MP vs Limited use

[KawaiiKid]

So I am a fan of both these mechanics. In case you aren't familiar with limited use, what it does is basically what it says, each ability has only a certain amount of uses available during combat.

I'm wondering which which mechanic you guys like more and why? I'm really torn right now on which to use for my game.

 

[Amarok]

why not both? you can have lower skills that only use mp and more powerful ones that use mp and also have a limited use.

 

[Chaos Avian]

Phantasy Star used this very mechanic. There were two types of abilities in that game, one being Techniques and the other being Skills. Techniques used MP and Abilities had limited use. I quite like that mechanic myself~

 

[MMMm]

You've got access to attacks that use a lot of different resources.

TP, MP, attacks with cooldowns, attacks with limited uses. They can all have a place in the game.

I'd say to vary it up. You can make some characters inherently more powerful than others based on the resource they use. Like your holy warrior can heal people with both her MP and TP, making her more efficient than any other healer in the world.

Or your woodsman has powerful axe attacks that all have long cooldowns.

Your warrior could be the typical fighter in an RPG maker game who relies on TP, but you can mix it up by giving him the preserve TP flag so he can save it up and spend it later.

Your archer could have a limited number of explosive arrows or an alchemist could have only a set amount of items to toss, like sleeping gas, Max HP reducing mushrooms or poison powders.

It'll make all of your characters feel different during gameplay.

 

[Kes]

I don't see why it has to be either/or. In my current project I have some skills which use either MP or TP and can be used at any time as long as you have the resources. Some skills, however, have cooldowns and a handfull have a limited number which can only be replenished if you sleep at an Inn. The player is then able to make strategic decisions about what to use and when.

 

[TheoAllen]

Not really fan of limited skill use, unless the skill is quite broken
But still, I prefer to be able to use all skills with some resource managements

 

[jonthefox]

The problem for me with limited use per battle is that usually, all of the non-boss battles won't last long enough for the limited-use to have any meaning or relevance.

A more interesting idea would be limited use -until you sleep at the inn(or whatever)-, kind of like a "X amount of uses per day." This is similar to an MP system (where you have to balance your strategy between "saving" your uses (or MP) for the bosses vs. using them to get through the non-boss enemies without sustaining too much damage.

 

[Tai_MT]

Eh... I use anything that works. I'm not really a fan of "limited use", but lets be honest here:

No matter what system is in place, most RPGs generally have an excessive amount of uses for their Skills. Whether we go MP or whether we go "limited uses".

The only games where "Limited Uses" even have an effect anymore are Tabletops.

That being said...

I've got Skills that require nothing to cast. I have skills that require MP to cast. I have skills that require TP to cast. As the skills get more powerful, their costs go up. The most powerful MP skills cost pretty close to 100 MP. The most powerful TP skills cost 100 TP. The least powerful MP skills cost about 3 MP and the least powerful TP skills only cost like 20 TP.

My personal feeling is that if you're going to allow for a ton of casts of a Skill, then its damage needs to be limited in order to reflect the massive amount of usage it will be getting. That way, you're promoting the gameplay of "cast a Skill every single turn". Or, if you're going to go with "limited amount of casts of a skill", then you need to make the damage somehow overwhelming or the Skill incredibly useful to promote spending that resource in emergencies instead of "saving it for the boss".

I think a better description of my opinion on the subject probably falls under the trope of, "But, I might need it later". Yahtzee Croshaw explains this perfectly in his review of Mercenaries 2. Basically, if you're given something powerful, but it's of limited use, you "save it for later", because you might need it. It's the "Final Fantasy Elixir Syndrome". You get something amazing... but you never use it. In case you need it later. And you never need it later.

Meanwhile, if you're given a massive pool of MP to use your skills constantly, combat ends up being very simplistic or "easy mode" because most people don't think to balance frequent casts of skills against enemies, enemy types, damage types, etcetera.

