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White Gale Stone
4e9864
>>101046
I'd absolutely agree that this shouldn't have any hard numbers. Much like in a tabletop RPG, finding and exploiting a loophole isn't generally fun for everyone. And there's little else to be gained from precise figures here. The fuzziness also leaves more room for you to allow unusual and creative things as you see fit. ("That sounds fun, sure, let's go with that.")
The same thing goes for the rest of the stats. I think the current level of importance attached to them is OK (now that you no longer mention possible stat changes with every choice). I don't think attempting to precisely quantify stats like Dragon or Mind any more than your current fun spirals makes sense. They just give you room to consider proposed courses of action and say "sure, that's reasonable" or "Ceri is unlikely to be able to pull that off".
For instance, with how we've raised Ceridwen to have a high Mind and low Vigor and Speed, it's reasonable to think she could come up with creative ways to use portals, win at a game of strategy or reasoning, carefully have a conversation without giving away a secret, or come up with a clever scheme to gain power and influence. It's not so reasonable to think she could outrun an athletic pursuer on flat ground, free-climb up a mountain, travel cross-country at a fast pace for 16-hour days, or take on a group of fighters head-on without pulling any tricks; if we tried to suggest things like those, you'd either tell us that Ceridwen isn't capable of it, or let us try and most likely fail. If we're in a situation like those, we'd have to come up with some other solution instead.
A Ceridwen from an alternate universe could have been a skilled warrior who thinks three-on-one head-on fights are a fun challenge but not so fair for the three, but that Ceridwen wouldn't have been able to get away with some of the things we've done.
So please do keep stats at about the current degree of vagueness; more precision would just make things more complicated, both for us and for you. (You might even consider renaming "MP" and "HP" to just "Magic" and "Health", to avoid suggesting they have "points".)
The only reason I'm asking about her rate of magic regeneration is to get a rough idea of how to evaluate and discuss ideas like "let's randomly use some magic for something amusing", and comments like "do we want to use MP on a game?".
The premise you suggested where magic regenerates non-linearly, with smaller amounts regenerating quickly and larger amounts straining us and taking longer to regenerate, makes perfect sense; I like the idea of magic working more like a muscle, and it's an approach that isn't used nearly as often. (That also might allow for the idea of adrenaline in an emergency situation, and would suggest that working out with our magic to its limit would be the right way to train ourselves to have a higher capacity.)
And that's a system that would be hard to put precise numbers to, but that's reasonably easy to hand-wave; I'd leave out even the numbers you mentioned in your post, because that might vary depending on how Ceri has used her magic, and how much she's strained herself. Lifting a 2-kilo weight 100 times doesn't require anywhere near as much strain as lifting a 200-kilo weight once. And a single burst is quite different than long-duration endurance. (More "precise" magic systems have to add things like "cantrips" to approximate things like this.)
The analogy to a muscle also gives some good rough ideas about how to think about using magic for random things. Does the following roughly correspond to the model you have in mind?
If we're doing something that seems like it ought to be trivial (for instance, polymorphing a funny face for a moment, or making a brief small portal that doesn't move anything but sound and light), we can probably recover that almost immediately, as long as we don't want to do it for a long time without stopping; so, quick gags when we're not already "tired" don't need us to worry about magic usage. Doing something major (like a portal across town for two people) or high-endurance (like maintaining a major polymorph for a while, especially one with a physical, non-cosmetic component) isn't something we should plan on doing many times per day, just like we wouldn't expect to maintain a fast running pace for a long time. (More so if we're doing something physically active at the same time; physical activity with a polymorph on might be like running with ankle weights, though it's possible the polymorph would also be making the physical activity easier for us in ways that compensate.) And if we do something that takes all the magical strength we've got, we're not only going to need to cool it for the rest of the day, we'll probably go to bed exhausted and want some extra sleep (an early night or a late morning).
Does that sound about right to you?
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