To butt into this conversation, in my attempt to homebrew a tabletop system, I found a decent solution to damage calculation is to convert 20 joules into 1 point of damage, and have a human sized character's HP average somewhere above 100. When damage is dealt to a character below 100 HP, they gain penalties to their rolls, and if they reach 100 points of damage penalty and their HP is reduced to 0, they are incapacitated. When they reach -1x their max HP, they die. (This is somewhat relevant for context).

Take a 9x19mm bullet for example. If I picked out a very rough average of 500 joules from a ballistic performance chart, that would deal 25 base damage, but that damage scales up for every point of a roll above the base difficulty until it starts dealing multiplied damage at the higher end, on top of armor penetration value. This way you can simultaneously deal enough damage to take off a chunk of a target, but still allow for lethal blows if your dice roll is high enough.

As to the question of a hand grenade, I couldn't find exact measurements, but 1 gram of TNT is about equal to 4000 J, so that would equate to 200 damage in my calculation, but combine that with shrapnel and casualty radius, you'd probably be dead even with a bombsuit if it doesn't absorb enough damage.

So if you're willing to do enough research, you can probably abstract damage values enough to be somewhat simulationist. Obviously, damage points aren't real and you have to fill in the blanks on things that aren't measurable. But what the OP is describing is basically just weird fantasy stuff with characters taking millions of points of damage. That is what I find distasteful in stat inflation.

Converting work into damage? What about piercing weapons that do not need that much energy to penetrate, and not much depth to incapacitate or kill. A knife, dagger, fencing weapons, you name it.

In Dragon Wars, a low magic spell cast by the player will do mare damage than the breath attack of a typical enemy dragon. Also, human enemies, even those that shouldn't be exceptional, still have higher HP than you do.

Or SaGa Frontier, where common enemies, even human enemies, can have more HP than you can possibly have (excluding a certain mage duel that is an exception to the rules, but even then I think the game needs special rules to handle that batttle, including the fact that loss of all HP isn't a defeat (but loss of all LP is)).

I think the lopsided HP scale is responsible here.

Let's consider a similar situation happening in a Dragon Quest game. A confused party member casts Explodet/Kaboom on the party, dealing around 140 damage to the party. This damage is enough to be significant when used against the enemy, but on the party, 140 damage, while significant, isn't instantly game-ending. Low HP characters might be at serious risk (particularly if they're already injured), but the spell is not going to wipe out the entire party. By having a (roughly) symmetrical HP scale, confusion is at least reasonable.

In SaGa Frontier, a confused enemy is basically no threat to the other enemies (unless it has a petrify or death attack), but a confused party member could wipe out the entire party.

By the way, one game that sort of does the reverse is Paladin's Quest, where your HP is significantly higher than the damage you deal and than the HP that normal enemies have. A confused party member isn't going to wipe out your party, for example. I think damage is about the same between party member and enemies in this game, but the HP difference allows normal enemies to be killed reasonably quickly without every single encounter being a fight for the party's lives. (With that said, the game's difficulty gets a bit high mid-game, then drops later on, then suddenly spikes right at the end boss, which is a poorly designed fight for different reasons.)

By the way, I don't consider that dragon in Dragon Wars that can breathe at you for 14 damage to be bad design. The game is very clear that you are not supposed to e fighting this particular creature, and there is a solution that avoids the fight (and is the intended way to solve the game, as the game's ending actually assumes that you find this event and take the peaceful way out, even if the event is technically optional (good luck fighting 10 dragons at once, each of which can do 1-4 damage to your entire party)).

If the game's HP scale were more like, say, Chrono Trigger's (or SaGa Frontier's), I would say the developers would be perfectly justified in making this particular enemy's dragon breath deal over 1,000 damage to the party. After all, Chrono Trigger does that to you, putting you into a fight against an enemy that goes first (before even your fastest character) with an attack that hits your party for over 1,000 damage (assuming you're not on New Game + with end-game armor). The difference is that in Dragon Wars this fight is best avoided entirely, while in Chrono Trigger it's one of those mandatory fights where you're meant to lose, and the game continues after your defeat.

Either way, I'd say the design here is better than either:
* Having a randomly encountered enemy able to do this much damage.
* Having a boss that you're supposed to lose to, but yet doesn't hit that hard, causing the player to waste time and resources on the fight, not realizing that it is a fight the player can't win (because the enemy has too much HP). The first Bahamut fight in Final Fantasy 3 (Famicom) is a good example of a fight that has this issue.

Armor penetration value combined with a damage multiplier if it defeats the armor. If it doesn't defeat the armor, then no damage multiplier. Heavier melee weapons have more base damage but no damage multiplier, or at least not as severely as a bladed weapon. Damage isn't just how hard something hits, but how much trauma it inflicts, but obviously that has to be more abstracted.

For firearms, armor piercing ammunition would also negate armor, while hollow points have a damage multiplier should it defeat armor. Bladed weapons are a mix of these, but since they aren't traveling at extremely high speeds, they would have a very small base damage that's augmented by various other scores, while firearms have a fixed damage that's generally very high. Depending on your stat makeup in appropriate scores, you'd have between 1-20 melee damage plus weapon damage.

This might be matter for another thread or two:

First, mandatory fights in RPG that are intended to be lost.
(The beginning of the Kain saga comes to mind)

Second, how RPG manage defeat, or, what happens after you lose a fight, be it with a secondar enemy or a boss (many games make you reload, but not all)

I definitely prefer more "reasonable" numbers when calculating damage with a hard cap.

