for mana
It makes sense in soooo many ways:
-
Mana has a super dope and relevant etymology: "Mana is a foundation of the Polynesian worldview, a spiritual quality with a supernatural origin and a sacred, impersonal force. To have mana implies influence, authority, and efficacy—the ability to perform in a given situation. The transition from Polynesian worldview to video game mechanic is intriguing.
-
Unlike ‘health’ - mana is a more complex ‘stat’ that has unique attributes. In Diablo 2 if I remember, it slowly regenerates over time and higher level spells cost more mana. There’s also a maximum amount of mana that can be held at any point in time - this maximum increases as a character ‘levels up’ - in dnd 5e this is communicated in # of spell slots. As another example, in Larry Niven’s fantasy books - mana is the magical fuel used to cast spells, and is a non-renewable environmental resource; heavy use of magic could deplete the mana in an area.
In Sourcecred, mana is representing an individual’s “support” of a project. “Support” is definitely a more “magical” type of contribution vs. what contributes to a cred score. It’s more subjective, ‘softly’ defined, and mystical because it’s often just the awesomeness of human beings who are building towards something they believe in (not to get all mushy but you know what I mean).
As a mechanic some reflections/ideas:
-
Mana can regenerated when it’s used because it can be generated and calculated continuously by active contributions of ‘support’.
-
It can be capped at a maximum (maybe like in Niven’s books, it IS a scarce resource. Maybe every project has a maximum amount of mana available based on some other variables…).
-
Mana can depreciate / disappear (demurrage) if not used OR just only regenerate to the maximum
-
Contributors can ‘level up’ their maximum mana based on threshold of cred, time spent contributing to the project, or some other subjective reward structure.
-
Mana can be dynamically spent to express “influence” (re: og definition of mana). Just like spells, to exert more influence (i.e. stronger spells) will cost more mana. This will make use of mana intentional.
More thoughts here… but maybe will spin out in a game mechanic thread… Regardless - mana ftw 