Healers that can only heal and are fragile little things. Why the convention that healers should have dreadful defence and lousy HP stat?
There are very specific balancing and functionality reasons for this.
Usually, the healer is there to facilitate the survival of your party I.E major damage dealers.
If the healer is essentially capable of taking a lot of punishment without going down, your party has little to no weak point, as the healer can just keep on healing your party ad infinitum.
The weak healer convention is there, because it's suppose to provide a specific entry level for attacks, and has been common in RPGs since the table-top era.
Take down the healer, take down the party. This kind of strategical set-up for games have been the norm since the invention of chess.
The reason the healer is weak, is the same reason the attack mages are weak. The attack mages/wizards/witches etc. deal
a lot of damage in one go, and can usually do so from a distance, and as such, you balance that out by lowering defense etc.
so that they'll die quickly if a melee character manages to catch up to them.
It's also tied together with the story-telling/social conventions, where essentially magic users are the "nerd" of the fantasy universe,
and as such, are physically less fit than the warriors who would be the "jocks" of the fantasy universe.
Anyway, you could of course make a self-sufficent party members, all/several with some healing capabilities, but the general issue with this is that it is a much more extensive job to balance out, and therefore costs developement time/resources that could all have been avoided simply by having a dedicated healer.
Point in case, as much as I love FF7/8 for their settings, scores, nostalgia factor, and game-play - the balancing of both of those
games is entirely messed up, due to the scope of those systems.
The completely open ended and diverse character development schemes of both those games means
that you can break them both all day in more ways than I care to contemplate.
One might argue that this is a good thing because it allows for players to choose their own play-style, but I would also argue
that it ruins the meaning of those choices, since you'll still be able to run through these games like a breeze regardless of what
style you choose, unless you're severely under-leveled. At that point, you might ask what meaningful difference there is
between having one healer, or an entire party of them.
At least the traditional system incentivize strategical play. The other one is just arbitrary for the most part.
- I hate Level Scaling with enemies like FF8. I like it when a game makes me feel like I deserved that for playing their game.
I don't like scaling either, but I fail to see why everyone bring up FF8 in this regard, seeing as the scaling in 8 was
next to non-existent (it was something they toted more as a gimmick to sell the game, than an actual game-play element).
Hit level 45 etc. and go back to Balamb, and you'll one-shot all the enemies there just as in any other FF game, or other Jrpgs.
I would argue though, that scaling could be useful for boss-encounters etc. as certain encounters are
there to provide challenge in the game-play, which is efficiently ruined if you're over-levelled.
That being said, scaling of regular enemies is problematic if your game has back-tracking, or exploration set in already
covered ground, since it forces the player to waste tons of time fighting mobs in areas they've already probably grown tired of.
Anyway, these are things I don't include in my games -
- Silent protagonists
- Straight up high fantasy
- Skill systems that do not allow for player input/choice
- large amounts of equipment slots (is hell to balance out)
- perfect societies (real societies have organized crime, prostitution, thugs/delinquents, broken infrastructure, drunks,
womanizers, insane people, biggots and broken dreams, and so these elements will be present in the stories I tell)
- item farming/item creation (just because I personally hate those kind of games, and consider games centered around
this kind of game-play the game-equivalent of crack)
- stories that try way too hard not to be "stereotypical" and just end up being contrived, unnatural and embarrassing to watch
(like writing an "empowered female protagonist", that essentially just ends up being an exaggerated copy of any male
power fantasy toting forced one-liners reminding the audience over and over again that she is, indeed, and empowered
female character. This is tokenism, and insults the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about what constitutes
good creative writing.)
Everything else is pretty much on the table, as long as it's done well, in my opinion.
