3rd rung said:
I don't think mana bars are the best way to do that, so I agree with you on that, but unrestricted use is not the answer hear.
Mana bars aren't bad for games where you can *either* spam lots of relatively low-power spells, OR tactically cast a few big ones. It gets out of whack when they don't carefully tune how much mana you have with what you're likely to need to DO with it and the relative value of those spells.
Having individual abilities on varying cooldowns works reasonably well, too. What annoys me is when they have BOTH variable mana costs AND variable cooldowns (although I play DDO, which does this, and they've managed to tune it fairly well.) I also don't like the cooldowns method so much because they tend to give you "non-magical" abilities that ALSO have cooldowns and it makes the different tactical approaches ALL EXACTLY THE SAME. It also means that you have INCREDIBLE burst damage because you will start every fight with every ability up and ready to go.
I mean, there are all sorts of options where you can make magic feel more powerful than swinging a sword (so you want to use it), yet not let it be the be-all, end-all of the game so non-casters have their value. Let's look at some options:
1. Traditional mana bar, and spells have relative point costs based on what they do.
2. Variable special ability cooldowns.
3. "Charged" abilities, where you have to build up a store of power by doing something other than casting, like punching enemies or whatever, then you get to "finish" with the ability. Maybe if you're going more for a straight-caster feel, you have to throw so many lesser spells before you can throw a big one. You can also do this inversely, where every time you throw a spell you build up "heat" or "magic toxicity" which hurts you severely or just cuts off all spellcasting entirely once it hits a certain level.
4. "Conditional" abilities that only work under very specific conditions. So, you may have some nice insta-death effects, but they only work if you've already gotten an enemy down to 1/2 health. Or you can only throw your massive firestorm if you've laid down a "fire sphere" area. And it doesn't work indoors or in the rain and water creatures can put it out.
5. Extreme Friendly Fire (particularly when you can accidentally blow yourself up quite easily). That rain of meteors spell you have? It's great! Except that the area is so huge it's almost impossible to cast it and not hit yourself. A lot. Granted, that one time when you managed to climb up that hill over the town and target it JUST right and take out the WHOLE TOWN IN ONE SPELL, that was SWEET. You did it ONCE. IN THE WHOLE GAME.
6. Spell components. I'm not particularly into this method (unless it's done really well and thematically) because basically it's treating magic like it's a gun, and you need ammo. But it is a functional method, provided you can't just buy and carry more components than you could *ever conceivably need*. To me, this would be more interesting in a game where it's tied to the exploration and the game mechanics, so you actually have to go out and find most components on your own, then turn them into spells which you can then use.
7. Prepared spells. (As in D&D). I'm not a big fan of this method, particularly not in real-time games, but it does accomplish mostly what it's supposed to accomplish, which is making you use your magic as a limited resource.
8. Recharge stations. This is basically a different version of spell components/mana bar, where you have to go "recharge" your ability to use stuff. You could implement this in such a way that it didn't mimic the ammo/mana bar model, however, by having spells be ablative: every time you cast one, it's weaker than the last one you cast, and recharging doesn't let you cast more spells, it resets you back to MAXIMUM POWER spells. This might also be a fun mechanic because you could throw in lots of items that give you a partial recharge to one spell category, maybe, or will swap charge from one category to another, or whatever. Lots of interesting stuff could be done with that. You could also make it so that categories have several different spells, like an attack spell, a defense spell, and a utility spell, and have a large part of the strategy of the game be about finding ways to use the attacks from one category, the defense from a different category, and the utility from a third category so that you're not constantly running out of charge.
9. Magic doesn't do the same things as non-magic. One of the major reasons why magic HAS to be limited at all is that it basically just replaces stuff you could do either a.) not as well without magic or b.) not as easily. Why invest in stealth when you can just cast a low-level spell and make yourself invisible? Why struggle to get decent weapons and armor when you can just cast a protection spell and throw fireballs? Why learn to pick locks and have to play that damn mini-game over and over and over and over and over and over when you can just throw Magic Unlock and be done with it? Or, worse, magic STACKS with the non-magical methods, so you will ALWAYS be better off having BOTH armor AND magic protection. (When this is done, mage characters are universally more powerful than non-mages, because your non-mage simply can't reach the levels of ANYTHING that the mage can.) So, have it do entirely different stuff. They do this a bit in some games where you can use magic to telekinetically fetch objects or get people to stop attacking you or change shape to fit through small holes or whatever. But they usually flub it big time by making it so that you HAVE to have the magical abilities to do the specific puzzles, and they use precisely the same puzzles over and over and over and over so it becomes incredibly tedious as well as incredibly inconvenient not to be a mage. You can even do this to an extent with combat magic by having magic be your only area-of-effect damage, it just sucks in comparison to single-target damage done by ranged or melee. So, you can have a non-mage character who can annihilate single enemies, while the mage slowly whittles away at groups.
Anyway, you get the idea.
