Lago's Kickass D&D-Book Marketing Strategy!

[Orion]

Subclass: Hero
1 Precise Blows
2 Courageous
3 Grounding Shot
4 Inspiring Aura
5 Field Medicine
6 Dashing Blows
7 Giantbane
8 Determination
9 Flurrying Blows
10 Kingship

Subclass: Monk

1 Leaper
2 Groin Kick
3 Poison Immunity
4 Ki Strikes
5 Throw
6 Air Walker
7 Seeing the Soul
8 Not Being There
9 Spell-Shedding Soul
10 Fiery Ki

[Username17]

There is a substantial reason to go with specifically 13 staring races and classes, and that is to defend the opening book from the accusation of "not being a complete game." Any new edition is facing as its strongest competitor - the old edition. And there will always be some holdouts. Some people out there seriously play 2nd edition AD&D or even original AD&D. And your primary job as a creator of a new edition is to convince people that they should switch from the old edition to the newer one. 3rd edition did that much more effectively than any edition before or since. Most people at this point, play an edition that is somewhere between 3.1 and 3.4 - using rules from 3e and 3.5 indiscriminately. While 4e should have sucked everyone out of 3e, it... didn't. Go to a convention, and there are more 3e games than 4e games. That's a problem.

And one of the biggest problems 4e had in getting people to adapt it was that there were eight classes in the basic book. You wouldn't think that would matter, but it totally did and does. See, while the PHB is in some sense competing directly against the PHB of th previous edition (in which having more classes is good, but perhaps not as important as art and legibility of layout), you're also competing the new PHB and the promise of expansions with the old edition with all the crap in it. Whenever you introduce a new edition, it's always going to have less classes than the previous edition, because it does not have several years of a dozen or more expansion books coming out every year behind it. It's walking in there with a PHB, a DMG, and a Monster Manual. So a new edition can't compete in having more material, it can only compete in having the promise of more material in the future.

2nd edition AD&D had dozens, maybe hundreds of character classes. But the basic book had eight. When 3e came in with eleven character classes (and of course the promise to print more later on), people were enthusiastic. They were willing to accept the logic that it was a new edition and wasn't going to have everything all at once. There was a little bitching about the cutting of the Magic User, the Priest, and especially the Thief - but the idea that there "was not room" in the PHB for those things had a fair amount of traction because there were demonstrably more classes than there had been. This indicated to people that the "no room" excuse was valid, because they had already increased the class numbers. Contrast that with 4e, where people who were annoyed by the cutting of the Barbarian, Bard, Druid, Monk, and Sorcerer all were completely unsatisfied with the argument that there was not room for their pet class. Instead of having people pining for 3 cut classes accepting the apology because there were negative three slots left, you had people pining for five classes who did not accept the apology because there were "obviously" three slots left and there clearly "could have" been space for whatever their favorite was in the PHB.

Now, because the new edition would be competing against 3e as well as 4e, it has to have more classes than 3e does in order to show itself as a serious contender. If it doesn't get people to switch over pretty quickly and instead people "wait until more expansion books come out" it is unlikely to get a lot of people to ever switch. Once the buzz is died down, you're not going to get a lot of people to jump onto your new edition band wagon from the old. I figure that you've got about a year to convince the majority of the fanbase to switch. Once you do that, you can squeeze out the old editions through peer pressure. But if you don't do that, it will go the other way. Let's look at a Convention next month: Dundracon has more than 2 games listed using D20 rules than it has 4th edition games. Even straight 3rd edition D&D considerably outnumbers 4e. And you know what that means? That means that peer pressure is sending people away from 4e and back to 3rd edition. That's unacceptable from a marketing standpoint.

So. You need people to adopt now or at least soon, and you need them to do so simply with the promise of getting expansion material that they have not seen. And you do that by convincing people that your edition does three things:

• Addresses some of the known issues with the previous rules.
• Is an acceptable game in its own right.
• Covers as much D&D ground as possible in the starting books.

So you're going to be telling the 4e players that you're giving the boot to the Fighter, the Warlord, and the Cleric. But you're making it up to them by pointing out that you have five extra classes, so there obviously wasn't room for 3 more. Unfortunately, you're even more going to be trying to convince 3rd edition players to jump aboard. And then you have to tell them that - like 4e - there are 5 classes from the PHB unnamed. But I believe that will fly because there are more total classes. Just as people were willing to trade Magic Users for Wizards when the classes increased; they will be willing to trade Fighters for Heroes without too much fuss when it comes with more classes.

