So, when designing an RPG, there's many decisions that need to be made. For example, one needs to decide how powerful healing magic is.
* In some games, healing magic is powerful. This, of course, means that the enemy design needs to take that into account. (Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is an example of a challenging game with powerful healing magic.)
* In other games, healing magic is weak. This results in a very different game from a balance perspective, and often relegates healing to between battles or emergencies.

But then, there's a rather puzzling aspect of many RPGs, particularly older ones (it dates back to at least Advanced Dungeons & Dragons); having most healing be weak, but then there's one practical healing option that's powerful. Examples aren't hard to find. For example:
* In AD&D, and in any AD&D based CRPG that has player-usable 6th level Cleric spells, healing magic is weak, except for the Heal spell, which is a full heal (-1d4 HP in 1e, but that's a minor difference).
* Wizardry 1-5 (excluding 4) are like this, as well. (Wizardry 4 is very different in this regard, particularly since you can have a group of priests all healing you.)
* Bard's Tale is like this. In BT1, it's quite ridiculous, as you have Conjurers with weak single target healing (once they get it; there's no 1st level heal), but then Magicians, once they get their 7th level spells, get a cheap full party heal as their only healing spell.
* Dragon Quest 1's Heal spell is weak, but then at level 17 you get Healmore, which is powerful, and is required to beat the final boss without TAS-level luck manipulation.
* More recently, this sort of happens in the Queen's Wish series. Most healing spells are weak in that game (though there's equipment that will boost it), but (and this seems to be partially due to a bug), the Haven's Mercy ability is an incredibly powerful group heal (and it's available from the start, unlike the other examples I mention).

So, thoughts on this design decision, which has always felt odd to me?

(Note: By "practical" I mean that it has to be something that can be used on a semi-regular basis. It should not use up extremely rare consumables (so nothing like Romancing SaGa 3's Shatter Staff), should work reliably (so no MAHAMAN-like spells that usually do something else, but can occasionally heal), shouldn't have an unusual cost (so no spells that drain levels from the caster as a side effect, or that cause aging that can't easily be reversed).)

In the first couple of Fallout games, you can cast First Aid and Doctor on yourself to heal 4 to 10 hit points if successful each use, but only three times per day per skill and it takes 30 in-game minutes to do. Assuming an average of 5 in Strength and Endurance, you would start with 30 hit points and get 4 or 5 hit points per level.

Is that useful for this topic?

I think the problem with AD&D or D&D 3.x healing (and also many other) spells is that they aren't necessarily weak per se, but that they don't 'grow' enough with you, so they become weaker the stronger you get until they're almost useless. When you're low level, "Cure Light Wounds" (or even the 3rd ed. cantrip "Cure Minor Wounds") can be quite powerful and possibly heal you fully, but on higher levels 1D8 +1 per caster level (max +5) is just ridiculous. It would have been better if the spells worked with percentages; just like Heal heals 100%, they could have made Cure Light Wounds so that it heals 10% of your HP or something instead. Of course, that would have made them very weak at low levels, too. I guess, old D&D is just like that, exponential power curve, so low level characters are weak and need good healing spells in order not to die, high level characters are overpowered and needn't concern themselves with anything below a full heal or at least healing spells of their highest casting level anyway ...

I recall the healing for Book of Eschalon being laughable at best. I also recall that Avernum 4-6 had weak healing.

X-Com has both weak field healing and recovery time; but on the other hand, if your survived getting shot by a plasma gun with but four of your abstracted health left, I suppose you might need to be put up a while.

Besides what Leroux said about scaling in D&D (which is really a very visible result of D&D striving to force spells to mainly be relevant around their level and then become obsolete instead of having, in this case, a generic partial healing spell that does 1d8 + (1d8 + 2) per two levels, with no limit), in general I'd say that it's a matter of setting a threshold past which the character reaches the peak of their powers and truly goes beyond what others might be capable of, since your examples are generally high level exceptions. You gave that DQ1 example where such a skill is even required for the end, which would prove the point, saying that this is why you had to do that and others couldn't, because you reached that level of ability. And otherwise it's the power fantasy and the reverse difficulty curve it comes with (that I know you hate, but I for one enjoy), reach a point where you're (nearly) invincible, at least for regular enemies that earlier might have caused problems, which may also allow you to experience more aspects of the game than merely the struggle for survival.

