Medicine Side Effects

[Resilynn]

A common complaint I hear is that medical chemistry is so effective that it takes away from rounds- both in that it takes away some realistic rp because even the most dire of conditions can pretty much be medicated away in seconds, and also in that it means antags have to kill to disable, especially members of security, or else they’ll just run back into the fight after getting their heal juice. 

A few suggestions have been made on how to fix this, including making chemicals more rare, but I think that takes away from the chemist role. Instead, I propose our most common medications have the following mechanics implemented as side effects:

Dermaline. While it will still heal pretty much all of your burn damage immediately, it will make you more sensitive to pain thanks to your freshly grown skin (the same way painkillers make you less sensitive to pain), making you easier to incapacitate in combat. These effects will last for about a minute per unit metabolized. No more officers running between laser fire and an emt with a bottle of keloderm as needed.

Bicaridine.  Still a great liquid bandaid, bicaridine will now come with a 50% chance to cause some motor function issues (dropping items, falling down) for a minute per unit metabolized, as your central nervous system copes with this tremendous healing stimulant in its system.  No more cargo techs getting beat up by sentient crates and immediately effortlessly sorting the warehouse. EDIT: Bicaridine would not cause falling down, just dropping things.

Dexalin plus.  As always, still a bullshit overpowered way to negate the need for any air (did you know you only need .01 units of dex plus per second to survive without lungs?).  But just like irl, if you over oxygenate eyes they start to suffer. Dex plus will now have a 75% chance to cause eye damage and a 10% chance to make you nearsighted, rectified only by prescription glasses or mechanical eyes. Finally I will actually have to pay for making and using rescue cigarettes. Rip me. EDIT: instead of causing permanent nearsightedness, it would cause nearsightedness for 5 minutes per unit metabolized.

Peridaxon. It regrows all your organs!  Now, regrowing your organs will hurt like a bitch. Peridaxon causes pain crit for a minute per unit used as your innards get rearranged and smooshed back together inside you. Painkillers can, as always with pain, negate this. Miners are no longer able to casually walk back out onto the asteroid seconds after their lungs are basically ripped out of their mouths. 

Tramadol and oxycodone. What even are stuns?  Still stupidly effective, these will actually function like opioids now. Taking them will result in the same kind of addiction effects as nicotine, if you go too long without taking them, you will feel mild pain.  Oxycodone’s withdrawal will also come with adventures in vomiting. Drinking with either drug in your system will result in liver damage. Not only will this make paracetamol great again, it will also hopefully make officers think twice about adding prescriptions to tramadol in their records that they only convientently get filled when there’s a wizard with stuns onboard. 

 

 

None one of these effects will take you out of the round. They will, however, make it more difficult to jump back into labor intensive work after getting seriously injured, as you will have to deal with side effects for ~10 minutes or so each time you are medicated. 

Not only do I anticipate that this will balance out medical a little, increase realism, and cut antags a little slack from an endless onslaught of heal juiced security officers, but I also hope the 10 minutes or so of side effects will give people reasons to do things like sit in the bar and library and garden as they recover from whatever just happened to them. I’d love to see people thinking of creative ways to keep working around their side effects- whether by taking risks or finding ways to adjust their jobs to be less physically stressful as they recover. 

Also, chemists will not have anything taken away from them and will, instead, be called upon more often for recommended doses and be more responsible for monitoring the use of opioids by other members of medical  

 

I’d love to get feedback on this, this idea has been brewing for a long time. 

Edited February 12, 2019 by Resilynn
Made small adjustments after feedback.

[Sh4rd]

This idea would be very beneficial. I find that injuries are basically pointless as I can go to medical and immediately have them fixed. This takes away from the RP massively as I don't have to make any hard decisions when in medical about my health or a patient's if I am playing as a doctor. Adding these side effects would help improve the RP massively and make antag rounds and major accidents very entertaining. 

[Soultheif96]

As a pharmacist main, +1. 

