3 magical damage types for the Metaverse
I highly recommend that if you haven’t already, you check the previous articles in this series. It will be relevant for the following conversation: The Universal Asset framework series. The articles where we talk about Universal Spells and Color as a magical primitive, are specially relevant to this article.
The 3 types of damage
In previous articles we’ve talked about potentially having interoperable magic spells which we’ve been calling Universal Spells (USs). In this article I want to discuss 3 types of damage we might expect these USs to have. The first type of damage is the most obvious one and the one we’ve discussed in other articles as well, it’s the basic damage that’s derived exclusively from the Universal Primitive (UP) of the spell, its “digital skeleton”, we’ll refer to it as “universal damage”. UPs for spells are typically projectiles, and so they might involve a risk/reward function based on the behavior of the type of projectile chosen to calculate the damage they do (in terms of hit-points(HP)). Check the Universal Spells article for further details.
The second and third damage types we’ve alluded to them in past articles, but we should state them more clearly now here. For now we’ll call them “magic-type damage”, and “color damage”. Magic-type damage is the most traditional type of damage, already typical in many games. These are your fire, ice, electric, holy, dark, etc. damage types. Because whoever creates a Universal Spell (USs) can freely choose the appearance of that spell, once they’ve chosen a UP, this will be a user’s choice. Spells sharing the same UP (a simple straight-shooting projectile for example), could be of different magic-types, it could be a medium speed: fire-ball, ice-ball, lightning-ball…
For our third type of damage, “color damage”, as discussed in a previous article where we associated color to magic, we might want to have a series of canonical magic-types, and colors in the Metaverse — I’ve been advocating for a 10 colors, 10 magic-types system. Now, by default any magic-type should have a default choice for color (orange for fire-magic for example), or one color we can say is more naturally associated to that magic-type. But we don’t need to restrict ourselves to tying both magic-type and color together. In fact, if we consider them as two independent properties of a given spell, we introduce a lot more flexibility for both world-builders and players, and potentially more fun and interesting gameplay dynamics.
In terms of creating a Universal Spell (US), magic-type and color are a choice made by whoever creates the asset, and this can simply be viewed as additional metadata attached to a given spell. It’s then the choice of virtual worlds whether they want to leverage this additional information or not, gameplay-wise. One of the most straightforward ways to leverage it would be to implement secondary damages for spells, in the form of magic-type damage and color damage as we’ve been discussing.
It’s already typical in many games to make certain enemies/players strong or weak against certain magic-types. Pokémon, the “Souls” games, Legend of Zelda… are just a few popular examples. By standardizing the choice of magic-types and colors we can append in the metadata of our spells, we make it easier for world-builders and players to converge to a finite set of popular choices.
Color damage is just an additional potential type of damage, but one that exclusively depends on how a spell “looks” in terms of its color. So a pink fireball can still do fire damage, but additionally do “pink-damage”, while a red fireball does fire damage, but “red-damage” instead. This has very interesting effects and benefits in terms of role-playing. Some players might favor specialization in either a given magic-type or a color. E.g. “My character is exclusively a pyromancer, but they are okay using different colors for a flame”; or “my character is exclusively a blue-mage, but doesn’t mind mixing different magic-types, as long as they all look blue”.
Enemies and players could be strong or weak against color damage and magic-type damage independently, given players more flexibility on how they choose to fight them, without having to fully sacrificing the role-playing characteristics of their avatar, if they’re committed to a certain type of play-style (color-centric, or magic-type centric). It also encourages players to try different magic-types and colors.
From the world-builder side, there’s 4 potential choices. All worlds must implement one of the 3 damage types, the universal damage type that comes from the choice of UP for that spell, but the other two can be optional, given 4 possible combinations of choices.
- Worlds could decide to implement neither color damage nor magic-type damage.
- Worlds could decide to implement magic-type damage but not color damage.
- Worlds could decide to implement color damage but not magic-type damage.
- Or worlds could decide to implement both magic-type damage and color damage.
From the asset-creation perspective we just ask that USs come with a choice of a UP, a magic-type, and a color (very easy choices to make for whoever is creating the US). And worlds just need to decide how much or not they want to leverage gameplay-wise that additional metadata present in the US.
Of course, what that translates to gameplay-wise is fully in the hands of world-builders. Players may choose to use a spell of a certain magic-type and color, but they could behave different in different worlds. Yet we should expect similar behavior across most worlds for a given color and magic type, specially the most popular ones (which is part of the reason why we’re advocating why the Metaverse might choose to favor a system like “10 canonical colors and 10 canonical magic-types”. Since this can help with interoperability).
Color and more color
I imagine another advantage of making color so important is that it incentives asset creators to make color variants of any potential interoperable spell. So the next time you acquire, buy, or make an interoperable spell, instead of having 1 look, you might get 10 different looks, each of a different color. Although this would be assuming these color-based mechanics have become popular enough in the Metaverse for most players to demand them.
This expands the roleplaying potential for players, and even makes spells you might buy on secondary markets or acquire elsewhere more valuable, since different people might favor different visual styles.
Final Remarks
These are just some basic potential choices that make sense in a framework like this. The Metaverse might end up using additional damage types beyond these 3, but these 3 are a very natural starting point in my opinion. We haven’t discussed how we ensure that what the asset creator of a spell chose to put in the metadata matches the visual representation of the chosen 3D-file/particle-effect associated to any given UP/US. But there already exist some technologies that can help us in this area, for example automated tools like AI.
Image recognition could be one way to corroborate the “predominant color” of a given spell. In fact I imagine automated tools should have a much easier time verifying the color of a spell, than the type of spell via image recognition. Although non-automated tools could also be used. We can use things like verified credentials (VCs) and decentralized identifiers (DIDs) attached to the metadata of these spells, to ensure players can’t “cheat”, or by accident create a spell that looks to behave differently than what the metadata implies it should behave as. But that’s a whole different topic for another article.
