Damage scaling and danger of death

Matt Miller 

JRPG's had highly variable damage, compensated with a high 'buffer' of HP. As levels rose, both damage and HP scaled. At lv 1, a hit was 9 damage to your 50 life. At lv10, a hit was 99 damage to your 500 life, and at lv100, a hit was 999 damage to your 5000 life.

 Matt Miller 

Part of what informed Mayhem was that high level fighters are piles of HP. I had a fighter with...112 HP? While successful toasted by a dragon, mere human weapons had small effect--even the most successful attack was never going to deal more than 30 damage. 

Keith J Davies

It makes for a steeper survival curve between levels. At any given level you'll see a comparable fight time (as measured in rounds; spell animations might take longer) because damage is a pretty consistent fraction of hit points. However, if you see a significant mismatch in levels it's going to be very unbalanced

For instance, two Ftr1, two Ftr5, two Ftr9, two Ftr13, two Ftr17... at each level, the pair might fight for about 3 rounds before one or both drop, and the outcome is probably unpredictable. However, a Ftr5 vs Ftr1 might be only a round or two and very predictable because the Ftr5 can one shot the Ftr1, while even if the Ftr1 hits the Ftr5 he won't do enough damage to matter... and the Ftr9 vs. Ftr1 might get his armor scratched but is in totally no danger..which is fine. 

Rolemaster, and IIRC later editions of D&D, and several others have made similar design decisions. It encourages a degree of grittiness and caution. Even early editions of D&D had a lot of places where you could die pretty easily, even at high level (save or die effects, really big damage against hit point totals rather low compared to 3e-era D&D, etc.)...There is a place for it. Hit point vs. damage escalation works well for the heroic warrior vs. sword fodder trope. 

Other games aren't looking for that. They want to have deliberate distinction between characters of different grades. Depending on how other things work it might be a matter of hit points and damage scaling by level (which prety quickly moves low-level and high-level into different arenas), or it might be different effects trumping each other (*cough* casters in D&D 3+ vs noncasters), or different ranks being able to affect others or not (in Paranoia, low-grade weapons don't affect higher-grade characters), or defensive powers that come online and render higher-level characters functionally invulnerable (many supers games).

Matt Miller

You make good points. I think I'm less and less jazzed on benchmarking fighters. A fight should always be dangerous, even from a position of overwhelming superiority.