But looking at it, it might actually pay off to leave Elementalists named "Wizards" so that th Grognards don't have to give up too much too soon. But I think dropping Barbarians, Sorcerers, Clerics, and Fighters is a great plan. The Warlock simply polls better than the Sorcerer ever did. And the Cleric and Fighter baggage is better shed for other classes that fulfill those roles. Neither class really has a place in modern party dynamics.

-Username17

[Orion]

Well, "assassin" is still non-negotiable.

[Username17]

Well, "assassin" is still non-negotiable.

I don't follow. People seem pretty happy with the Rogue. And while I would have nothing against including the Assassin as a expansion class; it seems like it's the kind of job that you could plausibly do with the Rogue class without breaking a sweat. Like the Thief, the Ninja, and the Pirate, it could certainly move books because it's a popular concept. But I don't think that you'd lose any sales because you told people that out of the PHB people who wanted to play any of those things had to write "Rogue" on their character sheet.

-Username17

[Orion]

Sorry, I didn't realize "Rogue" was already on the list. Since it is, Assassins aren't necessary I guess.

[Mask_De_H]

Quite.

Subclass: Rogue
1 Tricky Bastard
2 Sneak Attack
3 Ceaseless Chatter
4 Sleight of Hand
5 Spot Dodge
6 Two for One
7 Cunning Forgery
8 Deathblow
9 Schrodinger's Heist
10 Steal the Sun

Subclass: Gish
1 Alarming Ward
2 Arcane Rebuke
3 Sigil of the Fang
4 Spellweave Ward
5 Mana Barbs
6 Surge of Power
7 Sigil of the Overlord
8 Reversing Ward
9 Veil of Reality
10 Sigil of All

Warlock:
1 Eldritch Bullet
2 Fiendish Charisma
3 Dark Servant
4 Aura of Infernus
5 Shadowbind
6 Ethereal Puppet
7 Planar Wound
8 Dirge Finale
9 Eldritch Nova
10 Break the World

[Username17]

People want combat roles that are clearly defined for their characters and they want to substantively alter their tactics from battle to battle. These are not contradictory demands. People want to benefit from having a varied party and they don't want to be told that they have to play a Cleric or even that they have to play a Tank. These are not contradictory demands either.

The combat roles system of 4e is a failure. It's a failure for many reasons having to do with combat math but it's most specifically a failure because it could not have worked no matter what numbers were put in. They have 5 characters and 4 roles. What that means is that it is necessarily true that you're going to have more than one player on the same role. And that means that you have to be getting tangible benefits from having more than one character in the same role. And that means that crap like the "5 Paladins Party" and the "5 Clerics Party" were necessarily going to happen as soon as you committed to that design decision. Once you've made the decision that you are going to have more PCs than roles, it is not even possible to "Copy Protect" the roles, and then people making Clone Wars teams is a predictable consequence.

The solution is to have more roles than there are players. Also, to check your fucking math and make sure that shit like the Vengeance of Peace build can't put all enemies on lockdown forever. But the big directive is to make sure that there are substantially more PC roles to fill than there are PCs. And that by extension, any particular party can be expected to be filled with characters filling different roles. And further, that if you make another group with new characters, that those characters will actually fill different roles.

What this means is that when someone is the last player to make a character may be told "I am already a Golden Hammer Knight, play something else," which is annoying but acceptable. But they won't be told "Everything else is covered, so you have to play a Rogue." And that's good, because being told that you must play X feels a lot more stifling than being told that there is something that for whatever reason you cannot play.

Now, I've been doing a lot of thinking these last few years on what makes an appropriate set of character roles. And I've come to the conclusion that it absolutely doesn't fucking matter. At all. Every combat ability you have does one of three things:

1. Reduce the amount of turns before you win.
2. Increase the number of turns until you lose.
3. a. and b. (most common).

Making it take twice as long before you lose is pretty much the same whether you are halving the enemy damage, reducing enemy hit chances, increasing party hit points, or making enemies waste actions. It just doesn't fucking matter. The only thing that makes fuck all difference is whether these things stack or not. If they do, they might as well be "different" roles for all the difference it makes. If they stack poorly or not at all they are the same role.

