What's The Purpose of Inflated Damage in RPGs?

[Road_Block]

I believe that the raised health pools in games, like FFXIII and others, is used as a way of controling progression and as a means to separate early game content from late game content. By creating the large health differences, it makes it nigh impossible for low level characters to defeat higher level enemies, effectively forcing the player to first progress through the earlier content.

Meanwhile, after the player has cleared the lower level content, drastically raising health pools (in the course of just a few levels) not only allows the player to contend with the higher level content, but also renders the lower level content far too easy for the player. Thus, players are driven forward from the old, easy content into the new, challenging content.

The end result of this of course is massive health pools by the end of the game.

 

[GrimHeaper]

I was reading the FFXIII-2 impressions, and I sighed mournfully when I read that the battle system remains largely unchanged, so I guess I'm to expect, once again, characters that can easily do upwards of 9000 damage every hit with the minor caveat that the overworld enemies all have 6,000,000,000,000,000 HP.

I quit FFXIII not because of the linearity (I got accustomed to it and even got into the story quite a bit) but because of the ridiculous amount of time that it took for me to take down average enemies upon entering Gran Pulse. Yeah, a challenge is good, but noticing that I was rocking 7000-9999 damage and was still not so much as making a dent in any of these enemies was just a taunt in my opinion.

So just what the hell is the purpose of having so many digits, besides making you feel like you're fighting a goddamn mountain with a plastic spork every time?

HAHAHHAHAH small time dmg and HP sir
The dmg is to show how much stronger than something else is than another.

 

[Annoying Turd]

(MMO's don't count, the are bastardized horrors that never should have been created)

In Ultima Online nobody ever had above 100-120 hp.

 

[Kopikatsu]

I was reading the FFXIII-2 impressions, and I sighed mournfully when I read that the battle system remains largely unchanged, so I guess I'm to expect, once again, characters that can easily do upwards of 9000 damage every hit with the minor caveat that the overworld enemies all have 6,000,000,000,000,000 HP.

I quit FFXIII not because of the linearity (I got accustomed to it and even got into the story quite a bit) but because of the ridiculous amount of time that it took for me to take down average enemies upon entering Gran Pulse. Yeah, a challenge is good, but noticing that I was rocking 7000-9999 damage and was still not so much as making a dent in any of these enemies was just a taunt in my opinion.

So just what the hell is the purpose of having so many digits, besides making you feel like you're fighting a goddamn mountain with a plastic spork every time?

HAHAHHAHAH small time dmg and HP sir
The dmg is to show how much stronger than something else is than another.

That's just Disgaea 3.

Disgaea 4's level cap is 99999. IT WILL BE AMAZING!

(MMO's don't count, the are bastardized horrors that never should have been created)

In Ultima Online nobody ever had above 100-120 hp.

You mean Ultima Online I, right? What about Ultima Online VIII? (Or whatever the newest number is.)

 

[Sinclair Solutions]

Because when I see my character has 200 health in Chrono Trigger DS, I think that is a good number. Then I lose 93 health in one enemy attack. Sad face.

Honestly, I have no idea. I think Paper Mario had the right idea with no inflation. You knew how strong you were, because you had 10 health at the beginning of the game.

 

[GrimHeaper]

I was reading the FFXIII-2 impressions, and I sighed mournfully when I read that the battle system remains largely unchanged, so I guess I'm to expect, once again, characters that can easily do upwards of 9000 damage every hit with the minor caveat that the overworld enemies all have 6,000,000,000,000,000 HP.

I quit FFXIII not because of the linearity (I got accustomed to it and even got into the story quite a bit) but because of the ridiculous amount of time that it took for me to take down average enemies upon entering Gran Pulse. Yeah, a challenge is good, but noticing that I was rocking 7000-9999 damage and was still not so much as making a dent in any of these enemies was just a taunt in my opinion.

So just what the hell is the purpose of having so many digits, besides making you feel like you're fighting a goddamn mountain with a plastic spork every time?

HAHAHHAHAH small time dmg and HP sir
The dmg is to show how much stronger than something else is than another.

That's just Disgaea 3.

Disgaea 4's level cap is 99999. IT WILL BE AMAZING!

And they need it considering how powerful the people are in that game.
I admit that certain things are much 6,000,000,000,000,000 HP is an exaggeration on his part, but Disgaea 4 will likely be able to.

 

[Gladiator32]

Hitting an enemy for 100 damage when they have 500hp sounds better to some people than hitting 1 damage out of 5hp.