My reason to approve Resilynn's suggestions is because chemistry as is already enables medical to become a factory, you come in hurt, you come back out perfectly fine, thanks to the medication.

With the suggestions above, this will make sure that chemists and pharmacists take dosages into consideration and make doctors decide is it worth it to send out a security officer with KeloDerm to heal his burn wounds to get shot again. Same applies for painkiller prescriptions.

I am a little sketchy on Bicaridine as it is the only medication to heal just brute damage and once ODed, it heals away the internal bleedings. Anyhow, it is an acceptable consequence. 

As for Dex+ plus, I really hope this does happen so that we can take consideration of that 300 Suffocation regen into consideration but end up with a cost. 

I would appreciate something to consider on Peridaxon, because not only it is a god-medicine, it stops the (Surgeon: I need Peridaxon please, now) when they can do the surgery to fix the problem, lazy bastards.

I would like to start with paracetamol again because it does make Oxycodone and Tramadol prescriptions become something to think twice about when they can settle with a mild one. Same applies for oxycodone induced surgery, we wouldn't want a vomiting patient once it wears off now do we?

Lastly, this would make some of the chemist's booster pills much less effective so they won't appear as a god when under effects of their concoction, so yeah, again. +1.

[Snakebittenn]

As someone who hates everything, this is a lovely set of suggestions. Although, I would like for soporific to be made to metabolize much faster, and for keloderm to stop working. Thanks, that'll be all.

[Soultheif96]

17 minutes ago, ParadoxSpace said:

As someone who hates everything, this is a lovely set of suggestions. Although, I would like for soporific to be made to metabolize much faster, and for keloderm to stop working. Thanks, that'll be all.

Please do note that soporific is used for when medical cyborgs need to sedate the patient enough to preform ethical surgery, a quicker metabolization would encourage that the surgery must be done with haste, lest we would have to increase the dosage, which will cause ODing. That will not be fun if that happened.

Suggestion on KeloDerm to stop working, we could limit the use by throwing in a reaction that slows the metabolization, increasing the risk of ODing if the burn patient is fed too much. This would encourage a full treatment by the doctor using burn kits, cryogenics, and so on. 

[Resilynn]

26 minutes ago, Soultheif96 said:

Please do note that soporific is used for when medical cyborgs need to sedate the patient enough to preform ethical surgery, a quicker metabolization would encourage that the surgery must be done with haste, lest we would have to increase the dosage, which will cause ODing. That will not be fun if that happened.

Suggestion on KeloDerm to stop working, we could limit the use by throwing in a reaction that slows the metabolization, increasing the risk of ODing if the burn patient is fed too much. This would encourage a full treatment by the doctor using burn kits, cryogenics, and so on. 

I'd like to table sopor to a different discussion since it's a whole different problem separate from the over use of medicating away problems in a way that discourages meaningful rp after injuries.

Same goes with keloderm.  I'm staunchly against taking away any options from chemists.  As it is, with these changes, keloderm would already have some negative side effects.  I'd like to have the debate elsewhere, though, and focus on this set of suggestions so that this doesn't turn into a big complicated argument and is instead something that, with enough feedback, hopefully we can push developers to work on.

[Pratepresidenten]

All of this is fine and well, but you've left out an critical absolutely critical part of medical, namely the cryotubes.

People will just opt out from all the chems and just say "Just put me in the cryotube!!!11", and bingo bango, by the power of the magical mix of CryoClonex, they're healed in no time at all. You might argue that you cant use cryotubes in the field, and you'll be right. Sure you'll get to put some chems and bandages in before rushing them back to medical for the miracle cryobath and maybe put them on dialysis is they scream hard enough.

I think most people will be brought to medical by medstaff or general crew if there's mass casualties, and there you meet the easy access cryotube for all your healing needs.

 

What would be your suggestion to tweak this wondermix?

[Soultheif96]

On that note, Prate, I do have a suggestion that pulls from other sources of cryogenic cells like Halo.