So from a role protection standpoint, shooting giant blasts of fire is the same role as giving people a bonus to melee attacks because thy don't meaningfully stack and therefore don't want to be on the same team. While cursing your opponents to have a penalty to attacks from weakness is a totally different role from cursing your opponents to have a penalty to attacks from blindness, because that stacks. And that means several things:

• You probably shouldn't have characters like the 4e Warlord who provide bonuses to scimitar dancing rangers but don't provide bonuses to Ice shooting wizards.
• You should have totally arbitrary, possibly color coded, buff and debuff slots in order to arbitrarily drive wedges between character actions to keep monoculture action spamming from making sense.

The first part of that is simple. Just don't write abilities like White Raven Tactics that only make sense if all your allies are cool with charging into melee. The second part is more difficult, because there's no "right" answer. However, I would suggest that since the apparent goal is to have a lot of available roles, that something like this:

Makes more sense than something like this:

So if you're a Necromancer, all your curses are "Darkness" and only the latest Darkness Debuff counts, so you're going to want the Warlock to play a Fire or Lightning Warlock instead of a Darkness Warlock. And you're going to want to be the only Necromancer in the party. But you're not going to sweat it if someone else wants to be a Murder of Crows druid. Because while it certainly is tactically similar to your army of the dead, none of it is "Dark" so all their shit stacks with yours.

As for tactical groupings, those are as good a template for the three subjob groups as anything. Essentially it boils down to:

• Group I classes benefit directly from front lining it - getting directly into the face of enemies and stabbing them. In the face.
• Group II classes benefit directly from hiding behind allies.
• Group III classes benefit directly from getting flanking shots - open attacks against enemies that are otherwise occupied.

At the risk of confusing Europeans, I'll use an American Football reference: Group I are linemen, Group II are quarterbacks, and Group III are Receivers. But those groupings don't actually say what a character is doing from those positions. A Psion might be spamming mind crushes and telekinesis assaults, but he does it directly into enemy minds and bypasses his front line allies, so the safest place for him is behind the Monk. So he goes Group II just as the Necromancer does, despite the fact that the Necromancer is a more traditional "general" position.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

Oh cool, I never thought of the idea of mechanical role protection being that simple. So, running off the FFXI chart:

You have seven Humors: Fire, Water, Wind, Lightning, Earth, Dark, Light. A humor can be Waxing (buffed) or Waning (debuffed). If a humor is in a state, and would come under an effect that would change it, the newer effect applies. So two guys dropping Waves of Fatigue (Fire type action denial) wouldn't get along well because the target already has Waining Fire, whereas if one of the guys started flinging Crushing Inertia (Lighting type action denial), they'd be the best of friends because Fire and Lightning are Waning.

The Humors could also act as a makeshift alignment chart/type descriptor: each person and each class has a Major Humor (primary focus) and a Minor Humor (secondary focus).

Fire: Creative, outgoing, brash, insensitive
Water: Spontaneous, adaptive, timid, doubting
Wind: Sensitive, worldly, mercurial, flaky
Earth: Clearheaded, focused, anxious, stubborn
Lightning: Intuitive, ambitious, impulsive, melancholic
Light: Giving, protective, intense, judgemental
Dark: Open, clever, introspective, distant

And instead of say, Hero being Direct Damage/Tank, he's Fire/Lightning or something.

[erik]

Any reason that Ice was left off your summary there Mask? It seems nichey enough to be included.

Ice: Forbidding, stoic, cool, distant

I stole distant from Dark... Dark can instead have insidious or treacherous, or something to that effect.

[Mask_De_H]

I folded Ice into Water, fits the D&d elemental chart better and I didn't want to use Cold.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Oh shit, what if I make a creative and spontaneous Dark necromancer sub Earth rogue?

[Mask_De_H]

Oh shit, what if I make a creative and spontaneous Dark necromancer sub Earth rogue?

Then the dude's a spontaneous, creative master of Shades and getting information. The Humors as alignment and the Humors as class elements are different things. I just didn't get to hashing out the meanings and distribution of that for classes yet.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Two things:

The first one, when do you think that a videogame based on 5th Edition should be released? I think that one should come out about a year after 5E comes out, after the tabletop fans settle in and get some initial momentum going. The timing of Neverwinter Nights was, IMO, a stroke of genius--it came out at precisely the right time after 3E was established and it was good enough to grab a lot of peoples' attention. 5E should try to duplicate the same thing.


