going into detail about it!
so, "why do we do So Much Damage" in final fantasy has always been a pet peeve of mine. why are the numbers so stupidly high? like, in d&d, doing 8 damage is a pretty big deal, but in final fantasy you're doing 4-digit damage usually by the mid-game.
while playing mystic quest i decided to just experiment around with the games numbers for a while.
at level 1, you start the game with 12 attack power (with the starting sword equipped. it, however, cannot be UNequipped, so for all intents and purposes, we have 12 ATK) i went to fight a slime, concluding they were the weakest enemy in the game because Something Something Dragon Quest and with my pitiful 12 Attack dealt a non-critical for 48 damage.
so unless slimes have Negative Defense, my Attack was being multiplied by 4 during damage calculation for no reason.
the thing was, at the time, i had said "for no reason", but i realized later that what i had mean was that the x4 multiplier wasn't tangible. it came from nothing and could not be influenced by my stats or equipment. and reaching that conclusion, i wondered if it really was "for no reason"; perhaps there was a meta reason, outside of the game, for its existence.
see, that x4 didn't escape me in how odd it was. because i work in RPG Maker, and it's impossible to not notice the default damage formula, which multiplies Attack Power by 4 and Defense Power by 2, again, seemingly for no reason. why not just have our stats, you know, NOT lie to us? so i started doing math on multiple RPGs that i liked.
in Paper Mario, the stats are 1-1, compared to RPG Makers 4-1/2-1. that is to say, if the Attacker has an ATK power of 2, and the Defender has a DEF power of 1, the Attacker's Attack does 1 damage. late into the game, you will still be encountering enemies with 0 defense. but more importantly, Mario's defense cannot increase naturally. the attack power of your Jump and Hammer abilities increase via story progression, but Defense only increases by equipping certain badges. this is the start of the main conceit as to why damage is so high in other RPGs: defense is Overpowered.
Paper Mario is weird though, increasing Attack only through story progression. so i looked at the more traditional style of leveling in Undertale.
in undertale, at LV 1 you start with 20 HP, 0 AT [which is actually 10 AT] and 0 DF [which is actually 10 DF] - the numbers in parenthesis on the stats screen are the boost to those 2 stats, and are NOT secretly boosted by 10 in the background.
with each increase to LV, you gain 4 HP, 2 AT, and - get this - 0 DF. that is, until your LV becomes divisible by 4, at which point your DF increases by 1.
now, undertale only pretends to have 1-1 numbers, and its math is, in reality, a nightmare mess, but for this example we're going to pretend it's not and that everything's fine: within that context, this is the Hoop the game has to jump through to make defense not completely brokenly overpowered.
with 1-1 numbers, a traditional JRPG that ups all of your stats when you gain a level, defense has to increase incredibly slowly compared to attack. in addition, armor has to be MUCH weaker (visually) than equivelant weapons.
if we were to give a hero an iron sword with 10 attack, it would be reasonable to assume the iron armor would have 10 defense, but with 1-1 numbers, that 10 defense is absurdly strong. if our hero were to fight a duplicate of themself, they'd be at a stalemate.
some games, like TOME, cut defense in half. this introduces a new problem, where only every other point of defense matters. or in dragon quest, only every 4th point (assuming the most commonly accepted version of DQs damage formula is correct), so increases to defense inherently mean less until you can pass that arbitrary threshold.
instead of making defense weaker, we make attack stronger.
by doubling attack (instead of halving defense) during damage calculation, we ostensibly accomplish the same thing: defense is half as powerful as attack. But! increasing defense by 1 is no longer worthless; you gotta flip around - it's NOT that "defense is half as strong as attack", it's "each point of defense makes each oncoming point of attack half as strong"
the only ostensible downside is that now our damage output is getting pretty high, but that's whatever.
simply double both attack and defense from there, and we have the exact formula that RPG Maker starts with. ATK*4 DEF*2. but why would we double something that already worked fine?
RPG Maker calls this feature "Variance" - most JRPGs add some RNG to your damage rolls to resemble the dice of a TTRPG. however, unlike the simple set numbers of dice, JRPGs use percentages of your base damage for Variance. and if the game uses, say, 20% variance (the default in RPG Maker), then, well, 20% of 10 base damage is only 2, giving a damage range of 8-12. but 20% of 40 base damage is 8, giving us a damage range of 32-48, so the large number gives opportunities for bigger ranges of damage.
FFMQ, however, doesn't have variance, so there's no actual reason for it to use x4 attack instead of x2. i can only assume squaresoft intended for variance to be in the game, then decided against it but didn't bother to change the base math.
so there's the conclusions i drew - the numbers in JRPGs are so big to 1) aid in preventing defense from overshadowing attack, 2) allow for bigger pools of random numbers for damage roles.
it's such a simple solution to the problem though. i had to wonder why i was so mad at the concept of "Big Number" for so long. i realized eventually that my real problem never stemmed from the numbers themselves, but from the feeling of being lied to. it was the lack of transparency that was getting to me.
have your damage numbers be whatever you want in your RPGs. but you gotta tell your players what's going on.