If the patient is undergoing cryogenic therapy, they have a 10% (modifiable) chance to have an allergic reaction scaling from mild to severe, inflicting toxin damage or organ damage (this can be discussed elsewhere). The idea is to keep the patients in medical for longer observation to make sure they are fine.

To counteract this allergic reaction, leporazine and dylovene would be useful to immediately stabilize the patient from cryogenic temperatures. Also reduce severity of allergic reaction.

This is purely a suggestion or idea to hinder cryogenic care.

Edited February 12, 2019 by Soultheif96

[Resilynn]

I’m not opposed to looking into solutions to the cryo problem, but I also think we could move forward with these changes as we try to think of one. Honestly I wouldn’t mind if they were removed entirely, but I think we could have that discussion on another thread too. 

There are a ton of issues with medical currently, and I’d like to be sure we don’t get some kind of paralysis trying to fix all of it that prevents us from fixing any of it. 

Edited February 12, 2019 by Resilynn

[Carver]

Nerfs that don't actually impact the chemical ability to heal? Good, can wholeheartedly agree with each and every one of these. Though I hope the painkiller and alcohol 'synergy' isn't too extreme on the liver damage, I do love a little of the pills n liquor Max Payne experience.

[RayGray]

Dex plus - you get a deep cut treated, YOU ARE NEARSIGHTED. the only one I'd vote against.

 

Dex Plus is the sci fi element of this game. Not the aliens.

Dex Plus is shit OP, that I agree. But we dilute it now to play around it. Who you are gonna oxygenate? Most often, people who can't breathe and/or people without a lot of blood.

^^^ Which brings me to the military and quasi-military, those end up without a ton of blood the most in a normal scenario, no? And they need to see what they are shooting at after more than one scrape. XD Otherwise modern medicine is better than sci fi medicine that's supposed to be viable.

I'd make Dex+ cause dizziness and possibly collapses due to oxy high?..

 

Also, on a reply above - Peri doesn't fix *ruptured* organs, those still need surgery. I miss the olden days when Peri had to be administered into the cut open seriously dmged organ through the dropper to fix it, though.

[Resilynn]

21 minutes ago, RayGray said:

Dex plus - you get a deep cut treated, YOU ARE NEARSIGHTED. the only one I'd vote against.

 

Dex Plus is the sci fi element of this game. Not the aliens.

Dex Plus is shit OP, that I agree. But we dilute it now to play around it. Who you are gonna oxygenate? Most often, people who can't breathe and/or people without a lot of blood.

^^^ Which brings me to the military and quasi-military, those end up without a ton of blood the most in a normal scenario, no? And they need to see what they are shooting at after more than one scrape. XD Otherwise modern medicine is better than sci fi medicine that's supposed to be viable.

I'd make Dex+ cause dizziness and possibly collapses due to oxy high?..

 

Also, on a reply above - Peri doesn't fix *ruptured* organs, those still need surgery. I miss the olden days when Peri had to be administered into the cut open seriously dmged organ through the dropper to fix it, though.

Peridaxon fixes ruptured organs.

the whole idea of these changes is exactly to keep people from rushing back into combat, so I’m not sure why you’d cite needing to see what you’re shooting at as a reason to change the dex plus side effect. 

[VTCobaltblood]

Interesting. I'd testmerge for a week to see how it goes. Though I can see the bicardine effect be really, really, really fucking annoying.

Edited February 15, 2019 by VTCobaltblood

[Lady Fowl]

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/6059

Gonna move this to projects section, 

[BurgerBB]

tbh im a bit in denial that this is being accepted by the community considering all my suggestions to changing chemistry in the past that are significantly more forgiving and reasonable while this one is quite the opposite. i have a very strong feeling that once this is implemented, people are going to complain hard and strong, and very rightfully. 

So what I'm reading is that bicaridine gives you the MONKEYLIKE flag which prevents you from using pretty much 90% of things as long as it's in your system. Unironically it would make a good stun/sleep mix since it literally prevents you from using guns, weapons, and tools while it is in your system full stop.

