Death to the Mana Bar!

[Hamster at Dawn]

I think maybe you should have a small reserve of magic so that, rather than be helpless when you use up all your mana, you can always cast low-level spells as much as you want. That's what you want really, the ability to cast lots of basic spells but only one or two massive spells in times of great need. It's just difficult to implement that into a game.

 

[JMeganSnow]

I think maybe you should have a small reserve of magic so that, rather than be helpless when you use up all your mana, you can always cast low-level spells as much as you want. That's what you want really, the ability to cast lots of basic spells but only one or two massive spells in times of great need. It's just difficult to implement that into a game.

Nah, it's not difficult--they implemented this in DDO. The various caster prestige paths can all get spell-like abilities that they can use for either miniscule amounts of mana or even when they're out of mana. (They also made it so that if you go below 10 mana, you regenerate mana until you're back up to 10, so you can always use your very cheapest spells even if you're technically "out".) Or you just make the basic spell free.

Sometimes I wonder if some games just make it so that you eventually completely run out of the ability to use specials so that you HAVE to use the auto-attack at some point.

 

[JMeganSnow]

Double post, sorry.

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

Death to the mana bar! Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller!

 

[d4rkxy13x]

Ooh, I have a good idea to solve the mana bar problem : instead of rinnung out, your character becomes tired ; your spells cast more slowly and deal less damage. I think it could work.

 

[sean360h]

I thought this was going to be about Yahtzees bar in Australia, I am actually kind of disappointed as it would have made an interesting topic.

I thought that to

 

[rokkolpo]

People that conjure fire out of nowhere need something to stop them from doing it to the entire planet.

That little blue bar was the solution.

I think of it like this: You need to regain focus to conjure up more shit, as you get better your mana bar will increase in size and thus making you a better wizard capable of using more mana.

Seems about right to me.

 

[Gunjester]

I think one of the biggest problems with magic vs. non-magic in fantasy games is that they have opposing arcs. Mages are fun as heck to play at high levels when you can simply wave your hand and make enemies vanish, and you have all kinds of cool spell effects to throw around essentially at will. GETTING to those high levels from the initial "I have a magic missile. Pew. And I'm spent." stage is a horrific grind.

Touche, seriously you've pointed out something I knew but forgot about, and thats all true, I guess I'm just not obsessive enough about a single RPG, or at least MMORPG, to care enough to shoot for ultra-high levels. Unfortunately I've noticed this trend being broken by developers, even with low mana a lot of games hand out Potions like they're lemonade, hell a lot of the MMOs give you up to like, 100 by the time you finish the intro quests, i.e. Maplestory. So as much as I agree thats the way it SHOULD be, seems the game designers are changing it to make mages more accessible to new player and in turn, more annoying for others.
KSers should be banned by the way ^^.

 

[GaryH]

I always prefer systems where magic is absurdly powerful but takes it's toll on the user by making them insane, slowly killing them or both.

You want massive, unstoppable powers? You got 'em, but you're still only human and something has got to give.

This is cool but how would you implement it into a game (assuming we mean computer game not tabletop d & d type thing.) In single player, could be fun if it was built into the story. Cant see it workin in multiplayer.

Easily, there are two ways I see it working. You could just work in tangible drawbacks to all the spells. Damaging spells that hurt you, buffing spells that weaken you in other areas, etc. etc.

That's a fairly tame example though. The other way to do it is to add a risk of some kind of drawback (ranging from a simple debuff, to accidentally helping the enemy you're trying to kill, to sudden, unpleasant death) to every spell and allow each spell to be charged up or to build up some sort of "pressure" when used often. The more spells you use or combine, or the longer you charge up a spell, the greater the risk of it back firing with unpleasant/deadly/unfortunate results. Better spell casters wouldn't just get higher damage numbers, they'd be able to handle more powerful spells with less risk and the extra damage would come as a by product of this.

Bonus points if multiple spell casters can combine their powers to amplify this effect, for better or worse.

There's no need for a mana bar either, your spells are limited by your own sense of self preservation and/or how lucky you feel.

 

[C2Ultima]

I thought you were talking about Yahtzee's place from the title. You make a good point.

 

[RivFader86]

Mana is the best limit....doesn't have much to do with the maori beliefs anymore but if you look at it as something like "mind focus" or anything else that can be used to describe the ability to concentrate it makes "sense" that this "resource" would deplete over time when doing something that requires a lot of "brain work" like casting spells. And no matter what you do to limit the use of spells it will always come down to not beeing able to cast right now or atleast not a spell in the same school of magic.