So, most of the time, you end up with a game that is either Easy Mode or a game that is "But I Might Need It Later". Which... honestly just makes me tell people, "Doesn't matter how you do your skills, it matters how you do your combat. Your combat system is what is going to determine Skill Usage, and whether it adds depth to the mechanics".

 

[Maliki79]

I never cared for skills with limited use. The only skill I even remotely enjoyed using that had this mechanic was Terra's Morph in FF6 and they never explained it well in game...
As for more typical skills, I think MP/TP is more than enough to regulate skill use. Cooldowns: maybe depending on the individual game. (My game's 'cooldowns' exist as the accumulation of TP)

 

[Lord Vectra]

For my project, I have limited uses, but I don't use it quite often as the cooldowns I put on skills seems good enough. Only skill I can think of on the top of my head is a skill that kills the target in one turn if the hit is a critical.

I have nothing against limited uses; I think they are necessary sometimes because, otherwise, they'll have a cooldown that will probably not cease anyways during any combat (unless, I guess, you're fighting a boss).

 

[Wavelength]

I've been thinking about MP and its role in combat for a long time, and it kind of frustrates me that I haven't come up with a single rule of thumb that should be used for most games.

Probably the most difficult part of the analysis is that MP might look like the same mechanic in most games, but actually constitute an entirely different mechanic between different games. MP is always a "pool" of limited resources that your skills share - I'll get to this momentarily. But beyond that, MP's function varies wildly between games!

• In some games, MP is restored after every battle, so MP simply dictates the rate at which you can use powerful skills during battle (think of it almost like a flexible, global cooldown between skills).
• In some games, MP is limited and doesn't naturally recover, but is easily restored using items or mid-dungeon restore points. My instinct is that this is the kind of game where MP is the most problematic from a design standpoint, because it introduces a psychological "cost" to using your skills which inevitably feels bigger than it actually is. If you blow your MP now, you won't have it for next battle.
• In some games, MP is limited and scarce, and ways to recover it (outside of safe areas like towns) are even more scarce. Here, MP is the player's "trump card" that they can pick and choose when they feel like they need it. It is a chronic (rather than acute) resource that needs to be managed well in a long-term dungeon strategy. In a well designed game of this sort, the optimal strategy should not be to save all your MP for the boss fight.
• In some games, MP is technically limited but the player has so much of it that it might as well not be. Here, the designer should either drop MP entirely and consider other limitations on skills, or should rescale their MP pools/costs to ensure that players need to make decisions about spending MP.
• In some games, MP is restored within battle, for example a bit of MP is restored every turn or a bit of MP is restored each time you land a basic attack on an enemy. Here, MP's role is to dictate the balance and flow of power in combat between your more-powerful skills and less-powerful non-skill actions (basic attacks, guarding, etc.). It forces the player to make themselves vulnerable at certain points, and lets the player feel very powerful at other times. If MP is not also restored after every battle, though, the player may find himself doing un-fun things like skipping turns at the end of a nearly-won battle in order to build up more MP for next battle.

In all of these cases, MP represents a "pool" of a limited resource that is shared between your different tools - you can use a skill as much as you want (as long as there aren't other restrictions like cooldowns), but it means you now have less MP to spend on your other skills. The player thus has a ton of flexibility over their battle strategy, which is great in theory. In the same breath, that battle strategy has a tendency to become stale, allowing the player to pick a single move and spam it over and over, which is not fun or interesting. It also allows the presence of one slightly-overpowered skill to completely crowd out most of the other skills in the game, meaning the player will almost never use those other skills.

Therefore, a system that revolves around the use of MP is probably best for a game where the designer is extremely good at balancing different skills, and has a variety of diverse enemies that actually require different strategies to defeat. A system that revolves around the use of MP could also be good for a game where expression in combat is a more important aesthetic of play than challenge or exploration.

