Ooh, but that is actually a very good idea. If the dice themselve have "health" it would solve a lot of the current gameplay issues:
- It would incetivise the use of low roll dice to soak up damage.
- It would mitigate the effect of "unlucky" roll of no defense.
- It would make up for more interesting combat by changing the strategy throughout the game. At first, all dice are fully healed, later they are damaged and must be used carefuly.
There's couple of problems that would need to be solved though:
- Monster attack would have to be stronger to balance out "more health" of the player. How to balance player's defense along with it?
- How would heal work? Currently it revives dead mana, would the new heal only heal damaged mana or only revive dead, or both? How to differentiate it substantially from defense?
- I think it could be interesting and perhaps even more intuitive if the same system worked for monsters too. They could have some "red" mana dice they would roll and use each turn and when all their mana dice are dead, they are defeated.
- How to display mana health on the screen? I think a healthbar for each die would be too cluttered, maybe a fill of the grayed out dead mana? Radial or linear? Would it reduce readability of the numbers?
Thanks for the suggestion, this could be fun to implement and it's a lot to think about.