Splash damage
Explosive or area weapons deal damage to everyone near the impact point, not just a directly-hit target, rewarding proximity to enemies with area denial and punishing tight clustering. Team Fortress 2's rocket and grenade launchers build entire classes (Soldier, Demoman) around splash damage for both offense and self-propelled mobility (rocket jumping), while Diablo III's area spells clear packed monster groups efficiently. Designers use splash damage to reward positional AoE tactics, to make explosive weapons feel powerful against groups without requiring pinpoint single-target accuracy, and — notably in TF2 — to enable splash damage as a traversal tool via self-damage-boosted jumps. Key decisions: falloff curve from the epicenter (linear versus steep), self-damage rules (and whether that damage is exploitable for movement), minimum/maximum blast radius, and how splash interacts with cover and geometry (does it go through walls?). Pitfall: splash damage with no falloff or self-damage penalty makes area weapons strictly dominant over precision weapons — the tradeoffs (self-risk, travel time, ammo cost) are what keep splash from crowding out other playstyles.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time
- Common in: shooter, arpg