Quantifiable Mana [Lore addition/Amendment?]

[Luxury 1082]

My gripes from the current system carries over to this one. The Cost of Spells should reflect their complexity and/or relative density, while Tiers should remain a learning threshold which reflect when they can be learned. Tiers are ineffective at denoting cost. See the following:

 

An eight-emote Tier Five Tornado and a three-emote single-target Gust of Wind sit at the same mana cost under this system. A spell requiring significantly more sustained effort, focus, and execution time should not cost the same as one resolved in a fraction of the emotes. The numbers need to reflect the actual weight of what's being cast.

--

That said, I am foundationally against this numbers based arms race which has plagued magic. I'd only relent to such a system if people start actually talking about stamina systems for Knights (they never will).

[The Vulgate Cycle 577]

9 minutes ago, Apotolofo said:

That's a very valid concern, and I see the opposite concern with mages as well. "If non-magic fighters can have unlimited stamina, why do we?" ykwim?

Thats true, though my answer to that personally would be:

• It would be powergaming to have unlimited stamina and I would hope thst sort of thing would get called out and reported at need.
• As a magic user, calling on supernatural sources to do incredible, powerful things, that there is an almost implicit expectation that you are taking an extra limit to balance out the crazy spells that can be thrown out at people.
• Your system has the flexibility to be adjusted up or down at need as it stands rn to counteract any concerns about a change like this being too limiting and even allows for exceptions to certain spells be made if need be.

But I do see your point overall and the system is interesting.

[Apotolofo 2206]

4 minutes ago, Luxury said:

An eight-emote Tier Five Tornado and a three-emote single-target Gust of Wind sit at the same mana cost under this system. A spell requiring significantly more sustained effort, focus, and execution time should not cost the same as one resolved in a fraction of the emotes. The numbers need to reflect the actual weight of what's being cast.

 

That's a valid concern actually, and I totally see that. 

But is it not already like that? To cast a T5 gust is... a T5 spell. And to rp it as not being a T5 spell is sort of powergaming imo. 

I do agree however that most of the actually useful spells are T4 and above, which might be a whole other thing altogether. Maybe spells that are able to be scaled should just be at 1 mana cost, the scaling being based on "skill" rather than mana.

Perhaps each emote used to cast a spell should be 5 MP in cost! That's another idea on it's own, which I might make a separate little table for.  

[Anbennar 2351]

@PrimnyaQuorumhey.

[ProcaPro 557]

59 minutes ago, PrimnyaQuorum said:

eeeeeeeeeeeeeh

 

No other magic is so purely casting as void is. I dislike the idea that a T5 mage needs to struggle with spellcasting [6 T3 spells? seriosuly? I get 6 slightly better (or worse) longbow shots when mundane man gets infinite arrows?] which is their bread and butter vs a human will crashout if you suggest they might be tired.

 

I tackled this issue in my connection rewrite via exhaustion being a threshold that is reached via sustained casting and can be mitigated by casting lower tiered spells relative to your current tier or by taking some emotes to naturally recover. I dislike the idea of straight mana-pointing mages. Likewise, how long does it take to recover them? What is a spell is half off and rounds into a decimal? This feels like a half-answer at best and I don't think its a good idea to try and jerryrig a bad bakedpotato idea at that

 

Imo voidal casting is INCREDIBLY unbalanced. Constant teleports, constant "oops all icecicles", constant powergaming issues BECAUSE of how vague the lore is.

 

This amendment is needed. For balance, for clarity, for the sake of having some manner of fairness and whatever else when facing the super-teleport mage. As it stands I think this balancing would be fantastic for actually telling people what they can and can't do, and be a step to handle the amount of powergaming and scaling we tend to see.

[LoTC's Next Top Model 1626]

the problem with systems like this is that they either completely destroy void magic, or they do literally nothing and are pointless. one's actively bad, and the other is "why bother".

controversial opinion- if you let a void mage cast six t5 spells on you you deserve the L. you just let them get, what, twenty consecutive uninterupted emotes and DONT expect them to win? cmon bro.

[PrimnyaQuorum 4003]

8 minutes ago, ProcaPro said:

 

Imo voidal casting is INCREDIBLY unbalanced. Constant teleports, constant "oops all icecicles", constant powergaming issues BECAUSE of how vague the lore is.

