Skull132

The whole reason why ions are strong is because there's no pain/stun/cripple mechanics on synths. That is it. Either we add those, or we don't change a thing.

YAAASSSS GAGA YAAAAAAAAS. On a serious note, yes. Gimmicks, whether successful or not, tend to be in dire need of an "End". This is one of the reasons why I really like nuke and malf: they have an end. The story has a natural end which can be achieved. Without it, all that'll happen is that security will keep running around the station, eventually arrest the person, and it'll be horribly anticlimatic.

Firesuits can't be trivially fixed, I'm afraid. Ingame fires have a dumbass steep temperature curve, for one. So that any fire proof item must protect against incredibly high temperatures. But what's more, fires generate an incredibly large amount of pressure. Which means that any firesuit must also be a pseudo spacesuit. I'd rather we just. Not use firesuits. At all. And have RIGs for this.

Just as an update. The PR isn't dead and nor am I. My week's just busy. I'll get into reading the new feedback and uploading a tweak next week, promise!

Ye but. "Med Tech" sounds sci-fi as hell. While not being draggy or otherwise eough. "Go see the med tech when you're done." It has a good mouthfeel.

https://forums.aurorastation.org/topic/14668-fuse-medical-roles-and-detach-medical-from-the-real-job-of-medical-doctor/?do=findComment&comment=139044

Because I really don't care for the difference and "Intern" makes the purpose of the role as a learning one more clear. Addendum: also because "Medical Resident" was born out of one of the arguments that we're trying to avoid. There was a spiel about how medical interns don't exist or should be reclassified as resident yadda, which is the entire reason for why we got the title in the first place. "Medical Intern" was actually the first learner role we implemented.

Okay so. I did some thunking and thinking. It was pointed out to me that a use-case for some of the alt-titles was to play a doctor character that would have no responsibility to touch surgery ever. Sooo. I removed surgery access from "Medical Technician", which used to be "Medical Doctor". Basically: the Med Tech would be your general doctor-type-person, who's responsible for healing a stubbed toe and whatever else can be done with cryo and drugs and bandaids. And surgeon is the guy who goes around diddling your internal organs, should the Med Tech be unable to help. This does still leave us with the issue of Surgeon being akin to a super-doctor, buuuuuut. There's no solid answer to this, unfortunately. Re: triage technician. Eh. The connotation attached to the word "Triage" typically implies a really bad situation***. Plus, it leaves it unclear that the dude's primary job is to get out there and help people in a dire situation. A rescue tech helping inside the medbay should make sense no matter how you look at it, specially when push comes to shove. *** Yes, I know that every patient that enters a hospital is triaged regardless of the actual severity of the situation around them. But not many people know this factoid.

I did some word-play around the titles to rid ourselves of everyone being a technician or a specialist. The PR itself is here. Still listening to suggestions if anyone has anything better to offer.

An epiphany to be had. The amount of "master" roles in medical wouldn't actually change with these changes, if you go with surgeon remaining as a separate entity. The issue arises from the fact that medical is by far, the only department where alternate titles, which are meant to be just flavourful, now have a meaningful impact on gameplay. I guess this is a good example of when a tool is used for a purpose it wasn't intended for, huh?

Except. Homogenizing will is very likely to fix the issue, because you stop a scenario where multiple roles could do the same thing...? Further, to make the other roles useful, or mechanically necessary would be to undertake a journey much more complicated and likely to end in failure. We already tried to make mental traumas a mechanic, a lot of people moaned about it. We had chemical side-effects, things which made chemistry more difficult to use a "Get out of jail free" card, it was reverted because people moaned about it (though I will grant that in that case, it was a mildly lazy implementation). If you try to make, for example, hospitality staff necessary, you are setting yourself out to create mechanics which mandate that a player spends 15+ minutes in the medical bay. Who is going to enjoy a game like that? Same for mental traumas: the moment you try to add mechanics to those, you're gonna have a large set of people in uproar because we should trust the playerbase to roleplay those out properly or whatever the dicks. My point is that there is a certain limit of depth we can allow for medical, or any department, really; without it detracting from the general gameplay experience. And the depth required to justify some of our specializations likely is beyond that point.

@nonno_anselmo to counter you a bit. First, please drop the "No true Scotsman" argument. I have a good 3 - 6 months of cumulative play time in medical behind me, in various roles; and I'm sure that could well be said about other proponents of this thread. So your call to arms is a worthless logical fallacy at best, downright insulting and dismissive at worst. What's more, none of the things you listed as "Medbay does" would be in any way inhibited by these changes. Again, the mechanical and responsibility sides of the medical bay would not change with this. A point repeated to death by Coalf in this thread, but apparently not enough. I also question your point about there not being any toe-stepping. We have an entire chart to outline what certain roles can and cannot do. Why do we need such a chart? The answer is, because it is not clear otherwise. And that is a problem. It is a problem for gameplay and general user experience. And we've had regular shifts of age requirements, job fragmentation, etc. on grounds that all go back to "Because this is how it should be IRL" or for other similar reasons, that are not supported by gameplay.

