Health is generally considered an important resource in games. It makes sense. When we run out of health, we die, we lose, and we have to start some portion of the game over again. We always like to know how much health we have, and in RPGs, a very numbers-driven and statistic-heavy genre, we like to know exactly how much health we have.
Terra Battle is essentially a turn-based JRPG board game for iOS. The screen is broken into a grid. Your characters, enemies, traps, and power-ups are single tiles, and special bosses take up four tiles. You can only move one character on your turn, and you attack enemies by flanking them — surrounding them on at least two sides. There are more systems on top of these basics, like weapon advantages, elemental weaknesses, and proximity bonuses, which all make for a game that’s easy to understand, but one that is complex enough to reward tactical thought.
However, the most interesting thing about Terra Battle is what it doesn’t do. Considering the limited space afforded by a phone’s screen, the game has to prioritize certain information. While the game displays a health bar for each character, both ally and enemy, it doesn’t display specific numbers. You’ll never know exactly how much health any character has at any one moment. Even as the game shows numbers flying off characters when they’re attacked, that information is meaningless because we don’t know the total they’re being subtracted from.
At first this weirded me out. It bothered me to not know exactly how much health someone had left. It seemed like too important a detail to leave out. Yet, as I played more, it slowly dawned on me that HP is really an unnecessary detail in most RPGs and even in most games. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, exact health numbers are not important.
We can never really know exactly how much an enemy’s attack will hurt us. It’s not just a matter of comparing their attack with our defense. We also have to factor in any bonuses that we get from armor, weapons, or other modifications. That’s a lot of math to do on the fly, and even if we could calculate some single value to represent damage, it would only be an average value. Combat is still affected by randomness, virtual dice rolls behind the scene. We have a single stat that represents our attack power, but a lucky critical hit could do more damage than that average, or we could miss altogether.
It might be nice to know that I have 1153 hit points left out of 2351, but the only actionable information that I get from those details is that I’m at half health. I should probably heal myself or at least be prepared to heal soon. Dipping below that halfway mark is dangerous. The exact value of that halfway mark doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’ve passed it.
Strategy is based on probability. In Terra Battle, if my archer is half dead and loses about a quarter of his health with each attack, then he’s very likely to die if he’s attacked two more times. If I don’t heal him now, I risk losing him. That’s the information that I use to determine what I’ll do on my next turn. I’m not thinking about the exact values of health or attack or defense or damage, I’m only thinking in generalities. The archer could possibly live after two attacks, but I would never be able to predict his survival.
Exact HP numbers have always been displayed for us, so that information has been made to feel important. However, when combat is decided by dice rolls, any specifics lose their tactical importance because they don’t give us any greater actionable intel about the situation.
By switching from a television screen to a phone, Mistwalker was forced to reconsider what information the player needed. Turns out, HP isn’t as important as we thought.