P.S. Continually saying you "always have to do everything yourself" is probably the best way to insure you WILL have to do everything yourself.
Just to be doubly clear on this, I can honestly care less why people opt not to do good in the world. It's totally not my business (there's obviously no shortage of people not being part of the solution. And even if some kind of nonsensical (borderline insane) mental gymnastics can remedy that, it's not worth the headache (nor tempting insanity) or the time and effort while there is so much work to be done
)
I just want to add, its almost irrelevant, but I've been putting a lot of thought into a different damage system that I think would be ideal for King's Field, but works just as well for any game. It leads me to think that the damage calculation should be broken up into two parts. The first part can probably be called the damage model, and the second part the damage formula.
There may be more parts, but this seems to be logical, because the system I have in mind changes the model, but not the formula. Or in other words it is independent of the formula. In the post up above "ATK=DEF then damage = ATK/2" expresses the formula. And the classical model is simply ATK=ATK and DEF=DEF.
Now I will explain a new model, I've decided to call the Void model. In the Void model only the magical affinities deal damage, so that the physical affinities cancel out. But first the magical affinities are modulated by the physical affinities, in the form of N dimensional unit vectors, where N is equal to the number of physical affinities. The formula is applied to each component of the vectors. So there are N*M sources of damage (instead of N+M) where M is the number of magical affinities....
In other words, you don't have a fire attack and a slash attack, you have a slashing fire attack. And you can't have a slashing fire attack and a piercing water attack in the same attack. You can have a slashing and piercing fire and water attack though.
So if a piece of armor has 0 fire defense and some slashing defense, and is attacked with a slashing fire attack, then the slashing defense is not a factor, the fire attack passes through unscathed. You could say the slashing defense is voided, but that's not why its called the Void model...
It's called the Void model because it introduces a 4th physical affinity and a 6th magical affinity, but the two affinities happen to be mutually exclusive because of the way they are calculated. Technically they are a dual affinity, so that one is positive and one is negative, or vice versa. Together they are called the Void affinity. And they occupy the hole after the Stab affinity, and the hole after the Holy affinity. You can even treat them as separate affinities if you want to as long as you keep in mind that they can't both exist on the same piece of equipment (not a problem if you only use one or the other)
For the sake of discussion we can call the physical affinity Avoid and the magical affinity Ovoid, or Alpha and Omega void. These affinities only exist if the sum of the physical affinities does not match the sum of the magical affinities. In which case the difference goes into Avoid if negative, or Ovoid if positive. Since physical affinities cancel out in the Void model, the damage itself can simply be said to be Void damage. Void in this case is equal to the Ovoid affinity, since only magical affinities deal damage.
You could probably use whatever kanji SOM_PRM uses for Magical and Physical, but it would just confuse things I think (and not translate into English well) because the void affinities are really remainders, so the Ovoid magical affinity really represents physical damage, so if you were to translate it this way, then you'd have a magical affinity being called Physical.
The simple way to think about this, is if an author setup an attack with 10 Fire damage, and 0 on all of the physical affinities, without the Void affinities then this attack would deal 0 damage. Obviously that's probably not what we want. So after you calculate the difference, there is 10 physical affinity unallocated, so that goes in Avoid, and now you have an attack which has none of the classical physical affinities, so its like a Magic wave attack or something, you can imagine the attack cooking the target from the inside out. Of course you can have armor that can defend against such an attack, or a magical field might be better, but said armor can't defend against an Avoid attack and an Ovoid attack simultaneously.
An Ovoid attack is pretty straight forward. It represents a weapon with no magical properties more or less. One way of looking at it is if a game took place in a contemporary setting, everyday objects would probably deal Ovoid attacks. Since they have not magical properties.
Finally, I just want to say that I don't think conventional King's Field games require a Dark affinity, like in KF4. But a Void affinity can take its place more or less. That said Void is not at all supposed to represent darkness. But Dark Souls does have an odd kind of Dark magic that deals physical damage and is connected to humanity, so that could be a way to think of it, if you wanted to make a class of magic that deals strictly Void damage. But any magic can deal (a)Void damage in varying degrees. It would probably be interesting if (a)Void magic was a class of attack that can't be defended by natural means, Eg. no equipment can defend it, but spells can, or only a special class of equipment can. But (o)Void damage could potentially be a quality of all equipment if you wanted it to play a significant role in your game. In fact Dark Souls's Dark Magic would almost definitely be Ovoid variety.
Back to KF. The way I see it, any magic that literally manipulates light (or darkness) should use the Holy affinity. But if its like necromancy it should mainly use the Earth affinity. But all of the elements can have a role in necromancy. For example ghosts and skeletons are animated by Wind, unless underwater, then by Water. And unless I have my monsters mixed up a Wraith is really a ghost made of Fire.
PS: By default the void affinities will be hidden, like dark matter/energy you might miss them/not realize the true potential of a weapon or spell. But they will be translatable, so that a game can show them and call them whatever it likes. Also the model will have variations. Like void+1 to convert the first magical affinity to a physical affinity, and void-1 to do the opposite, and so on. And void-less to simply normalize the physical affinities so that no void affinities shall exist and everything is easier to setup.
