Animancy, Memory, and Bones

While my other 'callings' (archtypes) are relatively straightforward, I often still go back to the Animancer and think that something's not quite right. My design goals for this calling are:

* Powerful spells
* Rituals
* Manipulation of spells
* Reactive casting
* No limited resource

The thought to solving all of this was to "gather" memory for a couple of ticks (actions) as described in my action economy post. But, discussing this with friends revealed that this would most likely result in people doing nothing but gathering memory, essentially skipping their turn, in order to do something cooler on the next turn(s).

Further brainstorming lead to the idea of tying memory to objects - let's say bones for dramatic example. If objects could store memory, animancers could store bones on their person, which fits into the game's idea of "pockets" for inventory management. However, this idea alone violates the last design goal of no limited resources.

Putting two and two together: if animancers could use pre-stored memory from bones, or use time to gather memory, this prevents them from ever running completely out, but also lets them do quick bursts of powerful spells without just waiting around.

The pocket limit for each character prevents this from ever getting completely out of hand. Animancers who walk around with a backpack full of bones need to take actions to get those bones out of the pack and into their hands or pocket, so they could have just been gathering the memory they needed from the surrounding area instead.

This all adds up to a simple solution that doesn't change much of my other design choices. We'll see in the next playtest!