What is everyone's opinions on 'feelies'--things like cloth maps, special D&D-edition dice, coasters which have the character classes' faces on them, etc.?

I don't think that they're particularly important to lure in grognards or even other roleplayers, but it's been my (limited) experience that things like statues of drow in chainmail bikini and miniature dioramas of heroic fantasy locales catch the eye of new people.

I do think that 5th Edition should be focused on grabbing new players without alienating old players. While fewer people are playing tabletop games, with bullshit like WoW out I think a lot more people are receptive to the idea of heroic fantasy. 5th Edition needs to strike before the iron cools off; if 5E underperforms then I think that it's the end of the D&D tabletop franchise as we know if. But if it does well, we might see a revival of it like with 3E.

[erik]

I folded Ice into Water, fits the D&d elemental chart better and I didn't want to use Cold.

Hrm, by that reasoning lightning gets the boot as it is part of air.

I am not really sold on the humors [edit: as alignments that is] to begin with but if they are there then ice seems mandatory. Hell it is even a better simile for describing a personality than almost any of the eight. "She is like ice" is much more descriptive than earth, water, air or fire.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Ice is a phase of water. Lightning is the correction of a large electron potential difference. Do you see the difference between considering ice to be water and lightning to be air?

[erik]

Ice is a phase of water. Lightning is the correction of a large electron potential difference. Do you see the difference between considering ice to be water and lightning to be air?

That is irrelevant to anything posted so far. There is no need to try and put apply scientific understanding to a thoroughly unscientific elemental system. That way lies madness.

Adherence to the DnD elements was the objective reason given and it was the target for my rebuttal.

[Username17]

I agree that if you wanted to make them into personality types somehow, that Ice, Thunder, Light, and Dark are all much more descriptive than Earth, Air, Fire, or Water. However, I don't think you should, because you want people to be able to play themselves, and if you have a player who has a sunny disposition you don't want it to be "bad roleplaying" for them to play anything but a Paladin, an Inspiring Hero, or a Passionate Bard. Because that would be really insulting.

What is everyone's opinions on 'feelies'--things like cloth maps, special D&D-edition dice, coasters which have the character classes' faces on them, etc.?

The most important thing about them is that they are outside the control of the designers of the game because they are manufactured by a different branch of corporate. But the second most important thing about them is that they are important in advertising and in moving digital product.

When people spend money it is easier to justify if at the end they have some thing. So if Might and Magic VI comes with a physical map that's all pretty and shit, people are substantially more likely to buy it in a box rather than download a cracked version. And having D&D stuff in comic shops and game stores really makes people think about D&D. And makes mothers in there with their kids ask what all this D&D stuff is about.

So it's definitely valuable.

I do think that 5th Edition should be focused on grabbing new players without alienating old players.

During the "hundreds of thousands vs. millions" discussion, I tallied up th number of advertised games at a Con, and found that there was more than one 3e Game for every 4e game. That was about half a year ago now. I just checked one that is happening in mid February, and there were more than 2 advertised 3e games for every 4e game.

Now, that's conventions. Conventions are a disproportionate generator of "old games." I mean, there are also several AD&D games on that list from people who probably only get an AD&D game together once a year, at that convention, and do it for old time's sake. But still, about 1 in 4 games there were D&D of one sort or another (outside of Cons, D&D's dominance is larger than that), and 4e's market share of that seems to be less now than it was a few months back.

What this indicates to me is that if you didn't get a single new fan at all, and just won over all the D&D players, that you'd still have something that was hand over fist financially successful. Obviously, you're going to do some new player outreach, and you have a whole corporate structure devoted to doing that - but the number one priority is convincing the 3rd edition players that this is the edition that they have been waiting for.

Number 2 Priority is convincing 8 year olds that they want to be a D&D nerd. And stuff like the Penny Arcade tie-ins is by far the best way I've seen to do that.

-Username17

[Username17]

Thoughts on tactical combat:

It is a narrow line that combat must walk between being unsatisfying (3e) and boring (4e). And we can learn a lot from things that people say they do to their games in order to alleviate those problems.