Also for dermaline, every 0.4 seconds, the amount of brute damage you take will be increased by 240% until it is out of your system. What is probably intended is that you're meant to take 2.3% more damage per unit metabolized, but still that's pretty strong.

For dexalin plus, you have a 10% chance to go near-sighted every 0.4 seconds and a 70% chance to take ~1 eye damage every 0.4 seconds when the chemical is in your system. Ironically, the way it is coded will make it so that it literally cures near-sightedness when dexalin plus finishes metabolising.

Peridaxon now causes hallucinations at absolutely incredible strength. Like it gives you 85 hallos per internal organ healed per 0.4 seconds. This is probably unintentional as well but if you take like 1u of the stuff i think you'll have like 100 seconds of super-strength hallucinations after everything is calculated.

Tramadol was buffed. It has a SUPER slow metabolism rate and also gives you 30% damage resistance to brute on top of the already existing 80 pain resistance. It can also give you muscle spasms at high doses when you withdrawl. For some reason you vomit at the end when it's done metabolizing, so this would make for an absolutely excellent stun meme weapon if you give someone a cigarette with tramadol in it.

Oxycodone is the same as above but amplified. 

 

[Scheveningen]

Chemical cigarette synergy was removed entirely. You can't abuse dexalin plus or virtually any other chemical with it anymore.

[Resilynn]

2 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

Chemical cigarette synergy was removed entirely. You can't abuse dexalin plus or virtually any other chemical with it anymore.

Yes you can.

 

Correction: Unless it was changed within the last 3 days, yes you can.  A cigarette 1 part bicaridine, 1 part dex plus, and 1 part peridaxon will keep you alive indefinitely in space without rupturing your lungs.

Edited February 16, 2019 by Resilynn

[SatinsPristOTD]

I'm all for drugs having side effects. I love it. I was only against KeloDerm being removed on the basis that drug synergy was being ignored.

Kinda excited to see this happen. It makes Medical less braindead. Imagine having a reaction to Bicardine. We could ACTUALLY use the allergy section of the medical note format!

[VTCobaltblood]

With how it's implemented in the PR, this is extremely brutal to merge in its current state, and much worse than what Resi suggested.

[Scheveningen]

2 hours ago, Resilynn said:

Yes you can.

 

Correction: Unless it was changed within the last 3 days, yes you can.  A cigarette 1 part bicaridine, 1 part dex plus, and 1 part peridaxon will keep you alive indefinitely in space without rupturing your lungs.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4220 No, actually, this is the way it's been roughly a year now. Smoked reagents are applied periodically rather than instantaneously, meaning you will likely accrue 55 brain damage, pass out and have almost every trauma in the game if you foolishly step into a vacuum with a lit cigarette containing the above chemicals.

Stepping into space with a lit cigarette filled with all the three mentioned chemicals will not guarantee your survival. Far from it, in fact, as stepping into space without an oxygen source will give you 55 brain damage, a lot of traumas and otherwise spell death for you, because you will be unconscious within 20 seconds. Inhaling reagents from cigarettes from the syndicate tricordarzine pack appeared to only regenerate roughly a 1/3rd of the typical brute damage it would heal every tick, while also consuming the same amount of reagents! Contrast this to direct injection of tricordrazine, and suddenly we have a problem with efficiency.

Given the rule of thirds seems to be applying here, dexalin plus, peridaxon and bicaridine's healrate is only working with 33% efficiency, then slash it down to the fact that it is once again only 1/3rds effective with its material consumption compared to that of raw injections, now we have a statistical effectiveness of only 11%. Ergo, it's 89% stupid of a method compared to that of injections. So... why would you ever smoke medical reagents, compared to just injecting it raw?

Well, I don't know. People do suboptimal things all the time. And if you look at it right, it often gets people killed.

