Week 36: In which nothing much happens

I've been busy with work work and catching up on all the things I neglected with the house during the push to alpha #1, so haven't made any progress on the game lately.

One of my friends brought up a tricky issue with the magic system I have planned. Your magic resource will be a fairly small stock that recharges quickly when you're not using it (already roughly this way in alpha 1). The desired gameplay result is that you'll be free to fire off a few spells when you decide that you need a boost in battle; you'll have to wait a bit between rounds of magic, so you want to choose a good spell at a good time and make it count; and you recharge fast enough that you might easily fire off two rounds of magic in a normal battle.

The tricky issue comes in if I provide any kind of healing magic. If your magic is unlimited and recharges quickly and you have a healing spell, then you have full recovery after each battle, which I don't think I want. But how to avoid that dynamic? I currently have these main ideas:

• No healing magic. The obvious and easy solution. Your health recovery is limited to a consumable healing item or limited stock thereof.
  
  
• Healing magic causes some kind of longer-term resource drain. I'm already considering having a "fatigue" penalty that you accumulate when you use your entire magic charge at once, probably something like making your magic recharge more slowly. Healing magic could always cause fatigue. Or another effect such as reducing your maximum magic charge until the next time you rest in town or whatever.
  
  The general idea is to add a downside to healing magic so that one wouldn't always want to heal up. But having the downside be some effect that weakens your character doesn't appeal to me so much, because I want you to feel free to use magic frequently without worrying about a long-term strategic resource (such as MP in typical RPGs), and in general I want to avoid the "dungeon of attrition" model that many RPGs follow.
  
  
• Healing fully will put you at risk to get attacked by more enemies before you're done. Maybe if you sit around for a certain time period, there's a continual chance for enemies to appear from one of the area entrances (with the certain time period such that it takes you longer to heal up from serious injury). Or, if you take some kind of fatigue penalty for magical healing, you can rest to recover from fatigue, but there's a chance for enemies to appear every time you rest.
  
  
• I just thought of this one, so it's totally not thought through: Healing magic temporarily reduces your maximum health each time you use it (or, healing magic becomes progressively less able to restore you the more you use it, to think of it that way).

I'm also thinking of how to restrict healing items (assuming I have some). I just want to avoid the "99 Heal Potions on the wall" syndrome. I keep thinking to limit your inventory space in some way. One thought is that you have a limited total capacity for consumable items ... which are basically "healing items and arrows" in this game, so making a pooled carrying capacity doesn't add much interest here. Better is to just limit how many healing items you're allowed to carry, probably by you having only a certain number of potion bottles (see A Link to the Past).

I've also thought of making you find ingredients for potions ... but that can suck if not handled well, and is really a way to substitute for money rather than an effective way to limit healing items.