The enemy's attack hit, dealing 3 million damage to you. Your action?

In other words, the enemy just did 3 *million* damage to you, and you survived. (Or we could invert this, with your attacks routinely dealing millions of damage to enemies, but the enemies still take a few hits to kill.)

What do you think of games that have such high numbers for stats? Do you think it's a good thing, or do you prefer it when games keep numbers small?

Related question: What about when the scale of stats is asymmetrical? There are some RPGs I've played (Dragon Wars and SaGa Frontier) where it's possible to deal an order of magnitude more damage than you have HP to a normal enemy, in a typical situation, without killing the enemy. Do you think that's a good idea, or would you prefer the sat scale to be symmetrical?

At best it can be funny when it's part of some broken game exploit (see Morrowind or basically any Elder Scrolls).

Generally, I'm not a fan if it's that extreme, I'm ok with some stat inflation (my characters doing ~11 damage at the start of the game, able to do like ~100 at the end) but at some point it sort of takes me out of it because I'm thinking of these numbers as an abstract, and the idea that a character can take 10,000 x more damage than a single punch or whatever gets silly.

Reasonable numbers are much better.

The most extreme example I've ever seen is Diablo 3. You are hitting for trillions of damage and enemies have quadrillions of HP. It's extreme to the point of hilarity and the numbers basically lost their meaning, when you can't be sure how hard you hit an enemy because you can't be sure whether the amount of numbers in a row shown for like 0.5 seconds means it's a billion or a trillion. Compare it to Diablo 2, where you were doing thousands of damage at most. And had having 2K HP was considered a lot.

It's annoying. Find myself thinking that the limitations of 8-bit kept numbers reasonable way back.
May have some use in ARPGs, where the gameplay is driven by the "hunger" for ever greater... everything. But otherwise, smells of bad game design to me, and the ratio between the numbers at the start of the game and those at the end shouldn't be more than in the order of dozens (100 vs. 5000 is already huge, way I see it), and preferably single-digit at least for the characters' main skills (what's wrong with 50 vs. 250? or 30 vs. 100?). Would want greater breadth of skills, opening more options, than just piling on numbers to insane levels.

It just adds too many unneeded zeros.

Idle clickers understood this appeal. Numbers. People want a sense of progression. The gameplay cannot change much, but... thirty years ago, you simply had a long game where the enjoyable activity (beating up the beatable up, shooting up the shootable up) simply lasted and was its own reward. Now we have to have to have to grow a capital of sorts, to invest and produce, or else we're wasting time instead of, uh, spending time. So, instead of keeping it at clicking three times to kill the monster (3x1 dmg to 3 hp), which would be boring, we get to eventually : click three times to kill the monster (3x50000 dmg to 150000 hp). Which is new and fresh and epic and super satisfying. What a journey. What a progress. What a rich experience.

So of course, the more the better. Quantity is power. There's the thrill of the distance gone : remember when I was dishing out 1 dmg ? I grew up to be a god relatively to my former self, even if so did absolutely everything else in my environment, which, well, makes it relativistically meaningless. But also, intertextuality : remember that other game where I was dishing out 50000 dmg ? in that one I'm at 50000000 dmg. I'm exploring brand new horizons. This game so much more epic.

Let's be honest, the "intertextuality" aspect is not that new : Pinball and coin-up players were laughing about high score inflations long before the personal computer boom. But players complaining if they don't get "a better weapon" (along with, defeating its point, bazooka-withstanding baddiies) are a relatively recent development in videogaming.

They're not necessarily zeros.

In fact, unless the game uses a decimal floating point system for its numbers, they're probably not going to be zeros; binary floating point numbers, if sufficiently large and written out in decimal, always end with a 2, 4, 8, or 6, and it's not too had to prove that. (For an example of a game that uses this, see Swarm Simulator.)

Then again, incremental games are the only games I've ever seen where the numbers go high enough for double floating point precision to be an issue (and not all of them do). An RPG would not be balanced at this point, since it would boil down to the following, when A attacks B:
* Is B's evasion higher than A's accuracy? Then then attack misses. (The d20 system has that issue even at more reasonable levels, particularly if you imagine what would happen if you removed the natural 1 and 20 rules. at which point you might just skip the dice rolls entirely in most cases (ignoring criticals).)
* Is B's defense higher than A's attack? Then the attack does zero damage.
* Is B's HP higher than A's attack? Then the attack does so little damage it might as well be zero.
* Othewise, B is now dead. There is no in-between. (Well, technically there *is* an in-between, but it's so small that the probability of it coming up is so low that it might as well be zero.) I've been playing The Plague Tree lately, and some of the numbers have become so big that it's rather comical. For example, the number of cases has become so high that the game no longer bothers to show the mantissa (game uses scientific notation for large numbers, of course), and even so high that the *exponent* is displayed in scientific notation. I looked up some information about the engine the game uses (The Modding Tree), and it apparently can handle numbers up to 10^^1.80e308. (That's Knuth's up arrow notation here; bet you never though that would come up when talking about a videogame? That number is 10 raised to the tenth 1.80e308 times, and, I believe, is far bigger than a Python integer could get before the computer runs out of memory.)

(Note that not every incremental game gets that high. Candy Box 2, for example, doesn't get numbers high enough for scientific notation to be necessary. Also, note that "idle clicker" and "incremental game", as far as I can tell, are synonyms.) Try playing something like Swarm Simulator. Or, better yet, The Plague Tree. (Possibly other games based on The Modding Tree?) When it comes to idle clickers, for many of them getting the number up is its own reward.

(Also, seeing how the numbers behave for someone like me can be fun.)

Ah, you've been playing Disgaea, I see.

Realistically, I'd prefer a hard cap of say, 99999.

What is the meaning of 1 health pint then? What is the minimum full health that an entity is going to have in the game? Start there. That brings memories of Dragonball.

I think the scale should make sense.... If you have an attack that brings the player characters to the end of the world, for instance (Safer Sephiroth, Super Nova) and deals 8000 damage, your spinny flashy sword attack shouldn't deal 16x the amount of damage as that attack.

Damage and HP scaling has to be within reason. It doesn't make sense to me for a mechanical robot monster to have fewer HP than a living mushroom, just because one is at the beginning of the game and one is encountered later. This has always been a gripe of mine with JRPGs and WRPGs alike.

It doesn't bother me as much, especially if the rest of the game isn't trying to look or be "realistic".

But larger number are way harder to read, The difference between 8 and 9 digits of damage is huge, but is not easily seen visually. Who has time to count them in the heat of battle with numbers floating all about.

huge numbers in videogames i find them stupid.
sure that 5% on a billion hit means you get a lot of bonus or do you?.

i think numbers should stop at 100K then it still all makes sense in meaningful way

Here is a crazy idea, stolen from some pen and paper RPG:

Have less HP, but make them meaninful. Call them status (inunjured or healthy, bruised, etc until inconscious, comatose, etc). Assign them negative effects. There can be positive effects as well depending on the character. There can be impacts positive and negative on the morale of the rest of the party and the opponents. Have less strikes impacting, but when they impact, it hurts. Maybe a few can be lost but soon after you get negatives and maybe other effects (like easier to hit or whatever).

You can combine that with armor, magic/sciencefictional "force shields" to be lost with no effect or maybe with the effect of loing effectivity in locations if you are using locations, or overall. Etc

And again I think of Betrayal at Krondor. Damage is first done to stamina (which is also used for spells), health is affected after that's depleted, but from then on all attributes drop according to the lost HP.