Nobody likes arbitrary health management

Wrong.

Never start a suggestion by stating what "everybody" thinks. There isn't a single thing that is a consensus amongst everyone.

Now, to address your suggestions:
A means to obtain regenerating health would be ideal. But how fast do you want this regeneration to heal you completely? Since your concern is nonstop action and exploration, I would assume "as fast as CoD does".

That would mean removing all other forms of healing for balance purposes. Beds would also lose it's most important function, becoming something like chairs. And you would still face a barrier should an enemy or trap prove too lethal. You would have to stand still and wait for a short while as your health recovers in order to proceed. Roughly the same time it would take to use a bunch of bandages.

Should healing items remain in game while you regenerate that fast, that would seriously hamper PVP. Actually, combat in general would have to become pretty much instagib. If you are given but a small reprieve, you are pretty much immortal. Holding a shield up would allow you to regain full health way too easily.

But if you absolutely want all of that, then I would suggest requesting a Mod for it, if you can't make one yourself.

 

I'm not saying the concepts are bad. I'm just saying that, imho, it is better for a game mechanics that requires active participation to be interesting or fun. Right now health management is not that.

Food is largely its own topic. Imho, food needs to have a longer-lasting buff (with a corresponding higher cooldown). That makes using food a more meaningful choice. Right now it lasts a pretty short time so a lot of the non-healing buffs are so-so in overall utility (not worthless, just so-so). For instance, it should at least last for a boss fight. I'd say you'd also want enemy challenge on a planet to be more varied (some packs, more bosses, etc) so that there are more opportunities to decide to use buffs.

But again, that's a side issue to how health management needs work. Either it needs to be a more engaging system when it comes to using items or less items. Eitherway the tedious busywork needs to be removed as much as possible one way or another. Right now I think the scope of health as a resource needs to be carefully considered. Either a short time-frame (per battle basically) or a longer time-frame. Items, cooldowns, and their uses should be balanced around that and focused on making the decision to use an item important (rather than just mindlessly using it whenever you can until your health is full).

Basically what I'm saying is that if you could make a short script that removes all player involvement based on a trivial parameter then something needs to change. Right now health is like that.

I don't have a particularly strong preference for how things should go. However, if we want health to be about survival then we need it to be a resource used over a longer timeframe. That likely means making it harder to heal and having a lot more health. Though such mechanics do make it possible that you then force some players to sit around for 5 minutes waiting for cooldowns to heal -- so it has its problems.

 

Can someone give me one example of a fun health management system that you actively participate in? One that does not involve not managing it?

I really can't think of one. For me, Health Managenent is inherently a hassle. It is meant to impose a restriction on you. A non-intrusive system that escapes being a non-issue is something I haven't come across in all of my gaming life.

 

If everyone heals to full outside of combat (assuming it doesn't take enough time for the player to get bored and go AFK), then combat damage is meaningless if it doesn't kill you outright. If a fight takes away 40% of your hp, who cares? You can sit down for a minute and you're back to 100% before the next fight. This leads to very bad combat balancing decisions, because every single fight must have the possibility of killing you outright (or else there is no chance of death), and that simply isn't fun. Dungeons would be almost impossible to balance unless you put all NPCs into pre-selected groups behind doors that can only be opened by the player. Otherwise, you risk two fights (each with instakill possibility) from being encountered at once, which gives you roughly zero chance of living.

If regen is slow and takes more than (arbitrary number) one minute to heal to full, what gameplay decision needs to be made by the player? What meaningful choice is put into the game? Your choice would pretty much be "Do I use healing items, do I sit here and do nothing because I want 100% hp, or do I go forward anyway knowing that I'm probably going to die?"

If you don't have out-of-combat regen naturally, then dungeons can be a war of attrition, where the player must make careful decisions about when to use healing items, when to go forward, and when to back out.

 

There are plenty of games that use health as a meaningful resource overall. I'd say Minecraft has a fairly decent implementation from what I remember. Healing is a more difficult, so losing health is a big deal and healing is rare. Sure, you still manage health. You do it by using healing items rarely, being conservative with danger, and learning to avoid getting hurt.

