Spell casting types of costs

[jasonpickering]

there was an RPG a while ago where you were half dragon (No not skyrim) and the player had these super powerful dragon spells, but each time you used it you lost some of your humanity. it you completely depleted your humanity you lost automatically. it came down to this thing that you see in a lot of other games where the player wont spam spells because they will always be afraid about what they will need later. You use the players fear of what will come up next to manage their spell use.

Example: a lvl 1 minotaur comes around the corner and I blast him with a fireball. next level I run into lvl 5 minotaur. "Damn I should have saved that fireball. I could use another fireball, but what is going to be on the next floor?"

you could even use it as Corruption. perhaps you are calling on an ancient demon and each spell damages your soul. but that same idea you could remove some of your Max health also, which has already been mentioned.

Another idea could be taken from Street Fighter. as you play street fighter you charge up a super meter (I think this is right) well lets say you charge up this super meter somehow (over time, killing enemies, killing enemies with a soul suck move, Exploring). it goes from 1 to 3. Spells would have different values then. so fireball costs 1, but an inferno that burns everyone on screen costs 3. so you could shoot 3 fireballs or use this inferno. Its kind of a modified Mana system. dealing with smaller numbers, and it takes longer to get that 1 MP.

[Marker Mage]

May I suggest having whatever resource used for spell casting being split into more than one resource? It could be as simple as having multiple types of MP that were used for different spells. Maybe spell 1 uses type A MP and type B MP, while spell 2 uses type C and D, spell 3 uses type B and C, and spell 4 uses type A and E. With such a set up, you could cast spell 1 without it affecting how often you can cast spell 2, but casting spell 3 would lower the number of times you can cast spells 1 and 2, while casting spell 4 lowers the number of times you can cast spell 1 without affecting how many times you can cast spell 2 or spell 3. Basically, the kind of thing you see in a multicolored Magic the Gathering deck.

One game that I remember from my childhood that I think made this interesting was Secret of Evermore, which relied on an ingredient-based system for its spell costs. I'm sure that there has probably been a roguelike or two that did something similar. It DOES allow a possibility of setting up a system for assigning random spells to the various pairs of ingredients, which allows the player to try combining random ingredients to see what happens. This brings up another potential type of spell casting cost, risk.

Having risk as a cost means having the spell have a chance of not working how the player expects it to. Maybe it fizzles out and wastes a turn, maybe some of the parameters change unexpectedly so that you get caught in the blast radius, Maybe the target is changed, or maybe the spell just flat out blows up in your face.

If you want to go with a Lovecraftian horror theme, there's always the possibility of having magic cost you sanity. Just have the player experience various effects like seeing stuff that isn't there or having the names of their items change (maybe change "green potion" to "green poison") or having one monster appear to be another if they've been using magic a bit too much. While you're at it, change the descriptions to be more terrifying. And if you really want to scare the player, have the game not react to any key presses for a few seconds.

Rather similar to the sanity cost, but you could also try having a spell leave its caster with a status effect of some sort.

[Bear]

I've been thinking about having spell-point recovery work in an odd way.
Consider if a caster has several different kinds of 'mana' points: short, medium, and long-term. 

Weak spells take 'green' mana; you can recover enough to cast them again in minutes, or maybe seconds.

Medium-power spells take 'yellow' mana; you'll recover in minutes to hours.

And your most powerful spells take 'red' mana, which you recover in terms of days. 

But if you're out of green mana, weak spells would come out of yellow mana.  If you're out of yellow mana, medium-power spells (and low-powered spells if you're also out of green mana) would come out of red mana.

The idea is that the caster needs to be a little bit careful with his resources to avoid squandering his 'red' and 'yellow' mana on 'green' spells, but if that level of care is met, he has a pretty free hand with 'lesser' spells, even while recovering from a 'Major' casting that he can't do very often.

[devonps]

@Jasonpickering - nice idea, I think you have the makings of a 7DRL there my friend

@Marker Mage - Another good idea as it takes the basic ingredients approach and expands it a little further.

@Bear - This is a great idea, I wish I'd thought of it, I can see how it could fit into my design but I can also see how much retro-fitting I would have to do to the spell templates.

Thanks all for the responses.

Steve.