Darloth/PotentialCharmDesignTheory

How are/should charms be designed?

Here's an idea I had, which seems to occasionally but not always be the one the designers follow.

Charms should be arranged into thematic trees, with each charm encapsulating one or more distinct action or ability. 'Soak damage', 'hit better in melee' or 'dodge the undodgable' would be examples of this.

To an extent, they already are, but very inconsistantly. Some charms duplicate the effects of others but don't require them, some require unrelated charms, and so on.

I would be very interested to see what a charm system broken down into atomic charm effects would actually look like. A given charm would require prerequisites based on what it incorporated, but would not/should not simply replicate those, which leads to speedbumps. If possible, all charms would expand themselves naturally, either with buyable sub-effects, unlocked further abilities at higher essence levels, or upgrade charms which let a previous charm do more (but never less at the same time! that's a new charm entirely.)