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

@Dex Pokemon has a similar system to dragon quest, for what I assume to be similar reasons.

Did Final Fantasy start with that limitation? I seem to recall early entries having thousands of damage too, though perhaps I'm thinking of remakes.

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@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.

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