If I (respectively: my enemies) have several million HPs, so we can take several "3 million damage" hits before we die - what does it matter?
I mean, where's the difference to, say, both of us having 134 HPs instead, and we're dealing out 30 damage per blow?
Wouldn't it essentially be the same? I think it's ridiculous. See above as to the why.
But, of course - at the end of the day, it's up to the developers, what they want to use for their game.
And if they want to go with ridiculously high stat numbers? - All the power to them, for as much as I care. Why shouldn't it be possible to deal much more damage than you have HPs?
Depends on the weapon used, no?
And if the enemy survives that "magnitudes more damaging" blow, you're probably glad, that you can deal out that much damage, right?

What ToxicTom said, large numbers are much harder to read. And calculate.
If I have 134 HP and took 30 damage, I can quickly see that I can survive three more such hits.
If I have 7045050 HP and took 1577250 damage, brain has a much harder time seeing that it's the exact same thing. (And those are still pretty round numbers.)

Sure. That's a given. That's also why I said, such large numbers are ridiculous.

Especially if - game-mechanics wise - the numbers do exactly the same - whether they are huge or small.

But apart from playability (or rather: readability and/or calculability) reasons...?

I'll die the same, whether I have 134 HPs and get hit five times with 30 damage, or whether I have 13.450.350 HPs and get hit five times with 3.000.000 damage - dead is dead.

And it's just as quick.
Yeah, only that the rat in this particular starter dungeon probably has 15.000.000 HPs. ;)

Here's a question: How much damage does a bee sting deal, and how many bee stings does one need to suffer before they hit 0 HP?

This is against bare flesh. No armor, no vehicles, no clothes, no mecha suits.

In some incremental games, the numbers get so big that they go into scientific notation (and there are a few that go even *further* than that), at which point one eventually just looks at the exponent and not the mantissa. The difference between 800 digits and 801 digits of something might be significant numerically, but at this point it feels rather small.

Worth noting that, with numbers these huge, exponential growth sometimes ends up feeling rather slow.

Disgaea took the approach of abbreviating some of the numbers. In the Japanese version, once damage numbers get high enough, the last 4 digits are replaced with the 万 character, and in other versions, the last 3 digits are replaced with "K". Using scientific notation could be another valid choice, as while it might not be easy to tell whether a number has 8 or 9 digits, one can easily look at numbers like 3e8 and 2e9, notice that 2e9 has the higher exponent, and clearly notice the difference.

Then again, in order to function, an RPG needs to have finer balance than an incremental game, which tends to limit how high the numbers can go, or else the game turns into a situation where attacks either OHKO or fail to do damage, and which happens is not dependent on RNG. Actually, I've been playing incremental games like Swarm Simulator (goes past 1e1000), The Plague Tree (I've reached 10^10^28, displayed as 1e1e28), and The Prestige Tree (not that far, but already way past 1e1000).

It just gets ridiculous when the scale is so lopsided. In Dragon Wars, for example, there's a combination of two items (a weapon and a quiver) that allows a character to regularly deal 60+ damage, as well as a weapon that deals 1d100 damage, in a game where you're likely to reach the end with less than 20 health, and strong enemies can routinely survive those amounts of damage, yet an enemy breathing for 14 damage to the party could be a party wipe. (Note that the particular enemy that has a breath attack that powerful is an enemy you are meant not to be able to kill.)

Or SaGa Frontier 1, where your characters are limited to 3 digit HP, yet you're routinely dealing 4 digit damage. Furthermore, it happens that SF1 has confusion and charm effects, and when a party member is confused/charmed, you can get situations like this:
* Charmed party member uses DSC on another, doing over 10,000 damage, which is rather excessive on a character with less than 1,000 HP.
* Confused party member using an attack like MegaWindBlast or MillionDollars on the party, hitting everyone for 4 digit damage; that's an instant party wipe.
(I note that SF1 came out in the period where Square didn't really care about game balance (see Knights of the Round and Orlandu for other well-known examples), but is probably the only one of those games where that balance can work against you in a dramatic fashion. Fortunately, you can save and quick-save anywhere outside of combat, so the party wipe isn't particularly punishing.)


But what if you have 7.0450e6 HP and took 1.5772e6 damage? Is that still an issue, or is that manageable? (Worth noting that I did have to count the digits when writing this.)

Or, what if you have 7,056,050 HP and took 1,577,250 damage? Is that any easier?

Notation really does matter here when the numbers get really large. There's a reason that a symbol like a comma is used to group digits in large numbers, and a good reason that scientific notation exists, and these are numbers that aren't too big to come up in scientific fields (particularly astronomy).

