I have long considered making a magic system similar to this as well. I think the way I would do it though, is more of a Star Wars Galaxies style approach. Have a health bar and a stamina bar. If either stamina or health get completely empty the character can not longer hold on and faints/dies.

I like the usual GURP system: have a spellcasting attribute, which represents your aptitude. Every spell you cast, you make a save (some random chance which decreases the higher your aptitude). Should you succeed, the spell goes perfectly. Otherwise, you get taxed. Taxing temporarily lowers your aptitude, reducing the potency of all your spells, and deals damage to you. Aptitude is recovered over time, and through resting.

This way, you can use a super spell and not die, but you better win the battle, because otherwise the next spells you cast will be underpowered. It also means that you may want to start off with weaker spells, and use your most powerful only as a finisher (which will stop spellcasting classes from winning in the first round of combat)

For everyone that has doubts how this system functions in an RPG combat environment, start digging around for some players of yester-year's versions of Shadowrun and ask them.

It works.
It is, however, best if all have the same equal levels of health and don't have sliding HP systems but instead sliding damage resistance systems; true.

In question to the heal: 2 possibilities:
1) Healer fails and hurts himself trying to heal (yes, I've seen it...it's funny every time...well..until death, and even then sometimes.)

2) Healer heals himself.


In question to super spells:
Hope you have the drain resistance to soak up that much of a spell charge.
This doesn't suggest that there is a level where doing so is comfortable.
Instead, it's never easy, you just get a slightly (emphasis on slightly) better probability of soaking.

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However, that all being said; you need pretty strong death penalties to make this work (assuming one will choose the normal infinite lives concept for an online RPG) since it doesn't matter if I die if I can take out a five men in the process with a few spells.

Quote:Original post by Tesseract
Or maybe you could set it up so that spells use mana, and once the mana is gone spells start to leech off your hit points at a specific conversion, say each HP is worth 3 mana, or something. Then you can pause in your spellcasting, let your mana recharge, and use it to heal yourself.

Add in a golf swing power system for the casting strength instead of clicking icons and you have something I've built in the past. ;)

Definitely some great ideas from you guys. The specific implementation of course has to depend on how exactly the rest of the game works, so that the game remains balanced.

In the application I'm thinking of, in terms of penalties for dying, yes, they would be either very severe or entirely permanent.

I'm liking the stamina idea - that way both warrior type players and mage type players would both be using the same resource (stamina), rather than mages using a separate type (mana).

And yeah, it would probably break the usual convention of having spellcasting characters be really weak and frail, in order to balance it out.

Quote:And yeah, it would probably break the usual convention of having spellcasting characters be really weak and frail, in order to balance it out.

Or, like I said, don't make health and stamina expandable meters.
Make them fixed permanently, (don't even offer 'buffs' to increase them) and instead make advanced characters better at resisting damage and fatigue.

In so doing, the magic wielders will be good at resisting damage from their spell casting, but not necessarily good at resisting damage from being physically hit.

Counter to this, a physical combatant will be better at resisting damage from being physically hit, but not from casting spells (if such a case is even possible in your system).

The key here is not to make the drain that occurs from casting spells capable of being resisted by normal methods like stamina drain resistance.
If you allow for this, instead of making a speperate drain skill for magic resistance, then magic wielders will all be marathon runners.

So, instead, though the damage from casting a spell hits stamina and possibly health depending, this type of damage should not be capable of being resisted by physical damage resistance or fatigue resistance.

Fatigue recovery, however, would make sense for magic wielders to have as casting is a very taxing event on the body in this system, and as such, they will want to be capable of training their body to recover to full energy quickly so they are not defenseless; even if their health has already started to take hits.

Maybe you could have a fairly common "two layered" health bar or "potential damage" system -

Taking physical damage permanently reduces your HP:|=============  |Using spells doesn't actually reduce your HP, just one "layer" of the health bar.Even if this "layer" is reduced to nothing, your character will not die: |=========----  |But if you subsequently get hit, this "magic damage" is permanently applied to your HP:|=========      |If you manage to avoid being hit after casting, you quickly refill your bar:|=========----  ||==========---  ||===========--  ||============-  ||=============  |

I like the concept there as it is very elegant, but the only problem with it that I see is that since the casting damage only takes permanent tole on your HP if someone hits you while your casting damage is in effect, magic users will potentially cast-and-run at a very high rate of frequency, making them akin to mosquitoes, but sometimes mosquitoes with missile launchers..

Quote:Original post by Griffin_Kemp
I like the concept there as it is very elegant, but the only problem with it that I see is that since the casting damage only takes permanent tole on your HP if someone hits you while your casting damage is in effect, magic users will potentially cast-and-run at a very high rate of frequency, making them akin to mosquitoes, but sometimes mosquitoes with missile launchers..

True. I suppose this is more of a balancing issue though, and working around it might be as simple as tuning the recharge rate after casting or introducing a delay before recharging starts.

Also, I like the idea that a skilled player could potentially survive an encounter with no permanent damage (especially in a single player game).

Well, if you use the drain resistance concept instead of a recharge meter, then you have that option as well, and you don't have to worry about the mosquito problem.

Drain resistance is a simple formula concept.
Skill in Drain Resistance: X
Power of Spell: Y

X vs. Y = result.

You can make X and Y many different kinds and forms of formulas as needed.
I state it as "vs." because you would mathematically contest X and Y differently depending on how the formulas are written.

This is essentially the same as receiving a hit to the body in physical damage and testing to see if your Body or AC (depending on which system you are more familiar with thinking in) can soak the damage.