How to name skills? Patterns or unique?

[ThatTurtle]

I'm working on a turn based RPG. Some games use a sort of system of prefixes and suffixes for consistency when naming skills. The best examples I can think of right now are the Shin Megami Tensei and Final Fantasy games and the various spinoffs of those series.

Most of the Shin Megami Tensei games have prefixes like Agi (fire), Bufu (ice), Zio (lightning), Hama (light/expel), and Mudo (dark/death), to indicate the skill's element. (The closest thing the series has to wind is "Garu" but some games use "Zan" aka force instead.) Most people who've played any MegaTen game are probably familiar with the naming conventions. For anyone who hasn't and needs more details, allow me to elaborate:

If there's a "Ma-" prefix before the element, it means the spell hits more than target. The suffixes indicate the skills' power level. No suffix is the most basic spell. The "-dyne" suffix indicates the strongest spell of the line like Agidyne, Bufudyne, Ziodyne, and Zandyne or Garudyne. The intermediate suffix varies for some reason- Agilao, Bufula, Zionga, Hamaon, Mudoon are all 2nd tier spells.

The "Megi-" prefix means it's Almighty. Nothing resists Almighty.

Spoiler

(Except for a certain human character in Devil Survivor 2, but it's not shown on the stats screen. Or any human who has the passive skill equipped. There's a handful of demons who have that, too. But the original DeSu 2 was definitely the exception to the rule. Haven't played Record Breaker yet so I can't comment on that. Oh, and a couple bosses in Nocturne resist it as well, but certain parts of Nocturne are infamously difficult. I digress.)

Megido hits all enemies for medium Almighty damage while Megidola does heavier damage. Megidolaon is severe. As you can imagine, an attack that can't be resisted and hits the entire party is quite dangerous. Some of the super bosses have it. 
There a usually a handful of unique skills in each game that don't follow the pattern. Ragnarok is a single target fire skill stronger than Agidyne, for example. It's generally exclusive to Surt but sometimes demons/persona can inherit it via fusion. 

Dia is the basic 1 target healing skill, Media recovers a bit of every party member's HP, Diarama restores moderate HP for 1 ally, Mediarama does the same for the whole party, Diarahan fully restores 1 ally's HP, and Mediarahan fully heals everybody's HP. 

Recarm revives an ally with 50% HP, and Samarecarm revives with full HP. The buffs and debuffs have their own naming conventions of suffixes and prefixes. Suffix generally indicates the stat affected, and prefix indicates whether it's a buff or debuff. I'm starting to ramble here so I'll move on. 

More recent Final Fantasy games use the "-ra" suffix for 2nd tier spells and  "-ga" means 3rd tier. Some of the basic prefixes are Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, and Cure. Some players find the combinations awkward to pronounce. ("Thundaga" does sound a bit strange to me...) 

Anyway, what do you prefer, unique names for every single attack, (kinda like Pokemon,) or some kind of naming pattern like the ones used in MegaTen or Final Fantasy?

 

[Ms Littlefish]

"Fire" and "More Fire" is effective but it's blah. I like unique names, granted. It's more work. I think naming your skills is an opportunity to show off some of your game's personality and tie into its aesthetic. The suffix/prefix thing will work as well. But no matter what approach you take there should be a rhyme and reason to the names and they should give a basic indication of what the spell will accomplish. 

Also, I like saying "Thun daga aga aga aga aga aga aga" because I find that word ridiculously fun to say.

 

[??????]

I like Fire-aga, cause when you say it over and over it sounds like Viagra... So childish

 

[HumanNinjaToo]

I prefer unique names. To get ideas for skill names, I try to sum up what the skill does in two or three words and then troll the thesaurus for synonyms until something strikes me. I also prefer to have the skill names reflect the character and or elemental affinity. As an example, I have a rogue type character with a nature affinity. The skill does damage and chance to poison. I started with poison vine and worked it into Black Briar. It's simple but unique.

For me, it's easier to recognize a skill in a list when it has a unique name as opposed to searching for the correct fire spell out of 5 that all start Fir- and end in various suffixes.

