Just one thought I just had: The relative balance of HP, damage, and healing in an RPG can have significant effects on how the game feels.

For the purpose of this topic, any game where the player can avoid all damage through pure skill I am not considering to be an RPG. It is acceptable if damage can be avoided through strategy, for example by becoming immune or disabling the enemies, but I am not counting games where you can simply dodge all attacks. (One consequence of this definition: the Mario and Luigi games fail to be RPGs under this definition.)

Anyway, we can look at the main cases, and how they make an RPG feel:

Low damage, low healing: In this game, often your HP determine how long you can last in a dungeon. Healing can get annoying in games of this type, though if the healing is cheap, it may be a necessary evil. (This is the exact sort of game that would benefit from a "auto-cast healing" menu command, as found in later Dragon Quest games, for example.) Personally, I find this combination to be the least interesting and the one involving the most busywork (at least until an exception to the low healing becomes available). Example: Ultima 3; at high levels, the fastest way to heal is to go into a dungeon and drink from a fountain there.

Low damage, high healing: If healing is cheap, the game can become too easy. If healing is expensive, you have an interesting dynamic here; dungeons become a test of endurance, but you don't have to cast tons of spells to get your health back, and in-battle healing is a viable strategy. Examples: Arcana, Paladin's Quest (excluding the final boss)

High damage, low healing: This sort of balance makes combat quite lethal, and something you may want to avoid or win as quickly as possible. Using spells and other abilities to prevent damage becomes important here. It's interesting to note that many of the games that fit this category have exceptions (Heal in AD&D, MADI in Wizardry, Restoration in Bard's Tale). Personally, I dislike this sort of balance because it makes in-battle healing essentially useless. Examples: AD&D (and CRPGs based off it), Wizardry 1-7, Final Fantasy 1 (pre-GBA), 2, and 3 (original), Might and Magic series.

High damage, high healing: This sort of balance, IMO, leads to the most exciting gameplay. An enemy can take you down to low HP quickly, but you can also heal those HP rather easily. It is in this sort of game that, for example, a spell that fully heals the entire party doesn't seem to be game-breakingly powerful; if you're not careful, a character could be killed in a single round. Healing becomes an integral part of the gameplay in this sort of game. Examples: Etrian Odyssey series, Shin Megami Tensei series (at least Nocturne), Elminage Gothic (once you reach a decent level).

There are a few other factors that affect the gameplay, like how common and powerful resurrection and multi-target healing are. In terms of multi-target healing, a weak but cheap (or free) multi-target heal feels different from a powerful one. (One example of the former is the Heal Staff in the first Final Fantasy; doesn't heal much, but heals the whole party and costs nothing.) Weak but free MT heals create a situation where it's best to try to get enemies to spread out the damage rather than focusing on one character (in other words, they discourage having a single designated tank character) and encourage rotating your party members' positions to spread the damage out.

What are your thoughts on this? Which sort of balance do you prefer?

Are you on drugs?

I feel like Darkest Dungeon made this dynamic work extremely well. To be fair, majority of trash fights are actually low damage/low healing, where damage done by opponents is slightly more than what you can heal so you can't ever feel safe, but you can do alright in most fights.

However, when you encounter a more powerful opponent or even a boss, your health can drop dramatically. Damage prevention is key here naturally, but in addition to that, the game features mechanic in which each friendly character needs to be dealt a final blow after they reach 0 health - in other words, 0 health won't kill them, just bring them in a state where they can be killed. Suddenly, combat becomes high healing/high damage as healing as little as 1 HP allows such character to survive one more full-blown attack. The system is rather exciting and extremely tense, just as majority of Darkest Dungeon really.

All of this is further shuffled around by both all attacks and all heals having a potential to get critical multiplier.

I guess not, just passionate with RPGs.

This actually reminds me of Might and Magic 2, where 0 HP would knock a character out, but any amount of healing would bring the character back, provided the character didn't get hit again. There's a reason Moon Ray (which heals the entire party while damaging the enemies) is such a good spell in that game.

Also, in many SaGa games, a character reduced to 0 HP will lose a life point (LP), but as long as the character still has LP, any healing spell will revive the character. Note that SaGa games don't usually have multi-target heals, or those that exist are not without cost (Romancing SaGa 3's requires using up an item in finite supply, SaGa Frontier's costs the user 1 LP to use).

That's a shame, I could've used some.

Yup yup, multi-character heals become rather powerful in that scenario. Naturally, this is Darkest Dugeon I've been speaking of, so if you don't manage your party's Sanity properly, paranoid or masochistic characters can just rightout refuse healing, because they're assholes. All of these mechanics create a rather intriguing dynamic, which can get quite infuriating at times purely due to randomness involved.

But yeah, generally, being able to revive characters mid-fight is a bit of a staple of jRPG games, in one form or another. Not all do it, but majority certainly does.