Is there some ability that you get later that, say, heals 50+ HP when used? If not, then that's a case of only weak healing, not mostly weak healing. Problem with making them percentages is that then the spells are now really weak early on.

See, for example, SaGa 3 (Final Fantasy Legend 3) (not its remake). At the start, the only healing spell you get heals only 30% of the target's max HP, and that feels really weak when you also have low HP. Then, as the game progresses, you get more HP and MP, and you get spells that heal 60% and later 100% of max HP. (And there's cheap multi-target healing available, but not until later, after the point of no return.) So, healing feels strong enough later on, but not at the start.

Also, exponential power curves aren't good for balance. The problem is that, when you do that, you end up in a situation where, unless things are very precisely balanced, balance can fall apart rather quickly; it's as though it were balanced on a very narrow tip; one nudge and it falls down. That is, the player being one level higher or lower makes things way too easy or way too difficult. (In the context of this topic, there's still the fact that things get *much* easier once you get that strong healing spell. In Dragon Quest 1, as soon as Healmore is learned, things get much easier, and you no longer need to worry about keeping your HP topped up between battles (especially nice when there's armor that regenerates HP outside of combat (easily obtained at level 17, significantly harder to get at 16), and where MP recovery outside of towns doesn't exist).

(By the way, possible fix for 3e (and 3.5e) D&D: Multiply the level-based term by the number of dice the spell gets. Now Heal is no longer a huge boost over Cure Critical Wounds. Note, however, that I haven't checked its balance with the rest of the system.)

To clarify, the problem with the "reverse difficulty curve" is when it happens when you're fighting level appropriate enemies. In DQ1, there are enemies that are level appropriate *after* you get that one spell, and tend to be highly dangerous before you get that one spell. The final dungeon is a fair challenge for a level 20 character (I've even died at level 30, the level cap, to a red dragon that put me to sleep), which I feel is appropriate, while early game enemies are weak at that point. (Worth noting that you do end up fighting weak enemies later because you can only save in the starting castle, and while Repel is nice (a spell that should be in more RPGs), it doesn't work in dungeons.) Enemies in the final dungeon *should* be hard (but manageable) when you're ate reasonable end game levels, harder than beginner enemies are for a level 1 party.

For DQ1, level 17 isn't quite enough for the final boss, to my understanding. The way it works out is as follows:
* Level 1-6: Outright impossible, even with TAS level luck. (The final boss's attacks never miss, and you have no hope of survival; you don't have sleep yet.)
* Level 7-16: You need TAS-level luck. For the final boss, you need to put it to sleep (1/16 chance), then for the rest of the fight, the boss needs to not wake up (1/3 chance of it awakening each turn), and you need to hit it with Hurt (1/16 chance, again). Also, you need good damage rolls. At higher levels, you might be able to survive the boss waking up (but can't outheal the damage), and you have enough MP to not need good damage rolls, but the rest still applies, though at the tail end, you *might* be able to do damage with a normal attack. (The game has been beaten RTA at level 7, though there was heavy luck manipulation; there's a GDQ video demonstrating this.)
* Level 17: You get Healmore. To win, you still need to get lucky, as apparently you still need to get Sleep to hit once (1/16 chance, again). Trying again means having to go through the entire dungeon all over again.
* Level 18-19: Doable with some luck. Note that this may depend on your name; some names may be able to do it when others can't. (You get Hurtmore at level 19, but that spell, again, only has a 1/16 success rate on the final boss.)
* Level 20: You have a good chance of victory at this point.

Go at it like you would in a real situation or at least a.logical one.

Daggerfall:
Make spells and have the user decide what they need for the time. That way its up to the player.

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead:
Sterilise the would to avoid infection and use a bandage to keep it clean. Both are optional and both do not heal the wound, only help increase healing and preventing infection.

Like real life....only a sped up time scale. Other factors are skill and repeat damage.