 

[stupid enough to like FF13]

All I want are ability names that actually give me some sort of idea of what an ability does.

In short, if you have to reread the OP to know what "Mabufula" is after reading this post, that perfectly demonstrates the problem.

 

[Vox Novus]

I think tiered names help the player to associate which abilities do certain things and are related and in that sense, I know Fire, fira and firaga All share the core word fire and so all are fire spells and after being introduced to it ra is middle tier and ga top tier.

Media and diarama are bad names to me because they make me think more of a school project/class than a rpg spell.

 

[Chaos Avian]

I personally love pattern naming, I do it myself. Like the OP I used SMT and Phantasy Star for naming references with prefixes and suffixes. "Ra-" for all hitting spells, "-da" suffix for medium tier and "-lah" for top tier spells.

For example for my fire element spells I have:

Spoiler

HegiHegida

Hegilah

Rahegi

Rahegida

Rahegilah.

What I also try to do is hint what the spell does in it's name (almost like Dragon Quest's bad puns) so the player doesn't always have to look at the icon or read the description. "Osea" sounds like it could be Water element and Oxigi for Poison right? :3

However, outside of spells I don't follow the naming patterns but tend to go the unique route, physical abilities especially.

 

[The Mighty Palm]

I always liked Dragon Quest's spell names. "Frizz" was fire, "Crack" was ice, etc. Named after the sound they make. I love that idea.

Dragons dogmas spells also had cool names. Ingle=ranged fireball spell. Comestian=AoE fire spell. Bolide= BIG FIRE METEORS OF DEATH. It really helped to

give them their own identity.

 

[Farr]

Depends on what do you want to achieve.
No one wants to guess what is that spell called `Khalizabolt` effect.

Generic are always good IMO, fireball, thunder, haste, we all know what they mean so why bother trying to make up names.

 

[Vox Novus]

I think generic names are sort of the right idea but by doing that you lose a sense of identity with your game, the last thing you want to do is to make people think of another game or compare your game to another game while playing it.

Its important to find an identity of your own in some way without compromising identifying what the ability does. The Dragon quest example is a good one because its different but makes sense when you read it.

It should also make sense to your target audience as well, don't make a bunch of japanese named skills in a game that doesn't have anything to do with japanese culture.

Take Final fantasy one ailment is silence which prevents the casting of spells (by rendering the mage in-capable of talking/chanting the spell). Later final fantasy games would make the spell to remove Silence Vox. This makes sense assuming you know that Vox is latin for voice. However is the average target audience for final fantasy going to know that?

 

[stupid enough to like FF13]

Dragon Quest's problem is really that they have a system of suffixes and prefixes...and are completely inconsistent about them.

Let's take "Crack" (ice, single target). Upgrades to "Crackle" (one group) and then "Kacrackle" (all enemies). Okay, what about "Frizz" (fire, single-target)? "Frizzle" is...single-target. "Kafrizzle" is...single-target. One-group fire spells all fall under the "Sizz" line, which are all one-group—except Sizz is treated as a separate element than Frizz.  Or how about "Woosh" (wind) spells, which likewise are all one-group? Starts with "Woosh"—then goes to "Swoosh" and then "Kaswoosh".

(And then you just spam Thin Air or Roundhouse Kick every battle instead of remembering what any of those do.)

 

[Omnimental]

I prefer both pattern naming and theme naming. Use keywords to make the Help dialog sweet, simple, and easy to read, but abilities names should have FLAVOUR. It's yet another part to show off a bit of your world. Settings which consider magic to be... well... mystical, should have elaborate fancy names for their powers. Settings where magic is taught rote in schools from books should have formulaic names.

A big part of the issue is that help dialog is either not used at all or painfully misused. Mendala's Dancing Embers with the tooltip [Fire; Random] is a lot more interesting than Fire: Random.

Give me something distinctive, something that stands out and is memorable.