---

Cooldowns, unlike MP, are generally limited to individual skills, and therefore the only resource shared between skills is the character's "turn". This has a lot of built-in advantages. It forces the player to use a variety of different skills. It mutes the "crowding out" impact of a single very powerful skill (allowing the designer to intentionally create overpowered skills with long cooldowns if desired). It also tends to feel good for the player, compared to other limitations: even if you spend the "cost" of a cooldown, it will naturally come back to you without you having to do anything else.

Mechanics like "Over Limits" (temporary periods of enhanced power that occur once you've dealt/taken enough damage, or once something else has built up) also serve a similar design space to Cooldowns if they happen frequently enough during battle.

Cooldown systems encourage medium-term planning and thoughtful use of time/turns. This makes Cooldown systems ideal for games where strategy within battles (as opposed to longer-term strategy across entire dungeons) is paramount. Cooldown systems are also great for designers who are not confident that they can balance their Skills against one another perfectly.

One of the problems with a Cooldown system is that while the player will not spam a single move over and over again, they may fall into the same "pattern" of moves - start with move A (3 turn cooldown), then use move B, move C, and finally move A again; rinse and repeat. Careful design of skill cooldowns can avoid this flaw. For example, if it's natural to use Move B right after Move A, then a good Cooldown amount might be 3 turns for Move A and 5 turns for Move B. If you use Move A on turn 1 and Move B on turn 2, then your next available use of Move A will be turn 4 while your next available use of Move B won't be until turn 7. The player can now choose to either save Move A for turn 6 (and do a lot of other interesting/creative things in the meantime), or can adapt their battle strategy to not use Move B directly after Move A on the next cycle, in order to use Move A on turn 4.

I'm very torn about the use of MP and Cooldowns together. Some games do this (including one of my own), but it can be slightly uncomfortable to the player to have their options limited by not one but two different systems, and can make battle strategy either unintuitive (if the MP pool is small) or complex without a reason (if the MP pool is very large). On the other hand, the use of MP alongside Cooldowns may be useful to gain most of the design benefits of Cooldowns while forcing the player to engage in tactics other than using Skills every turn - especially if the number of Skills available is large enough that it would be impossible to have everything on Cooldown at once. There could be better ways to encourage the player to do this, however...

---

Limited uses ("Charges") of skills within a battle (or some larger timeframe) would be very difficult to make an entire combat system out of. That's because the power is so front-loaded in these skills and the balance of a battle would shift dramatically depending on the length of said battle; in other words, with Charges, the player becomes more disadvantaged the longer the battle goes. If I were to try and design a battle system around Charges, it would be a puzzle-oriented battle system where the number of turns is small and highly-controlled (either through fixed enemy damage or through a turn limit), so that the player's real decision is which subset of skills they want to use in this limited time. (The use of Charges here prevents them from using the same skill over and over, but in a less restrictive way than Cooldowns.)

More often, skills with Charges are intentionally overpowered and the design wisdom behind giving them a limited number of Charges rather than Cooldowns is to present the player with the decision of when to make the most of their powerful skill (which can be an interesting dilemma), rather than how to use it most often (which is usually a pretty rote decision of use it as soon as possible, and then use it as soon as it comes off of Cooldown). Often, the number of Charges on a skill is 1 - you can only use it once per battle.

In a system where the player can only equip a limited number of skills, an interesting choice presents itself between powerful skills with a limited number of Charges versus less powerful skills that can be used in perpetuity (assuming enough MP / finished Cooldowns).

Sometimes, you can only use a skill X number of times throughout a dungeon, during a day, or even throughout the entire game. Here, it truly is your "trump card" - you can use it when you really need it to overcome something difficult, but you know that's one less use you have of it later. It's like a more impactful version of rare (limited) consumable items that are collected throughout some games.

The more limited the Charges are, the more powerful you are allowed to make the skill without breaking the game's balance. In the case of Charges per Battle, this also allows the player to use very fun skills in every random encounter (perhaps even more than once), without the skill making up a significant part of strategy against bosses. In the case of Charges per Dungeon/Game, you can make the skills even more gamebreakingly powerful without risking game balance too much. The player will feel the impact and rush of using this skill!

