Healing items - particularly how powerful they should be, how plentiful they should be, and how much they should cost - are situational in a ton of different ways. I rarely see indie
or professional games get this right.
First, consider buying five 200 HP Potions versus one 1000 HP Hi-Potion. The developer should consider such factors such as:
- Battle difficulty vs. Dungeon difficulty: Will you need that 1000 HP in one shot (rather than spending five turns to heal it) because enemies are that powerful, or is each individual troop a cakewalk, making it feasible to use your potions after the battle for sustain in a long dungeon that can grind you down? Are characters fully healed after battle (making the use of Potions for "sustain" irrelevant)?
- Concept of turns and time: Some RPGs don't use turns at all, which changes everything. In some ABS's (e.g. Dark Cloud), you can just go to the pause menu while a monster is wailing on you on chow down as many restorative items as you want, meaning 5 Potions are every bit as useful as 1 Hi-Potion. In others (e.g. the Tales series), you have to wait a certain amount of "cooldown" time before you can use a second item, or items take time to use.
- Inventory limits: How many of a given item can you hold? Additionally, is there a cap to the total number of items you can hold at a time? (e.g. Super Mario RPG, Azure Dreams, World of Warcraft)
- Character HP curves: The full 1000 heal could be a waste for a character that only has 600 HP. The designer should consider the potential difference in HP between characters due to class or level, and the overall HP level of characters due to how far in the game players might be.
There are a lot of different levers the designer can play with to come up with a good balance, so that both items are potentially useful and the decision between Potions or Hi-Potions is an interesting one. Some of the more obvious ones include:
- Price: The most obvious differentiator. High battle difficulty and strict inventory limits, for example, would mean the Hi-Potion should be more than five times the cost.of the Potion. If these items are both very cheap compared to the amount of money your player has, you have deprived them of an interesting decision.
- Rarity: Perhaps the Hi-Potion isn't available in stores at all, and can only be found while adventuring. Or maybe it's only available after the halfway point in the game, or is only available in limited supply at shops.
- Satiation: If healing items can be used outside of battle, can they be used repeatedly, or is there a limit? (This is popular with "Food"-type healing items, such as in Tales of Symphonia, where you can only eat one meal after each battle.)
- Incomparables: Giving one item or the other a bonus or malus besides the base restoration makes the decision more interesting than "do arithmatic" and would be a useful tool for the designer in games where the 5 regular potions would normally be a cheaper way to get the same effect.
- Adjusting any of the factors above: Smart adjustments to battle difficulty, after-battle healing, character HP curves, or especially inventory limits can take a broken system and make it live again.
Next,
consider buying a Potion (heals 200 HP) versus an Ether (heals 200 MP). So many games get this balance wrong, because the designer needs to consider:
- Cost and power of healing spells: This is the most important one. If your healer can heal 200 HP for 5 MP, the Ether is much more useful outside of battle, and possibly in battle as well. The basic out-of-battle formula is ((Ether power * Healing Spell healing) / (Healing Spell cost * Ether price)) vs. (Potion power / Potion price). The higher number represents the better item.
- Cost and power of offensive spells: Let's say you take an average of 50 damage per turn in battle, and using a 100 MP Fireball shortens the average battle by one turn. Using 200 MP has saved you only half of the HP that a Potion could have restored.
- Characters' Max MP and MP Regen: In some games, you don't really need the Ether at all. And in some games, you restore all of your MP (but not your HP) after each battle, making the use of Ether a solely battle-focused decision.
- Battle difficulty vs. Dungeon difficulty: It shows up here, too, because it determines whether you have the time to use the Ether then a healing spell within a battle while monsters are wailing on you.
In addition to Price, Rarity, Incomparables, Inventory Limits, etc., the designer has a few additional levers to work with:
- Spell use restrictions: The most common one is to forbid spell use outside of battle, meaning you need to use a turn in battle to heal characters. This isn't a very good one, because it's very easy to abuse by waiting to kill the final, weakest monster in a troop until your party is all healed up. Other restrictions, however, such as only being able to heal low-HP allies with magic, could get the job done (but require elegant design so as to not annoy the player).
- Item vs. Spell incomparables: Perhaps most healing spells are more focused on buffs or curing statuses, as opposed to direct healing. Now your MP-restoring items have a slightly different use than your HP-restoring ones.
- No healing spells!: This requires excellent battle balancing skills, but it does make battles much more exciting (especially if Healing items are limited as well), and as a bonus, it also takes away the easiest direct comparison between Potion and Ether, and forces you to think about how much damage you might be able to avoid by singing your enemies with an extra Fireball.
Finally, like you mentioned, Hime, there's also
the question of whether your Potion should heal 200 HP or 20% of your Max HP. The 200 HP is much easier for most players to understand and calculate, so if all other things were equal, it would be the better way to go. However, there are several factors that are important:
- Character HP curves: Gentle HP curves mean that your fixed-HP items can stay useful for a longer time. In one of my games, despite other stats growing, Max HP stays flat at 100 for the entire game! Steep HP curves mean your fixed-HP items will quickly become outdated. Additionally, if Warriors have three times the HP of Mages, then your percentage-healing item is three times as useful when used on them.
- Spell calculations: Do your healing spells restore a number of HP (much more common for spells), or a percentage of the ally's Max HP (rare for spells)? You might want to match it with items, or you might want to intentionally pick the other one for items to create an incomparable.
- Granularity: In a game where the three main types of Potion heal 20 HP, 500 HP, and 9999 HP, especially where Inventory Limits or Satiation are at play, the player will find themselves at some weird, uncomfortable decisions ("what do I use to restore 3600 missing HP?") at certain points throughout the game. This is much less likely when your three options are 20% Max, 50% Max, and 100% Max.
- Game economy: The single most important factor, and perhaps the one that designers most often botch. If the amount of money you earn increases exponentially throughout the game (e.g. you're earning 10 gold from early monsters, 2500 gold from midgame monsters, and 60000 gold from endgame monsters), it's actually very important that your items (and equipment!) do not stay relevant through the entire game. If they do, the player will be able to buy everything they want as well as everything they don't really want, and the whole system becomes very uninteresting. You might as well not have money in the first place. This is one of the strongest arguments against %-based Restorative Items.
I don't think there are too many levers you can play with for this one, so as a designer you really have to nail it when it comes to the above factors (like character HP curves and game economy), and then make a smart decision about flat vs. percentage healing items.
These are just a few of the things a good designer will consider when they create restorative items in their RPG! They're also a few of the things that a poor designer will overlook as they go for the traditional Potion - Hi Potion - Max Potion setup without considering how it will play with the dozens of other mechanics in their game. It's really kind of a trap for newbie RPG designers, who want to make an RPG with all the classic fixin's, and it actually dries the fun out of what might otherwise be much more interesting battles/dungeons.
It's for that reason that unless you can point to a strategic depth that the existence of Items can add to your game (and a reasonable minority of games do accomplish this), it's better to just get rid of consumable items altogether, and pay close attention to battle balance. This will often make for quicker, headier, more thrilling, and ultimately more fun games than the standard Item setup will.