I'd argue that, when numbers get huge, order of magnitude differences become much more common, and that does have an impact on the gameplay.
Perhaps the answer is this:
* Damage: So low, in comparison with HP, that it rounds to 0.
* How many stings to die: Infinite, because the target's HP doesn't change when taking damage, as the amount of damage is smaller than the difference between floats for the target's HP.

Yes, floating point numbers (which many incremental games use, especially those written in JavaScript) have their quirks, and this is possible when numbers get big. (Somewhere around 2^53 or 2^54, x = x + 1 becomes true, even though that's mathematically impossible.)

Thanks for convincing me to never, ever design a game like this.

Slightly, but as I said those are still pretty round numbers, if the notation makes it clear that it's the same number of digits (which may be an issue if displayed like I wrote it), I can ballpark it to 15 out of 70 and get the rough idea. But it's still one more step, and an approximation, while in the low numbers scenario it's simple, brain's already wired for dealing with those quite intuitively, which is not the case with such large numbers. And when damage is often displayed for just a moment, even in plenty of turn-based games, proper game design would require it to be a number that can be grasped instantly.

I tend to prefer games where the inflation is less extreme. World of Warcraft is one of the extreme examples of "OMG the numbers get so big and so quickly".

I want "lower level" and "higher level" characters to definitely feel different and stronger, but not the way some games do it where they effectively just add a 0 to everything every 10 levels.

That's my initial thoughts. But stats grow at a linear rate of 1/2 per level. So at 3rd level your stats have doubled, but at higher levels comparable to other enemies only your MP really feels like it has more of, to the degree you won't run out.

Though the problem comes on how the system is built, and how it's suppose to work.

Diablo 2 for example you can do massive amounts of damage... to about 300k, being that a lower portion of the numbers is used for fixed point fractions, in which case you can say you take 30 poison over 5 seconds so it can deal that. On the other hand your health is also inflated to the same degree, but stripped quickly of the floating point number.

When i tinkered with a RPG maker game, it had some presets for leveling up, you had linear, and then quadratic. Quadradic was interesting since the stats would skyrocket, that's something that could only happen on larger than 16 bit machines, while 16 or less i think back to Phantasy Star 4, where i don't recall doing more than several thousand at any time.

So how would you get such large numbers. Lots of games calculating damage comes down to character stat + weapon stat + fixed effects x multiplier. The multiplier could be a 25% extra damage because it's a lightning sword, or that the enemy is weak to lightning, etc. With 16 bit machines you'd have a max of 65535 you could get to at any time, but in a lot of old-school RPG games you're unlikely to get anywhere near that. 8k of damage is 13/16 bits and assuming a weapon can double or triple that you still only get about 14bits, not wanting to get too high even if you hit max level in order to not have rollover.

As for more modern systems, 32bits can get 4.2 Billion as a max number, and 64bit can get 18... errr... what's the number... ahh, okay. 3.6 Vigintillion.... it's a big number. And even if that wasn't enough with BigInt and other libraries you can have them as large as you want (which you couldn't do on old consoles due to speed/ram limitations).

Or keep it in some type of scaling so at your level and normalize everything from say 1-10,000. Under the hood it may be much larger numbers, but doing what you think is 8000 and them doing say 250, the difference is enough to say who is superior.

If you are on similar levels then yes it would be about the same. But then you don't have the sense of 'growth' that somehow gets inflated which is the real crux.

Mhmm. Reminded of Hero Clicker, i turned off the human abbreviations after a while and just saw the numbers as 'does 65e105 damage, pay 25e2005 coins to upgrade' and the e value is really what was important. Typically if it was say 1% or less of my coins (or e3 less than my gold) i'd buy it.

But i haven't touched that game in a while.

I believe it was the sequel to Orconomics, Son of a Liche, where they in-world figured out the precise value of 1 HP, and weapon shops advertised the precise, tested, range of the new weapons they invented.

These novels are extreme fantasy satire. Like the main plot of the one is fractional share speculative dungeon crawling expedition financing. Or the general who does out of his way to remain middle management so he doesn't get noticed by the abusive evil overlord. That kind of stuff. This thread made me flash back to one of my early CS courses where, one of the projects was to manually reimplement much of Java's BigInteger class.

The situation changes when you factor in equipment, particularly legendary high rank equipment that's been leveled up in the item world. Also, there's reincarnation (a prestige system where you reset a character's level to 1, but get better stat gains), and other mechanics that show up later games like Disgaea D2's "growth correction" (stat bonus that scales with the *square* of the number of times you've reincarnated) and the land of carnage growth (there's a special mode you can eventually set that makes enemies stronger, but you now get a portion of the stats that enemies kill, as a separately capped bonus), and then there's a mode that increases the caps.

