Hi!

Im making a tactical rpg/management game. You control a party of up to 4 heroes in a fantasy setting out to claim riches. I plan to have some classes being able to heal. But how can I square this with "normal healing"? The party travels and searches for locations, and injuries needs to be handled by resting at inns, using bandage etc. Restoring health should be somewhat hard.

Skills use up energy which is restored upon sleep or with potions (which are limited). If some classes can heal this may remove the tention and "cost" of normal healing?

Any idea? Suggestions I came up with:

• Have healing use a secondary character resource (like "spirit") which can be harder to restore so magical healing during travels is limited.
• Dont use real healing but rather give non-permanent buffs that last a fight only (magic shield, temporary damage resistance etc).

Thoughts?

Why is there a "cost" to healing ?

is skilling towards having a lot of hitpoints so overpowered it needs a debuff ??

12 hours ago, suliman said:

Have healing use a secondary character resource (like "spirit") which can be harder to restore so magical healing during travels is limited.

Darkest Dungeon solved the problem by having two types of health. Mental health and Physical health. It's a lot like you mentioned here. So maybe call it something more common like "morale" and see if you can expand on what games like Darkest Dungeon is doing. Lots of room for improvement on this system.

Another way old games worked was with money. The traveler needed money to do things but could only obtain money from towns. A more strict wealth system with drains as the player explore, travel fees and the like, and the only means of money near inns and towns.

Edit: The Warded Man (Peter V. Brett) has this thing where people are stuck in towns, because only in these locations are they protected from the monsters.

Something like that will allow for a mana bar, that the player uses to ward against attacks and to use in combat. If the player can only refill by staying in the wards of others, it could serve as a similar mechanic in a fantasy type game.

You can always change the cost for the healing to be shared by other (usually more important) skills.

The player should have the thought of "should I use my resource for healing or can I survive the next engagement with the health I got?".

For example you can have healing cost items looted from monsters that the player can sell for a lot of money if they bring them back to town.

The amount of healing would depend on the value of the item which would make every loot be a potential healing item.

If the item heals 30% of the unit health but would otherwise sell for enough to hire 3-5 new units, the player will use these sparingly.

Of course using Golden statues or non-organic matter might be not suited for healing.

Instead you could use biological components like monster parts (tails, wings, intestines, etc.) you looted from wild animals.

Or cloth and medicine found from humanoid enemies.

Another idea would be to have your healer receive a penalty for healing.

This would lead to either less healing or less combat effectiveness for the healer.

Or he could use his own health to boost others (e.g. spend 1 point of health to heal 3 points of damage on another unit (except healers)).

That would make the player treat healers and healing as a limited resource and he would have to focus more on protecting his healers to keep their health high for future healing.

Many games limit healing to infight only (Darkest Dungeon is the best example).

This leads to players provoking an easy fight just to heal their troops.

I never liked this kind of healing restriction, but having an out-of-fight healing would make many dungeons too easy.

Good input!

Yeah I agree the infight-only healing in Darkest dungeons was very strange. You would prolong fights just to spam heals. But your healers couldn't heal during calm episodes with no enemies around. It felt pretty unnatural.

Im leaning towards having only temporary damage mitigation (such as magic shields) and have actual restoring of hitpoints only during resting and healing items (which are very limited). It makes the game more of a survival game which suits my design.