So I googled a little bit and came up with the following idea:

The game takes place in a dream-sort-of world, and each character has attributes that correspond to his mental capabilities. These attributes are based directly on Gardner's hypothesis of multiple intelligences. So every character has 9 attributes/intelligences:

• Spatial
  
• Interpersonal
  
• Intrapersonal
  
• Musical
  
• Logical-Mathematical
  
• Existential
  
• Kinethetic
  
• Linguistic
  
• Enviromental
  

Secondly, there are many elements which blend with each intelligence and are modified accordingly, such as:

• Life
  
• Dark
  
• Earth
  
• Thunder
  
• Frost
  
• Water
  
• Wind
  

etc

Thirdly, the combat takes place on an octagonal grid and spells cost Focus Points.

So now let's explain the mechanic about elements and attributes.

Spatial basically translates to "Area of Effect" and other related area effects. So if we combine Spatial with Dark we get spells such as "Obscure in Area" (Hides allies for a limited amount of time), "Obscure in Line" (Same effect, different distrubution), "Dark Teleport" (Teleport AND obscure) and "Dark Switch" (Switches the position of 2 people on the grid). Likewise we can combine Spatial with Water for "Wave in Area" (Damage and knockback, but MUST BEGIN from sea terrain), Rain in Area (Induces the "wet" status and adds chance for slippery). For Wind we have the likes of Tornado and "Directional Wind in Area" and for Earth earthquake and meteor shower.

Next is interpersonal, which is a pure status related attribute. Interpersonal governs spells such as "Rock Armor on Other"(Earth), "Find Charge on Other"(Thunder) and "Dispell Buoyancy on other"(Water). Now you might be wondering what's up the find spell. Well in this game status effects are invisible and you must find them. So someone must use "Find X on Other" on you in order for the whole team (and you) to know any potential statuses.

Intrapersonal is similar, but it deals with you. So instead of "Find X on Other" you have "Find X on Self" etc.

Musical governs spells which affect all combatants or the whole grid without any discriminination. A few examples include "Rain Everywhere", "Charge on All" and "Kite on All"(Wind).

Logical-Mathematical allows you to predict the damage and knockback of spells, analyse terrain types for potential enemies as well decude the skillset of a combatant. For example if an enemy attacks someone you can use "Deduce Earth Capability" to find the combatant's efficiency in casting several Earth spells.

Existential is all about Summoning companions to assist you in combat, although I haven't really fleshed this attribute out.

Kinesthetic is mostly about dealing damage to a single target, as well as moving through various terrain types. Spells include "Life Leech Punch"(Life), "Dig"(Earth), "Fly"(Wind), "Dive"(Water) and "Thunder Punch"(Thunder).

Linguistic is the attribute of precision and allows you to apply status conditions on all combatants that fullfil specific conditions, such as moving and/or casting a spell from a specific element. Includes "Conditioned Charge", "Conditioned Wet" etc.

Enviromental is the last attribute and probably is the most interesting. This is an attribute specialized in modifying terrain in specific ways. "Set Sea Terrain" creates sea terrian octagons which must be swimed through but are dangerous for enemies with low Water Attunement and Kinesthetic Intelligence. Other options include "Set Charged Terrain", "Set Mountain Terrain", "Set Chasm" and "Obscure Terrain".

So now let's talk about status conditions. These allow combatants to interact with terrain types, other combatants and attacks in unique ways:

EARTH

• Rock Armor: Knockback resist, More Armor, dissolves in sea. 
  

WATER

• Wet: More damage from Thunder attacks, less damage from Fire attacks.
  
• Liquidification: Adds evade change. More knockback suffered.
  
• Buoyancy: Can walk on Sea Terrain.
  

WIND

• Kite: Nullifies damage suffered from Wind spells, but increases knockback.
  

THUNDER

• Charge: Can be positive (+) or negative (-). Combatants with the same charge cause knockback to each other, but combatants with different charge are attracted to each other.
  

So each character has Attribures, as well as attunement for each element. For example, if Guy has 50 Kinesthetic and 42 Life Attunement, his "Life Leech Punch" is to have an intensity of (50 + 42)/2 = 92/2 = 45 + 1 = 46. Simple, right?

This needs to be fleshed out alot more, but I think it's a good start for a balanced Combat System that is simple and allows for creativity. Instead of judging numerical values, all information you'll ever need will be in the grid in an optical manner (combatant placement, terrain types etc)

 example of an octagon grid. Note that the squares are not part of passable/usable terrain; only the octagons.

I'm personally not a role-playing type, but I thought I'd just mention that Gardner only posited 8. "Existential" intelligence is generally not accepted. So I guess you have no need to flesh that one out.