PS: If you run out...smack em in the face....simple as that ;P

 

[Negatempest]

Oh boy, I can go into great detail about the existence of the mana bar. Mana is to a mage, what Stamina is to a warrior. It is not that the spells are "blocked" from being used, it is more like you (the mage) are spiritually too weak to cast more devastating spells. Not even the best athletes can run forever or the best martial artists fight forever...they tend to tire out. That is what the mana bar represents.

 

[Altorin]

Most game's mana and spellcasting isn't based on Tolkien, for starters. In Tolkien, magic was very old, and very powerful and also very rare. Wizards were basically immortal beings. Gandalf could no sooner teach someone to cast magic as you could teach a blind person to see. So get the idea that it's based on Tolkien out of your head cause it's not.

Mana systems in video games today are more like the Psionics system in D&D, but I imagine that those weren't really the inspiration. It was just a simple way for game designers to give you various abilities and balance their use - the more powerful they are, the more mana they cost. I don't think the mana bar should be gotten rid of altogether, but there are games that introduce new ways to work around it. Notably, a game could have a system like Mass Effect where more powerful powers have longer cooldowns and weaker abilities have shorter cooldowns.

Getting rid of mana for spellcasters is like getting rid of ammo for Guns. It really doesn't sit right with most players. Mana and Ammo are both strong gaming tropes for a reason.

 

[Zeekar]

OP

Can't really agree with this. There is no point in having a party if you are all powerful. RPGs are generally based around the party system so magic users would just be broken in that context.

RPG's like Morrowind, Oblivion, Gothic, Diablo, Titan Quest? There are just as many RPG's (or shoot and loot games at least) where you're all by your lonesome as ones where you have a party. Most PEN AND PAPER games are based around a party dynamic because, well, they're supposed to be a social activity. But I've seen gaming groups that were only 2 people, a GM and a single player. It feels a bit weird, though, because the GM spends half the time talking to himself like some sort of crazy person.

We're talking about completely different RPGs though. I'm just saying that it isn't prudent to completely do away with limits to what magic can do like a mana bar. I'm not saying that a game without one couldn't be fun.

There's a place for everything.

 

[QuadrAlien]

Someone's probably brought it up already, but there's always the Magicka approach - infinite mana, but a variety of ways in which casting the wrong spell at the wrong time results in things going hilariously wrong.

Mind you, perhaps an action RPG could equip the mages with spells which work like the attacks a boss fight might throw at you - powerful and can be used repeatedly, but with some manner of cooldown and visible patterns which would allow a skilled warrior to get attacks through. Just a thought.

 

[JMeganSnow]

So as much as I agree thats the way it SHOULD be, seems the game designers are changing it to make mages more accessible to new player and in turn, more annoying for others.

I'm not saying it SHOULD be that way, necessarily, but I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with having your spellcasters be an invested class, where it's just not easy to pick one up as a noob player and run with it.

DDO works this way, and I enjoy it, at least. They even tell you this at the beginning when you're creating your character: each class you can select has a "solo ability" rating. The highest is cleric (easiest to self-heal, after all, and you can kill things eventually with your mace even though it's hardly efficient), followed by Favored Soul and Ranger and Paladin and Monk and Bard in roughly that order, then Barbarian and Rogue, and then finally, at the very bottom, is Sorcerer and Wizard. And it's 100% true. If you are a noob, that's about how difficult you're going to find it to solo as those classes, particularly at low levels.

Even at level cap, casters have the limitation that they really can't solo the heavy boss mobs (who are flat-out immune to a lot of things, meaning that they have to be taken down by damage and a caster who runs out of mana can't keep up massive amounts of damage over a long sustained period--you need to be able to hit the auto-attack button and go get a sandwich to pull that off). However, as survivability goes casters pretty much completely eclipse any and all non-caster characters.

The game takes advantage of this fact, though, by pulling some very nasty tricks. In a lot of the high-level raids and epic quests, your casters being "OP" like this becomes absolutely necessary if you want to complete the raid/quest. What do they do? They throw in mobs that can't be killed effectively by ANYONE along with a major boss. The boss will destroy you if you don't get on him and get him killed before the healer runs out of juice. The caster doesn't have the sustained damage to kill the boss, so what the caster winds up doing is kiting the horrendous side mobs that would wipe the party if they weren't being distracted/contained/CC'd.

