The Elementalist (Patreon)

Hey Folks! Matt Colville here. James is on a short but much needed break and I am happy to keep the stream train rolling all night long in his absence.

Last week we talked about The Power Roll and how it came about, what problems we think it solves, and why we’re excited about it. There has been some REALLY GOOD discussion about it in the Patrons Only channel of the Discord which I encourage you to check out.

Folks really seem to grasp the…ah…power of this idea and how versatile it is. I literally just saw someone mention “The difference between rolling 7 damage and 8 damage is not significant. But the difference between getting the second-tier result on a power roll, vs the third-tier? Could be HUGE.” And there are lots of other cool ideas for how we could use this.

I said this in that channel but, at the end of the day, I don’t think the Power Roll itself will be the thing that excites people or turns people off. It’s what we do with it. If all we do is implement different tiers of damage? Well that’s not that exciting. But if folks see innovation in the power roll? Ways in which the power roll unlocks new mechanics or supports cool new ideas? That’s exciting. So the only question is; how cool can these things get?

Well there’s no way to know right now. Me and James got LOTS of cool ideas. Some will survive testing, some won’t. And we hope to work with other designers who bring their own novel ideas to the table!

In the meantime, we’re just scratching the surface of what can be done with the Power Roll (“Roll Power!”) and that brings us to this week’s post, The Elementalist!

Probably The Mage

I suspect the actual name for this class in the Heroes book will be “Mage” for reasons which will become obvious. But “Elementalist” will still be in there as the term sages use to describe these folks. The technical term.

You may recall various posts in the past where I was trying to figure out how magic in our game works, and what, exactly, is the Wizard Fantasy, if indeed there is one. Those threads produced a lot of interesting design and insight, but they didn’t produce a successful prototype. We liked the idea of multi-turn casting, but it was never clear that we needed it to make a cool Wizard.

Fundamentally, we know how our game works, we know how classes work. In general, you have a couple of Signature Abilities you can use every round, they never run out and they usually generate some of your unique Heroic Resource which you can then spend on Heroic Abilities.

In principle, any class could be designed using this and be perfectly fine. There’s no requirement that each class’ Heroic Resource work uniquely. Strain is an exception, Rage is an exception as it can be spent AND hoarded and you get different benefits either way. Both of these are examples of ‘we had a cool idea.'

But Focus and Insight don’t work that way. Are the Tactician and the Shadow boring? Nope! So really the goal is, like most design, to just work and get out of the way. Serve the fantasy.

That’s the power of exception based design. If we have a cool idea for how this class’ heroic resource might work uniquely? Great! If we don’t? No problem, the class can just use the normal rules and be cool and unique because of what all those powers do.

The Elements

I decided to go back to first principles, but instead of “why is there Wizards?” which I covered elsewhere, I threw out the notion of magic being an alien language and rules that let you to use Literally Grammar (subject, object, verb, whatever) to ‘build’ spells. Cool idea! But I don’t think this is that game.

And we discussed earlier how we should be taking the various unrelated fantasies baked into the D20 Wizard and break them out into their own classes. The Elementalist was one of those.

So…what is an Elementalist? Well, obviously it’s someone who can control the elements in supernaturally interesting ways. Ok, we’re making progress. Next question: what are those elements?

This was something that took me a few days of noodling to crack. Earth, Air, Fire, Water? The classics? Well, sure, we could do that. But like everything else, let’s audit them. Are these the right elements? Are these ALL the elements?

This is our original fantasy world. Every time I’ve run a game in Orden, I tweak the lore. I don’t view this any differently. I don’t always even feel like I’m inventing new stuff, just…I had never audited this before, and so didn’t know how it worked in Orden before. I just inherited some unexamined assumptions and that was fine.

Some of these classical Greek elements, it’s obvious how they can be gamified. Fire! EARTH! Sure! Fire burns things, earth can be lots of useful and dramatic things.

Then you get to Air and Water. Hm. How does an Air specialist air things? How do you Water someone to death? I mean, you can design these things, obviously. You could make a Water Mage (and now it should be a little clearer why we like Mage for this class over the more formal Elementalist. It’s cooler to say FIRE MAGE!) that did a bunch of Water Themed Stuff, but the utility of that stuff would vary wildly. Fire and Earth inspire ideas, but for me at least, Water and Air restrict ideas.

Water was, for me, a very difficult element to productively gamify. By which I mean, we could do it but it would be a lot of work, which is a sign that we got the elements wrong.

Then I thought about…what other elements might there be? And for some reason STEEL popped into my head. That’s a cool idea! I started just writing down other ideas for elements.

Now I was no longer strictly bound by the classical Greek elements. Other cultures have different ideas of what the elements are, obviously. And there’s nothing about Orden that says we should hew closely to the Ancient Greeks for some reason.

