A brief thing on limiting healing in RPGs
Sep. 24th, 2013 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indigozealI mentioned how I found challenging but ultimately enjoyed how Baten Kaitos approached healing - the items that can heal you in battle constantly decay and have to be replaced, and the high-level, more-effective heals are available only through a form of trial-and-error crafting. It got me thinking about other RPGs that have interesting mechanics that play with limiting the availability of healing somehow.
- Planet Stronghold is turn-based but uses an aggro system adapted from MMORPGs. Nothing draws aggro on a character like having them heal, and you can imagine that having enemies gang up on your tech users, typically the frailest members of your party, will not go well for you. It makes the timing of healing a tactical decision - do you really need to heal right now? Can another member of the party do something to deal enough damage to draw aggro away from your healer on this turn? Add to this Planet Stronghold's severely limited MP pools and the fact that you can't use techs outside battle, and you really have to think before you heal.
- Poison works in a really odd and uniquely aggravating way in Phantasy Star III - instead of slowly sapping your HP, it will not only render you unable to heal, but it will also prevent you from seeing how much HP the affected character has left (instead of, say, 207/286, his HP will be displayed as P/286). Despite that PS3 is generally Wrong Wrong Wrong: The RPG, this mechanic leads to some interesting games of chicken: since antidotes take up valuable limited inventory space and MP needs to be saved for healing proper, I kept mental tallies of the damage my poisoned characters had received and subtracted it from the HP I thought they had pre-poison, trying to postpone treating the condition for as long as possible. (Poisonous enemies tend to populate an entire area, after all, and it wouldn't do to waste and antidote or Anti tech and then have the patient just get poisoned again in the next battle.)
- The DS RPG Contact has you cook up foods to restore your health in a crafting side-mechanic, with the added catch of digestion time - the more elaborate the dish, the more it heals your character, but the longer it takes to digest. You can't eat anymore or heal anymore while you feel full, limiting the amount of HP you can regain in a given time frame. Interesting, and something that would normally skew battles to a defensive bent on your end, but your control over your character in Contact is severely limited - you just put equipment on him and send him off into real-time auto-battle, occasionally interrupting to change his tactics or feed him items. Plus, most dishes aren't preparable until your cooking stats reach like level 50, and I was at something like 13 by endgame. The mechanic isn't very well-planned, but then again, neither is anything else in the game. It needs to be taken away from Contact by a Videogame Idea Protective Services.
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- Planet Stronghold is turn-based but uses an aggro system adapted from MMORPGs. Nothing draws aggro on a character like having them heal, and you can imagine that having enemies gang up on your tech users, typically the frailest members of your party, will not go well for you. It makes the timing of healing a tactical decision - do you really need to heal right now? Can another member of the party do something to deal enough damage to draw aggro away from your healer on this turn? Add to this Planet Stronghold's severely limited MP pools and the fact that you can't use techs outside battle, and you really have to think before you heal.
- Poison works in a really odd and uniquely aggravating way in Phantasy Star III - instead of slowly sapping your HP, it will not only render you unable to heal, but it will also prevent you from seeing how much HP the affected character has left (instead of, say, 207/286, his HP will be displayed as P/286). Despite that PS3 is generally Wrong Wrong Wrong: The RPG, this mechanic leads to some interesting games of chicken: since antidotes take up valuable limited inventory space and MP needs to be saved for healing proper, I kept mental tallies of the damage my poisoned characters had received and subtracted it from the HP I thought they had pre-poison, trying to postpone treating the condition for as long as possible. (Poisonous enemies tend to populate an entire area, after all, and it wouldn't do to waste and antidote or Anti tech and then have the patient just get poisoned again in the next battle.)
- The DS RPG Contact has you cook up foods to restore your health in a crafting side-mechanic, with the added catch of digestion time - the more elaborate the dish, the more it heals your character, but the longer it takes to digest. You can't eat anymore or heal anymore while you feel full, limiting the amount of HP you can regain in a given time frame. Interesting, and something that would normally skew battles to a defensive bent on your end, but your control over your character in Contact is severely limited - you just put equipment on him and send him off into real-time auto-battle, occasionally interrupting to change his tactics or feed him items. Plus, most dishes aren't preparable until your cooking stats reach like level 50, and I was at something like 13 by endgame. The mechanic isn't very well-planned, but then again, neither is anything else in the game. It needs to be taken away from Contact by a Videogame Idea Protective Services.
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