I joked about the thread getting cleaned up, and then less than 12 hours later the thread got cleaned up lol
Or burn, freeze or ... poison their aura, apparently. But yeah.
Look, I'm willing to get on board with the conceit that all weapons do some kind of aura damage (despite that clearly not being the stat that's being damaged), but why does it need to have the same damn "Captain Planet" element system laid over the top of it as the magic system? For that matter, why does the magic system look like that in the first place?
Far better (IMHO), to have a single kind of Weapon damage, make Lust attacks scale to keep up and have Magic divided into "schools" that could actually provide the non-lethal effects that this game's premise requires. Illusions, mind control, that sort of thing.
IDK, I found the "all damage just hits aura" thing to be both really boring and not at all supported in game. I don't know if I'd support that one. It's so damn cliche.
As for why the magic system looks like this, it's undoubtedly because this is a placeholder system that wasn't meant to last this long. It's just a super generic, easy to add system that doesn't really take a lot of design work. And having designed a couple combat and magic systems myself, it takes a lot of work to make them interesting.
I think you can make multiple damage types work, but only if you design in enough RPS type action to make it interesting. Having like 10 different damage types and they're all equally effective (except lust which just sucks) with no reason why one is better than another given a specific situation is just... really boring. And boring is the worst sin of game design.
If resistances were more dynamic, at the absolute very least, we could make the current system sort of interesting. Just wholesale rip off pokemon and the effective/neutral/not effective system for resistances. Then make enemies actually generate with different resistances and damage types based context rules.
And your examples? Either of them on their own is an entire game. A very limited form of control exists in the Lilith's Command spell, and that already comes with massive restrictions because there's just no way to pull it off in a satisfying way in a sandbox game.
Everyone already has enhanced toughness and resilience for the sex to work without gore, so damaging magic isn't a problem in itself.
This isn't supposed to be a sandbox game, it's supposed to be an RPG. It's still described and advertised as such. We'll need to address the combat system and progression eventually. This game could use a little more *game* to it.
And yes, I agree with your last point. Just do the flexible survival thing and say that magic is making people inhumanly resilient. We're clearly not going for originality points with this game anyways, just pick any easy explanation.