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.
Simple-ish. At least, if you're asking me.
1. MP Healing is often 3-6x more effective and efficient than Consumables. This renders game balance completely out-of-whack and "very easy". I've spoken at length about this in about a dozen topics.
The short-hand of that is:
If you have a 50 GP Potion that restores 120 HP, but have an MP Pool of 80 and can get 4 Heals out of it of 50 HP a pop, then your entire MP bar is worth 200 HP. If you double the cost of an MP restoring consumable to 100 HP, then it looks something like this:
50 GP Consumable for 120 HP (2.4 HP per GP spent).
100 GP Consumable for 200 HP ( 2 HP per GP spent).
This, of course, doesn't take into account that keeping both HP and MP consumables on hand at the same time is very inefficient with your money and/or inventory space (if inventory space is restricted, anyway). It also doesn't take into account that the act of simply gaining a level gives you more MP to heal up with, which only makes healing even MORE efficient in terms of money.
Now, just to get to THIS level of "similarity", I had to cut the effective healing of the spell by about 2/3rds AS WELL AS double the cost of the consumable.
That is how efficient MP Healing is.
This also doesn't take into account that most players won't even be healing inside of combat, so the lower number isn't even an issue.
Nor does it take into account the fact that you may not be missing 120 HP, but maybe something closer to 50, so healing with Magic is just better since you're not wasting Potential Healing and a ton of money. Say, for example, you have to heal all four party members after combat, but none of them are even missing 100 HP. You can spend 4 of those 50 GP consumables... or 1 of those 100 GP consumables to do it.
MP Healing is far too efficient and must be nerfed into the ground to even make consumables viable.
2. MP Healing tends to render one of your party members absolutely useless for anything EXCEPT healing. Nobody is going to spend a turn with their healer doing damage if they're too weak. They're also not going to spend a turn with their healer, healing up, if they output a ton of damage. There's not really a "middle ground" with that either. If they're valuable enough to be able to fight with instead of healing... damage output is preferable as it cuts down the number of turns in combat and minimizes HP loss. If they're not valuable in a fight at all, they eat up a slot in your party to just heal you up every single turn... or every few turns... and they're largely useless otherwise.
3. Being able to heal frequently without cost or preparation tends to render most games as "very easy". Once I get an easy way to heal up, the game never again presents a challenge to me. FFX was rendered pretty much "easy mode" with Yuna's healing until I hit "Sin" who hit his overdrive and killed me instantly with no way to heal. Yunalesca was kind of a grind, so was Seymour before her, but I had enough MP Healing reserves to essentially outlast both bosses without problem. Yeah, lots of players complained about how hard Yunalesca was. She's easy when you realize, "hey, heal up every single turn and pour on the damage to win". Same thing I do in basically every RPG I've ever played.
4. Buying consumables is an effective gold-sink in the game. I've never ended an RPG with anything less than 500,000 GP and nothing to spend it on. If the player can only heal through Consumables, they will spend the cash to heal up. Likewise, they will get more effective and efficient in combat in order to not spend so many of their heals. It promotes player skill. Or, at least, it promotes player skill as long as your combat system doesn't rely entirely on stats and it isn't "mash attack until you win" type combat.
5. Promotes players being prepared. If a player knows a dungeon is coming up, they will stockpile consumables rather than rely on random chests to get them or their massive MP pools to cover for them. It also means you don't have to include so many "HP/MP fully restored!" points in the game. Those points only exist because the devs realize that players are only healing MP and AREN'T stockpiling consumables to use. They are an admission of bad game design in most instances. You can actually make a dungeon trek more challenging if you expect the player to be prepared. In fact, you will probably have to.
6. A consumable is a "strategic option" in combat. Who do you use this turn to heal someone else? Which skills are necessary to kill the monsters? Who could you afford to have skip a turn in order to heal up someone? What if you have to heal multiple characters, which ones are the priority for being able to attack while the rest need to heal up? Who do you sacrifice a turn for in order to revive someone from death? Who should spend their turn to get rid of Poison on your character? The player must decide how to spend every action and which characters will spend those actions. Each choice, effectively, matters.
7. Makes treasure with Consumables more valuable. If you get something you normally spend a lot of money to stockpile, getting some free ones will be valuable and useful rather than, "Oh, I was hoping for some new armor or a weapon or something". It also makes chests with money more valuable too. It also has a fun knock-on effect of making Inns exceptionally valuable. If your Inn will heal to full HP/MP for cheaper than using consumables, the player will prefer to use it instead. But, if they're far away from an Inn and don't have that option, they have to heal up with Consumables. Finding an Inn or leveling up near an Inn become exceptionally valuable things.
8. You can do interesting things with your consumables. In RPG Maker, you can actually increase efficacy of consumables through states or equipment if you want to. Which means, you could stretch out weaker and cheaper healing items far longer than you would using MP if you wanted (the only way to do this with MP Healing is through reducing MP cost, or installing a plugin that lets you use a formula for healing).
---
Anyway, yeah, I avoid MP healing pretty much constantly. For all of those reasons listed above. Also, for a few reasons I didn't list which are specific to the kinds of games I design.