More Design Foolery: Elemental Aspects for Four Corners

[selentic]

Thinking about design features:

• Fantasy Heartbreaker
• Inspired a bit by Avatar (the cartoon not the movie, err, either of the movies! ;) ), as well as Thief With No Shadow by Emily Gee
• Stats are sliders which move up and down in response to actual play events
• The world is characterized by the 4 elements - elemental peoples & critters, in various combinations
• Characters all have differing levels of each of the 4 elements; these are also slider stats, which are tied into the magic system; roll to manipulate the natural elementals - both the "positive" and negative/opposing elemental aspects can be used to elicit a particular flavour of elemental magic, but with very different means
• There are also non-elemental stats - elements are cherry on the top, not the whole substance of a being
• Character creation can be done with a specialized draw of the Tarot
• Uses die pools with rich dice
• Beings (or just particular traits) with more spiritual natures roll a different shade of dice (a la Burning Wheel); certain magics may also grant mundane traits/abilities a spiritually shaded bonus die
• Each element may also be characterized by a die colour (not so sure about this); if so, elemental dice are separate from spiritual/mundane dice
•  If the dice are so super-enriched - a big "if" - then the dice game probably is something like DitV's; you gather your talents into a master pool and spend dice out of it as you take actions; Dice only make sense if you "roll into the pool", however, and i'm not so keen on that - i'd love to have characters be stressed by their travails, slowly depleting and regaining their essential resources over the course of the narrative!
• The other option for super-rich dice is to dictate the outcomes of the action based on the dice contributed to it's pool, OR to require certain sources of dice to take particular actions - eg. you need to roll in *some* Fire dice to throw a flaming punch, and more to summon up a fire elemental. This is cool, but I'm not certain that such a resource based system plays harmoniously with slider-stats...
• Either way, it works a la "to do it, do it" - you establish the intended action in the fiction, then pull together a rich die pool from your resources (available dice) to see if you can carry through on your intention; how the dice come out determines how the action comes out - the more elemental power you contribute to a pool, the more likely elemental effects will blossom
• Utter failure is almost always an option in rpgs - here you may try to throw that flaming punch and fail utterly, but you might also land the punch sans fire, or unleash the fire, but mistime the blow, as the dice dictate.
• Some actions may be elementally characterized without physical affect, such as a launching into a "fiery" tirade, as each of the elements is associated with a different set of attributes; (these relationships might be made explicit with stats/abilities for each on the character sheet...)