There's a difference between nurses and atmos techs tho. Atmos techs have concrete mechanics to back them up. Nurses do not. There is no mechanical backing for hospitality staff, specially after gutting viro.

I sometimes feel like I should pay more attention to the other half of server management. Note that this is my first time encountering the surgery chart, which is now apparently active practice in the administration when it comes to dealing with issues of that nature. While it works as a stop-gap, as Coalf pointed out, the entire chart existing is a bad thing. It is hidden information to anyone who doesn't actively follow the server's moves (so to a regular player); it is arbitrary information, in that the information it contains is not at all supported by mechanics. The old separation of just having the Medical Doctor and the Surgeon was better, because the OR is a concrete thing, ergo, it is intuitive enough to link Surgeon to the OR and to create a separation between the two roles. But when it comes to whatever is written into that chart, there ain't no good way to intuitively figure that shit out based on ingame information. The next point is the matter of how many jobs cover each others fields partially and how many of them lack a concrete mechanical distinction between the roles. With some of them being completely unsupported. While yes, we are a roleplay server, we are a roleplay server in a roleplaying game. As Coalf pointed out, a lot of the roles do the exact same thing just in mildly different flavours/with different restrictions, which later on leads to conflict (either ingame or in player complaints, as demonstrated recently). Also, do try to think of this from the perspective that this is Le Future. Due to the advances of medical technology, it certainly doesn't make sense to have as much hospitality staff around, for example. You can just cryo/pump someone full of chems at least 50% of the time and they'll be off. There's no real reason to have a nurse on stand-by with a medical doctor. If we actually choose to pursue more medical updates in code, with ideas such as auto-docs and whatever regularly making rounds, then some other roles would also become suspect. Presently, beyond chemistry and command staff, you only really need a general medical practitioner, a surgeon, and perhaps a runner-lad/EMT-type-lad, depending on what equipment we give them. Final point, names are a detail. As Coalf pointed out above, disagreeing with the names as he proposed them doesn't necessarily mean you have to bin the entire suggestion. Coming up with alternatives is plenty helpful, as was the case for the chemistry PR. I don't personally agree with Coalf's name suggestions either, but I'm struggling currently to come up with better alternatives without stooping to horrible specifics, like "Triage Technicians" and whatever else has also been proposed.

That's just the thing, though. Half the distinctions we try to make with alt-titles and job separation in the medbay are worthless, gameplay wise. There is not enough content to have nurses and otherwise hospitality staff as separate alt-titles. The distinction between medical doctor and surgeon is, too, often bent one way or another: either on dead hour, you get away with doing more because of, largely, gameplay concerns. Or you end up restricting and differentiating between various forms of surgery because yes. Coalf's proposition isn't stripping away anything, however? All of the gameplay is to remain the same. Could you substantiate this further? WELLL. This is where some flak is to be taken but there is a mild separation of ideologies here. There is an inherent danger in leaning towards fluff where the gameplay clearly does not support it. Like, as much as we might want to believe that RP is important and RP must be put before mechanics, the blunt fact is that at least half, and likely more, medical bay visits end with the mechanical concerns being prioritized: you heal the person, yeet them away, and call it a day. And this is a thing that's done by both new and "senior" medical players. And it's fine, it's just that it is dangerous to hark back to some idealized version of roleplay that either doesn't exist, or fades away the moment push comes to shove. ------- In general, I'm inclined to agree with Coalf's reasoning and the essence of his proposed solution. Though I am uncertain how well I specifically enjoy his proposed titles, but I can't think of a better solution at the moment.

This harks back to a discussion had a few years ago about mining mobs. Basically, the question was what kind of mine mobs would be nice and what kind not. The main issue with adding clearly combat related monsters (big creepy things whose primary function is to beat ass) is that it may result in miners becoming hard core combatants. Which is not necessarily a good thing for our setting. Tighter integration with security or some other form of militia might alleviate it, eg. if we had a generic mercenary group on-hand to help deal with the more precarious situations in mining and on away-missions, but that is not presently the case. Overall, IMO the inclusion of these would depend on how regularly they spawn, first and foremost.

YES PLEASE. I have wanted medicine to have more complex interactions with each other for SO FUCKING LONG. Thank you chada. tho please put that into a different PR so we can merge this one without waiting too long.