 

[Saulkar]

A lot of people already covered the reason why but I know of a better way to accomplish this. Simply put have a weapon that can do rocking damage to some enemies tearing them to pieces and causing wanton environmental damage but at the same time not even making a ***** when going up against the real badasses. Then you know shit just got real.

 

[Stammer]

Not only does it make things a lot more grand and epic-feeling, but it serves a practical purpose as well. Namely that larger numbers are easier to scale-down with effects.

If, for example, a character's HP was only a maximum of 10, if he was hit with a Poison effect that dealt damage over time, it would be hard to take it away. I mean, 1 HP per second is a MASSIVE problem when you've only got 10 HP in the first place. If HP is 100, then suddenly you can make it 1 HP/tic and it would only be a minor thing.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Bigger numbers look more awesome, so it's a cheap way to make you feel like a bad-ass, ofcourse it defeats all purpose if you don't actually put a dent in the enemy.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I'd imagine because it creates a sense of progression without actually requiring actual progression to be planned haha.

Bingo. Right on the nose.

There are a few RPGs that buck that rule, and make your options matter most, but for the most part these games present the Illusion of Progress.

You get a new Shiny Crystal Sword, and then you have to stab something like 10 times just to get them to stay down. The problem is that your previous Gold Shiny Sword took like, maybe 2 or 3 more hits to do the same thing.

Or how about in The Force Unleashed, where you have a Light Saber that you have to truncheon ordinary soldiers with over and over again just so that they will die.

 

[S3Cs4uN 8]

Seems like its just oldschool. nNow a days its much faster, but those games that cling to the old ways make the game super fucking hard, and the bosses even worse, because in the end it's more satisfying. At least I believe that's the logic.

I believe Yiazmat is a good example of that. man i loved that giant white doom dragon from hell

 

[theheroofaction]

Because big numbers are awesome
535,644,854,899,999,667,686,658,685,762,644,753,754,596,234,364,323,122,678,989,754,454,645,032

IF you saw this number above a head you would feel great about it

 

[loc978]

I dislike RPG systems that do that. Especially when they apply armor as direct damage reduction (as opposed to percentage damage reduction or to-hit reduction). Still not sure why D20 isn't more popular in video games. The processor does all of the hard parts for you, so why not?

 

[Akytalusia]

the FF's are still sportin' the 9999 damage cap these days? take a hint from Disgaea. we like our big numbers.

 

[thedoclc]

As almost everyone has pointed out the shortcomings of these ridiculous numbers, and I actually agree whole-heartedly, I'll play -devil's advocate-.

1) The inflating numbers allow for a finer level of distinction between builds in games which flaunt mechanics. For example, suppose an RPG uses numbers generally below ten. (Yes, this happens, especially in table top games -besides- D20). Imagine a score which is baseline 5 (5 damage, 5 strength, 5 whatever). I can't very easily fit in much between 5 and 6, meaning the minimum bump I can give something is 20% in this case. However, if the baseline is 5,000, I can have bumps to this stat which are as small as a tiny fraction of a percent. This makes tweaking abilities a little bit easier for whoever is building the system. You can give the player more "crunchy bits" which up stats and do so without significantly changing the balance of the game.

2) The larger numbers can convey the sense that the characters have entered a grossly different tier of power than they started in. Consider the example of D20. A (non-broken) build for a low level warrior type might hit once per round for roughly 10 damage. Now a high level character might hit three times for twenty each hit. The low-level guy is clearly no where near as powerful as high level one, but we can easily comprehend the difference between the two. Now imagine a setting which follows the camp logic of something like DBZ, where some of the characters are just normal humans and some destroy planets every few episodes. These inflated scores, if carried over from gameplay and into story, could easily convey to the player that the character has stepped into a whole new league of power where things normal humans can do do not apply. However, it seems this has rarely been implemented, though there is no reason it -couldn't- be. Imagine, for a second, that Bioware made a superhero style RPG where there were normal humans whose stats were in the two-digit range and then the superhumans whose stats were in the four digit range, and the player switched between the two as the plot demanded. Imagine when the normal human threw a punch, at best they did 6 damage, but when the big superhero punched, he did 600 and destructo-physics kicked in with some appropriate property damage.

For an example of a system like this, check out some of Palladium's TT RPG books; better yet, don't. Reading them induces serious headaches.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

It's called "padding a cashcow", a practice that needs to be thoroughly banned.