The drawback, of course, is that the more limited the Charges are, the more conservative players will be about using the skill. If you want your player to use a skill a lot, Charges (especially any type of Charges that don't restore after every battle) are not the way to go. Charge systems on skills are usually for very specific skills whose design requires it because they are either abusable or intentionally overpowered.

In general, I don't recommend mixing Charges with either MP Costs or Cooldowns on the same skill. If a skill has a Charge system, give it a Cooldown of 0 and an MP cost of 0 (or some negligible amount) to avoid unnecessary complexity. A possible exception could be healing skills - you may need to add Charges on top of the standard MP/Cooldown system for healing skills for balance and skill diversity reasons.

 

[Tai_MT]

@Wavelength

A good post about the benefits of a great combat system. Namely, knowing what you're doing before you decide on a feature. Also wonderfully expands on my concept of "Doesn't matter how you do your skills, it matters how you do your combat. Your combat system is what is going to determine Skill Usage, and whether it adds depth to the mechanics".

I did however have to disagree with the "charges" aspect. I don't think I've ever played a game (not just an RPG, a game), where "very powerful and limited use" skills, items, weapons, abilities, etcetera ever felt "good" as a player. It always feels like I need to "save it for later". Or, it makes me feel like I need to "grind" so that I don't have to use those resources. After all, if I grind so I don't have to use the resources... then get to the boss and kill them without the resources... why use them if I don't have to? I'm just disagreeing that such a system is ever "viable", because its problems can be mitigated or even eliminated by just swapping to either a Cooldown system or an MP system.

A "charge" system needs to balance your limited charges with enemy variety. Enemies that you MUST expend a charge on to destroy. Otherwise, a player like me (I don't think I'm the typical player, but I think a lot of players probably fall somewhere on the same scale of "But, I might need it later") will just hoard the charges forever, to the end of the game, and never really use them.

If you are going to do a "charge" system, I propose the only way to really go about it, is to make charges quickly and easily refillable. If you have a combat system where you must spend your charges to defeat them, even in basic combat (to keep the player from hoarding them all the time), then you should probably be doing this after every single combat. You should be refilling it all the time. Or, the other option, is to give a player a reasonable amount of charges to get through a section of game. You can cast Ultima roughly 8 times between Inn rests. The dungeon has 2 minibosses and a boss at the end. You can also cast Fira roughly 35 times between Inn rests. A player might reasonably spend some of these "charges" in the Dungeon. Especially on a fairly regular basis. But, there's no guarantee. They might use a few charges of Fira. Probably never even spend a single charge of Ultima if they don't have to.

Even as a child of 6, playing Final Fantasy 1, with it's "limited use spells" based on D&D systems... I rarely used magic unless I absolutely had to. I figured out, "yeah, I can cast Cure and heal... but then I have to go back to town and stay at the Inn to get that back. I don't want to walk that far. I'd rather buy some restorative items so I can keep going along and not rely on magic". I had the same issue with my Black Mages. They sat useless in every single combat encounter.... until I'd hit the boss monster. Then, they were DPS and my warriors and stuff would heal 'em to keep 'em in the fight. They'd only change roles once they ran out of "Charges". At 6, I figured out that if you have "limited charges" of a skill, you really aren't going to use it much, if at all. Because, quite frankly, the game dev is telling you not to. They're telling you to hoard it.

"Limited Charge" systems for skills don't really feel like "a resource to be monitored" in combat. They feel like a pointless system to me most of the time. Like, "Oh, hey, you could cast spells, and they kill stuff real quick, but they're not really necessary, and hey, maybe you need them... LATER".

Heck, even the Metroid games have this problem. You can get Missiles and Super Missiles and Power Bombs... But... do you ever use it in COMBAT except with a boss? Or an enemy that outright requires you use them on it to kill it? Getting a refill on these things is even a pain.

