<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I'm sure most of you notice breaking RPG engines is something of a hobby of mine. People often talk about how games are imbalanced because you have arbitraily powerful attacks like Knights of the Round or whatever, but what's often overlooked is the ability to heal. The basic premise of healing is simple. You give up some of your MP or whatever your game calls it to exchange for some HP. Problem is, in just about every RPG ever designed, converting MP into HP is horribly efficient. So efficient that it's always the right choice to do, and this strategy is necessarily optimal, because if it's not, the battle would not be winnable (at least not without more leveling up). Let's not even talk about items which are like get out of jail cards. The existence of this easily discoverable optimal battle plan makes battles trivial. You can mix things up by putting status attacks or special abilities, but that just means some other MP has to be conserved to deal with them. If a conservative healing strategy doesn't work, then it's usually the case that no other strategy will work at all.
There are multiple problems that needs to be addressed in order to make a RPG where healing isn't the best strategy. Until then, all games are basically broken because you can beat every one of them by just healing your person whenever they get low enough that the next strong attack can kill them.
1. Enemies do too much damage. Almost all RPG enemies to do too much damage. When things can kill you in a relatively short time (3-4 turns say) you have no choice but to heal constantly. Grandia and Chrono Cross are probably the two exceptions to this as it actually takes a while for most bosses to kill you, but of course they're completely trivial if you use healing at all. Clearly you can't make a game without any kind of healing because then the boss will necessarily have to be unable to kill you before you can kill them. The best solution I can think of is that everything should be % based to hit. In Final Fantasy Tactics there's plenty of attacks that can take off 50% or more of your life but unless you're a Calculator you certainly don't heal everyone that drops below 50%. It's just too costly, and attacks won't always land anyway.
2. The person doing the healing should be very vulnerable. Tactics probably did this the best. A healer needs to be well protected. With many games healing is instanteous and therefore risk free. You really need a real time system, or at least very fine grained rounds (like Chrono Cross or Tactics) in order to create a meaningful opportunity to hurt the healer. There also needs to be some kind of tactical manuver so there can be a meaningful effort to protect the healer as opposed to just hoping the enemy will randomly not choose to attack the healer casting a spell.
3. The ability to mitigate damage should degrade over time. If you got a whole in the middle of your body, I don't care if you cast a heal spell, an elixir, or nanoclue to put it back together, it should still hurt. Breath of Fire 3 had moves that lowered your max HP for the duration of the fight and those kind of drawback should be applied to healing. This also allows you to make bosses that cannot kill your characters fast but still remains a challenge because over time your ability to defend steadily deteriates.
Ideally I'd like to see a game where it isn't always the best thing to do to heal everyone whenever possible. Tactics is about the closest I think of that fits this category, assuming you're not using Calculators or Chemists or Monks.</div>
There are multiple problems that needs to be addressed in order to make a RPG where healing isn't the best strategy. Until then, all games are basically broken because you can beat every one of them by just healing your person whenever they get low enough that the next strong attack can kill them.
1. Enemies do too much damage. Almost all RPG enemies to do too much damage. When things can kill you in a relatively short time (3-4 turns say) you have no choice but to heal constantly. Grandia and Chrono Cross are probably the two exceptions to this as it actually takes a while for most bosses to kill you, but of course they're completely trivial if you use healing at all. Clearly you can't make a game without any kind of healing because then the boss will necessarily have to be unable to kill you before you can kill them. The best solution I can think of is that everything should be % based to hit. In Final Fantasy Tactics there's plenty of attacks that can take off 50% or more of your life but unless you're a Calculator you certainly don't heal everyone that drops below 50%. It's just too costly, and attacks won't always land anyway.
2. The person doing the healing should be very vulnerable. Tactics probably did this the best. A healer needs to be well protected. With many games healing is instanteous and therefore risk free. You really need a real time system, or at least very fine grained rounds (like Chrono Cross or Tactics) in order to create a meaningful opportunity to hurt the healer. There also needs to be some kind of tactical manuver so there can be a meaningful effort to protect the healer as opposed to just hoping the enemy will randomly not choose to attack the healer casting a spell.
3. The ability to mitigate damage should degrade over time. If you got a whole in the middle of your body, I don't care if you cast a heal spell, an elixir, or nanoclue to put it back together, it should still hurt. Breath of Fire 3 had moves that lowered your max HP for the duration of the fight and those kind of drawback should be applied to healing. This also allows you to make bosses that cannot kill your characters fast but still remains a challenge because over time your ability to defend steadily deteriates.
Ideally I'd like to see a game where it isn't always the best thing to do to heal everyone whenever possible. Tactics is about the closest I think of that fits this category, assuming you're not using Calculators or Chemists or Monks.</div>
