How Spells Work in Dreamscape and its Mana Costs

Spells can work in a variety of ways and there are 3 main types: Insta-cast, chant, and "stored".

Insta-cast is just that, an instantly cast spell like buffs/debuffs or small-scale offensive attacks and manipulations. An example would be a self-buff like "Empower", which increases ATK for a short duration.

Chanted spells are more "technical" in a way. Requiring a longer time to prepare, the user can flesh out complicated tricks and attacks, which can cause devastating effects to the defender. An example of this would be "Frenzy Plant", which erupts massive vines from the ground and completely changes the battlefield. Chanted spells are also mostly concentration-based. If concentration is broken whilst chanting, the spell can be selected to be a weaker variant, or can be used as a focus for another spell to decrease its cast duration. An example of this would be "Heal", which requires concentration to heal one's wounds.

"Stored" spells are a little tricky. Primarily used by those who aren't gifted in the art of mana manipulation- which is mostly everyone (at least in the human race), stored spell users require tomes or scrolls to imbue mana into a sigil. These spells must be chanted, and it takes considerably more time and mana to chant and imbue the spell. Once stored, though, the user can treat the spell like an insta-cast, and dish out massive damage in one go.

---

Mana cost in this world is proportional to the difficulty of the spell used. At lower levels, most spells are percentage based. This is due to the fact that mana in the human body can be seen as water in a cup. At lower levels, there is just barely enough mana for basic manipulation, allowing for spells to be used, but not as higher levels. At higher levels, mana capacity is high enough to allow for more advanced manipulation, and thus lower-level spells hit a peak at its mana usage.

For example, if a level 1 Rin with only 20 MP max casts Elemental Shackles, it will take about half his MP away in one go, due to the complexity of the spell. However, if a level 100 Rin with 7000 MP max casts Elemental Shackles, the peak amount of mana usage for it would be 100 MP, meaning that only 100 MP would be used, rather than taking half of his MP away.

---

As for mana manipulation, really anything goes if you have the mana for it. Many end up making new spells because of it. And some even die trying to make one, simply because they didn't have the mana needed to make it.

Also, different materials have different types, so transmuting needs to fit certain criteria before being able to turn into another object. More will be explained later~