What you have to factor into any resource for your Skills is how much of a pain it is to refill them. "Limited Use" is really only done in two or three ways. 1. Refill after every battle. 2. Enemies can give a set amount of refills per kill. 3. Refill at an Inn, or through a Tent, or some other "full recovery" method.

The first method can make combat too easy and raises the question of why even have limited uses at all, if most enemies don't last through Turn 2. The second method could be more strategic, but a player might end up grinding monsters and killing them just to get charges back, which isn't really that fun. The third method requires the player spend a lot of time backtracking to towns, rushing new towns (Pokémon does this with its Pokecenters!), or buying expensive consumables to recover usage of their Skills (which start out rare and super expensive, so you grind a lot... and later end up super cheap towards the end of the game, which makes limited use Skills a pointless endeavor since you can literally pop a Full Recovery item after every battle and still be making a profit).

I just can't see a "limited use" system working in any way that doesn't immediately make me question as a dev, "so... why not just use MP instead? or "why not just use Cooldowns instead"?

 

[Wavelength]

@Wavelength

A good post about the benefits of a great combat system. Namely, knowing what you're doing before you decide on a feature. Also wonderfully expands on my concept of "Doesn't matter how you do your skills, it matters how you do your combat. Your combat system is what is going to determine Skill Usage, and whether it adds depth to the mechanics".

I did however have to disagree with the "charges" aspect. I don't think I've ever played a game (not just an RPG, a game), where "very powerful and limited use" skills, items, weapons, abilities, etcetera ever felt "good" as a player. It always feels like I need to "save it for later". Or, it makes me feel like I need to "grind" so that I don't have to use those resources. After all, if I grind so I don't have to use the resources... then get to the boss and kill them without the resources... why use them if I don't have to? I'm just disagreeing that such a system is ever "viable", because its problems can be mitigated or even eliminated by just swapping to either a Cooldown system or an MP system.

A "charge" system needs to balance your limited charges with enemy variety. Enemies that you MUST expend a charge on to destroy. Otherwise, a player like me (I don't think I'm the typical player, but I think a lot of players probably fall somewhere on the same scale of "But, I might need it later") will just hoard the charges forever, to the end of the game, and never really use them.

... (quote abridged for length)

First of all, thank you for the kind words about my post!

As far as Limited Charge systems for skills, I agree they should be more of the exception rather than the rule, but I think there are a lot of ways that Charges can be a viable mechanic, a justifiable mechanic, even a great mechanic!

A Charge system (with limited uses per battle) would be appropriate, for example, if you want to design a Storm skill that's most appropriate for clearing weak enemy mobs. (Perhaps the skill scales with how much more powerful you are than the enemy.) A player could use this Storm skill two or three times (instead of hitting Attack 14 times) to quickly clear the weak mob, but a more challenging mob might leave the enemies with most of their HP after the two or three allotted uses, and bosses even moreso.

A Charge system (of any sort, including Dungeon-wide) could also be appropriate for Healing skills or perhaps just for in-combat Healing skills. I've talked about Healing Skills a lot elsewhere and how they can destroy the fabric of battle strategy by erasing mistakes if they're too easily available - but it's also reasonable to want to give the player a way to erase a few mistakes if things go very bad very quickly. Here, a Healing spell that works on Charges works like the equivalent of the ability to take just 5 (or some other number) of items into a dungeon in a dungeon-crawler.

I know that you have said in many places that players won't ever use anything that's limited unless they have to, but that shouldn't ring true if the Charges restore after every battle (it's "use it or lose it"). It does ring true if the Charges don't restore until you, for example, leave the dungeon - but that's the entire point! A trump card is something you use when nothing else will do. The player shouldn't be using it unless they feel they have to. And if you're doing a good job as a designer, most players should occasionally feel like they have to.

