DnD & Magic

[sillygoosegirl]

As those of you who care may or may not know, Josh and I are gearing up to run a campaign sometime in the future. At the moment we're thinking of using a D6 system (we've purchased a used copy of D6 Fantasy from Amazon). But we still think we want to apply our own 5-element magic system.

I'm just curious though, as we reinvent physics, what "element(s)" other people think the following things should belong to.

Cold - Is this Fire because it is an absence of Fire? Or is it Water because Water is opposite fire? Or do you find and bring cold from where ever it happens to be, using which ever medium (Earth, Air, or Water) is at hand? Something else?  All of the above?

Lightening/Electricity - Is it Water and/or Air to call the storm? Is it Earth to draw the lightening strike like a lightening rod? Is it whatever medium is acting as a conductor or insulator?  Is it actually just another form of Fire? Or is electricity just a more abstract form of Spirit (ie electricity is the real source of Spirit power in the first place)?

Comments

[ashke.livejournal.com]

My opinion (granted I haven't played as much DnD as the rest of the group but I thought I would throw in my 0.04 cents or something).
With regards to cold, I consider it to be of water substance because I consider cold to be opposite fire. Also, I somewhat consider Cold to be a part of water and air since when I think of cold, i think of lots of breezes and snow/ice/etc.

With regards to lightening/electricity, I would say it would be more air to call the storm then water. Yes, I would say that it is Earth that is like a lightening rod that attracts the lightening to the ground. I wouldn't say Electricity is another form of fire but you can easily produce fire from it (ie. a result of it but not actually contains it). I would say it would be more form of a spirit if anything else.

I don't know if my answers made much sense or help you and Josh with the figuring things out for the possible gaming. I know Nick has been coming up with some rules too so you two might want to talk to him. (he's still asleep. sigh.). If you have any more questions or need clarifications, just ask me.

[tortoise.livejournal.com]

The three ways of organizing a five-element system I can see are:

1) Grammatical elements: Water, Air, Earth are nouns, Fire and Spirit are verbs. At which point lightning should have Air as its subject (as that's the medium it travels through) and Fire as its predicate (as it's a physical process). (Similarly, normal flames burn solid things, so they should have Earth as their predicate. Fire with Water as its predicate is Greek fire or something.) Cold is also a physical process, so it should have Fire as its predicate--its subject should be whatever you're cooling down.

(Some things that have Spirit as their predicate: possession and farspeaking are Air-Spirit, domination is Water-Spirit, healing is Earth-Spirit.)

2) A circle that goes Water-Air-Spirit-Fire-Earth. Then lightning should be a mixture of Fire and Spirit, and cold a mixture of Water and Air.

3) No defined matrix of relationships between those five elements--they just all exist. Then I'd say
a) You can make things cold with any element except Spirit. If you make things cold with Fire, you have to dump the heat somewhere else. Otherwise, they have to actually be near some form of that element.
b) Direct creation of lightning is Spirit-based (because that's the niftier option) or Fire-based (because you don't want people playing Frankenstein). If you want to wait forever, you can also create lightning with weather magic, which is mostly Water and Air with a little bit of Earth.