An Element-ary System (An Idea for campaigns with Elemental Affinities)

Working in a Persona system, and with a few ideas mulling around in my head for a pokemon based game, I thought it'd be appropriate to try and work with other people to get this idea set out.

The basic guideline for this idea is being Null, Strong, Neutral, or Weak to another sort of element. Giving the example of Fire, Water, Earth and Air to explain it (Just put the elements where they are to give a name rather than abstract things):

Earth: Nulls Air, Strong to Fire, Weak to Water
Water: Nulls Fire, Strong to Earth, Weak to Air
Air: Nulls Earth, Weak to Fire, Strong to Water
Fire: Nulls Water, Weak to Earth, Strong to Air.

My basic idea for this concept is:

Null: Attack is ignored.
Weak: +3 to damage dealt.
Strong: -3 to damage dealt.
Neutral: No Effect.

Granted, this makes Multi-attack builds a bit powerful...

While giving players free reign to pick their own elemental affinities to fit their flavor would be nice, as long as they kept to that flavor, it would make things a bit more complex when the DM would need to balance things like elemental affinities alongside. But sometimes elemental affinites are more or less a part the campaign you can't go without. (See the Pokemon Example).

This is HEAVILY a work in progress, since it's in no way balanced from a party standpoint due to the flavor malleability

Reason this is here? Can be included in quite a few different settings such as, say, Pokemon, Persona, Tales Of, even Yugioh has elements even if the affinities is only in the games.

I've been wondering how to work in elemental affinities for some time... this is interesting.

You might want to use even numbers so that cutting damage bonuses in half is easier.

Hm. Point. Probably +2 then. Don't want to make it too powerful otherwise it makes Multi-attack builds broken.

Yeah, you guys have any ideas regarding this? It seems... Dull, more or less.

With how the combat system is built... Teh only way to make the elements feel like they're doing SOMETHING is maybe doing it with elemental HP as some type of Break Meter that losing in this secondary HP does, something to the battle... Cause just adding a little amought of damage, kinda is total "meh" compared to some of the more fun things that can be pulled off with the system. So like you do extra-normal damage and you're effecting some secondary stat to a degree... Or something.

One idea is to not allow reflavoring on the player side but have the GM go in and assign the current combat talents to the target system's equivalent. A different idea is to allow player reflavoring and up the bonus damage to +4 but use a much higher number than 30 for base HP. A final idea is to treat the bonuses as "lose life" that is calculated independent from the number of attacks a move has in it and maybe have a -1 to resistance without directly acting as vulnerability.

Something that started thinking about: Elemental Power Level...(will call it EPL form now on) This thing would be a sorta secondary "HP" amought that turns into an Extra Resistance, Temp-HP, Vul, or something...

Not totally sure how to work EPL. But maybe something like this:

Null: Damage / EPL(Happens first to the damage effects) => Normal effects => HP Loss
Weak: Damage + EPL(Happens after vul) => HP Loss & EPL goes down by one
Strong: Damage - EPL(this happens after resist) => HP Loss & EPL goes up by one
Neutral: Damage Dealt to as normal, nothing happens to ELP.