Find yourself taking too much damage because of mismanaging opponent debuffs? Use a Charge of your Healing skill to give yourself a bit of breathing room and regroup. There is no "I want to save it for later" - you're likely to die if you try to do that. Find that you've run into an enemy troop that's much harder than the others in the area? Use a Charge of your Meteor skill to wipe them out and save your precious HP. Sure you could save that charge of Meteor for the boss, but since it deals damage to the entire troop, you're probably saving more HP by using it here. Your decision to make, player!

Now, why not just give these skills MP Costs or Cooldowns instead of a Charge system, and be done with it? You could, but I feel there are reasons why the Charge system works better in these examples:

• Limiting Storm by Cooldowns or especially by MP would allow Storm to become a large part of the player's kit in a 20 turn boss battle, which might be counter to what the designer wants. With the Charge system, if you can only use Storm twice per battle, it's not going to be a big part of your kit in a 20 turn battle.
• Using MP to limit the number of times you can use Storm would mean its MP cost would need to be high, defeating the point of using it. This is a skill whose design requires incredible cost efficiency. But if you could use such an efficient skill any number of times, it would crowd out all other damage skills.
• Cooldowns would have the effect of not allowing the player to use Storm skill two or more times in quick succession, which is what they'd want to do to clear the easy mob.
• A high MP cost would actually do the trick just fine for the Healing skill - if your MP system is limited and scarce, without easy ways to recover it. As the designer, you may be designing your MP system toward another dynamic of play (for instance, you may be refilling MP after every battle in order to let the players use interesting skills without worrying about hoarding them) - but you can use limited Healing charges to give the player room to make only X number of mistakes throughout a dungeon.
• Cooldowns will not work for the Healing skill - players will simply kill all but one weak enemy, and wait for their Healing cooldowns to expire.
• Meteor, somewhat like Storm, occupies a different design space than standard Skills. Forcing them to draw from the same resource pool, as in MP, would mean that one or the other would almost certainly be crowded out - at least in any given battle and at most throughout the entire game - depending on which one is more cost-effective.
• Cooldowns (that reset after each battle) would not an effective gate on the Meteor skill because it would mean the skill is available for every battle, which is against the skill's design.
• Cooldowns (that carry over between battles, or reset after X number of battles) would feel uninteresting in play, because the optimal move would generally be to use the skill as soon as it's off of cooldown (thus maximizing the % of turns or battles you are using it in). Limiting by Charges means you have to pick and choose when to use it. Additionally, players could abuse the system like with Healing, above.

These are very specific examples of skills, and very specific design intentions for those skills, and that's why I say that Skills working on limited Charges should be the exception and not the rule!

Interestingly, the one place that Limited Charge skills are the rule is in Collectible Card Games. If you think about it, in most CCGs, each card is a charge of an ability (or in some CCGs a summon) that you can only use once. You have charges of several different skills in your hand - perhaps more than one charge (card) of a certain skill - and you have to figure out when and how to best play those limited charges. This is an extremely compelling element of playing CCGs, and while designers should use extreme caution in trying to port these dynamics over to RPG combat, it serves as a great monument to how limited resources can create great gameplay in general.

 

[Tai_MT]

Those do sound compelling, but as a player myself, I can't see myself engaging in the behavior you describe with the "Limited Uses". Though, I am not stupid enough to think that I'm the rule instead of the exception.