All it takes is for the caster to make one mistake and die and you've got a party wipe on your hands (unless everyone else in the group is on top of things and can squeak out a recovery). EVERYONE has a completely vital, indispensable role in order to get a successful completion, but the roles don't *overlap*. A caster is not just another more powerful dps who does damage with lightning bolts instead of a sword or a bow.

So, to sum up: I think what really needs to happen in order for casters to FEEL like casters (that is, awesome and powerful, wielding mighty magics that bend the very rules of the cosmos etc. etc. etc.) is to design your game with the fact that they can pull this stuff off in mind. Then, when your non-casters are slaughtering their way through the orcish horde, Gandalf is busy kiting the Nazgul. Or something.

You have to be smart about how you design for this, though. I much prefer the way DDO does it to the way WoW does it. In DDO, you *may* have an "ideal" character class/setup for a given role, but it devolves a lot more on how you *play* your character than having a very specific ability set. There's no such thing as "best in slot" gear in DDO. There IS in WoW. Instead of trying to stack up super-high stats, as you do in WoW, in DDO it's about getting as many valuable abilities on your gear as you can. There's a hard limit on how many special abilities gear can have, and then you have problems with minimum level to USE that gear. In DDO, most effects don't stack, so there's a hard upper limit to how high you can push your abilities. You need resistances and immunities and defenses to stay alive, and you need to be flexible. Veteran DDO players have tons of inventory space dedicated to "swap gear", and unless you're coasting through easy quests you'll be swapping items in and out pretty much constantly. I have yet to see a WoW player who switches weapons half a dozen times during a combat because well this guy has a certain kind of damage reduction, so I need this weapon set in order to kill HIM, then here comes the caster so I need to switch to my maximum DPS set in order to get him down before he nukes me to death, and oh here comes the heavy hitters, I'd better switch to my ranged weapon to deal with them, and this dude is immune to that damage type so I'd better use my wand . . .

It's a completely different feel. But I tell you, your caster feels AWESOME in DDO once you get them going, though. There's nothing like the first time you do Shadow Crypt and seeing a literal HORDE (like, 15-20) of shadow-monsters descend on you, throwing up a firewall, and watching them all poof to ash in seconds. Or sprinting down the hillside, seeing a mob in the distance that is charging your way, and casually tossing off a finger of death without even slowing down. I don't just play casters, though, because my non-mages feel awesome too, just in different ways. I'd call that a working system.

 

[Syntax Error]

You disappoint me. I thought this thread was a direct calling out on Yahtzee and his AWESOME business.

 

[KyoraSan]

actually, in about ever fictional story the characters do get exhausted if they overexert their magical abilities will nilly.
Consider the cooldown times and mana bar like a "strength" bar.

 

[Shieldage]

Shadowrun RPG has a stun bar and a physical damage bar. Getting too close to a concussion grenade and getting a minor stab wound cause the difficulty of otherwise mundane tasks to increase by roughly the same amount. Fill the stun damage completely and you pass out, with further stun attacks causing physical damage. Fill physical damage bar completely and you pass out with further attacks potentially causing death.

A magician can cast Heal on someone's Medium wound and than use their willpower stat to resist 'Drain'. If they fail the Drain test they take stun damage. Pass it and the amount of stun damage decreases, possibly even reaching none. If they fail badly or they're trying to handle a huge spell beyond their means they may wind up taking physical damage. Stun damage can't be healed by magic.

In order to help resist drain, ritual magic can spread it around multiple magic users, although the really really big stuff like setting off volcanoes have Drain represented by number of participating magicians expected to die from the overload.


If you have a Medium stun wound from casting a spell, your chances of resisting further stun damage decreases, because it hampers your ability to concentrate. In other words, there's a level of diminishing returns. You might be able to cast twenty spells in a row if you are really really lucky and are casting low-powered spells, but more than likely you won't be able to cast more than five or six without rest.

There are various stimulants most people in Shadowrun can take to decrease stun damage instantly, but magicians can't use them regularly or they risk hemorrhaging magic ability. Trade off.


I think its better than a mana bar, as a stun bar can be used to track more things.


Other Alternative: Rather than a mana bar, you can have magic take a heavy toll on your inventory. If you need to carry a three pound ball of iron in your backpack, to make an immense one-shot fireball, you're not going to be casting many of them in a row on the road.