 

[woootbm]

I prefer both pattern naming and theme naming. Use keywords to make the Help dialog sweet, simple, and easy to read, but abilities names should have FLAVOUR. It's yet another part to show off a bit of your world. Settings which consider magic to be... well... mystical, should have elaborate fancy names for their powers. Settings where magic is taught rote in schools from books should have formulaic names.

A big part of the issue is that help dialog is either not used at all or painfully misused. Mendala's Dancing Embers with the tooltip [Fire; Random] is a lot more interesting than Fire: Random.

Give me something distinctive, something that stands out and is memorable.

I started typing something but this is perfect, really.

I also have a fear here. Which is that developing a pattern like this makes it easy to just spit out a million spells (or items, or other things, whatever the naming convention is used for) rapid fire instead of sitting down and actually designing stuff one by one. This is the definition of creating a cookie cutter, ain't it?

 

[BloodletterQ]

I actually have no problem with using made up words or obscure languages with an affix. It gives magic its own language.

 

[Wavelength]

I prefer unique names, by a mile.

Fire -> Fire2 -> Fire3 is mundane and reminds you that you're not dealing with an interesting difference.  Fire -> Fira -> Firaga is slightly better but new players will take considerable time to understand and remember the differences, and it's still not that interesting.

Flare -> Fireball -> Pyroblast is far more effective, easy to remember, and evocative.

A powerful AoE version could be called "Lava Shower" or "Flame Wave" instead of Maagidyne (way too hard to understand, even after playing the Persona games!) or Fire 3 All (too boring) or even Flame (which could easily be confused with the single-target equivalent "Fire").  If you hear "Lava Shower", you immediately have a cool and accurate mental picture of what this spell is going to do to your enemies.  The more descriptive, the better.

 

[??????]

@Wavelength - what about 'Meteor Shower'? That totally sounds like an end game fire AOE, and you can also add some unique status effects for it - which are unknown due to them being alien

 

[Milennin]

I prefer uniquely named spells because they're more fun, and tend to sound cooler. They can also be part of a characters personality, like Echoing Thunder is a skill only my character knows, whereas naming it Thunder3 instead could just be whatever.

 

[Wavelength]

@Wavelength - what about 'Meteor Shower'? That totally sounds like an end game fire AOE, and you can also add some unique status effects for it - which are unknown due to them being alien

Sure!  Anything that's evocative, simple, and descriptive is good by me!!

 

[Rikifive]

Personally I really liked DDS skill naming. What's wrong in seeing a name like 'Pyriphlegethon'? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

In all seriousness, I really liked that - at first it was kinda confusing to know what are they doing and how that works, but when you understand that, then it makes it really easy to read and it kinda looks more original than Fire > More Fire > Even More Fire > An End Game Fire Spell, but it also depends on game style and many other things.

If each skill is different and there are many of them, then original names for each one is good instead of adding more letters until it's unreadable. Imagine something like this -

Fire element spells that deals fire damage to all enemies:

Maragi > Maragion > Maragidyne > Maragibedyne > Maragibedyleine > Maragibedyleinege > Maragibedyleinegerede > Marawhatever.

but if the spell system is quite simple like just FireI > FireII > FireIII, where each one does the same thing, but with more damage, then naming them like in DDS looks good for me.

Also I simply like original ideas and naming system, especially if they kinda makes sense like in DDS - by name you can determine element if it's a buff (name ending with -kaja) or debuff (name ending with -nda).

But there's no 'which one is better'.

 

[Schlangan]

For me, some skills have their names from very rough/wrong translations in other languages (french/english, japanese, chinese, korean, hindi). The languages it comes from gives the class of people using that, for example gods in my story mainly use japanese-named skills, whereas titans use chinese-named. The main character likes to create its own attacks, so the name can change greatly depending on what he wants to do.


Doing so, if a more powerful variant of a skill appear, its name will change with no real prefix logic. I name a darkness attack "Kuroshine" for example which roughly translate to Dark-Die. The improved version is called "Yamikamisen", roughly translated at "Thousand darkness gods". The them black/dark remains, but that's it.


Doing so gives different names for various moves, and the extended description that I put helps to understand what it is.