Accepting the tag in from Matt, lemme begin by addressing a non-argument. False! Every single time the development team has a worthless slug match with a bunch of medical players who berate us about the nuances of real life drugs, we wish that we had not used or perpetuated real life drug names. Also false! Whether or not we use real life drug names, or some made up shit, has no direct impact on believability or seriousness. Believability is established by the names being well created in the context of the game. Seriousness is an arbitrary notion and not really impacted unless we call a drug something patently hilarious. In my opinion, this change is a good change. Because it removes the inclination for people who think they know shit (or actually know shit) about medicine IRL to see real life drugs in their ingame couterparts. It removes the expectation of the medicine to act as it would in reality. And this is a good thing: because the purpose of this game is NOT to be a simulation of reality. Concessions are made in every mechanic to make the game out to be actually playable, which often comes at the cost of "realism". The amount of times people have argued with the dev team over worthless nuances of IRL drugs, only to have said argument remain unaddressed because, frankly, the expectations levied were unreasonable from a gameplay development perspective, is astounding. And frankly, if we can pleasantly avoid this, then that is one heck of a reason for me to press the "Approve" button on this PR. Secondly, due to the fact that concessions have to be made for the game to actually be playable without having completed 10 years of med-school (or being a wikiwarrior), tying in-game drug names to IRL drug names may actually be misleading. Specially if the use-cases of these drugs do not overlap. Removing this connection will allow the development team and contributors greater freedom in morphing the medical system into something that is both fun and usable. And this does not have to come at the cost of complexity, as some may fear. Brain-med itself was a huge step up in terms of complexity and depth, and though the mechanics are based on reality, they are still gamified. So in this case, we can indeed have our cake and eat it too. There is no reasonable argument to the contrary without invoking the slippery slope fallacy. I also have two analogies to illustrate my point. I'm an extreme noob when it comes to the medical field, the only drugs I really know by (TRADE) name are common painkillers. I played a lot of medical in my first year on Aurora, and my lack of knowledge of real life drug names did not inhibit my gameplay in the slightest. The only people who would be mildly inconvenienced with this change would be people who actually know a lot of IRL drug names and now have to re-learn some shit. But fortunately, those people are in the minority. Speaking of re-learning shit. There's another batch of mechanics I am very familiar with professionally and academically: integrated circuit design and logic. Lemme tell ya, the ingame representation of that is a gross simplification and an outright lie of what it is based on. But this is fine, because if I (or someone else) was to actually make the mechanics in question more realistic, then you would legitimately need a year of studying to figure out how to send a fucking string message from one chip to another. And that is not the point of this game. Both of these examples are to say that while we appreciate the knowledge of real-life professionals (and wannabe wikiwarriors), they are not our main audience, and we cannot cater to them exclusively. This change gives us freedom to make the game more reasonable to play, while extinguishing a whole bunch of worthless and shitty arguments.

In theory. But no one does this. And if something can be enforced via mechanics with minimal detriment to the gameplay experience, why not do it?

WELL. It's not that simple. All sprites to SS13 are typically contributed under a specific form of the Creative Commons license, this means that using them for another project is perfectly fine, provided that the source of the sprites is credited somewhere (typically in the PR or changelog or both). If the artist does not agree with this, then they absolutely should not have licensed the sprites under said license in the first place! But the reason why we're not outright stopping sprite ports is due to our own lack of sprot manpower, realistically. We'll just be more selective, specially so with loadout items.

As answered, TL;DR: yes. Exceptions will exist as is necessary but no more dumps of random bland or out-of-place looking clothing from other servers, please and thank you. Or in general.

Recent events have spurred the creation of this policy in order to clarify and direct future efforts in this specific field. Looking forward, newly added non-generic loadout items are required to be associated with a specific in-lore culture. Direct ports from other servers are highly discouraged and will face higher scrutiny. Further, no new alternative crew working/duty uniforms are to be introduced until the present situation with them has been unfucked and unified for NBT. Elaborations below: What's a non-generic loadout item? We consider minor and generally unimportant accessories to be generic loadout items. These include items such as gloves, canes, watches, etcetera. What does it mean for an item to be associated with a specific in-lore culture? Simple: the item in question must fit into, visually and thematically, into one of the many cultures represented in our lore. When in doubt, consult a lore writer/master. It is highly recommended that you highlight this on the PR yourself, instead of leaving it up to us to figure it out. And a slightly longer elaboration on why this policy exists in the first place. Loadout items have been a surprisingly hot topic of debate over the years, with view points ranging from absolute and total player control, over to the idea that literally everything should be the same forever and ever. Well there's a golden road somewhere there, but there are things to be kept in mind when finding this. Outside of the memetastic argument of bloat, there's another common MO in the process of adding new loadouts which is what the staff are looking to target: ports from other servers. As time progresses, it would be nice for Aurora to slowly and consistently develop its own style both visually and content wise. What directly undermines this goal is the porting, recently en-masse, of loadout and generally accessible gear from other servers. Loadouts and what people wear and use are a great way to further represent our lore ingame with, so make use of it. Similar scrutiny is slowly being applied to the porting of resprites from other servers, with ones from very visually distinct servers (like Eris) already being forbidden/denied. This policy is primarily forward looking. However, as always, the developers reserve the right to review and adjust the currently available options of loadout items.

On SOME use-cases, it'd be pretty simple. Simple have the completion action of a radial invoke a verb. But it's not something you can do in every usecase. So short answer: no.

What you said is all well and good but. I have very concrete evidence here to link you to TwoTales, the originally banned key, dating back to 16JUN2020. As such, the appeal is denied, have a nice try next time.