LE The four classical esoteric elements.

[HallLytton]

As some of you probably already know, Air, fire, water, and earth are used in esoteric teachings and certain philosophies around the world and throughout history. It always seemed kinda unfortunate that Bethesda chose a simpler approach to magic, in the form of the fire-ice-lightning decision. I'd like to see a mod that maybe alters the setup a bit to use the four classic elements, possibly in a more action-oriented fashion.

 

On the Xbox 360 controller, which I personally use in playing Skyrim, the four face-buttons can be easily linked to the four elements, ie: A-button (green) is earth, B-button (red) is fire, X-button (blue) is water, and Y-button (yellow) is air or wind. The neat (and probably unintentional) thing is that both the colors and positions of each button are in-sync with each element's real-world concepts. Which got me to thinking how they might be used in a video game's magic-system.

 

One thing that kinda irritates me about Skyrim's magic-system is how you constantly have to switch between spells and weapons when playing a spellsword. I often just stick to powers or shouts to minimize that headache, but there are occasions where I just have to equip a spell. But I've devised a potential work-around that revises the magic-system to be less obtuse.

 

If you provide the player with a racial power, usable by each race, called Concentration (which you would hold the power-button to use), which switches the four face-buttons to spellcasting-mode, then there are a number of ways you can implement spellcasting in a button-combo style of play. The method I came up with is to have a standard four-button combo, each part of the sequence determining a separate factor of the spell.

 

For example, the first button pressed would determine the spell's primary variable, the second button a secondary variable, the third button pressed determining the spell's elemental focus, and the fourth and final button-press in the sequence determining the spell's shape/form and target. An equip-able spellbook could be implemented for players to record combos they've learned, which would be wielded like a weapon and held just below eye-level so as not to obstruct vision too much. (This would be handy for more complicated combos; spellsword-types would probably memorize a few go-to spells for easy casting and forego the book altogether.)

 

Not only would the necessity of keeping a spellbook handy to record spellcasting-combos make straight spellcaster-types feel ridiculously wizardly, the sheer number of potential button-combos would allow for the later addition of more spells until the list of possible spellscrolls is worthy of a magical library. As it stands, there aren't enough spells in the vanilla game to warrant more than a small filing cabinet.

 

Now, to illustrate how the combos might work, let's assume you wanted to generate a simple magearmor. The combo might look like this:

 

A/Green/Earth (Solid, un-moving object; the primary variable)

+

A/Green/Earth (The secondary variable)

+

Y/Yellow/Air (The elemental manifestation, ie an invisible force)

+

A/Green/Earth (The targeting and form, ie the user's body)

 

So, as you can no doubt see, the combos would flow together rather intuitively. And you could continue to turtle behind a shield while casting a healing-spell because you don't have to continuously swap out spells. I'll give you a second example, casting a wave of fire outward from the caster:

 

B/Red/Fire (The primary effect, destructive heat)

+

A/Green/Earth (The secondary effect, physical effect)

+

B/Red/Fire (The elemental manifestation)

+

X/Blue/Water (The targeting form, ie a radial wave from around the caster)

 

The only hiccup I'm still ironing out is what to define the effects on the spell are for the Primary and Secondary Variables. And assuming anybody takes enough interest in this concept to have a go at it, I should be able to work that out relatively easily. Anyway, any input and/or interest?