It seems like RPGs can't agree on what is a lot of damage. In the Dragon Quest series, an attack doing over 100 damage is a lot, but in Final Fantasy you're regularly doing multiple thousands of damage in an attack, whereas in dungeons and dragons an attack doing 30 damage would be a grievous wound, if not outright deadly.
@Rosemary There's a degree of sense here - Dragon Quest started on consoles where they were forced to represent HP as a maximum of 255, and so 100 damage is a significant chunk out of anything.
Final Fantasy started with this limitation, but went to larger numbers as soon as they could.
With D&D, a d20 is the primary resolution mechanic, so basing HP around something to do with that can be quite useful - same with games that use 2d6 having 7 harm as meaning dead
@Rosemary FF1 definitely had the cap going by the wiki - and yeah, it is possible to work around it, just not something many developers would have done until the hardware offered easier support/more flexibility
@Dex Restricting even bosses to have no more than 255 HP would seem to limit the damage ranges to a bit lower than what DQ uses today, at least.
@Dex You don't want your final boss to go down in just three decently strong hits.
@Dex After all, any limitation of that sort you can work around in one way or another by using multiple bytes to represent the data, even if it complicates calculation somewhat.