I was playing a dot.hack game the other day and realized that they have a kinda interesting system for elements.
Rather than an element being attached to a weapon or armor directly, every actor instead has a set of umm...elemental stats. Much like STR or DEX, they just have an x number of additional stats that are instead labeled with elements versus statnames.
I presume the way these things work (seeing as there is no exact definition ingame) is this:
Seeing as they are numbers (ie: I have 25 fire element) they just add this number to attack damage if the enemy is weak to fire, and subtract it if they are strong. These stats don't generally rise unless a piece of armor, or weapon, is equipped, or permanently if an item is used (ie: FIRE boost, +1 Fire element forever) or well...script calls I guess.
I dunno. I suppose this could enable more details with the elemental process of gaming.
Instead of a fiery sword, you could now define just how fiery a sword this is
ember knife +2 fire
fire sword +8 fire
blazing claymore +20 fire
magma weapon +99 fire
I am sure I could provide more details if asked, but I just woke up.
Does anyone else think this plausible or useful? Want to help me in tackling it?
--J