 

This amendment is needed. For balance, for clarity, for the sake of having some manner of fairness and whatever else when facing the super-teleport mage. As it stands I think this balancing would be fantastic for actually telling people what they can and can't do, and be a step to handle the amount of powergaming and scaling we tend to see.

And this doesn't help any of that because it is negligble to voidstalkers and it reduces all voidal mages to a maximum of 6 combative spells per OOC time period. Voidal mages cannot do anything else besides cast spells effectively without having that shot by becoming a scion

[Vertigo_Round 332]

I like this. Genuinely I feel like if this doesn't happen we should just use the bardmancy system.

[_AzureLexi 766]

I strongly disagree with this amendment 😤

 

Spoiler

/j, number nerding

I'm personally partial to the Base 2 system, since void magic is heavily implied to be exponential in cost.

• T1: 2MP
• T2: 4MP
• T3: 8MP
• T4: 16MP
• T5: 32MP

With an ordinary mage having enough mana to cast 2 of their strongest spell (aka, T5 has 64MP). This gives a T5 mage 8 T3 spells.

They should ONLY scale on tier, not charge emotes, bc that's how the lore is made. Action cost and mana cost are SEPARATE balancing measures.

Everyone saying mages shouldn't have exhaustion is silly bc a mage's mana is their health bar. Though I strongly agree that, until Martials have a stamina resource, void mages should be allowed flexibility.

 

 

[Wolfy-D 468]

1 hour ago, The Vulgate Cycle said:

For magic users, who have crazy spells that do crazy powerful things, it makes sense to find some way to quantify how much they can do per combat encounter. 

I'm only really gonna poke this part. Most spells are either equivalent to mundane stuff, or take way long enough to be stopped by someone before it is casted.

 

 

Also I'm just gonna throw in this little system Realsamler gave me when I started learning magic that he (I think) figured out based on existing magics

 

64 mana pool
T5 cost: 32
T4 cost: 16
T3 cost: 8
T2 cost: 4
T1 cost: 2
T5 shifting costs 9 mana (5 in obelisk)

46 minutes ago, PrimnyaQuorum said:

And this doesn't help any of that because it is negligble to voidstalkers and it reduces all voidal mages to a maximum of 6 combative spells per OOC time period. Voidal mages cannot do anything else besides cast spells effectively without having that shot by becoming a scion

I lied I'm also gonna poke what Primnya said here.

 

Voidal mages CAN use sword up to arming which were the standard weapons of the roman army (I think) for a very long time. And they can also use slings which are incredibly powerful if you actually read the lore and I'm pretty sure short bows too.

 

Basically, there is a pretty decent list of things mages can do other than magic.

[monkeypoacher 8055]

You should expend a flat amount of mana per turn of casting, because this is already how magic lore balances the power of a spell vs. its effort/complexity. It also means that all combatants just need to keep track of a number (the per turn cost) and a variable (their current mana) instead of each usable spell and its tier.
 

Tiers exist to keep track of what spells your character can cast. When you're writing the tier progression of your lore you shouldn't have to think "well only T5 characters should know this, but it's not really a 50 MP spell" or "novices should be able to cast this, but it should cost more MP..." You see what I mean? I see that as a major source of future arguments and exceptions.

 

Also a mana points system based on how many times you can cast a spell of each tier is just a more complicated system of Vancian spell slots. 

[greisn 366]

i think this is nice altho i like the creative discretion more, i'd rather deal with that than people calling each other out over a numbers game every crp

[Tentoa 3160]

Void magic lame, I'm glad y'all suffer all the time. -1 

[Sr_Dimentio 586]

WOAH! As a voidstalker that actually tries not to spam spells too much this is actually nice!!! And I was about to complain about knights not exhausting themselves lol, I hope this and a possible energy thing passes because it would make crp more fun and less... Well, until the other person gets tired or have to log off lol.

 

Really big +1

[ClassyDryad 2367]

Currently voidal magic recovers per encounter much like Templar so mages would be going from 8 t3 spells per encounter to 6 t3 spells per day. It would not make sense to do this unless mages got increased power in other aspects which would undermine the entire point of being a voidal mage. Not really sure how voidal mages are getting off so many high tier spells as well I've basically never gone past my regular mana pool as a voidstalker.