Sometimes Lifegain is Pretty OK
In which I follow up my indictment of lifegain as a power-up with a rousing celebration of the healing power of healing.
Last week I started talking about the problems that designers are faced with when they create healing powers.
I showed that the main problem is that damage abilities are a path to victory where life gain abilities are sad little conditional things that risk only becoming powerful enough by making games interminably long and boring.
That isn’t the whole story.
In Defense of Healing
Last week I said “Healing does not win games, it merely buys time and delays a loss.” On its own, this is really not good enough for all the reasons I mentioned last week. On the other hand, in the context of a well developed game, buying time can be critical to a whole host of successful strategies.
Investing in a Shiny Future
Good gameplay is often about putting the player in the position of choosing between conflicting goals. Long term vs. short term advantage is a very effective dilemma (and one of the reasons why I went on about Marathon 2’s ammo clips). On the short term end of things, designers will provide players with cheap and fast abilities, units or effects that can be used in the early part of the game. To tempt the long term players, designers provide things like very powerful units that take a longer time to come off the production line, status effects that grow in intensity over time, and abilities that are game changing but that require the player to build up resources before unleashing them. In situations like this, the goal for the short term player is to prevent the game from lasting long enough for the long term strategies to bear fruit.
This is the mentality of a sprinter against a marathon runner. The sprinter will win the 100m dash every time, however the marathon runner has reserves of endurance that will allow them to continue long after the sprinter’s legs have given out. Lifegain can be a way of moving the finish line. By buying time, a player’s long term investments can be given time to pay off, and the short term player will hopefully run out of gas.
The caveat here is that you need to be sure that you are a marathon runner facing a sprinter. In order for buying time to be a successful strategy, you need to have a clear advantage against the other player in the late game. The risk here is that if the other guy is also a marathon runner, then moving the finish line really doesn’t help you all that much and while you were wasting energy moving the finish line, the other guy was setting up for a smashing victory at the end.
by-nc-nd
February 4th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
So where do the “reap” skills rate? I’ve always found the skills that do damage while simultaneously healing you, such as a vampiric attack or a soul-essence transfer or something along those lines to be very hard to balance.
Particularly when the skill powers up to a point where you may well heal for MORE than you damage the opponent for.
February 19th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Well, a 10 point life drain is almost as good as a 20 point damage spell, in the sense that if your life goes up and theirs goes down by 10 points then there is a 20 point difference.
If I’m right about damage being generally preferable to gain, then you’d expect that at the level of 10 point damage spells that life drain would life around 6-8 points.
In a lot of games, life drain type attacks are used by ‘evil’ or dark powers, which often also have abilities that give up life for another resource (like spending life to gain cards in Magic). So for those situations, reap spells are extra valuable, because the result is more gas for the other powers.