You mentioned a "Storm" ability that kills low level monsters, or weaker enemies. That might be interesting, but I'm not sure a player would use it like that. Or, maybe they would. It seems "obtuse" to me. Personally, once I figured out the power of the Skill and how much more efficient it was, I'd just spend my first three turns of every single combat, spamming it. Why bother even hitting "Attack"? The skill is 3x more powerful than mashing Attack. Even if it's not, it's an AOE damaging skill that does a lot of damage to weak enemies. I'll just sit here in the beginning area, raise my level and my stats to above where the dev thought they should be, and then plow through every encounter from here to the boss. I'll do it again once the boss is killed. It's also a skill that's useful in a boss fight. Most traditional bosses have some "minions" with them, which the player needs to decide are a more valid threat (they get lots of hits against you) than the boss. If they can tank the damage, they'll ignore the minions. If they can't, the minions die first. Cue Storm Skill. I'll just slap that 3 times and I no longer have to decide if something should be prioritized in combat like that or not. Granted, you could do something similar with MP or cooldown skills, but there's an actual cost associated with those two systems that your "Storm Skill" doesn't have associated with it. You've essentially given me a 3 charge "clear the board of weak crap" Skill for no cost. Which... begs the question... Why are there so many weak enemies in the game that be cleared with this Skill? Why is this not a balance nightmare of a game that runs on Easy Mode? I cannot imagine, as a player, enjoying a game that lets me walk through 90% of basically all combat because they've given me a "murder everything" skill. Even if it's on a "Limited Charge" system. I can't imagine this skill would work at all, except in a game that doesn't care about "player skill" in combat.

Though, to be quite honest... I'd rather have the Earthbound approach to dealing with "weak mobs" than some "Limited Charge" system. I'd rather defeat them immediately as I encounter them, wasting no resources, and getting the money, XP, and items they dropped. I find the "power validation" to be more fun as a player than having to spam a single skill in every combat to make it over with quickly.

As for limited charge healing skills... They're already in the game. Why are we making redundant systems? Potions. Limited amount of charges. They heal. Same thing. And you can have up to 999 of them, or whatever your game allows for the money that is going to be burning a hole in your pocket by midgame, since most RPGs don't have very good "currency sinks" built into them. I asked that very question designing my own game and went, "I don't need dedicated healers, or skills that heal. Players will buy their healing items and spend a turn to use them. This creates a money sink and prevents me trying to determine a proper amount of 'spell casts per mana pool' when it comes to healing.". That's just my personal solution, there are better ones than that. Often, in an RPG, healing is so integral or unbalanced that you'll never use your healing items. All you're doing with the system you describe is turning a skill into a worse version of buying a Potion in town. Unless the healing skill heals the whole party. I'm not sure how you'd get a player to use it at that point, since if you only need to heal a single person, you wouldn't waste a charge that would hit the whole party. Give me 20 Healing charges for a dungeon and I'll just buy my 99 Potions with money and not use the charges. Especially since they serve the same function. Unless the healing magic is just infinitely better... But, then you risk unbalancing combat again. Or rendering Consumables worthless... I don't want to be the man who figures out how to balance that in a real combat system. That sounds like an even bigger headache than my "Every choice creates a different storyline" nonsense I'm writing for.

The real problem with the "But, I might need it later", is that it's difficult as a dev to design a system where the player feels they need to use their limited charges of something in order to win, or in order to survive, or whatever. The most common practice among most gamers is, "I'll just reset after game over, go gain a few levels, then wreck the boss/enemy so I don't have to use my limited charges". You would have to specifically design an entire game around getting players to use those charges. That means, every battle is either going to have be incredibly difficult... or unbeatable by grinding levels/stats. Maybe the boss lays an incurable countdown timer on the player at the beginning of combat which kills the player when it hits zero and makes them unrevivable... Except, you've got a Skill with 3 charges on it, that removes the state and heals a little bit. It's the only skill that does that. Then, it's useful. Valuable. You're forcing a player to use a charge to deal with something. Because it can be dealt with no other way, than by using a charge.

See, if you have a "Limited Amount of Charges" system, you have to design the entire game around it. You have to eliminate any and all alternatives to play. You would have to nearly eliminate winning combat without these charges. You'd have to nearly eliminate the use of any items in combat. These charges would have to be something you have to use, and use carefully, or most players won't touch them. Or, they'll touch them so infrequently that they may as well not exist. It's the "Final Fantasy Elixir" problem otherwise.

