DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

Well, if your success rate is 100%, and some non-unique enemies carry really valuable stuff, that can be rather game-breaking. If you compensate by not making any enemies carry anything especially valuable, the player stops caring so much. And if things are too easy to get, you don't care so much when you get them.

Here's a method which I think might address some of the absurdity of only being able to steal from enemies while they're still alive and resisting, and limit some of the frustration of keeping an enemy alive to steal from it over and over. Instead of having a "steal" technique which takes an item from the enemy during battle, have a skill that represents marking them to be carefully stripped of valuables after the battle is over. The skill always works- if the enemy type carries any kind of item, you increase your chance of receiving it at the end of the battle, and if they never drop anything, you get a message telling you so (possibly the enemy is marked as an invalid target so you can't eve use it on them in the first place.) Some enemies such as certain bosses may have their drop chance changed from 0% to 100% when targeted with this skill (after all, you're only going to fight them once,) and possibly some uncommon enemies with noteworthy items will have their drop rate changed from 0% to something lower than 100%, to enforce a bit of extra effort in acquiring the item (since at least within reason receiving an item may be more satisfying if it took some effort to get,) but depending on whether it's something that would be gamebreaking to collect in large quantities, further enemies of the same type might be marked as invalid targets for the skill after that.

For high profile creative figures with a history of success in a commercial context, having their ideas stolen by other people in the industry, where actual money is at stake, not just creative pride, is probably a legitimate concern.

I think we'd all love to have to worry about our ideas being stolen.

A few people so far have mentioned the downside of avoidable encounters wherein the player risks becoming underleveled and not being prepared to complete the mandatory fights, but I think there's another important issue that this doesn't address.

Encounters should constitute some kind of meaningful challenge, or if not challenge then some other sort of entertainment. If the only purpose of all the non-plot-mandated encounters in the game is to give you money and experience so you're strong enough for the next point in the game, then you should be cranking the rate way down, and the the returns per battle way up, or just doing away with them entirely and giving the player all the experience they need from bosses.

In the earliest RPGs, random encounters constituted a meaningful challenge. Even if it wasn't that hard to get through one battle, the attrition from dealing with them repeatedly over the course of the dungeon was a legitimate threat. Full healing before boss encounters was often not provided, so you had to face the challenge of preserving your strength over a series of encounters and having enough left at the end to beat a powerful enemy. But as RPGs in general became more accommodating to players over time, the essential purpose behind random encounters was lost from many games. They no longer posed a realistic threat of defeat on their own, and access to free healing and saves before bosses became standard, meaning that they served little purpose as pre-boss attrition either. Players started to decry them as nonsensical and antithetical to fun, because they were divorced from the context where they had once added something to the gameplay experience.

You don't necessarily have to use random encounters to create a meaningful attrition challenge. Earthbound, for instance, used a touch encounter system, but enemies were powerful enough and difficult enough to avoid that they imposed a challenge the player couldn't simply choose to sidestep. But if you do give the player the option to generally avoid encounters, then you'd better find something other than challenge to make the encounters worth having there at all. Declaring that you'll make things easy for the people who don't want to be challenged, but give the people who want challenge the option to challenge themselves, is generally a shoddy compromise, because for most people who want to be challenged, there's a distinction between the game challenging them, and their having to go out of the way to make challenges for themselves.

I've seen all or nearly all of these used before, but some of them only once. Star Ocean 2 had a huge set of elements, some of which didn't even make this list (such as Void and Star,) the upshot of which was that all the elemental affinities except Fire, which was used more than the others, were nigh irrelevant, because the chance of affinity matchups was small enough that you could just ignore it most of the time.

If you're going to have a large list of elements, I think it's better to ensure that they all do something interesting besides "extra damage to things weak against this element."