Poll of the Day > Is the spell demi only in final fantasy games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I said somewhere else that demi was a common spell in RPG games, and somebody said they had never heard of it before, and that it was not in <list of like 5 game franchises>

Which makes me wonder, I guess it is only an FF thing? Because I haven't played too many RPGs outside of FF but I thought it was an RPG thing in general and I might be wrong.

"What game? I don't recall it from Diablo 2 or 3, Guild Wars 1 or 2, Divinity Original Sin II, Baldur's Gate 1 of 2, or Skyrim."

Demi by name is unique to Final Fantasy (for the most part), but percentile damage IS rather common... but of those you posted I only recall it from Diablo 2 (Static Shock I think it's called)

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Demi usually equates to gravity magic in other series which (for some reason) deals damage equal to a fraction of your current total.

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I love talking classic gaming so.... care to pontificate further?

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Final Fantasy, Legend of Mana, Tales of, Golden Sun, Magical Starsign... list goes on

I'm just trying to think of the table top equivalent, there are gravity spells but they work nothing like the video game counter parts.

http://dnd5ed.wikidot.com/wizard:graviturgy

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I thought he was referring to percentile damage, not literally gravity... cuz that way you got like HalfLife and Warhammer

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idk, someone made a decision along the line that Gravity was a percentage based attack, and then someone said that was stupid and tried to make games with actual gravity damage, and that's why Geralt dies every time I try to get off some peasants roof in Novigrad.

(I am pretty sure there is not actually a linear line through these things)

Might and Magic is another to come to mind

I would like to know which game come up with it first, (I suspect FF) because it did not come from the table top world.

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KodyKeir posted...

idk, someone made a decision along the line that Gravity was a percentage based attack,

It kind of makes sense if you think of HP as being proportional to size/weight. Sort of a "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" sort of deal.

Of course, HP very frequently is not particularly correlated with size/weight in these games, so that kind of falls apart almost immediately, but I can understand where the logic comes from.

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tbh, when I heard the spell name, I couldn't even remember what it did. The concept is similar to things done in other games, but I can't think of one that calls it that.

idk, someone made a decision along the line that Gravity was a percentage based attack, and then someone said that was stupid and tried to make games with actual gravity damage, and that's why Geralt dies every time I try to get off some peasants roof in Novigrad.

Gravity damage is a good concept (and I kinda love gravity damage, even though it's often portrayed in a silly manner -- and even inconsistently, like how Brago used it in Zatch Bell), but I've never understood why it's factored in as a percentile for demi. There's no reason why gravity should have the same impact on everybody given differences in weight, strength, etc.

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From what I can tell, FF5 was the first game with Demi in it and it was part of the Time school so I can't tell if it was initially even meant to be a gravity spell.

it's not an easy spell to balance is probably why most games don't use that kind of ability. I think FF goes with the idea/irony that you can potentially deal a LOT of damage with it, but at the same time can't really kill anything with it (the ultimate in diminishing returns).

but then to "balance" it, like with most spell effects, FF just gives complete immunity to 90% of enemies. (FF really needs/needed a saving throw system or something).

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SMT has some abilities that scale with enemy HP, I think?

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Percentile based damage is certainly a thing. I mostly think of it as a thing in Arpgs though. Diablo 2 had static field and Titan Quest & Grim Dawn had percentile based damage abilities as well, although they where kind of useless in the later games because bosses had a high resistance to it and you would mostly want percentile damage for bosses, not normal mooks. Overall, while static field was pretty good it felt like you bursted enemies so fast that it made these abilities kind of useless.

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Sahuagin posted...

it's not an easy spell to balance is probably why most games don't use that kind of ability. I think FF goes with the idea/irony that you can potentially deal a LOT of damage with it, but at the same time can't really kill anything with it (the ultimate in diminishing returns).

but then to "balance" it, like with most spell effects, FF just gives complete immunity to 90% of enemies. (FF really needs/needed a saving throw system or something).

There was one that could kill with it. Diablo. Had to get him to level 100 but then he became practically Odin but better.

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