you know what, another way of using this exact mechanic, but differently, might be to instead give the party a health boost/buff that adds X%HP (on top of their original max HP) whenever they sleep at an inn (more expensive rooms could give slightly more). It makes you at least want to be careful when you enter a dungeon fresh out of town since you don't want to lose that 'un-heal:able' 40% of your health. One such skill for each party member combined with very rare and/or expensive healing items might to expand.Not 100% sure if I understood what you meant here, but if you are suggesting something like each healing item/skill temporarily lowers the characters max HP until they sleep at an inn, then I'd say that's a pretty cool mechanic that I'd definitely don't know if I'll use it but I like this idea. Something like how ' Second Wind' in D&D4th.ED works. Fact is, I've considered giving most characters a personal skill which would allow them to once per encounter heal/defend themselves in battle. I'm more leaning towards limiting the usage of some skills to once or twice per the second suggestion might work well for some kind of roguelike dungeon crawler where you try to go as far as possible, I like the second idea much better. However, I've no cool down on any of my skills so far and I'm not planning on adding it either. not that games need to be logical, but still. Using a cool-down on healing skills on the other hand is a decent method, although it feels weird to put a cool down on item usage from a logical perspective(?). But I'd like to find a way to limit healing that forces the player to be more careful (which I hope would make even mob encounters more meaningful and I don't like the concept of fully healing the party at the end of combat (it feels to vanilla for me), the ideas of limiting usages either to once or twice per encounter, or as you mentioned, until you 'defend' is more interesting mechanics to healing skills/items super crappy doesn't really solve the problem since it just means one or two characters would spend their turns on constantly spamming those crappy heals (which would feel very unfulfilling for the player I think). I can see how this could be a problem and if not carefully planned by the dev, could make the player get stuck. Maybe just add a few very rare powerful HP restore items in the game that could be used that way? Maybe even going so far as not allowing the player to heal whenever they want outside of combat either, just at an inn or specific checkpoints etc? So, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to make an RM-RPG without healing potions or healing magic (that can be used in combat).

Slowly killing your characters while you're waiting for the state to disappear, unable to use items or spells. Also I guess, enemies who can spam skills inflicting states such as petrify, bind, sleep, blind or confusion that renders your characters useless. You usually start off with little to no money and TP so it's always challenging in the beginning, but about halfway into the game you more often than not have a decent healer as well as ~x40 healing items in your inventory.Īt that point, the only real danger are usually enemies that does massive single target damage or decent AoE damage (unless you have good AoE healing skills that is). So I've been thinking about balancing the combat for my game and I've come to realize that one of the things I don't enjoy myself is the abundance of healing items/spells the player have access to in most RPG's.

Betrayal at krondor spells