Incidentally, the JRPG I am playing right now, Paladin's Quest, does not have any mid-battle revival. However, because damage amounts are so low relative to your HP and healing capabilities, it tends not to be a problem for most of the game.

Of course, then there is the final boss, who can do tons of damage in a single round, enough to lower a character from full HP to 0 if you are unlucky. For an extreme example, in a TAS of the game, the boss did 2240 damage to a character in a single action, and the boss can act several times per round. (Of course, since this was a TAS, this was intentional on the part of the player, but still.) Being able to fully heal your party a total of 18 times during the fight suddenly doesn't feel game-breaking anymore.

Sounds like a game perfect for ragequitting. I actually wouldn't mind playing solely to become annoyed, ragequit and never play it again. Avoidance of negatives > pursuits of positives - concept.

As for the relative balance, I enjoy high damage / high healing but excessive healing is annoying especially if both the player and the opponent can do it. I can't stand enemies with healing abilities in general though, it feels like I'm trapped in an endless scenario of trying to find one small loophole that in time manage to bring down some health that won't be recovered immediately. First enemy that comes to mind is a middle boss in Witcher 3 Blood & Wine. After several tries, I gave up and looked up a walkthrough and lowered the difficulty.

Personally, these days the relative damage / healing scenario is not as important as the relative power difference changing during progress. To keep the challenge of a game throughout, you need to apply a sort of a win and lose scenario that is surprisingly similar to an ideal* economy that is based upon low but consistent ups and downs like a sinus curve - you never get too powerful (but powerful enough it feels good) but you also don't lose too often or get stuck often enough that it becomes frustrating or tedious (but enough that it counter-acts the good feeling of occasional progress). I think far too many games are ridiculously easy in the beginning and the end, it's only the middle that strikes a decent balance.

Sadly, the older and the more games I play the narrow this thin line becomes and I suspect I'll be closing in on such a demand on this particular aspect of gaming that I'll end up skipping even 90% of the games I like solely because I can't reach an ideal challenge curve.

*Ideal as far as we know today I guess.

The "If" is the operative word in the sentence "If you don't manage your sanity properly". Getting members of your party afflicted is a type of failure state. You can avoid these things. Can't avoid crits tho.

Sorry I didn't quite get point (more to do that I didn't read the first message thoroughly), but I'll just mention that I don't really feel comfortable in a RPG unless I find some item which autoheals you all the time.

I think that was a bit for problem in e.g. Diablo 1-2 if I recall right, I felt that I always had to remember to keep enough health (and/or mana) potions with me, just so that I never run out of health (nor mana) in the deepest dungeons. Nox, on the other hand, has some items (cloaks etc.) that heal you slowly, I kept many of them with me since armor and weapons had a bad habit of breaking down fast in that game.

I really liked it, was it in Baldur's Gate games, or Icewind Dale, when I was able to find some kind of rings or something for my party members that would keep healing them slowly. Then i knew I was all set and I could relax.

It'd like to point out that the SteamSpy's median for gameplay time is around 12 hours.

Anyway, after 2 hours of playtime, you don't even begin to penetrate the surface. First of all, there being no reward for taking risks is just plain untrue - not only has the Antiquarian class been introduced, whose role is basically nerfing your entire party, but increasing rewards for completing a dungeon, the entire light mechanic is designed in such a way to facilitate player-driven difficulty, making the game far more difficult with decreasing light, but also handing out a lot more loot for it. Not to mention the longer dungeons with the option of camping, each additional room you visit that you didn't need visiting can contain things that'll massively boost your character or help you build up your hamlet, but they can also hurt you so badly you have to end the expedition or, even worse, just lose all characters.

As for there only being one optimal playstyle, that's quite false as well - not only do class synergies come into play (and become necessary later on) and optimal party construction is an essential factor with insane amount of combinations of synergies which are just waiting to be discovered, each type of dungeon contains monsters with different strengths/weaknesses that you need to learn to exploit. And no, there's not only one way of exploiting them. And don't even get me started on bosses who, while repeated, happen to be some of the best designed boss encounters I've ever seen. This -> you keep a core team of six to eight <- just stops working like 4 hours in, and the reason you get the freedom at the start is so that you get time to learn at least some of the individual classes before the game gets insane with its difficulty.

I get that you dislike the game, and that's quite fine, we can't all like everything - and Darkest Dungeon certainly has issues, like extremely punishing difficulty and need for player to grind quite a bit before finishing the game. But lack of variability or any pretense that you've mastered the game after 2 hours? Hell no.

I prefer that too but I want it to be an item that is hard to find, not some auto-stuff the game gave me. For example, I like resource management but then if I'm careful enough the resources are almost limitless as long as I search for them, inherent limits like 250 potions in one playthrough is not my kind of game. I remember in a patch they added a limit to the amount of potions you could carry in Dark Messiah.

Way to not understand a single thing I typed, fenix. You're usually more attentive than that.