First, in 3e the battles are over way too fast, meaning that even incredibly dangerous monsters don't feel like a major achievement when they go down. The thing people most readily identify as the problem is the culture of Save-or-Die, but that's only part of it. When people report the most fun and most memorable 3e battles, they are always big set pieces with dozens of casualties. If anything, taking out not just one, but several enemies a round seems to be fine, the problems are:

• PCs going down from normal in one hit is anticlimactic and feels unfair, especially to players who don't have the monster manual memorized.
• 4 PCs ganging up on a minotaur doesn't feel very heroic, whether the minotaur goes down in 1 round or 20.

What his tells us is that the 4e concept of ending people up against 5-20 enemies that each attack for piddly shit damage was actually inspired. My own survey of D&D complaints leads me to the same conclusion. And yet... 4e combat is boring as hell. It's so boring that their own in-house team suggests that for major set pieces you should totally make shit up and have the terrain have specific unlockable effects on the battlefield that let you do something different in the middle of combat. I don't think I have to tell a Gaming Den audience why anything that you're asking the DM to make up from scratch for every battle should have a set of rules in the DMG. But it's beyond that. During a battle with a Dragon, a Tron Paladin an expect to say "I attack with Holy Strike" something like nine times; and while it's slightly better for a Grind Paladin (because the decision tree on whether to use Bolstering Strike or Enfeebling Strike is based on whether you've taken damage since the last time you landed a Bolstering Strike rather than simply whether you are fighting several small enemies or one big one), it's still incredibly repetitive. And when you are facing a group of enemies (as you really should be), it stops being threatening and you run out of special moves many turns before the battle is officially over.

The PCs should have a choice to make every turn, not just the first four turns. And when the game is reduced to mopup operations the enemies should surrender or run away. And a list of forty special terrain squares or more should be in the basic book.

-Username17

[ckafrica]

A short thought on tactics; on my pet peeves is wolf pack tactics. That it often makes more sense for a team to gang up on one opponent and let it's colleagues wail on them until the first one goes down seems unrealistic to me. Not that the only thing to do is go one on one but that turning your back on even inferior opponent should have a risk. Perhaps something like an engagement system where if an opponent is engaged in some way they are more effective combatants and/or that bosses get substantial enough mechanical advantages for having minions in proximity that it is worth the party's while to take them down before piling up on the boss.

For the boss it would likely be a defensive benefit in nature, AC, Resistance or some such rather than offensive. I don't think you want him to be more dangerous because he has support; but you want that support to be, well support.

On engagement, I would think it could possibly just be as simple as "if they're targetted they're engaged" but you create abilities that have the potential of targeting/engaging multiple targets at once. Abilities that don't do much damage but keep the opponents at bay while they are whittled down to size.

[Mask_De_H]

Alright, let me try to explain where I'm coming from with the humors. With class humors, they basically act as the arbitrary buff/debuff colors that the class favors and/or like the rough roles I made earlier. While character alignment humors are more like character trope archetypes. Also, on the assignments, I was thinking of the elements that either get tags (dark, light, lightning), or get elementals (the classical elements). I also wanted to keep the 13 motif, but wanted a more manageable chart for mechanical purposes. That being said, Ice would work.

[RobbyPants]

A short thought on tactics; on my pet peeves is wolf pack tactics.

Part of that can be solved via good flanking rules or something. While you get a benefit to gang up on one guy, all of his buddies will also get a benefit ganging up on you.

The other thing is a side-effect of people performing just as well at 1 HP or full HP. There is no reason to hit someone once or twice, leave him alive, and then switch targets (unless the situation happens to tactically change for some reason). It's in your best interest to bring him down quickly to reduce the offensive output of Team Monster. This can be partially dealt with by something like 4.0's bloodied mechanic.

Of course, you don't want to overdo the bloodied thing, because then it becomes a "first round determines the victor" situation. If getting of the first hit severely weakens opponents, it's just another form of rocket tag.

[CatharzGodfoot]

It's possible to argue forever about element wheels, when ultimately it doesn't even matter to game play beyond how many there are. All it does is set the tone.

"Void", "Darkness", and "Ice" might all be similar, but they feel different. "Fire", "Lightning", and "Light" are similarly similar, but come with different sorts of baggage (Is it "anger of the noonday sun", "fireshield", or "thunderhead"?).

So when you come up with the list of 13 (or 7, or 5, or 11, or some non prime number), think about whether you want it to feel more like Final Fantasy, Rokugan, or alchemy.


