Damage/Health numbers

Do you think there is a perfect sweetspot for stuff like health and damage values in RPGs or really any type of game where it is relevant? How high can they go before there is a serious problem with power-creep and bloat?

I don't feel any satisfaction unless the numbers that pop-up aren't at least in the 100k area.

I'm quite okay with the 1-9999 scale, but things like hack and slashes that go until legendary/NG++ do require something that goes to the hundred thousands. That depends on whether damage comes most from gear stats or from more strategic oriented stuff that aims to vary from battle to battle. The former requires more rapid damage progression to feel satisfying.

I have the opposite feeling. I miss when damage numbers would increment slowly and start off at single-digits. Once numbers get anywhere close to a hundred, seeing the damage get higher gets boring and loses any perceived plausibility. The damage no longer seems perceivable and the only time damage numbers become exciting again is if they suddenly jump higher from where they were at before.

It depends what game it is. As long as I'm doing high amounts of damage for said level, it's all groovy.
Numbers stop mattering for me once it needs to start showing "k"'s to represent thousands.
Why even have the damage go that high?
Only MMO's suffer from that type of bullshittery.

I wish more games just tried to be simulationist with their health.
I think a good system would be one that tracked how much blood you've lost, and what parts of your body (if any) are wounded or crippled.
If you lose too much blood, you die. If your head or torso are crippled, you die. If your limbs become crippled, you can't perform certain actions as well (or at all).
It's detailed enough that you can still think about the bodily in the same intuitive way you would in real life, but abstracted just enough that it's difficult or complex to think about in the heat of the moment.
/autism

fug
Should be "not difficult or complex".

In Boringlands, it's entirely possible to do tens of billions of damage in a single attack. Numbers should be kept low, if only to be more distant from Pansy Bitchfraud.

It would be fantastic to see limb damage being represented more as a meaningful wound in games taking a realism angle. Something I loved about the original red orchestra was how getting shot in the arm would actually make you combat ineffective most of the time and cause you to outright drop your weapon, same with getting shot in the leg would reduce movement to a prone crawl.


Never played the second one but I've heard that about it a few times. Borderlands 2 is actually the most extreme example I can think of of damage and health values being absolutely horribly inflated. Even worse given that the game wasn't some MMO with several years of content under its belt for the numbers to get fat on.

The numbers don't matter as much to me as getting to see the enemy's health bar get chunked.
It's why I hate shit like WoW and Borderlands, since you can do so much damage through so many hits it makes the screen look like a spreadsheet, yet the health bar only goes down 10-20%

The thing I never liked about number porn in RPGs is that they never go all the way with it. Why not let me do so much damage that the number is rendered in scientific notation and then the game crashes?

God damn you make me angry you little mysogynist. I can just see you now, sniggering at having posted ANOTHER RACIST thread. Flicking back and forth between threads eagerly waiting for replies which are the only form of social interraction in your life. You've probably spent every night of 2017 this way, stuffing cheap processed food into your mouth as you FUCK MY FUCKING FORUMS with your vapid horseshit. The closest thing you have to friends are the ants living on the crumbs inside your keyboard, at some point we could have counted your mother but she probably doesn't go near the room now, even reaching for the doorhandle reducing her to a sobbing wreck. I can picture you reading this and thinking of an epic zinger to reply with, as you idly swing one of your poosocks around your head. The grin on your face revealing your yellow teeth accented with hints of green from copious consumption of Mountain Dew, the ends of your fat sausage fingers stained orange from Dorito consumption. To call you subhuman would be degrading to subhumans, to call you scum inadequate since that's the only thing you produce. You are the lowest possible form of life, you are to single celled organisms as an abortion is to a person. I'd tell you to kill yourself but you're so fucking filthy your corpse would probably re-animate and continue as usual. An eternity of being flayed alive is not ample punishment for the severity of the stain you have left on this world, having to touch your rancid hide for even a semptosecond would be a greater punishment than that to whatever unfortunate entity had to carry out the act. Even once the stars have burned out, and the universe is an endless black void dotted with dead celestial bodies, it will be a worse place because you existed. For the love of god and all things holy, leave, and never come back.

It's fine in turn based games, but I cringe if I see them pop out in real time action games like Dead Island. I get that most objects have values associated with them, but it feels like there's a lot of bullet sponge enemies.

Lifeweb handled it well.

I prefer small numbers RPGs, where damage figures stay around a few hundred, HP maybe reaching 1000 at the highest.

woah

I don't care as long as crits are written in
LARGE RED NUMBERS

Never heard of it. Care to elaborate?

If a game you like has a godmode cheat, the least you can do is give it a spin

i prefer when when the numbers are like paper mario/TTYD, or when numbers are like in D&D
numbers like vanilla WoW are fine too; TBC not as much

Disgaea do that as well

How are you not revered with Hydraxian Waterlords?

This server had a ragnaros and a majordomo in the room so you could kill 2 rangaroszs

Shooter: Most enemies should die from one hit by either shotgun or head shot.
RPG: Enough to make Enemy life bar go down in quite fast pace. Something like 4-6 hits to kill weak mob.
aRPG: Path of Exile.
This is how I feel. It never was about numbers but always about tempo of the game. I will even go as far to say you cannot make game too fast as long as there is still challenge in it.

rimworld has possibly the best implementation of this and i want it in every non-arcadestyle game.

the back end of how all the health stats interact is more complex than HP>1 perfect function, HP=0 ded, but things work in a sensible fashion so you don't have to think about it, and it lends a fair bit of depth and *fun*.

Games should not have battle numbers. Health bars are good enough. If you want numbers look at the logs.