Steal My Idea: Skill variants from CCGs, Part 1: Cooldown Variants

Cooldown: A period of time in which, after the usage of a skill, the skill cannot be used.

Cooldown is an important concept in balancing skills. The 3 main things cooldowns attempt to achieve in skill mechanics are...

1. Powerful.
2. Situational.
3. Limited.

For example, let us take this spell as our base example.

Prayer
1000 Mana.
5 minute cooldown.

Prevents all damage for 5 seconds.

This is an extremely powerful ability to become invulnerable for 5 seconds. However, one can see where this would be too powerful if there was no cooldown period (the ability to become immortal as long as your mana sustains you) and too useless if it was balanced strictly by cost (Imagine you had the ability to become immortal for 5 seconds but leaving you powerless by draining all your mana.)

Hence, the cooldown allows you to make a skill available to the player with the knowledge that it has a sufficient time and resource cost and remain balanced.


Variant Mechancis:

Flashback: The ability to use a skill while it is cooling down.

Flashback, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to "re-cast" a card after it has been cast for the slight cost of removing it from the game.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to use a skill while it is cooling down, exchanging a small cooldown. For example, our prayer spell above. Let us say that while the skill is "cooling down", we were able to cast it again while it is cooling down, in exhange for not being able to use again the skill for 30 minutes or an hour.

Buyback: Trading mana for cooldown

Buyback, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to recover a card after you have cast it for some extra mana.

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to cancel a cooldown for a specific skill by paying an additional mana cost.  For example, for our prayer spell above, let us say that the cost to cancel the cooldown of prayer is 1000 mana. The player could then cast back-to-back prayer spells at the cost of 3000 mana, giving the spell additional flexibility if the player can pay for it.

Dredge: Randomly trading one cooldown for another

Dredge, is a mechanic in magic which allows you to recover the use of a spell by giving up the possibility of several spells in the game as a whole. 

In an RPG, this could be represented as the ability to cancel a cooldown by giving a random skill the same cooldown as it has. For example, let us say that our player has two spells, Prayer and Heal. If he chooses to cancel Prayer with this mechanic, then some other random skill would acquire the cooldown that Prayer had. In this case, if he had 3 minutes left on the cooldown of Prayer, cancelling it would move that 3 minute cooldown to Heal.