Usually a cap of 9,999 damage and rare abilities or situations to dish out 99,999. Having those caps give an internal sense of progression (you can see how much damage you are outputting and can see how much more you can further improve your character to reach the max) and in those ranges, numbers still mean something.

When numbers become outrageous, they just dont mean anything anymore because you have no context. How high up can the numbers go? How much stronger can my characters actually get? If not, what am I doing wrong?

I do like it when games have a soft and hard cap so you get an idea on how to max your character and where to focus stats (the number always being 255 in Final Fantasy for example). Even just getting stats to 255 can be a chore so exponentially higher numbers (511, 1023, 2047, etc) at the same stat progression will be a nightmare.

In regards to damage, although I prefer symmetrical I understand why asymmetrical may be better. Although damage is symmetrical in FFX, HP is asymmetrical with bosses having far more HP so they can be damage sponges for your party to whale on. Its nice to see your hits maxing damage at 9,999 or even 99,999 especially if using multi-hit attacks and if HP is symmetrical, bosses will go down far too easily. I think Chrono Trigger did asymmetrical well in that your party and enemies did damage proportional to HP. Your max damage output is 9,999 and max HP is 999 and boss HP is mostly in the thousands with only the last few bosses breaking 5 digits iirc. Hitting 9,999 is also not guaranteed at all (I think even 3,000 is good with max stats) so battles are still of a decent length but fun. Meanwhile, boss damage is limited to the hundreds so 600 damage is significant and even 50 is big early game. You get relatively proportional damage without numbers going insane while also seeing a sense of progression from your characters only doing single digits of damage to 4 digits showing a strong sense of progression.

Actually, while it's on my mind, stat inflation is one reason I prefer Borderlands 1 over 2. In 1, you can find a really good weapon halfway through the game and use it well into the second playthrough. In 2, good luck keeping decent equipment for a couple of levels, because it is probably obsolete before then.

Bosses are a special case; they're allowed to have more HP even if the game is symmetrical.

SaGa 2 is symmetrical, for example, but you still get bosses with 4 or 5 digit HP, not to mention one normal enemy in the final area having 2,000 HP. (That's aside from that one superboss disguised as a random encounter that has 10,000, but it only appears alone, unless you're playing the remake and catch it in a chain battle.)

Naughty developers use too many noughts.

Curious.

Not sure how you'd overflow unless you use very large numbers or flags. And yes 2's compliment and integers. For a shmup wouldn't you have a max amount of life and that's also the max damage any one unit could give, thus making such large numbers redundant? I'm sure the hit points in say Tyrian could be summed in 256 or less.

Probably that way, been a while, but when it decides it depends on if it's using a custom int library or not. Do consider if you made your own int and it was 32bit whole and 32bit exponent, every N iterations larger you'd just move the value and modify how you handle comparisons, and anything beyond a certain size less (say e4 smaller) would just get ignored with adding/subtraction involved, while multiplication is closer to adding. (a 10bit x 10bit gets you a 20bit number, so multiplying e10 to e10 gets you a e20 number)

All the better when getting a bunch of levels i suppose.

The best median number for stats is the minimum number that exactly conveys the proportions (as ratio of differing scores) the game needs and not greater.

If your game really needs to convey godlike characters with accurate proportionality, then that number would be quite large.

Speaking for myself, unless you want to throw in some mythical creatures like dragons or angels, I get increasingly bored with godlike characters (ex: a level 20 character that can't possibly be injured in any meaningful way by a level 1 character based solely on his natural abilities and can somehow slay godlike creatures by his loneself without any assistance because he is just that awesome) so I tend to prefer when that number is in the lower range.

In pen and paper RPG such as Call of Cthulhu, the asignation of health points is not linear. Instead it increases almost logarithmically beyond human size. This takes into account the effects on actual combat: if a human has, say, 10 ho, a monster the size of the Sphinx monument in Egipt with either miltiple attacks that do severe damage or a practically lethal special one does not need more than 20 hp. The local manifestation of a god might not need more than 100 hp. Players do know that hp increase this way. This keeps numbers meaningful while monsters dangerous, often with total party kill if faced directly.

The point is: with proper game design, high numbers that lose their meaning fast are not necessary. Instead of notating damage exponentially, increase damage and hp logarithmically and balance the game.

Thats only true if you make it easy to hit the damage cap with multiple hits. Multiple hits should hit for a proportion of damage with different builds benefitting different attacks (such as if critical are dependent on chance, more hits are better but also more chances to miss and even criticals only deal 3000 max). If you balance between single hits doing one big hit vs multiple strikes that result in more damage, you can balance and provide utility for both.

The mobile game FFRK actually does this quite well. Some superbosses enter special phases that require an attack that breaks the damage limit of 9999 to knock them out of the attack but multi-hits are useful for building up chains to increase overall damage.

Agreed on the first point. I dont like when damage numbers are shown during cutscenes or cutscene battles though (unless there is a chance to beat the boss like in the Chrono Trigger case). It may be cheap but it shows that this is an unavoidable attack that you a meant to lose.

I misspoke here and was thinking about FF as a series with a focus on the modern versions (7 to 10) when writing the comment. On me for not being clear.
I am for bosses having more HP or the game wont be fun. Its the same with action games, bosses having tons more HP than the player so you need to dodge and slash them hundreds of times while they only need 3 to get you to critical HP. In return, you can heal.

Ultimately, proportion is important and just being able to dish out and post big numbers for the sake of having big numbers loses its luster after a while. Might has well just turn the numbers off and see how your hits affect the life bar if numbers get that big.