RPGs start with a sword guy. Or a gun guy. They don’t start with a healer chick, because healer chicks kinda need a sword guy to do like 90% of the damage for them, and basically they stand around behind the sword guy, being a mana potion to healing potion conversion tool. Tough sell for a main PC, but that is what I am intending to do.

What I plan to do to avoid this: In addition to the two moves per turn thing I wrote about earlier, Alastrina’s special moves are prayers. Standing around doing nothing more exciting than praying is not good fun, and the only way she’d be relevant is to crank up the combat difficulty to where the party would perish without her. So instead of just being a fountain of green numbers at the cost of mana points/potions, her prayers do more than simply restore green numbers, they build up a connection to the almighty, whatever or whoever that is.

Alastrina’s power bar meter is Japa. Each of her special moves, her prayers, do something useful AND build Japa (Japa is the repetition of a mantra; something that repeated focus on prayers should do to build up connection with the divine). A few ideas so far:

• Sustaining Faith: Gives a Heal-over-time buff to a single target
• Ward: Increases the defense of self or an ally for a turn. Can be combined with the attack move Fend to shield Alastrina from damage entirely.
• Blessed Focus: Increases an ally’s accuracy and damage for 3 turns.
• Extend Flow: Increases the duration of all buffs on an ally for 2 turns.
• Balm Suffering: Reduce the duration of all debuffs on all allies by 1 turn.
• Chant: Has no effect, but increases Japa much more.

If Alastrina takes damage, her Japa meter gets cut back. She is, after all, a healer; she shouldn’t be tanking, and if you let your healer get beat up, you’re playing the game wrong. Fortunately, she starts the game with Flonk, at least after they form some sort of alliance, so she will always have somebody else with her to fight alongside. And while Flonk may not share or even understand her faith, he gets the idea that if she stays alive, he stays alive. Once she fills her Japa meter, however, she is immune to channeling pushback, as she will have forged a Connection. When that happens, her eyes glow as she radiates holy power and have access to her top tier moves of wards, barriers and banes.

All of her basic moves now upgrade. Instead of one target, it becomes all targets, or the numbers go up, or something more good happens. So letting her build up her Japa is very much a win win for the party — but that is not all it is good for.

Unique to Alastrina’s move bar, she has an extra spell slot. Just one, randomly chosen from her deck each turn, and these are all Desperate Pleas. These are powerful interventions, a boon from the Divine to help she and her allies survive in the face of an overwhelming foe. At any point she can cash in these holy points for something great:

• Consecrate Ground: Deals damage to all foes every round, but burns Japa each turn. The effect ends when all is exhausted.
• Baneful Karma: Places a Thorns buff on an ally, who dishes out more damage than they take from attacks, but cannot be protected from damage. The higher the Japa was when used, the greater the percentage of reflected damage.
• Blinding Radiance: All enemies are blinded, and their attacks have a high chance of missing or hitting random targets. The percentage is higher of each based on the amount of Japa when cast.

As soon as Alastrina has invoked a Desperate Plea, her connection breaks, and her Prayer moveset returns to the unpowered form. Further, she cannot regain Japa until the divine boon has ended. So why would you elect this? Because sometimes the threats are intense and need an immediate salvation versus a sustaining defense. These rotate every round, so a great opportunity might show up that you can’t pass up on, or the boss is about to open up a can of whoopass and there may not be a next round if you don’t act now.

So the experience I am aiming for is a balancing act of strategic resources. You aren’t going to run out of mana points because mana points are pretty dumb. Instead, you build a resource during combat that you can elect to spend sooner for less benefit, or hold onto for more benefit. You are rewarded for holding onto them for as long as you can, but eventually you are going to want to burn them off. Nice thing is, you can get them back, but you’ll want to pick your windows of opportunity in order to do so. This is a bit different than being a healer in an MMO, where you are desperately hoping that the bad guy falls down before your precious spell juice bar goes to zero.

So, if you’re reading this, give me some prayer ideas, either a regular “lord, keep my allies safe” or as a demand of “hey we’s all gonna die, wanna step in here.”