GRIND!! When you can't be arsed to make actually challenging enemies.

i woke up kinda sad and for some reason this brightens my day

I think more of the problem with level scaling of enemies in a lot of games. It's pointless doing hundreds of thousands of damage if the enemies just scale accordingly to compensate.

I remember Tempel of Elemental Evil, where your Tank's HP LV1 is about 14HP or so. The less tanky party members are almost all well below 10HP at LV1. We also have Chrono Trigger, where all your Stats and Values are keept rather low throughout the entire game and you don't need to grind. You may do 4000 Damage occasionally, but that is through exploiting the enemy elemental weakness or very Mana extensive triple tech Attack of a high level group. Which feels good, because you know that was some serious damage right now! All your stats end at a value of 99, MP 99 and HP 999. Thats the end of the line. Its all completely fine and it works. And today, we have nonsense like Diablo 3, where you easily deal pointlessly inflated damage in the millions with numbers in all sorts of colors popping up on the screen. You may deal 5 million damage, but you don't kill enemies faster because of the difficulty level. Thats basically inflation by piss poor game design. Its just stupid. Not to mention, you can't even read those absurdly insane numbers anymore, they are just too big and too many on screen at the same time. Its just bad. Its funny how developers want to show up their "Math" skills. When in Diablo 4 the math is completely broken for the different damage type calculations. Utter incompetence!

The only "big number game" that I played so far is World of Warships, where the smallest destroyes have a few thousand HP, and the biggest meanest battleships are around a 100 000 "ship health", and a fully penetrating broadside from the latter deals 10k - 40k damage. In real life these behemots did displace thousands and tens of thousands of tons, and were armed with some of the biggest artilley pieces ever, so these numbers felt fitting enough for me. In the game, the bigger and more heavily armoured of these boats can withstand being on fire for several minutes or get hammered with non-penetrating hits/ lower caliber HE shells for some time, so it does make these gigants feel pretty tough that they are still in the fight, even after losing thousands upon thousands of hit points in an engagement. Same goes for the firepower of a destroyer when it's torpedo salvo hits for like 50 000 damage, instantly obliterating a cruiser or crippling a battleship. But yeah, shooting that random enemy grunt for 282 000 damage does look pretty stupid.

Some developers just don't know how scaling is supposed to work.

The first game where I encountered this issue was Sacred who prided itself for beign Diablo killer. Every single item had at least a dozen quantifiable stats and bonuses that had values anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Rare items could have as many as 20+ different stats

a skinner box is a skinner box, nothing new

For Shooter RPG's I actually like the Deus Ex model - a bullet is a bullet, but aim? There is the skill that the dice regulate - scale the reticle or decrease bullet spread as you level up to simulate skill in aiming.

Comparing 2 pieces of equipment becomes really bothersome when the numbers are so high. A side effect of this can be that designers then try to streamline itemization so that a single DPS number tells you everything instead of providing mixed and varied modifiers. Worst of both worlds.

Didn't math create the first fps game?

What do you think of the Monster Hunter series DW?

I actually noticed recently while playing p3r, how nice it is to have really low dmg/health and whatnot numbers when compared to some other games. Not that its always bad to have big numbers, sometimes it offers extra complexity that your game can benefit from, but there is definitely a point where it becomes impossible to decipher and make any sense of. You're right that there's just a point where your brain is not gonna be processing any of it. As with division for example, I actually turned off the dmg numbers at some point because it made no sense to me and I figured that its just better to see how much does the health bar move. pea brain strats, but hey it worked. On that note, I'm forever annoyed by games that have this overly elaborate math for their dmg. For example dmg scaling in souls games and so on. Just fraggin' tell me how much dmg it does, what is the chance of inflicting a status effect and so on. I don't care about doing optimal dmg or anything, but I want to know if I'm gonna be using something really horrible. Give me easy to read, flat numbers. None of that esoteric nonsense that will result in me googling things, which will likely distract me and soon enough I'd rather be doing something else.

Remember having this exact issue with Borderlands especially.. It got to a point where stats were basically incomprehensible even comparatively since it would be a matter of counting digits and not numbers.... Thankfully BL3 mostly fixed that issue which comes to show its just a matter of changing the practical orders of magnitude.

Even currency was originally intended to have a smaller scale. In 1800 Massachusetts an egg cost about 2 pennies. A 0-999 range already allows a granularity of 0.1% per upgrade which should normally be more than enough headroom. I'd be curious about what non d20 RPG systems DW recommends.

I agree with the idea of large numbers are bad. Some of my favorite RPGs have extremely low damage numbers. Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate. You're never hitting that hard, but when you notice how much more powerful you are compared to when you were doing 10 damage and then 20 damage. I disagree with the D20 thing...those numbers have never been big especially with weapons that do at most do 1d12 +2 damage. Even with buffs and a crit, biggest hit will be 25 damage? Depending on rules if crits double or just do max damage...and you're not critting every fight.

Maybe that's why I like Souls games, you start the game doing 100 damage, and by the end you are doing 400, maybe 600 if you are lucky. The numbers look small, but you feel so powerful, the power increase feels meaningful like you said. Basically if you want to do more damage than that, you'd have to spend 5min buffing yourself with magic spells and rings to gain at max 200 extra damage, you'll probably never reach 1k damage

I thought you were going to talk about how they keep pushing out FF. Like joe many FF are we going to get. It just doesn't make sense anymore

Lately I've been putting serious thought into the systems for a total conversion project of my own, that has a tie in novel that needs to be written first, and one thing I know I want to avoid is absurd level scaling. I.E., I refuse to give higher level humanoid NPC's 10 times or more the hit points of the player character. Absurd amounts of level scaling is just ludicrous and there's no excuse for it.

Yeah I can relate with that I play alot gacha Jrpg games where the numbers become pretty meanless in the end game. like damage numbers over the hundreds of thousands to a over a million & enemies with 2 to 5 million health. It's to the point where I just get tired of optimizing & just use the gear with the highest looking stats.

But muh number go up The higher the numbers the better the game

Not sure I like the floating HUD in this game, perhaps it's fine when playing but it seems distracting the way it's constantly moving around your character.

There's really no excuse for an American developer to have no clue about how firearms work. I'd almost say that an American developer being willfully stupid about firearms in their games is what someone from the UK would call a piss take, i.e. developers of awful shooting games are going out of their way to perpetrate this nonsense at the expense of the consumers.

Its not so much as even big numbers, chinese MMO's are far worse with that. Its the 2 sentence long equation you have to use to figure out the final number. Then they want to add multiplicative, and additive modifiers at the same time. The calculation can be dramatically simplified, but then they wouldnt have a scapegoat when they inevitably mess up 20 things again.

There really is no nice way to say it but it's just a thing for stupid people. If higher numbers don't change the gameplay then it's pointless.