TYPE CHART THOUGHTS

[pinkmoth]

i will be trying to assemble a type chart that i personally like. like pkmn style type chart.

the actual matrix of resistances and weaknesses doesn't matter super much to me right away. more the actual types

i want there to be variety. no two types should have too much overlap or that'll feel like wasted space.

i want the types to be inspiring. looking at a type should immediately bring some creature designs to mind, doubly so for any given combination, or combining the type with random object or animal.

i don't want there to be types that centralize certain broad concepts. a good example is pokemon's flying type, or its bug type: there are many many many explicitly flying creatures without the flying type in pokemon, and there are a good number of insectoid, athropoid, or otherwise invertebrate creatures that aren't bug. another good example is sound. pokemon uses sounds and music themes very broadly to great effect and the sound type would fuck that over.

current likely candidate list:
FIRE (cmon man its basically the perfect type)
EARTH (more explicitly natural rock/ground type)
FORGED (more explicitly artificial steel type; expands to include glass and perhaps ceramics or even plastic)
GROWTH (slight chance of it getting named LIFE instead)
MYSTICAL (witches and unicorns and the fairy tale space between)
POP (the modernity type)
MARTIAL (a more explicitly artificial version of fighting)
WATER (same as fire, but not all aquatic life should be water type)
RUIN (themes of poison, disease, radiation, disasters, and apocalypse feel disparate when you consider them seperately yet unified enough to fold into one type when you spell them out in a row like that)
ELECTRIC (same as fire)
ICE (same as fire, with the added note that folding it into water just does not feel right to me)
DAY (basically normal with a bit more identity)
NIGHT (basically normal+ a bit of dark with a bit more identity)
BEYOND (things that are very old, or from very far away, or otherwise from beyond reckoning)

an attempt to put all these into opposite pairs:
fire - ice
earth - water
growth - ruin
martial - pop
day - night
forged - mystical
beyond -
electric -

current explicitly scorned that don't have obvious analoges list:
flying (hogs the concept of being aloft), wind is farther from this criticism and i'm more interested in it, but not guaranteed.
actually nevermind. FUCK wind. no wind type.
bug (would rather spread insects and bug adjacent creatures across every type)
sound (too broad, so many thing makes sounds and i prefer the idea that a metalic sound is FORGED type)
poison (explicitly replaced with RUIN)
digital/plastic (explicitly replaced with POP)

ON FIRE

FIRE is basically the perfect type for any system with types. even magic the gatherings five type system has one (red) that's basically FIRE broadened to include all its symbolic associations. everyone knows what fire is, does, and means, and at the same time it doesn't feel like it hogs anything the way flying does because a design involving a flame is almost certainly gonna be dominated by that flame anyway. it's basically the perfect type and i don't know why you wouldn't include it

ON EARTH AND FORGED vs GROUND ROCK AND STEEL

the distinction between ground and rock is very forced in my opinion, even if they kind of make it work. the distinction between steel and rock also feels iffy at times. my take is to fold natural geology together into EARTH, and artificial metallurgy, glass, and ceramics into FORGED. this might dominate object mons too hard into FORGED, but i'll see about that. crystals / cut gems are kind of a middle ground between the two, given how little "transmutation" takes place in the gem cutting process, and my first instict would be to say that they're probably fine in either type but also fine without either type.

ON GRASS/PLANT vs GROWTH/LIFE AND A MYSTICAL TYPE

while on one hand a single type for all plant mons seems overly narrow, just spreading flowers all over the pie seems wrong too. My thought right now is to put plants-as-species into a type called GROWTH or LIFE, alongside fungi and slime molds and the like, while plants-as-mystical (or mushrooms as mystical) get put into whatever my equivalent of a fairy type is. Occasionally a plant might fall outside these categories and it won't feel too weird because there's already two instead of one? does that make sense

ON MYSTICAL

basically, i'm just slightly expanding the purview of fairy type. the space between and including witches and unicorns, that's my current image of MYSTICAL.

ON POP

POP as in pop art, pop music, pop culture, populism, fizzy drinks, bubbles both literal soap and financial - POP as in modernity, basically. In a way POP is my answer to the tendency to add a digital type, a plastic type, or a sound type that ends up mostly embodying recent styles of music. a "modernity" type would make you sound insane while any other word doesn't quite capture the broadness of the concept. Maybe it's too broad - i will have to notice that in designing creatures. at the moment i'm quite pleased with the idea.

thinking about it more, it's probably better to stick with POP being digital stuff, toys, candy, and the occasional slightly more out there grab like a piet mondriaan or something.

ON MARTIAL VS. FIGHTING

this is *mostly* pedantry and a name change for its own sake, but MARTIAL wouldn't include bestial or brutish sorts of "fighting": it is only referring to consciously refined forms of combat. mostly this just means martial arts and militaria i guess. does this mean all weapon object mons are MARTIAL type? i'm conflicted on that right now. Maybe i'll adjust this

on WATER

WATER would be on par with FIRE type for being the perfect type, but it has a big problem: if you make everything that lives *in* water, WATER type, that suck ass. if you take the same approach as pokemon's ground type though, and make it so that creatures that live in the water don't have to be WATER type, you have a nearly faultless type. It's still gonnna have a bunch of fish but not ALL the sea beasties.

ON RUIN

RUIN is a type i want because i think it's a cool and evocative replacement for poison both for being broader and for being less broad. RUIN more easily expands to include radiation, disease and more conceptual forms of insidious destruction, as well as themes of disaster and apocalypse, but also means MYSTICAL and any other type can barge in on *literal* poison space without it necessarily feeling stolen. It's also really really edgy, so it might be fun to go against the edgy grain when designing RUIN types.


ON WIND and ELECTRIC and ICE

I actually decided against wind when i had the thought of many different types of winds having different types. a tornado might be RUIN type, a hurricane WATER type, a blizzard ICE type. storms are more the field of WATER and ELECTRIC than WIND and ELECTRIC in this sense. On that note, I am adding ELECTRIC and ICE. Both are very basic elemental types with thematic broadness without hogging space that other types might wannna lean into the way wind does. ICE and WATER types are sometimes folded together, but so many designs feel really off if you don't distinguish between the two. the cultural sense of water and ice are just completely different.

ON NORMAL AND DARK AND DAY AND NIGHT

normal is kind of a nothing type, right? it's basically what they use when a design doesn't really go anywhere else. arceus and regigigas definitely aren't Normal. I don't really wanna include normal but i think having mons that are basically just... "plain" animals is cute. So. they get to be either day or night depending on what fits them better. it's kind of funky and weird but i enjoy using day and night so broadly... and what could possibly be more normal than day and night? day gets the NORMAL normal stuff... and night gets the stuff that's normal but you wouldn't really like to admit it, so dark's more mundanely mischievous stuff.

BEYOND

BEYOND type is for mons that are divine, from space, or from impossibly long ago. this fills a lot of holes in mystical and it's just Cool imo.


this isn't complete yet, i feel like i could use at least one type maybe two ala dragon/bug, although i don't want to lob all bugs into one type, i would want to do it to something else.

[Baatlefeel]

Who or what is being put on this chart?

[pinkmoth]

i was thinking of using it for fakemon instead of pkmn's original types !