Lifegain Probably Sucks
In which I begin a two part talk about healing in games and the problems that designers face when they try to implement lifegain.
Here’s an abstract strategy question: would you rather have an ability that healed yourself or damaged your opponents, given some random game that has health or a lifebar of some kind? For the sake of argument let’s say that these abilities are mirrors of one another, the healer heals just as hard as the hurter hurts.
You might think that because they’re mirrors, it doesn’t matter which you pick. The interesting thing is that this isn’t true, and that most of the time a damage ability is more powerful than an equivalent healing ability. This is what I want to talk about today.
Why is lifegain generally less powerful than life loss?
To understand why this is the case, you need to look at how games with health bars are won. You don’t win these games by having a lot of health. You win these games by making the other guy have no health. Healing does not win games, it merely buys time and delays a loss. The important thing to understand is that having 1 unit of health left when they hit 0 is just as much a victory as having 100 units.
For example, imagine a character who can do nothing but heal. They have no win condition. If the other guy can do 11 damage a turn (or second or whatever) and you can heal 10, then you’ve made the game 10x longer but you haven’t changed the ending. If the other guy does 9 damage per turn to your 10 healing then you’ve prevented the game from ever ending, but you still haven’t won it.
The second issue that stacks up against life gain is that healing is conditional. It only works when there is damage to heal. If your opponent’s strategy doesn’t revolve around hurting you (think Ring-Outs in Soul Calibur, Stasis Lock decks in Magic: the Gathering or anything that revolves around an alternate victory condition in any game) then any benefit of a healing ability is utterly canceled out.
Even if the other guy wants to win with damage, healing is still conditional. When you have 100% health, healing is useless. On the other hand, 10 points of damage is useful from the moment you say go. Taken some damage? Healing may still not be efficient. If you heal 10 points per use of your power and you have only taken 1-9 points of damage, then you are burning off 9-1 points of ability. The reverse isn’t true with damage. If the other player has 1-9 points of life left and you do your 10 points, you didn’t use all your power, but it doesn’t matter because you just won the contest.
By and large, you’d rather permanently remove the source of damage than temporarily reduce the damage being taken and our hurting power can do that while our healing power can’t.
When game designers balance conditional abilities, a good strategy is to just increase the power of the ability to compensate. The problem with healing is that it falls afoul of the first problem, in that it’s not a path to victory. A lifegain ability strong enough to balance out damage’s many advantages results in longer and longer games. No good! Games need to end and no one wants to create (or play) a game that grinds on forever.
All that being said, there is a place for life gain and healing in games. I’ll be discussing this next week.
Update: Here’s part 2
by-nc-nd
December 16th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Also, you can only heal yourself, but you can mete out damage to many opponents. So 10 healing doesn’t really do as much as 8 damage (done to multiple opponents).
On the other hand, aren’t there any games where having lower health affects one’s abilities? Like, at half damage, you can only inflict half of the damage you can normally do. If games don’t do that, why not?
December 16th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
For 1 on 1 games I’d agree, but for x vs many the dynamics are different. It depends on the symmetry of damage dealt vs health lost. It adds an important tactical dimension to RTSs, RPGs and squad based FPSs.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
“Also, you can only heal yourself, but you can mete out damage to many opponents. So 10 healing doesn’t really do as much as 8 damage (done to multiple opponents).”
True. But now we’re talking about AoE type attacks. Which I’ve now decided I should talk about next!
December 22nd, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I agree with this from an abstract perspective, however as combat devolves into more and more separate units (more players or targets), the ‘ticking dps clock’ algorithms start to change a bit.
If you have 6 party members on 6 enemies, being able to heal (provided it’s a great enough ratio of heal speed on abilities) doesn’t just make the battle longer - you can selectively heal to keep some important character alive (often long enough to do what they need to do). Again, this relies on an asymmetric ability concept and likely on a non-damage effect ability being present in the game. The other way healing can be useful in just a one-on-one combat is when there is a secondary counter race (the primary being hit points, but magic points is a common secondary) - whereby the healer can extend the battle frugally enough that he/she wins the secondary race first changing the equation (basic piecewise).
Also, there are many systems where healing doesn’t automatically lose. The most common system today is a >0 health system where your effectiveness does not diminish with loss a health until you hit 0 and then it goes from 100% to 0%. In systems where your effectiveness (and damage) decrease as your health does or in systems where there is no ‘max’ upon which healing is ineffective (in MtG you can wind up with 80+ health), healing has a bit more of an equal footing.
In a 1-on-1 dueling game of only damage and heal abilities and everything else being equal, damage abilities are invariably more useful.
December 23rd, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Aaron, it’s interesting that you chose Magic the Gathering as an example of a game where life gain can be pretty good. The first time I was introduced to the idea that life gain was actually not that great was in a pair of articles on why life gain is popular despite it being not very good and why life gain doesn’t show up much in competitive magic.
Since then, life gain has gained in popularity in the tournament scene, but almost always in the context of cards that do something else as well as give you life (kill a creature, put a permanent in play etc.)
Life gain is is especially vulnerable in Magic to the fact that there are alternative victory conditions and a lot of deck strategies that don’t care how much life you have.
I just posted part 2 where I went into an abstract explanation of when healing is more powerful, and you’re quite right about things like Tanks and Healers in team play as support roles that by being different bring more to the table than yet another damage dealer.
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:29 am
This is true for multiplayer games, but for singleplayer is usually opposite. In a typical RPG you lead a strong party of powerful heroes fighting with thousands of punny enemies. In such game healing abilities are far more important than damage dealing abilities since the only thing that matters is if you are fully healed before the next battle or not.