Hello Community,

I am looking for an alternative method for the rock-paper-scissors principle.

Here is the idea behind it (with 5 elements):


It should be easy to understand so that even younger people could choose the right opponent etc. quickly.

I will use it in my towerdefense game to give the monsters and towers a little system.
- The principle shall only consist of 3 - maximum 4 "elements".
- Default elements like fire and water and wind and electricity are not allowed together - maybe alone with other kind of elements. Its too old fashioned ;D

I dont want to use it... I want to invent sth new... maybe with the help of you!

I already had some ideas:

- Water beats Salt beats Ground beats Water

Maybe this will help for the understandment (it can be expanded in the same way)



I hope the ideas will flow ;D

GreetZ,
dice

haha, bbt sheldon ftw

For our BBT fans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iapcKVn7DdY

I think it's worth noting that the system cannot work with an even number, so you're stuck with 3 unless you want to go up to 5 or higher, or you're willing to allow ties.

How about... animal, mineral, vegetable? Animal eats vegetable, vegetable... grows on mineral(?), and mineral bludgeons animal. It's (perhaps) a recognisable combination from games like "Twenty Questions" as a quick way to narrow down what someone is thinking of, but I think this would be a unique application of it.

Have you seen these bigger versions of Rock Paper Scissors? Perhaps you can pick out some logical, interesting, and unique combinations of three out of one of the bigger charts.

PS: Some might find it interesting that I originally conceived of and prototyped KarBOOM as a physical Rock Paper Scissors game, hence the "Sapoi" mutator ("sapoi" is what we called Rock Paper Scissors in school in Fiji).

You're familiar with Pokemon? They had an awesome type system, it was really intuitive. Not really "even" as in "every element has the same strength", but cool nonetheless.

Technically, you just have to model your system with a graph and detect wether you are in a loop, or not, and if not, find a topological sorting for it. That's it.

The problem of those isn't so much to make them fair and balanced - that's easy enough, especially if you allow ties.

The problem arises if you're trying to think of items that represent your choices, in a way that every outcome seems obvious.

I did it recently for my game with 7 elements (allowing two ties for each element, two "strengths" and two "weaknesses"), and it's really difficult.

I mean, check out the systems in the link Jibb posted. Does "Human" beat "Air"? (it does, apparently). Does "Sponge" beat "Gun"? Who wins, "Wolf" or "Devil"?
I'm pretty sure the website was more concerned about possible, distinctive hand-gestures than logical outcomes.

In the end, sometimes it might make sense to add an element with no "real-life-analogon", or something that could easily be strong to anything. In my case, I went with "machine", which, well, isn't really very well-defined in the context of the game, so I can get away with it being weak/strong against unusual items.
That made the system fair, so I think it's okay.

Slight variation on the elements but with only 3 you could have Tree, River and Fire.
Tree stops the River;
River extinguishes Fire;
Fire burns Tree

I'll keep thinking