I get the feeling this might be a divisive topic. I wanted to see if people include or exclude healing in their games. I don't mean via consumables, I'm referring to spells. If you have a healing-capable party member, are they pure healers (i.e. White Mage) or do they have non-healing spells in addition to their healing capabilities (i.e. Red Mage)?
I generally include healing in my games but I always spend a lot of effort designing it in a way that - while it doesn't feel oppressive - also doesn't allow the player to easily erase mistakes (and thus make battle pointless or boring).
In one game, the cheap "bread and butter"-type healing spells have a fixed number of charges per battle so that the heals have to be used wisely; other available heals are either weak side-bonuses of attack skills, or very expensive "emergency glass"-type healing spells that offer a big heal but drain an even bigger portion of the user's MP pool (and in that game MP-restoring items are very hard to come by).
In another, I use an "Exhaustion" mechanic where after taking damage, the character's Max HP starts to slowly drop by a percentage of the damage taken (winning combat stops any further drop) - only eating consumable items or returning to an Inn can restore your Max HP. So you can heal as much damage with healing spells as you need to, in order to avoid the "acute" threat of getting spiked down to 0HP within a few turns from tough enemies - but the "chronic" threat of having your Max HP whittled away slowly over time makes it risky to just fight everything you see in a dungeon, and also encourages both strategic planning (avoiding damage) and risk-taking within combat (finishing troops off quickly instead of keeping your party topped off with heals) because each can minimize the amount of Exhaustion you take.
I'm trying to understand why someone would want to remove healing from their game while emphasizing healing potions at the same time. It confuses me cuz an HP pot is basically a Healing spell w/o the MP cost, right? I've seen it done the other way too. Like emphasizing Healing spells but de-emphasizing potions/consumables.
So there are a lot of details and exceptions to this, but as a general big-picture answer, the reason this design can be good is because most games offer easy ways to refill MP.
Whether that's coming from frequent MP-refilling Save Points, cheap and common MP-refilling items like Ethers, or just automatic MP restoration after each battle, a lot of games don't force you to get stingy with your MP across a dungeon. I'd even say that's a good thing, because the most fun part of most RPGs' battles is slinging your skills to hit enemies with big numbers and take a bunch of them down at once!
But when you have reliable, powerful heals available that can wipe out anything the opponents do to your party, those heals become the most important way to use your MP, and the characters' Max MP totals don't actually limit the number of times you can use those healing spells in practice because of the easy Refills.
So a player can just sit there and mash "Attack" without even thinking about tactics or pace (often this is actually more time-efficient than browsing menus in a boring combat system), take hits from enemies, and just use the Heal spell to erase all the damage they took whenever an HP bar starts to get low. It's the worst type of combat dynamic and reliable, powerful heals actually encourage that dynamic.
Consumables, on the other hand, are something that you can only "refill" as much as your Gold allows you to. If the only way to recover half your HP is a 1000 Gold potion, rather than a 4 MP spell, or if you can only carry a limited number of potions into a dungeon, then you are going to be much more careful about taking damage - and additionally, the designer can introduce elements that will challenge the players without spiking them to 0 HP in a single turn! This kind of design requires carefully tuning the game's economy (or its availability of consumables), but if done right it allows the player to enjoy slinging skills every battle without cheapening the experience by allowing all damage to be waved away with healing spells.
Obviously you don't want to make the healing potions cost like 5 Gold (unless you are explicitly limiting the number that the party can carry at once, or you're doing something even wackier like limited shop stock), or you wind back right at square one. There's no magic bullet to shortcut good game design and careful balancing. Often, the perfect dynamic is where there's a tradeoff between purchasing better equipment vs. purchasing more consumables.
Rather than thinking of a Potion as "a healing spell without the MP cost", it might be better to think of a healing spell as "a potion without the Gold cost".