Darksiders I also has a good system. As do most Legend of Zelda games. Both of them having longer-term health management system. Healing items are a limited resource. The player can choose to have some more resources devoted to healing or less as needed.*

*Edit/Addition. The more I think about it, the more I think health and healing should be more like this. Not sure about limited slots used for healing, but bigger health pools and rarer healing.

 

Unless you are playing the stable release, and that is due to unbalanced costs.

 

But what makes it fun?

I would argue that those games' Health Management made the rest of the game more interesting. Not the system itself. Having to stop to replenish a bar is the OP's concern after all.

And would those games be less fun if they implemented Starbound's HMS?

 

Considering that bandages are already very easy to make, it´s very difficult to run out of them unless you are purposefully carrying a low amount, and most Dungeon NPCs can drop Stimpacks.

 

My point exactly...

Combat may be fun. Resource management may be fun. But managing health? I never found that fun. Just more or less of a hurdle depending on the game.

But mind you, games are often about overcoming adversities. So a low health bar to me is another obstacle to overcome. And I find overcoming obstacles fun.

 

I'm sort of trying to say that it can't be fun, at least to my knowledge. As you said, a health bar is a measure of how close you are to a fail state. In my point of view, such a thing is not supposed to be fun in itself. It is supposed to make avoid dealing with it fun.

I want to elaborate further, but I'm on a cellphone right now. Not the best vehicle for lenghty discussions.

 

That was the same mechanic used in the Descent games. You started with 100 shields on your ship, but you could pick up items to boost it to 200. You could also convert your ships energy supply (Which did not regenerate) to shields up to 100.

 

Oh, I just thought of one game where health management is actually fun:
The Trauma Series.

Yes. Trauma Center/Trauma Team actually made dealing with a health bar very fun.

 

The mechanic itself doesn't need to be fun. It just needs to positively contribute to fun. Digging in and of itself isn't fun a lot of the time, but it can enable fun (for instance).

Having health be something that needs to be conserved can increase tension and encourage/reward player skill. Allowing players to choose how to spend limited resources on handling health allows the game to soften the blow towards less skilled players while enabling different playstyles. So if you had limited "drink" slots or limited techbuff slots or limited ability to eat (with significant choice to be made about the effect of food), then you'd support a lot of potential playstyles while having health be a limited resource to manage.

If our health pools were say two-three times as large, but health return harder to apply, then we'd see more of this. But the choice to use a given health item has to be a meaningful decision. Right many of them are plentiful and can be applied as much as desired -- the decision to use them is not interesting and does not enhance gameplay.

 

FWIW: There is a setting in the player.config file for health regen.

You can just about change every damn thing about this game... its crazy.

 

Team Fortress 2. Let's ignore Medics (which also arguably add fun to the game) for the moment, and just talk about the health packs that spawn in certain places on the maps. Let's say you get into a fight with someone, and both of you get a few good hits in. One or two more hits and either of you could die. You both know there's a healthpack nearby, but can you beat your opponent to it? If you make a bee-line for it you'll be an easy target, can you get it without getting killed first? Should you just kill him and then get it? Should you risk picking it up simply to leave him high and dry? Health management is creating all kinds of interesting options- fun!

Another more obvious idea would be any game where killing baddies can restore health, for example through health pick-ups. If you're getting low on health you could limp away and bandage yourself via some slow, safe, boring method, OR you could get in there and mix it up, relying on your skill to try to gain more health than you lose.


In my opinion, a way to get health back that didn't involve occasionally taking from an ever increasing supply of bandages/stims/whatever, would be very welcome in Starbound. Problem 1: I feel it's very cheap to be able to quickly restore health, even in the midst of combat at what is essentially no cost by eating a bandage. Problem 2: it's annoying to have to deliberately patch up every time you take 3 fall damage, accidentally dip your toes in a single tile of liquid poison, or swing by a pointy rock etc etc etc.

 

Diablo 3 has an interesting take on it with Health Globes. Kill monster, get Health Globe sometimes. Why not an item that occasionally drops from monsters that grants on pickup 25% of your HP over like 5 seconds?