“Ailments” suggestion for the medical system.

[Core]

Righto, so just as a disclaimer, I am fully aware that this stuff is terribly hard to code and I’m honestly not stupid enough to believe that even HALF of the features I propose here will be even considered, much less, implemented.

But hey, if anyone would be up to coding this, that’d be pretty amazing.

I’ve been giving this much thought as of recent and came up with quite a few ideas for the medical system. Sadly, the rules for this board only allow one suggestion per thread so I’ll go ahead and give you the one I think would be most needed for medical.

Right now, the old (slightly modified) baymed system we use is fairly boring at times. It has barely any complexity and seems extremely unrealistic. For example, the organ system is painfully inaccurate and not fun, the diagnostic part of playing as medical is limited and it mostly just devolves into being a sit at the front desk/watch sensors kind of role.

I propose implementing an AILMENTS system.

Pretty much, they’re diseases that some players can start out with or develop later during the round.

Ailments come in all shapes and sizes, from your harmless acid reflux or asthma, to your potentially dangerous blood clots or cellulitis.

These ailments would generally require the doctor/nurse/surgeon/whatever to take in account certain symptoms and pathologies and find out what a patient has, along with the best treatment suited for them. Perhaps they could use a microscope with the patients blood sample or swab to determine what kind of microorganism is causing an infection and treat it with a more targeted therapy instead of just using Spaceacilin for almost everything.

Currently, the only existing “ailment” that exists is appendicitis, which is, from my experience, less common than the chances of you actually getting it sitting there behind your monitor and can easily be diagnosed using a health analyzer. Preferably, have most of these “ailments” not detectable by simply using the dreaded health analyzer/body scanner and have the patient exhibit symptoms that they are only aware of, such as, stiff neck, specific type of pain (e.g dull, sharp, throbbing), dizziness, etc to encourage more interactivity between the medical personnel and patient.

Maybe even have more medications for the treatment of some “ailments” such as, an acid reducer for, say, a stomach ulcer or an immunosuppressant for the treatment of inflammatory conditions, but if used on someone with an infection due to either incompetence or other contextual factors could potentially spell doom for someone with an infection.

I think having 1-2 players randomly selected to have an ailment whether at the start or later in the round is enough to keep it rare enough, while at the same time being entertaining enough for both the doctor and the patient.

Oh, and have antags have a much lesser chance of getting ailments because who tf wants to start out with a brain tumor as Ninja.

Feel free to HEAVILY criticize this if you think my idea is stupid and/or needs some adjustments and such.

Holy shit, that was long. I went a little overboard there, huh?

[Scheveningen]

My problem with suggestions like these is that they typically just round out to the typical consequence of some people utilizing them to force certain positions in the game to interact with them just by virtue of round-start choosing the ailment. Not always, just typically.

If we say that a character has a blood clotting problem that spontaneously exacerbates, the medical department becomes required to respond to it regardless of how the current round state is and what priorities are being weighed.

Catch-22 is that if Medical decides, "Oh, we're going to ignore this guy since their condition probably doesn't rank higher than this security officer or head of staff that both got nearly hacked to death by rampaging cultists with claymores", then the player can find an excuse to take issue with medical staff ranking actually round-critical characters higher than that of characters that are deliberately designed to die much easier than anyone else.

If we say that someone has blood pressure high enough that they can literally die on the job, the first initial question that gets asked on the OOC side is, "Why is someone with a lethal medical condition triggered by stress working on a NanoTrasen space station where the risks of inhabiting space can be high-stressing?"

And this rounds out my problem with this. Sure, I am 100% certain that there will be a couple people who execute this reasonably and still sit in the middle between "boring" and "ridiculous." But is anyone also willing to deal with those kinds of characters that I just mentioned, as well? Because that's the bigger picture that has to be seen here, irrespective of how well the features themselves can be coded.