Dry wrote:

I'm personally not a role-playing type, but I thought I'd just mention that Gardner only posited 8. "Existential" intelligence is generally not accepted. So I guess you have no need to flesh that one out.

Yeah, I'll think about it. Thanks.

I'll try to add more stuff and clarify some extra parameters.

Well, I have a couple of ideas for you to consider:

What about making the 8/9 attributes purely the "stats", rather than also making them the types of moves? At the moment, it seems that each stat governs the effectiveness of each corresponding type of move, but that could be a little vague. What does it mean to be good at modifying terrain? I'm thinking that maybe you could look for other sources for the move types, and have the intelligence attributes as stats, which govern how good the character is independently.

Following on from that, I think the stats should reflect what defines each attribute in real life. Here are my ideas for what each stat could represent:

- Kinesthetic: Mobility. As both of these are the only physical aspects of intelligence and the game, respectively, I thought this was an obvious fit.

- Interpersonal: Offence.

- Intrapersonal: Defence. These two are fairly intuitive.

- Spatial: "Accuracy". Since you obviously don't want chance-based accuracy, I'm thinking that this could instead be applied to status moves, so that status moves only work if a certain inequality between the user's Spatial and the enemy's Spatial is satisfied. So, for example, a very weak status move could have "high" accuracy by only requiring that the user's Spatial be above a certain point. A more powerful status move could require that the user's Spatial be a certain amount above the opponent's Spatial.

- Logical: Focus Points. To reflect logical intelligence's role as arguably the most representative of traditional intelligence, maybe Logical could be the amount or the regeneration rate of focus points.

- Linguistic: Growth. Now, what if there were a system for you to increase the values of all your attributes during the game? That's something you could think about. If that idea came to fruition, maybe verbal intelligence could represent the ability for the character to gain points in attributes, making this the ultimate long-term attribute.

- Musical: Type Effectiveness. Given that there are elements like water, thunder, etc. it probably makes sense to have some sort of rock-paper-scissors/Pokemon-style type advantages and disadvantages system. In which case, Musical could represent the extent to which these advantages apply? For example, if you have terrible Musical, your "super-effective" attack would only do slightly more damage. On the other hand, if you specialise in Musical, you would do an incredible amount of bonus damage from a type advantage. I've chosen this stat for Musical for a somewhat esoteric reason; musical intelligence is probably best described as the ability to detect formants/harmonics at specific values, which in a sense is like the ability to find weak points in a fantasy combat game.

- Environmental: Extent to which you are affected by different terrain.

I guess that, actually, you can have the same types of attacks you mentioned in the OP (so AoE, single target, self-target, modify terrain, etc.), just that they would no longer be tied to the intelligence attributes.

Also, since you've gone relatively scientific for the intelligence attributes, maybe you could do something similar for the element types? Now I'm not a chemist, so I don't know any of this stuff in much detail, but maybe you could look for different chemical classifications. For example, states of matter: you'd have the typical gas, solid, liquid and plasma, then also the far-out ones like dark matter, copolymers, and other stuff beyond my knowledge.

Or instead you could think about "destructive elements", i.e. methods by which atoms or molecules are displaced from their original position. The advantage to this is that it translates very well to classical RPG elements. For example, heat would be fire type, dissolution would be water type, air pressure mechanisms would be wind type, etc. Something to think about.

Thanks for the feedback Dry!

The reason why I decided to distance this project, as a concept, from more classical rpgs was mostly in order to make combat less reliant on numbers and more reliant on smart spell combinations. In fact the whole system was built with combos in mind, such as:

*Set Sea Terrain
*Cast Directional Wind to push an enemy that can't swim into the water.

or you could cast charge (+) and charge (-) to a pair of enemies between a sea octagon, and get them to enter into it.

Nevertheless I like your ideas. I'm not sure if I'm going to seperate the intelligences from the spells but I might apply the bonuses you proposed in small extents. I want little math and I prefer for the information required/conveyed to be mostly optical. This is because I theorize that it should be far more natural to a person to make in decision by optical information.

As for the elements, I like the classical elements because they are easier to make spells for and plus,  the combat is always supposed to take place in dreams of people, so I think it makes sense.

Ah, less reliance on numbers. That makes sense.

In which case, your OP is still the way to go, but I'm just wondering if the choice of assignment of the different types of intelligences shouldn't be different somehow. It seems at the moment that the choice of what each intelligence attribute does is based entirely on lexical grounds: so Spatial, for example, concerns "space", because "spatial" comes from "space" and "space" in this sense is AoE. Spatial takes on a different meaning in an intelligence setting. This is not to say that they've been assigned "wrong"; Interpersonal and intrapersonal, for example, I feel are perfect. But others less so. I'll have a think about it and get back to you.