Element Shakeup

Sorry for the lack of posts in the past few days, I was struggling with some design issues.

I talked about some of the problem here. 

I've decided to bite the bullet and add three new "Scale" Elements- CYCLE,  REACH,  and SPREAD. These Elements respectively define duration for Effects, the distance from their origin that they can be placed, and the size of a phenomenon. I struggled with adding them primarily because I am loathe to add more Elements if not absolutely required, and because I felt that the latter two were only useful in the real world. However, a friend of mine helped make it clear that they could have applications in any HOUSE. Socially, REACH can be very important, and SPREAD can do things like determine things like how likely a Target is to be thinking of a given subject when you read his or her mind.

This definitely breaks the Kabbalah correspondences, but that's immaterial to the game. The game needs to be playable without strange or convoluted ways of modeling useful things. 

Adding CYCLE stepped on HOLD's toes, and it was already an odd fit. BLOCK covered some of what it did that didn't relate to duration, and it felt wrong as a FORCE derived Function. Arresting or sustaining action felt like a role COUNTER functions should fill. I've replaced HOLD with HARNESS, which is about gaining control of a target Phenomenon. This Function in turn stepped on the toes of ANNEX, and I decided to remove the extraneous aspect of control and make it a more perfect mirror to SLICE, by changing it to LINK.

Finally, I changed DRIVE to NEED. I started to see the use for a NEED Element for things like spell components, etc, where DRIVEs wouldn't be able to model situations that would prevent use of an ability if the NEED wasn't met.

After talking with my friend Greg (I'm not sure if he wants me to post his full name)  I came to see that a NEED is actually more fundamental than DRIVE, and that the emotional components can be covered by BONDs.

Additionally, DRIVEs had a bit of overlap with BONDs anyway, and I've been trying to avoid overlap whenever possible.

All of the changes described here are already on the Summary of the Elements.

This is the exact kind of process that I've been through with the entire game so far- one change has ripple effects and they all need to be addressed before the game hangs together again. Hopefully the game will now stay stable until we hit playtesting.

On Another Topic:

My goal is to begin posting on more interesting topics from now on. I have at least one post in the works on how to model parts of the "Avatar: The Last Airbender" universe which should be interesting.

I'll also begin posting the actual mechanical rules for Each Element into individual posts for future reference. By the time the playtest rules are ready, you should already be able to play the game if you wanted to, just by copying and pasting from the blog.