Could Poison be an element? Mmm…maybe. What about DEATH? Then the word VOID popped into my head and I put it on the list.

I remembered the Green Order from my novels, and some stuff I know about them but which you do not yet (their story is not as over as the first novel might lead one to believe) and I thought Green could be an element.

Not, The Color Green don’t be ridiculous. But what Green might represent. The idea of Life, Growth, the Generative Impulse, the desire of living things to Survive.

That was sort of a breakthrough moment for me. The elements didn’t need to be literal. They could be! But only as it suited us. If Green is Life and Growth, Fire could be destruction. Yeah. Yeah!

I kept coming back to Steel and what it might represent as an element and I honestly couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t already covered better by another element I already knew I wanted to keep, like Earth. Mostly Earth. And why should Steel, which is an alloy, be an element instead of Iron? And if Earth and Steel are two different elements, what about gems? Diamond?

And there are lore-based reasons why Steel is special in my world, and those reasons aren’t related to it being an element.

At the end of the day, Steel was cool but if it was right I wouldn’t need to come up with ways to make it fit, IT would be inspiring ME to create new stuff. Always a good sign we should cut something.

I reasoned if Green were an element, then so could death and decay be. There’s no reason one element NEEDS an Opposite Element, but I liked the idea of Green and It’s Opposite and so went with Rot.

Once I had Green and Rot I realized two things. First, these are two of the three elements from Jeff Lemire’s brilliant run on Animal Man which itself is just using ideas Alan Moore came up with for Swamp Thing.

Second ,I was sort of recapitulating the five elements from Magic: The Gathering. But only sort of, and not on purpose. I wasn’t starting with those specific elements, which aren’t really elements anyway. But also, I liked Magic: The Gathering (when it came out and for about 2 years after) and the way it treated colors as themes. Hell, I thought the whole idea of Red and Blue Lanterns was super cool and a brilliant innovation in Green Lantern lore!

Regardless, I wasn’t starting with any of that and working backwards, I was exploring. Sure, when I thought “Void” I instantly knew I was inspired by the Legend of the Five Rings card game (itself inspired from actual Japanese folklore/philosophy) but it was mostly the Game Design part of my brain saying “Hey you need a catch-all Weird category for anything you like that doesn’t fit the others,” and VOID was perfect.

So I ditched Steel and Poison and looked at what I had left.

Earth

Air

Fire

Water

Green

Rot

Void

That looked like a good list. Seven is a good mythological number. And these aren’t literal anymore, they’re metaphorical. Ok, so what are they metaphors for? That, as it turned out, was easy. Almost sort of…obvious. Another good sign in game design.

Fire - destruction. Not just fire, but destroying terrain or even willpower. But, yeah, a lot of fire, let’s be honest.

Earth - strength, permanence

Air - speed, quickness, reaction time

Water - change

Green - life, growth

Rot - death, decay, aging. The fact that life requires death.

Void - being, nothingness, soul, and none of the above.

Now we're onto something! I was so excited by the notion that Water was a metaphor for change that I instantly created a new Water Mage power because I was inspired, and I thought it served as proof of concept. Here it is. Sort of the first real Elementalist power, by which I mean a power derived from the principles of the Elements.

Triggered Action

The Stream Changes Course

Keywords: Water, Magic

Trigger: Someone targets you.

Effect: Spend one essence. Change the target.

Wow!! Now, is this remotely balanced? No, of course not. Is this even a 1st level Water Mage trigger? No idea. Is it cool as hell? Yes. It immediately made me excited to design the rest of the Water Mage. And stuff like…should this be 1st level and, if so, how much should it cost? Should there be a restriction on what kinds of things you can retarget? These are all things we can fix in development and testing. But in principle I had demonstrated to myself that the idea of the Mage could would. I took the element that I found least inspiring in both game and fantasy terms and I made it one of THE most inspiring and exciting. What ELSE could a water mage change? Size? Sure! Shape? Why not? The nature of your powers? Turn fire damage into lightning damage to exploit a vulnerability? WHY NOT!? The possibilities are limitless. Which means we probably need some limits. 😀 But that’s a good problem to have.

Seven Elementalists

Armed with new and inspiring ideas, I started prototyping the Elementalist, and thinking about how their Heroic Resource, Essence (really I think it’s Quintessence, but while that will be in the book, folks would just call it Essence) works.

We got seven elements, so I started working on seven elementalists. Mostly because I felt like I needed to prove that the different elements could all support robust design on their own.

At this point, we have no idea when you choose your character’s specialty. In other words, do you start as a Void Mage? Or do you start as a Mage and choose a specialty at 2nd level. It wouldn’t be later than that. It might happen inside first level. Like…there’s a certain milestone in the middle of 1st level where you pick a Subclass.

