Time for more geekery!
Nov. 15th, 2010 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sureiTypically, in video/computer games which feature combat, there's HP (health points) and MP (mana points), and the two are pretty much unrelated, and often unevenly balanced. Your HP decreases as you get hit, your MP decreases as you cast spells, and you can spend MP to recover HP (otherwise known as healing spells). Some games have some classes that can do the reverse (spend HP to recover MP (warlocks in WoW, I'm looking at you)) but that's an exception, not the rule. You can have either high HP or high MP, but not both; apparently all magic users have improved their minds at the cost of their bodies. If you run out of MP, you can't cast any more spells; if you run out of HP, you die.
D&D, of course, counts spells themselves, rather than spell or mana points; it's my belief that MP came about as an easier game mechanic. Also, "you can only cast x number of spells in a day" (and at starting levels, x is pretty darn low) can be really frustrating.
The thing is, outside of games and certain Jack Vance novels (his Dying Earth series is more-or-less the source for D&D's magic system), that doesn't seem to be how it works. Magic users don't run out of mana and then stand around uselessly (or start wanding things to death), they run out of energy. And when they're almost dead at the end of a hard fight, it's not because they got hit a lot, had low health to begin with, and/or their defense sucks (typical of magic users who have do deal with game mechanics); it's because they used everything they had and kept going. I run across characters collapsing due to magical exhaustion (or chakra exhaustion -- hi Naruto fans! -- it's the same thing) and "he was running his life-line into the red just to talk" and powerful magic that puts a strain the body and tires the caster to cast, and and and. And so on and so forth. Come on, you guys know what I'm talking about, here. Mana and health are unquantifiable, intrinsically linked, and frequently identical.
To put it into points/stats terminology, it's not HP and MP. You have a damage meter, and you have energy/life force/qi/ki/chi/chakra/mana/magic. And when you run out of the latter, you can keep going, but it'll hurt you. Because what keeps you alive and functioning is the same energy/magic/whatever that you use for spells/attacks/combat, and you're pulling it from your own systems to do so.
So there.
D&D, of course, counts spells themselves, rather than spell or mana points; it's my belief that MP came about as an easier game mechanic. Also, "you can only cast x number of spells in a day" (and at starting levels, x is pretty darn low) can be really frustrating.
The thing is, outside of games and certain Jack Vance novels (his Dying Earth series is more-or-less the source for D&D's magic system), that doesn't seem to be how it works. Magic users don't run out of mana and then stand around uselessly (or start wanding things to death), they run out of energy. And when they're almost dead at the end of a hard fight, it's not because they got hit a lot, had low health to begin with, and/or their defense sucks (typical of magic users who have do deal with game mechanics); it's because they used everything they had and kept going. I run across characters collapsing due to magical exhaustion (or chakra exhaustion -- hi Naruto fans! -- it's the same thing) and "he was running his life-line into the red just to talk" and powerful magic that puts a strain the body and tires the caster to cast, and and and. And so on and so forth. Come on, you guys know what I'm talking about, here. Mana and health are unquantifiable, intrinsically linked, and frequently identical.
To put it into points/stats terminology, it's not HP and MP. You have a damage meter, and you have energy/life force/qi/ki/chi/chakra/mana/magic. And when you run out of the latter, you can keep going, but it'll hurt you. Because what keeps you alive and functioning is the same energy/magic/whatever that you use for spells/attacks/combat, and you're pulling it from your own systems to do so.
So there.