As far as the numbers go, with 7 elements you can have (unless I'm mistaken, which is quite possible) 57 different sets of 3 elements, which is more than enough to cover the base classes.

At the same time, those elements don't mesh well with the paths as written. If a druid gets 'it's cold outside', 'it's hot outside', and 'it's a jungle out there' from one path, you're really looking at three elements per path. Is that the original intent?

[TavishArtair]

I think an important point on the decision tree here is that 4e powers... don't interact meaningfully with other powers in your decision tree. because there aren't enough powers or resources to interact with or outshine or anything. In this respect, 4e is immensely inferior to WoW. Yes, there are "staple" attacks that every class gets, but a fight can branch in many different tiny ways.

Most of these don't matter immensely in the big picture, but you can, for instance, only use a DoT effect once every now and then before using it again becomes ineffective, and generally using it didn't interfere with whatever else you were doing since it comes in the moments between major attacks, or you might decide to conserve mana and not use the DoT because the enemy is a useless mook that's going to die just standing too close to the party.

A paladin likewise decides whether or not to throw down Consecrate (an AoE attack, very "attention getting") if there are lots of enemies nearby that need to be given a wakeup call, or to control a few monster's attention using Hand of Reckoning so as not to interfere with control effects others are using (or because there's only one or two) or save a party member using Righteous Defense and Hand of Protection. These abilities are all, in 4e terms, minor actions... in fact, the paladin gets almost nothing but minor actions, because they are allowed to also wail on a target every single time their weapon speed allows them to (so, every round).

Sure, it's not the most engaging game. In truth you can get by just easy-moding it with a lot of classes... the paladin mentioned can, if they drop Consecrate, probably do whatever else they want, including taking a nap (as long as they tab occasionally to switch targets, so get your pet hamster to jump on that key). That's... really it.

Someone who is playing a game, however, and not watching ProgressQuest, will not do this. They will attempt to make useful decisions. Yes, there's some optimal sequences more or less repeatable in every battle, but they're called rotations for a reason... you basically never have the opportunity where you only hit one key repeatedly to resolve a fight, you have 20 abilities on your primary action hotkeys and you are picking between them and you've already eliminated 5 or 10 based on the type of fight and you know you're opening with 1 but after that you've got some 9 abilities to pick between based on what's going on. If you can write a more interesting game than WoW, these interactions can be actually interesting and not nominally DPS-increasing.

But you're writing something like 30 abilities on the character sheet in order to create that kind of interaction.

[Username17]

As far as the numbers go, with 7 elements you can have (unless I'm mistaken, which is quite possible) 57 different sets of 3 elements, which is more than enough to cover the base classes.

You'd actually get 35 potential groups of 3, 21 groups of 2, and 7 groups of 1. Which would be enough for 63 classes I guess. 21 if you held people rigidly to 2 picks.

At the same time, those elements don't mesh well with the paths as written. If a druid gets 'it's cold outside', 'it's hot outside', and 'it's a jungle out there' from one path, you're really looking at three elements per path. Is that the original intent?

As far as role protection goes, damage (and by extension possibly healing) always stacks. So if you inflict acid damage, or purple damage, or whatever that matters (as far as enemy resistances go), but it doesn't actually matter for role protection at all. Role protection only gives a fuck about things which have limited slots: buffs and debuffs. And even then, it only cares about ones that are competing for the same slots.

So if you're a Magma Wizard and you drop gravitation on people which is a "brown" debuff, you don't actually mind if the Sacred Might Paladin uses magic stone that is a "brown" damaging attack. You also don't care if the Elemental Seal Gish puts up a stoneskin that is a "brown" buff on the party. Even if there's only one "modifier" slot, the fact that stoneskin targets party members and gravitation targets enemies means that the two will never overlap to fail to stack.

If you're a Fire Warlock and lay down fire beatings on people it really doesn't mean shit to you if the Warchanter Bard in the party also gives out buffs that are technically Fire. It's just not even important.

So basically:

[Element] Damage	Always Stacks
[Element] Buffs	Conflict with buffs of the same [Element]
[Element] Debuffs	Conflict with debuffs of the same [Element]

As such, you could have a lot of fucking classes and classes could do all kinds of crazy shit and have all kinds of elements available for various maneuvers and still have strongly and obviously defined roles based on those elements.

-Username17

[ggroy]