Much ado about Mana

One problem that many games have is how to handle a mana. The essence of using mana, or MP, is to create an artificial limitation on the use of certain abilities in and out of battle. This leads to some problems with regards to balance. If abilities require MP to use, then they have to necessarily be stronger than abilities that do not require MP, since you are limited as to how often you can use that ability. However, some people go in the opposite direction to try to balance and make these MP consuming abilities too weak. Lets look at two examples:

Dark Souls

Now I have only played a little of this game, but magic seems overpowered when compared to melee. Since you can only use a spell a limited amount of times, as this quantity is refreshed at save points, the spell must be stronger to compensate. The result is that magic can defeat regular enemies in one attack, occasionally two, which is ridiculous in a game where melee characters must hit enemies four times or more, and must learn to dodge enemy patterns. By limiting magic use, magic becomes too strong.

Etrian Odyssey

Skills in this game are much stronger than regular attacks, as one would expect, but the problem arises from the difference in power between physical and magical attacks. The magic type characters are required to use MP for every offensive action because their default action, attack, deals low damage. However, the power of magic does not scale well, and as time goes on the regular attacks from the melee characters ends up being just as strong, if not stronger, than the mages MP abilities. This makes magic almost worthless in the long run.

So how can this problem be avoided in Shades of Grey? I am going to try to take a different approach to MP and use it as a limitation for all non-attack options. Most skills in the game will require the same amount of MP, currently planned at five, and MP will regenerate each turn by a fixed amount, currently planned at two. Finally, all characters will start at 50mp and will increase that number slowly as time goes on. This situation means that the player must manage how many skills he plans to use in order to avoid running out of MP. However, the player can refill his MP by the class specific skills, each of which requires specific conditions to be met. I will elaborate on what these special skills are in a later post. Full MP will be restored upon the end of each battle

Through this system the player will have to balance his use of skills and MP regeneration skills, and will even use the plain old attack command in order to survive.