What Do You Think of The Biochemist?

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Recently I was successful in having the Virologist job rejiggered into the Biochemist, which is an alternate title of Pharmacist. It operates as a merge of the virologist and chemist role.

Here is the suggestion as it was:

If you've seen the role, played it, or encountered those who played it, I want to know: What do you think? Do you approve of the Biochemist?

[VVipEdout]

Biochemist is by far the best update I've seen since I started playing, and it's incredibly more fun and convenient to have the person on virologist duty be able to do something useful in chemistry when they're not needed or viceversa. The only criticism I could make is how inconvenient it is to have isolation all the way in the sublevel and the fact the only easy access to the virus storage either involves climbing on top of a table or deconstructing it. Some parts of virology can be somewhat cramped, too; it's possible to get stuck in storage if you're not clever about moving the crates. Other than that, merging virologist and chemist has been nothing but a good decision.

[TheSleepyCatmom]

I still don't enjoy the fact that a biochemist is a virologist and a chemist. That's now how it works now, that isn't how it worked forty years ago, and that's likely not how it works four hundred years in the future. Regardless of how it was as a gameplay role, I can understand if they were held to a knowledge critique like nurse and surgeon are as alt-titles. But they're not, as Biochemists seem to be able to do both virology and general chemicals as a master of both fields, where as biochemistry is neither of them. All in all, while the change I think could be better executed, I didn't enjoy it because of this.

[Chada1]

I'm a big fan. It's terrible to never have a Virologist, and this gives Chemists something to do when they've already mixed all the Chemicals medical needs. Overall, it's a very fun addition.

4 hours ago, TheSleepyCatmom said:

I still don't enjoy the fact that a biochemist is a virologist and a chemist. That's now how it works now, that isn't how it worked forty years ago, and that's likely not how it works four hundred years in the future. Regardless of how it was as a gameplay role, I can understand if they were held to a knowledge critique like nurse and surgeon are as alt-titles. But they're not, as Biochemists seem to be able to do both virology and general chemicals as a master of both fields, where as biochemistry is neither of them. All in all, while the change I think could be better executed, I didn't enjoy it because of this.

I agree with this, if I had any advice, it's to have the Biochemist limited to Basic and Standard Chemistry and have Advanced limited to the Pharmacist, and have Pharmacist unable to do Virology as well ICly as the Biochemist. I think that'd be a good compromise, but I don't know how we would enforce it.

[TheSleepyCatmom]

Chemistry is not a related field to Virology. They require degrees with different fields of study entirely. Biochemists should have basic knowledge of chemistry (Basic medication) and a knowledge of how to /study/ Virology and do everything in the department. Pharmacists should know how to create advanced drugs (Up to advanced medications and specialist ones), and have minimal knowledge of Virology. An Exception would be CMOs who know both Virology and Chemistry, and they could do either.

 

I just believe it needs a rename if people want to play it like they do now. Something like 'Viro-Chemist', which is literal but also not an unrelated field as it's not a field of study. :shrug:

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

There are tangential relationships between pharmacy and virology studies. In a divergent timeline it is entirely possible for it to be a field of study unto itself - fields of study are entirely made and constructed by people. It is not a hard 1:1, but tangential relationships are really all we need as the baseline for science fiction roleplaying games, because gameplay carries an equal, if not greater, importance to a role than the lore behind it.

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/pharmacist-526052
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3577178/

We can still adjust the specifics of the role to better suit gameplay flow and the relationships between pharmacists and biochemists. Pharmacist remains for chemistry mains who do not want to do the business of virology. It allows them to be specialized and not have to worry about such a huge swath of responsibilities. But if there is interest in making them more specialized than the biochemist in terms of chemistry production, we could look into it? There is not really an intuitive way to categorize the chemistry recipes into 'basic' 'advanced' and 'specialized' intuitively since the wiki page for chemicals is suuuuper long. The existing model we have is the division of surgery types, which are (hopefully) intuitive in how the far fewer items are organized. It's been about 2 months now since I had to study the surgery steps but how they were set up I think I can still catagorize them decently

You got your simple surgery of amputations

You got your next level of bone repair

You got your next level of organ repair

Then you got your specialized brain and cataract surgery.