Though, to be honest, it might be kind of interesting to have a game that revolves around Charges of everything. Maybe with options to improve how many charges of each thing you can carry. Maybe you start out only able to hold 3 Charges of Cura, but you complete a sidequest and it earns you a 4th charge. That might actually end up being a fun kind of game, where you gain power like that. Maybe you're not always limited to 1 use of Meteor. Maybe you can have up to 5 casts of it. Maybe even have the charges be "renewable" in combat to an extent by requiring players to land a certain number of basic attacks or guards or something.

That's kind of the rub though. A "Skill Charges" system I think really only works if you've designed the entire game around having it and eliminated any alternative to using it. Otherwise, you get a "But, I might need it later" attitude from players. Because, if you can beat an encounter without using a finite resource... Why ever use the finite resource?

I dunno, I've just never seen a "Limited Skill Charges" system ever executed well. And by well, I mean, "it makes combat fun", "I'm not hoarding charges", "I'm not grinding levels/stats to avoid using charges", and "this feels well thought out and challenging". Maybe such a game exists. I don't know, I haven't played them all. For me, it's just like a Crafting System. I've never seen one that works well, or even works decently.

 

[freakytapir]

Long story short, the difference between limited uses and mp is a shared vs a separated resource pool.

A consequence of working with charges is that it greatly favors learning additional skills, as they directly increase the output of your character, so learning an additional skill is like increasing your MP Pool.

Working with charges also allows you to make your players diversify the skills they used. Preventing the spamming of the most mp efficient damage spell.

Best advice I can give : prototype and playtest. Make some skills of each type, mock up some enemies and characters, and get to testing.

 

[alberthk]

MP represents a degree of points which works parallel with HP, thus creating a suggestion of it being able to be restored through generic methods (potions, etc.)

Whilst, Limited Use, as the name suggests, gives the player the idea that it needs to be used efficiently.

But, it all goes back to your game's mechanic, both can be pretty much the same, depending on how a game's system is designed.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

In both cases, I almost always end up saving skills that require more MP or has less number of uses for really special fights, sometimes ending up not using them at all.. So make sure whichever mechanic you choose (or if you use both), that it would make sense. As for how to do it, I think Wavelength and Tai already made a fitting list of suggestions.

Just remember that you should only add features that makes sense in your game as a whole, don't ever add a feature just for the sake of having it..

 

[SOC]

I definitely prefer MP, especially systems where you can gain back MP in creative ways. The anxiety of "running out/being screwed" isn't fun for me. I quite like systems where I can use weaker skills that "build up" a resource, then spend the resource on more powerful skills.

 

[Countyoungblood]

Mp is a strategic bottleneck used by the designer to create multiple solutions to solving the problem.

You can cast:
10 small spells
Or
5 medium spells
Or
1 big spell

Different situations call for different spells. You dont cast super mega hp regeneration when a bandaid would of been a full restoration

Add mp regeneration and the problem gets more complex.

 

[Tai_MT]

You also run into the problem of, "If I just need a bandaid, why am I wasting my limited MP to do it? I'll just pop a Potion that costs 30 GP instead, since I've got so much money that I have no idea what to do with it all, since the dev has given me hundreds of treasure chests with money and items in them and all I ever really pay for is equipment in towns".

The problem with MP systems is that they are run in one of two ways:

1. MP is so valuable and difficult to regenerate that Skills/Spells aren't used at all except at critical Boss Fights. This means, there's no reason to use the low level stuff, because all you'll ever be using is the high level stuff against a boss since it's kind of pointless to spend a Combat Turn on anything less than maximum damage.
Or:
2. MP is so easily regenerated or recovered that there's no reason to use lower tiered skills/spells because you'll just pop a couple consumables, hit up the Inn, pick up a consumable in the next chest, use a Tent, recover at the save point... so you'll never need to conserve your MP at all and can constantly spam your high level skills/spells.

A much better system for using the "small spells, medium spells, big spell" would be in terms of a "cooldown" system. Why spend the big spell on a weak enemy then, and wait for the 5 turn cooldown when I could use two or three small spells and their 2 turn cooldowns in order to win the fight? Such a system makes more sense for use in a Cooldown type system.