But none of that matters for these purposes. Whenever you pick, you’re gonna need spells. Void spells, Air Spells. Even spells that are Air + Void, or Water + Earth. So I started brainstorming powers and spells.

Eventually I said “James, take a look at this. Have I gone mad?” I wasn’t done, but it was already turning into A Lot Of Work. James opened the doc and said “Whoah.” This is what he saw.

You can click here to peruse a copy of the sheet.

You can see how my idea for a Water Mage was evolving into a Leader.

James said “Ok this is cool, but for the purposes of prototyping the Elementalist, just pick one and finish it.” This is wisdom. So I picked the Fire Mage, highlighted here in orange.

Persistence

I thought something simple but powerful that could make the Elementalist stand out was; Persistence. Casting a spell and then keeping it going in the background so to speak while you cast other spells. And it should be possible to disrupt a persistent spell.

I don’t even think this should be unique to the Elementalist. Any class that might fall under the Wizard rubric might should be able to cast Persistent spells. Even the Talent maybe! 10th level casters SHOULD be walking around with all kinds of powerful wards that are Always On to borrow some Champions terminology.

Now, I still think this is a good idea but so far in testing it’s not working. Primarily because battles don’t last that long. Well, I think James and I think that’s a larger problem. As we scale the game up, we absolutely want Epic Battles that last 6+ rounds. It’s the whole reason we invented the idea of the Heroic Resource! We assume some battles can and should be Long when appropriate, and this was our solution to stop Slog.

And it just makes sense, right? What’s the point letting you decide how to spend your resource, when you only get three turns? Considering you’re gonna spend at least your first turn building Rage or whatever, that’s just not that many choices!

So we have some work to do there and in the meantime we have what I think is a functional rule for Persistent Spells or powers even if it’s Not That Useful right this second.

These are the current rules for Essence and Persistence.

Essence: You channel the substance of creation. When combat starts, you gain essence equal to your Victories. When you use a signature attack from your attack or area ability from your class or kit, you gain 3 essence. When the encounter ends, your essence disappears.

Three essence because we felt like you needed a goodly supply of the stuff to make investing in persistent spells worth it.

Persistent Spells: Some of your spells are persistent, lasting over several turns. If you are maintaining the same spell on several targets, and the effect includes a power roll, roll power against each of them separately. A single creature can’t be affected by multiple instances of a persistent spell. If you take damage while maintaining a spell, you must make the following power roll:

Roll 2d6 + Reason:

7 or lower: You lose all the spells you are maintaining.

8-10: You lose one spell of your choice you are maintaining.

11+: You maintain all your spells.

A persistent spell has a rider explaining A: how much it costs to maintain and B: what happens if you do. That decision is always made at the beginning of your turn. Some spells will let the target save to stop them, in which case you'd have to recast it all over again.

The Power Roll

About the same time I was supposed to be working on the Fire Mage, James cracked the “everyone’s rolling the same dice, but everyone’s getting different results” problem with the Power Roll.

That idea was so inspiring to me, I finished the Fire Mage like an hour later, now with all new power rolls! Here’s what I came up with. Note: the version we’re using in playtesting is already different from this! James took what I wrote, polished it, and it has since evolved in testing. But this shows our original thinking for the class, which is what this post is about.

Each class needs at least one trigger (probably one trigger picked at first level from a couple of choices) and it needs to be broadly useful. We expect most people to use their trigger most rounds, more or less. 😀 And most triggers should contribute to that feeling of “we’re a team.” We work together, we compliment each other in ways that should feel unique to the players at the table.

This one is called Explosive Assistance and it should be obvious how it works and why it’s cool and fun. But it doesn’t have a power roll, so let’s move on to something that does!

Ok, two signature spells, you can cast these every round, they never run out. And it should be broadly obvious what they do and why they are useful.

Something I had to figure out was: how is Arcane Fire different from Psionic Fire? And are there other kinds of fire I should be future-proofing the design against? This is what I came up with.

This was enough to convince me we could have three different kinds of fire, and mechanically differentiate between them. But I can’t get more precise until the game is more developed. You’re gonna notice, for instance, the Fire Mage has spells that they can maintain. Well, how is that different from Hellfire? I dunno, but I think the difference is: the Mage must spend essence to maintain a fire spell. Someone using Hellfire? It persists all on its own. There’s probably a saving throw, that kind of thing.

Fire Lance has both Damage and Knockback with each result. Now, here I didn’t do anything crazy, there are some starting values (3 damage, 2 knockback) and they both scale exactly the same way, +2 per tier. BUT! I thought it was obvious that…they didn’t have to. Fire could go 3, 5, 7, while knockback goes 4, 6, 12. To me, as a designer, just breaking them out like this implies they could have different progressions. For the prototype, I did my best to come up with something that seemed balanced. We'll strategically unbalance it later.