Trying to remember what chemicals I am allowed to make if we divide them up would be a nightmare

Edited March 28, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[TheSleepyCatmom]

It's already categorized in the way that I mentioned, Jackboot.

 

Basic - Standard - Advanced - Specialist, then Psych and so on.

Edited March 28, 2019 by TheSleepyCatmom
Edited for clarity.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I know. I am well aware. My argument was not intended to be that there was a wild chaos on the guide to chemistry page. The argument was intended to say that it's not intuitively organized. You can't muscle memory the relationship between the 8 standard treatment chemicals and the 4 basic treatments and the 7 advanced treatments and the 9 specialized treatments. Ethylredoxrazine requires only simple compounds (if you consider dyvolene and inaprovaline basic compounds given their proliferation throughout medical) and it's under specialized, whereas Tricord, a very effective medicine, in healing all traumas, is under basic. What is the difference between basic and standard? Then there are the anti microbials. Are they basic, standard, advanced, or specialized?  What about the painkillers/sedatives? Psychiatric medicine? Performance enhancers? Narcotics? Poisons? Cleaning agents? Sedatives?

Each of these sections have several subsections. Expecting people to categorize them into effective rules of thumb is an unreasonable goalpost to put forth. For the sake of gameplay, the distinctions between the chemistry-main of the pharmacist and the wider responsibilities of the virologist are divided as that: whether or not a person wants to focus on being a chemistry main exclusively, or do both. Having played the job myself, I can tell you that the split responsibility in terms of workload is itself a good throttle on the mastery of the biochemists.

Edited March 28, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[TheSleepyCatmom]

Not particularly. All of those are specialized fields of medication, and would require time to learn. Not everyone is required to learn each and every one of them. Also a not all chemical reactions react the same way. Medications react in separate ways when interacting with eachother. Which is why, even if Phoron is required for Dexalin, you wouldn't be able to make Dexalin Plus due to a more uncontrolled chemical reaction. But regardless, the argument is an argument for the sake of arguing. I simply disagree with how it is now. It would take effort to make it 'perfect' in my eyes, outside of just renaming it to indicate you want it played this way.

 

'This way' meaning allowing Biochemists to do whatever the heck they want instead of focusing on Virology. Since some people perceive Biochemists as being surgeon-chemists too for some reason, who also know virology. I dunno, just my two cents, I guess.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

The name is important because it does need to instantly put across what the job does. We'll take a crack at a possible tweak of the job's title, though per the original suggestion. We will also see if a clear and well maintained wiki page will clear this up.

[Arrow768]

8 hours ago, ChloralCocktails said:

Biochemist is by far the best update I've seen since I started playing, and it's incredibly more fun and convenient to have the person on virologist duty be able to do something useful in chemistry when they're not needed or viceversa. The only criticism I could make is how inconvenient it is to have isolation all the way in the sublevel and the fact the only easy access to the virus storage either involves climbing on top of a table or deconstructing it. Some parts of virology can be somewhat cramped, too; it's possible to get stuck in storage if you're not clever about moving the crates. Other than that, merging virologist and chemist has been nothing but a good decision.

I believe @ferner (who did the amazing viro lab setup) is already working on a medical update that will consolidate a few areas.

[ferner]

9 hours ago, ChloralCocktails said:

Biochemist is by far the best update I've seen since I started playing, and it's incredibly more fun and convenient to have the person on virologist duty be able to do something useful in chemistry when they're not needed or viceversa. The only criticism I could make is how inconvenient it is to have isolation all the way in the sublevel and the fact the only easy access to the virus storage either involves climbing on top of a table or deconstructing it. Some parts of virology can be somewhat cramped, too; it's possible to get stuck in storage if you're not clever about moving the crates. Other than that, merging virologist and chemist has been nothing but a good decision.

 

10 minutes ago, Arrow768 said:

I believe @ferner (who did the amazing viro lab setup) is already working on a medical update that will consolidate a few areas.

Thank you for the feedback regarding the lab and isolation areas, and yes, a medical update is something I'm actively working on, which take these weaknesses of the current setup into account. Though the virus storage in the main lab should be accessible without deconstructing the table. It's pixel shifted to be in its current position, its "real" location is by the table in front of it.