And let's not pretend "it can be moderated" is a proper excuse. It's incredibly difficult to moderate roleplay issues that strictly don't violate the rules unless the staff member themselves is bold enough to make decisions with no earlier precedent, which then creates its own issues about whether or not the staff member was in the right to make such a decision when there's no virtual precedent that would've stated that staff member was in the right to make that decision.

To tack onto that, one could determine or personally justify, "Well, there were a lot of conditions surrounding this one issue, so clearly it was 100% Okay, because it was circumstantial and merely judged by the individual case!" Which then throws out the idea of establishing precedent off of that one situation, because its conclusion was only determined off of the circumstances of the one situation. Meaning any lesson you could glean from that situation could be considered meaningless when applied to a different situation.

I feel like, just as a tl;dr to everything I said; There's consequences to every proposed system. A suggestion is only ever worth it (by virtue of cost-benefit) if the community would be okay with both the positive and the negative consequences that a suggestion brings about.

[Core]

My problem with suggestions like these is that they typically just round out to the typical consequence of some people utilizing them to force certain positions in the game to interact with them just by virtue of round-start choosing the ailment. Not always, just typically.

If we say that a character has a blood clotting problem that spontaneously exacerbates, the medical department becomes required to respond to it regardless of how the current round state is and what priorities are being weighed.

Catch-22 is that if Medical decides, "Oh, we're going to ignore this guy since their condition probably doesn't rank higher than this security officer or head of staff that both got nearly hacked to death by rampaging cultists with claymores", then the player can find an excuse to take issue with medical staff ranking actually round-critical characters higher than that of characters that are deliberately designed to die much easier than anyone else.

If we say that someone has blood pressure high enough that they can literally die on the job, the first initial question that gets asked on the OOC side is, "Why is someone with a lethal medical condition triggered by stress working on a NanoTrasen space station where the risks of inhabiting space can be high-stressing?"

And this rounds out my problem with this. Sure, I am 100% certain that there will be a couple people who execute this reasonably and still sit in the middle between "boring" and "ridiculous." But is anyone also willing to deal with those kinds of characters that I just mentioned, as well? Because that's the bigger picture that has to be seen here, irrespective of how well the features themselves can be coded.

And let's not pretend "it can be moderated" is a proper excuse. It's incredibly difficult to moderate roleplay issues that strictly don't violate the rules unless the staff member themselves is bold enough to make decisions with no earlier precedent, which then creates its own issues about whether or not the staff member was in the right to make such a decision when there's no virtual precedent that would've stated that staff member was in the right to make that decision.

To tack onto that, one could determine or personally justify, "Well, there were a lot of conditions surrounding this one issue, so clearly it was 100% Okay, because it was circumstantial and merely judged by the individual case!" Which then throws out the idea of establishing precedent off of that one situation, because its conclusion was only determined off of the circumstances of the one situation. Meaning any lesson you could glean from that situation could be considered meaningless when applied to a different situation.

I feel like, just as a tl;dr to everything I said; There's consequences to every proposed system. A suggestion is only ever worth it (by virtue of cost-benefit) if the community would be okay with both the positive and the negative consequences that a suggestion brings about.

 

Hey there, sorry for taking a bit to respond.

I definitely agree with you in the fact that every suggestion has its own flaws and perhaps I failed to underline some of the possible negative outcomes that a system like this could produce.

However, as explained in my initial post, the ailments are completely random, players are simply not allowed to pick their very own flavor of disease because of the reason you stated.

I would absolutely avoid implementing chronic diseases as well as it can force a player into changing their characters or question as to why epileptic bartender McUrist was even hired in the first place and that’s a big no-no.

Most ailments would preferably be harmless to avoid an oversaturation of people getting deadly diseases all the time as that is simply not realistic at all and I can see it being very annoying after a while. BUT, there will always be a small chance that something may be more serious than it appears to warrant a visit to the medbay.

If anything, have players be able to pick very benign and harmless ailments at round start to not bother medical when they’re busy with more important matters, perhaps something like migraines (Although this could just be easily roleplayed anyways).