Outside of the Disgaea, the only games where I've seen this complex a mechanic for boosting stats are shmups (some get really high scores, with ways to get huge multipliers), and of course incremental games (where, as I've mentioned, numbers can get high to the point of absurdity, to the point where special code had to be written to handle them).
Actually, 16-bit (and even 8-bit) computers can handle bigger numbers. While machine instructions might only work on a single machine word at a time, there's nothing preventing the programmer from writing code to handle bigger numbers. You see this, for example, with experience points and money in many games, or in cases like SimCity's population and money (both of which can easily exceed 65,535). Even Phantasy Star 4 has XP and money that can exceed 65,536. I happen to know that SaGa 3 on the Game Boy uses an unsigned 24-bit integer for money, and I know that because of an underflow bug (the programmer forgot to make sure that an enemy can't steal more money from you than you have).

In some games, of course, it is quite possible to get an overflow. In Final Fantasy 6 it can happen if a level 99 character with 140 magic power casts Ultima. In Final Fantasy 5 it may be easier to do, because there's plenty of ways to boost your damage:
* 2-handed (from Knight) doubles weapon damage
* Spellblade -ga or Holy will make your attacks instant kill enemies weak against the element, but if the enemy has the "Heavy" property (like most (not all!) bosses), you instead deal 4x normal damage.
* There's ways to get temporary boosts to level and strength, so you don't actually need to be at or near max level for this.
* There's also the combination of Power Drinks (bugged to not work in most situations) and Goblin Punch (not affected by Power Drink bug, does 8x damage if the attacker and target are the same level).

Note that, in either case, damage is capped at 9999, but the game still calculates the damage before applying the cap, and integer overflow can occur then, resulting in less damage than expected.

Final Fantasy 6 also has a division by zero error, if a confused Sabin casts Chakra (Mantra) on a single enemy it will heal Sabin's HP / 0 damage, which becomes 65535, and is then capped to 9999.

Actually, I wrote a little shmup where 64-bits actually aren't enough, and it's possible for the score to overflow a 64-bit integer.

(Strange justification; computer integers aren't actually approximations of the integers, but are rather an approximation of the 2-adic numbers. For example, in the 2-adic numbers, and in signed twos complement integer representation, 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ... converges to -1.)

25e2005 (which actually wouldn't be displayed that way, but would most likely appear as 2.5e2006) is tiny compared to the e1e28 that I've seen (notice the game doesn't display the mantissa?), or the fabled F1.879e308 (that's 10 to the 10th power 1.879e308 times, or 10 ^^ 1.879e308, and yes that's Knuth's up arrow notation here).

Also, e3 less is .1%, not 1%.

I stand by my statement: the amount of damage dealt depends on the weapon used, and if your enemies can stand that amount of damage several times over, you should be glad that you can deal it out to them.

Question: what amount of HPs would you assign to me (or any other real human being)? What damage would you assign to a real life hand grenade?

Tell you what: the numbers don't matter, because if I'd pull the safety pin from a hand grenade and then hold that grenade until it explodes - I'll be dead (assuming, I'm not wearing by a "bomb suit", etc).

So - we are safe to assume, that the damage dealt by a hand grenade, is bigger than my HPs.

Now, let's further assume I am armed with several hand grenades, and stand against an opponent who is wearing a "bomb suit", (aka: EOD suit) . Can I kill him with my hand grenades? Should be doable, though probaly not with the first throw.
I think that's a situation, comparable to your example of having 20 HPs but dealing out 60+ damage.
That is a "realistic" scenario. Well, you know what I mean...as realistic as it gets in this context.
Honestly? Sounds more like bad design to me, and hasn't necessarily to do with the numbers used.
If a game that has such powerful spells, doesn't provide anything to the player to shield against them (or against getting "charmed/confused" so easily in the first place), then the game sucks.
And then again: if I have 1000 HPs - it doesn't matter anymore whether I get wiped out with a 10.000 damage strike, or a 1.200 damage strike.
Dead is dead.
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Btw: "In order to get DSC a character must have the following:
-Suplex,
-BabelCrumble,
-GiantSwing and
-Sliding
Then all 4 of said moves must be equipped in characters move slots."

Sounds to me like you could avoid having this attack getting used against your own group, by simply emptying one of these four slots.
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Back to topic: as I said before: I think such huge numbers are ridiculous, and I definitely prefer the use of lower numbers in my games.
But in the end it really doesn't matter.