PREXUS'S PROFILE

I like that, what are you using for the calender thing? Rainmeter?

I bought Dungeons for my wife, but she doesn't like it because its not intuitive, or the controls are bad, or there isn't enough direction. I'm not sure what exactly it is she doesn't like, but she has gone to play it several times and every time she closes it down, cursing something about one of the things I listed above.

The world isn't IE friendly, you should be using Firefox, Chrome, or Opera. :)

D&D Campaigns run when we were younger are a great source of story ideas aren't they?

The idea behind a dedicated healer is an archaic trope from old games like FF1 and D&D (and even in original D&D iirc the healer was also the wizard.)

There is no reason that it should be done to this day, and shows laziness on an RPG designer's part.

That being said, having one character GOOD at healing is in no way a bad thing. It gives you an option when, for example, a fight is damage intensive and someone needs to be healing every turn. Why waste someone who does healing and damage equally on just healing, when you have someone who can heal much better than they can do damage, if they aren't going to be damaging anyways?

The jRPG style that most RM developers emulate enforces this 'White Mage' problem, and it is up to the developer to determine a way around it and redesign it.

Although, it has been done to death that every character can be customized to an extreme. Spoiled for choice comes to mind when I consider recent RPGs. In a setting where Magic isn't prominent, it is easy to replace healing with Items and suddenly everyone can use it. But for some reason, items are considered precious commodities, or represent and under-powered form of recovery in most jRPG games.

The two methods of fixing this is to make items more powerful, and more available. Healing magic as it were would need to be removed or reconstituted as buffs and regeneration as opposed to direct healing.

The other would be to have each character have a sort of Heal skill. Not a spell, but something they can train that offers them battle commands to the goal of healing. Using EQ terminology, "Bind Wound" for example would be the entry level to the skill. It would require a Bandage to use, and would only heal the user a small amount. Once you have leveled it up a bit, "Mend" becomes available. This again would be self only, but would require nothing and heal more. Eventually you could unlock "Tend Wound" which would allow a hero to recover another characters life, at the cost of a bandage. Then at the highest level, something that would allow you to heal the entire party at once, but only usable by a character once per combat (to give you incentive to level every characters Heal skill)

Oddly, someone I was talking to from hbGames just mentioned that game. I should look it up.