These should also read as two clearly useful, thematically similar, but situationally different abilities. They both do the same damage, but Fire Lance knocks the target back, while Conflagration affects more targets at the expense of knocking them back. Classic.

Mind you, I think a real 1st level Mage is probably choosing spells from different schools, but here it’s All Fire. And it may be we discover it's better if all the Fire Mage's spells are single target? And some other specialty is multi-target? That's possible.

After this, the Heroic Spells you spend your essence on. Let’s check them out.

James really liked Explosive Ward, but the testers reported rarely using it. Short combats is part of the problem, but really it’s just not good enough to warrant eating up your entire Action. Should maybe be a maneuver. Me, personally, I would have it cost some movement, like 3. But it’s not clear to me how far down the “movement is a resource you can spend” road we want to go down.

We could make it a trigger (it’s sort of already a stealth trigger) and we might! But for now, we want to restrict 1st level heroes to 1 trigger. Keep the cognitive load low. It may be we discover that’s no problem and players LIKE having multiple triggers, but I suspect that IF that’s true? It’s only true after you've been playing for a while and you’re used to the system AND your character. In which case that still wouldn’t be something a new PC has.

Also, we can all imagine higher level Fire Mages being able to cast Explosive Ward on allies and eventually maintain it for multiple people. But, again, that might overload players with Too Many Things To Remember. But as a rule players get more comfortable remembering shit as they get more hours under their collective, metaphorical, belts. So, we’ll see.

Also, technically, triggers have a different opportunity cost than spells that take your action. And that affects how powerful they can get. So moving this ability from an action to a maneuver or a trigger means adjusting its effectiveness.

BURN! is sort of the Fire Mage Thesis Statement. A lot of damage and you can just keep burning them. It should feel visceral when you do it. You can imagine your Fire Mage clenching their fist and gritting their teeth as they make the conscious decision to keep the fire on them. AND they can cast another spell that turn! Maintaining a spell just costs Essence, not an action.

I think it’d be dramatic as hell if Burn! got worse the longer it went. Lots of ways to do that, the easiest is probably; you reroll Power every turn, but it never gets less effective. So if you rolled an 8 the first time, and a 6 the second time, you still do 9 damage because you can’t go ‘backwards’ so to speak. This means eventually, maybe immediately, you’re gonna do 15 damage every round. Not bad! And probably necessary to motivate the player to spend that essence. No chance of a worse result than last time!

Translated Through Flame is another spell that has nothing to do with the theme of Fire, which is Destruction, but A: it’s cool, shut up and B: I spent a lot of cycles on a spell that would destroy terrain before I decided we needed more abilities that let enemies create terrain because it’s real easy to test that.

We like the idea of environments with destructible terrain, but it’s very map-specific and not something we’re worried about right this second. So instead, you get this!

You can teleport an ally AND everyone next to them gets burned AND knocked back on a good roll and, situationally, that is cool as hell. By ‘situationally’ I mean, it’s heavily dependent on the state of the battlefield come your turn. It may often be useless.

You may notice there’s a minimum distance which you probably already realize is there to stop someone from just teleporting an ally into the square they’re already in, just to get the burst damage. It’s a brute force solution, which some folks may perceive as hacky as hell, but as my grandfather used to say; if it’s stupid, but it works, it’s not stupid.

It may be that the final version of this spell can be used on the caster as well as allies. It may be that it's perfectly fine to teleport someone into the same square. We just adjust the essence cost up and the damage down to make it very unlikely you would bother spending it if all you're getting is the AOE damage.

This is a very simple example of how a power roll can work, with only the best result granting Knockback. At this stage, I was more interested in finishing the Fire Mage than I was demonstrating the potential of the Power Roll.

So, that’s a Fire Mage! Of course, it’s evolved a lot since I made this up, but that’s normal. I’m sure you’ll meet a more polished Fire Mage in a future patreon post. It was actually hard to stop myself coming up with cool Fire spells.

What’s Missing

Well, we got LOTS of ideas for how to use the Power Roll including spells that always do the same thing, but the TN to resist it changes depending on how you roll. Or a spell that lets you summon an Abomination (what they call an Elemental in d20 Fantasy) and the better you roll, the nastier it is!

Or what about a Light Weapon kit that adds more damage the worse you roll. Does that make sense? Maybe not! But maybe!

And also, the Real Fire Mage needs more abilities that destroy things, but that can and will be broadly interpreted.

That’s it folks, long post! But it represents the authentic process and thoughts behind the design, so I hope it was at least interesting and gives y’all something to talk about until next time.

Be seeing you…