That's one way to do it.
Right now my players and I are fairly content with the basic combat system laid out in LN #11. As far as the damage types, in another RPG system I played in the past, the elemental types of damage all had effects
,and all armor in the game had listed values against; slashing, piercing, blunt, fire, cold, electricity, and energy. Almost no armor blocked energy because its a special type of damage. To implement armor values like that into Novus would take.... A lot of work, I believe.
But as far as the effects, here is what the three elemental did: 1. Fire - Natural healing rates are halved against this type of damage, meaning it takes twice as long to heal from a burn. Burn damage had to be kept up with, seperate from ordinary blade strikes, for instance, even though both of them hurt the same HP pool. Also, fire damage has a chance to light you on fire, obviously. The chance of ignition fluctuated depending on how severe the fire damage was.
2. Ice: damages characters as normal, but inflicts a slow healing All Action Penalty. If you take a major icy blow, you're going to be moving slowly after that. It wasn't a 1 damage for 1 AAP, but unfortunately I can't recall the ratio. This AAP went away as you healed from the ice damage.
3: Electricity: damages like normal, sometimes penetrating metallic armor. Like ice damage, electricity also inflicts an All Action Penalty, but this penalty goes away very quickly, dwindling from round to round. However, there was a threshold where if you took too much AAP in one blow, the character was rendered unconscious. Damage from electricity heals as normal.
The above effects were from another RPG system, but I feel like it can be pretty easy to implement these ideas or similar ones into Novus, giving appeal to players for new artifact items. Perhaps special booms can be created just for the damage types. I have seen mentioned in the core Novus book that there is also Holy damage, Infernal Damage, Acid damage, and maybe Sonic damage.
Holy and Infernal already have rules listed under the White and Black magic schools. Acid... I believe is listed under rules for Dragons at the bottom. Sonic was listed under one of the sub schools for magic in one of the Libram Novus but... I can't remember which one. Also, I think the rules for Sonic were for that attack specifically, as opposed to for ALL sonic damage. Just some options for those that are interested.