Other options can add potions or other uncommon non reuse items. Scrolls or playing card size 1 use "scrolls" to poor in mana from a magic user, that is time locked. Once activated, the card pressed to the wound and the magic is released.
I imagine this to be like ice forming in a sea of mana. The sea froze a moment to a solid and melts back into the greater pool. Makes for good backstory. Add my handle to credits if anyone uses my idea in a game ^_^

Abilities? A perk that you can take gives more healing per rank, up to three times, 2-5 in 1 and 4-10, basically maximizing it to 15 or 30 HP per heal if you're lucky. Item wise, there are a few items that give over 75 HP with each use. The super stimpak in particular heals 75 and then deals 9 points of damage after two minutes as a drawback.

You can also rest to heal, which takes time in-game. Depending on which version you're playing, that would fail the main quest though.

Although it can also be argued that AD&D has some of the most powerful healing if you consider that Clerics can literally bring the dead back to life. Wizards also get the spell Wish and while I haven't seen it used in a CRPG, one of the things you could do with the spell Wish is to undo a single recent event. If Wish is used to cause a war or natural disaster to not to happen, for example, that could result in a lot of people not dying.

The issue with a lot of games isn't that healing is weak but that it becomes increasingly irrelevant as characters progress in level.

The examples you give involves healing methods that are not practical for everyday use.
* Wish, per old rules, ages the caster 5 years whenever it's cast. (Also, while Baldur's Gate 2 implements this spell without that cost, the BG2 version isn't reliable as a means of healing.)
* AD&D revive abilities have the drawback of permanently lowering the target's Constitution (in a game where you can't just get more), and furthermore you either have Raise Dead which doesn't do much other than removing the "Dead" status and Resurrection which doesn't come into play until after Heal becomes available.

By the way, you mention Wish undoing a recent event. There's actually some JRPGs that have abilities that can turn back the clock, undoing recent events. Dragon Quest 4-7 all have an item that can do that (although original DQ6's version could only be used once, ever, and then it disappeared), Final Fantasy 5 has a spell that restarts the battle, and Super Mario RPG also has a n item with that effect.

Star Crawlers
There mutltiple classes that have healing/regeneration abilities of sorts, whether it is self-targeted or party-wide. All healing abilities are pretty weak though, thus damage mitigation skills are necessary for the party to endure dungeons with lots of foes.

The stronger healing options are consumables, but they are best used for emergencies due to limited inventory space.

Underrail
Bandages can only be used outside of combat and player must have haver 40% to use it, unless your character has the doctor feat. In other words, it's just to treat light injuries after a battle.

Health hypos can recover a large amount of health and useable in combat; the problem is hypos have a significant cooldown and it gets worse at higher difficulties. Healing with hypos will help in a pinch, but it's best to kill before being killed, even for tankier builds. If you can't kill them fast enough, strategic positioning, and crowd control can help buy more time.

I just started playing Wildermyth and it's very challenging to play without healing in combat. Wounds carry over and heal very slowly on the overland map. There are some other options . All the classes can get the "Aid" ability if it gets offered as a choice on level up and using it in combat grants some temporary hit points that the first to go if you are damaged. However, this ability is considered underwhelming and a character doesn't take it in favor of other abilities more important to a build. The mystic, the game's wizard, also has an ability to gian a "hp shield" by interfusing with objects, not something that changes combat drastically. So, I have to move carefully because the combat map has a fog of war, calculate ranges of opponents all the time, and optimize decisions to avoid as much damage as possible. Until a monster uses a charge ability, tramples obstacles and reaches your mystic:D

Of course those examples are not practical for everyday use. Neverwinter Nights lets you bring back the dead without that constitution penalty that you mentioned, but you never see groups of Clerics going around digging up graves just to cast raise dead on all the corpses. It's not practical due to the spell casting costs that would require down time to rest plus their deities would probably get angry about it after a while. What I said about healing becoming irrelevant is true in this game. Healing is powerful but I always finding myself needing it more at lower levels. There comes a point, where I find myself hording Heal potions for boss fights because I can get by with a +2 regeneration on an item the rest of the time.

I'm currently playing through Mary Skelter 2 and having played the first one, I know that healing will become irrelevant regardless of how powerful it is. In the first Mary Skelter, you want to build up your party's agility so that they attack first on everything and kill it before it gets a turn. There's only two boss encounters where this strategy doesn't work 100%, and you need to do some mop up healing.

Oh and if you want to talk about using time travel to undo really terrible things, don't forget Chrono Trigger. That's pretty much the entire plot.