Here's a video as well of me going through some of the testing as I comprehensively did to hit all the marks mentioned in my post here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KqQsZL8FOI

Anyway, with those false assertions disproven and out of the way: I'm going to have to concur with Burger here. Some of the numbers are absolutely overtuned and create such negative consequences that are not only painfully obvious but are tuned in favor of keeping people out of the round or amplifying their vulnerability to get killed even harder (by proxy of weaponizing... beneficial chemicals, ironically enough).

I don't think "how can I abuse this to commit traitorous malpractice" was considered in the implementation of the changes in the PR, which is ample cause for alarm. The people who have a tendency to get creative with their chemical mixes on the odd chance they get traitor in R&D (i.e., me, because I'm presently coming up with different min-maxed concoctions all the time and lament not being able to use them) probably do not need more incentive and 'easy' ways to exploit weaknesses in chemicals to seriously murder people.

You could mix arithrazine and dermaline with a syringe stab or even with a syringe gun to seriously set-up a two-shot to someone by aiming at their head with a plasteel butterfly knife. Or with a plasteel spear, you could turn a two-shot into a definitive one-shot. If you wanted to carry a spear on your back, I suppose.

Some of the other balance issues have already been covered by Burger, but some of this either direly needs to go back to the drawing board or permanently shelved if there can't be reasonable solutions to the matter of medical chemicals being strong.

You cannot be equally concerned about medical chemicals being too strong without also considering that people would rather be back in the round without having to spend another hour in medbay having to painRP for the entire slog of the duration as they do nothing and black in and out, the rest of their round hinging entirely on the competency of the players in medbay.

Edited February 16, 2019 by Scheveningen

[Resilynn]

I mean, essay aside, I still use rescue cigarettes and they still work. I did an appendectomy in space with a rescue cigarette on lowpop not 4 months ago  thank you for explaining that all, though  

 

These changes were were designed to ensure people wouldn’t have to stay in medical.  Which of these would demand constant medical attention?  At the most, we would be handing off a pair of glasses and some paracetamol before sending someone on their way.  If you read the initial post, I mention using the bar, library, and holodeck as places to relax for recovery, which should take around ten minutes per drug and enable plenty of rp while simply disabling the ability to jump back into combat *easily*.  Combat should still be doable for all of these.

 

I welcome someone trying to figure out how to use these changes as traitor items. Creativity should be rewarded. Using Peridaxon as a pain crit would be effective, but still less powerful than just using chloral hydrate or half the poisons. 

[Resilynn]

34 minutes ago, VTCobaltblood said:

With how it's implemented in the PR, this is extremely brutal to merge in its current state, and much worse than what Resi suggested.

Agreed. 

[Scheveningen]

9 minutes ago, Resilynn said:

These changes were were designed to ensure people wouldn’t have to stay in medical.  Which of these would demand constant medical attention?

Short of not being able to pick up items or do virtually anything while bicaridine is in your system?

Dexalin plus having a chance to render you near-sighted with each tick (!!!), which is a very serious disability more-in with the aspect of how important vision radius is in this game? How about when they start affecting inhalers?

Peridaxon giving you incredible hallucinations (value of 85 (!!!)) and thus turning most characters into an unstable, screaming nut-case?

The two affected painkillers also may create muscle spasm problems when off a dose of either. They become addictive and rather debilitating as the round goes on, ergo, it becomes rather taxing on medical's resources to treat that. Unless medical's then-and-there policy is to throw the would-be junkie out and tell them to just deal with it when the onset dependance starts to take its toll. Then it's that one person's problem.

Personally, I'll start slapping people ICly if these changes go through for daring to use those chemicals over the cryo cell mixes which have no such downsides.

Edited February 16, 2019 by Scheveningen

[Resilynn]

Drago’s code is more extreme than what I drafted here. I agree we should stick to what I’ve drafted. 

[BurgerBB]

Tbh even what was drafted is a little extreme. The side effects themselves seem arbitrary and quite strange compared to other coderbases.

If you're going to nerf chemicals, nerf the metabolism rate or strength of the chemical. Adding side effects just overcomplicates medical even more.