Discussing brainmed and the "bleedout" meta

[Scheveningen]

"sO tHe MeTa HaS sEtTleD" opener aside, not particularly interested on going on a long diatribe about the various rounds I've experienced as citation for why bleeding out can be a problem for roleplay.

So, I want to actually open this with: I have no issue with the concept of bleeding to death. It is a thing that should happen, for the most part, despite its generally anticlimactic nature of a death and its congruence as one of the most common forms of death with the brainmed version we have right now. It is an interesting and semi realistic form of sustaining damage and then subsequently dying from said wounds.

However, (as you expected), I feel it is far too easy to bleed out and die to the rate at which bleedout occurs, and how exponentially deadly the possibility of bleeding out gets as your character gets more wounds opened up. Naturally, it will always be more effective in the short term to just target the head and either cut it off or deal enough lethal brain damage that this sort of thing is not an inherent problem that anyone should necessarily care about. But it is also very viable to be incredibly lazy and just shoot a non-IPC up with a bunch of bullets while focusing on no particular part of the body in particular, and you will still actually kill someone rather fast because the combination of pain, knockout and crippled limbs making it nearly impossible for one character who is rather wounded to drag their royally kicked ass to the medical bay, since it is far more likely they will reach the medical bay by themselves when the server inevitably OOMs before a round can normally conclude.

In essence, I mostly believe "bleedout meta" is a bit overtuned and potentially unhealthy for the game. Sure, it's great that characters can die and all, but the way bleeding out works is that it is practically a guarantee of death if you're in a specific role that is expected to frontline against whatever threat exists, whether it is merc or security officer or whatever - because the moment cult swords or bullets or spears come into play, you might kill the other guy, but omae wa mou shindeiru as well.

So why is it overtuned? Primarily because, well let's just flat out accept this: people die when they are killed, and dead characters don't roleplay nor directly generate roleplay, unlike living ones. A character that has to be hospitalized due to their injuries and cannot necessarily return to their work can still generate roleplay, though there is certainly a number of people who would rather die than be unable to be thrown back into the meatgrinder again. Of course, not being able to be given this option of taking a backstage role at all as the same character after being defeated is primarily the problem I'm getting at here. At present, bleedout meta views the inherent vessel that is a living character as extremely dispensible. It is an uncaring yet just system, it gives and takes from everyone equally. More crudely it takes an equally large sized shit on anyone and everyone who doesn't play a robot given the same situation.

Most unexpectedly, this is far more brutal for the antagonist than it is for anyone else, since you can consider yourself pretty much fucked if you are playing a character that just committed terrorism against mostly innocent people. You either play to die or be sorely disappointed when you die not on your own terms. Again, since "bleeding out and taking too much brain damage to survive" is the most common form of death that people run across with their risky associated playstyles, playing antag is extremely rough right now when you don't have iron (or equivalent substitute) pills in your pocket all the time.

Anyway, those are my points. I have literally no idea how to solve this issue entirely save for one small thing which would only address a small facet of the problem: Bleeding out in two body parts shouldn't double bleed out rate, just increase it by 20-25% or something, so that you don't go from "alive" to "immediately dead" in 5 seconds because someone got a viscerator grenade off on you. Which, by the way, are busted as fuck at killing single characters without a melee weapon that can oneshot them. 

Feedback and ideas are welcome. I've been perpetually at a loss lately with brainmed: I personally love it but also hate it a lot. It is something I appreciate as a workable system and yet it has some awful quirks sometimes that make surviving in this game more of a chore than it is a sort of "edge of your seat tension" thing.

[Cnaym]

9 minutes ago, Scheveningen said:

I feel it is far too easy to bleed out and die to the rate at which bleedout occurs

It seems to go against the RP concept to have low to no knockout and a high chance of a quick death. I would also prefer to have a ton more slow down or stun and be able to interact and RP with others instead. Going for the other direction of making the bleedout almost impossible but just having you collapse on the floor and requirering aid would be a good solution imho.

The bleeding out of multiple body parts is the current meta if you want to quickly get rid of someone yeah. Death should be a little easier to control for antags, since it can otherwhise happen that you simply run out of officers to fight. The other side of this is happened just this round. The antag died before having any interaction with crew, which made a shit ton of pointless bombings lack any reasoning or story. The chance to RP with antags after capturing them was a ton better in the past and I hope we can return to that.

My biggest issue with this is however that weapons feel really random. Your revolver can one shot someone or they take multiple rounds to the face and survive it. A bit more consistency and "punch" would do wonders for most weapons we have. A laser rifle for example does not need to kill anyone quickly, if the pain would just make you scream out in agony, maybe drop items etc.

The chance to take more hits before dying, but also requirering aid from teammates could move us towards more fun rounds of heist or mercs. We used to have  a ton more engagements and interactions per round simply on the basis that not everyone died after a couple of bullets. Lately I have not seen anyone get brigged or freed from the brig, since the usual route for both sides seems to end in the morgue now.

[WickedCybs]

There were complaints about brainmed making people too survivable before, right? Changed to this. I don't disagree that this "meta" is annoying, though to an extent I don't really think antags or sec in general are really angling to try and specifically kill people through it. At the moment, a lethal laser volley is always going to put you under or near the brain damage threshold (Lower than 85% blood oxy) by evaporating the blood inside you. Or if ballistics/sharp things are used, arterial bleeding is common, punishing and an almost near instant round ender without any open wounds if you don't have a medical team at your back. Your brain ticks down, at 49% you tend to become unconscious and then its over from there. It's unavoidable and weapons are just that powerful. 

I am not sure how a change could be made to reduce its impact. Perhaps lowering the brain damage threshold slightly when it comes to blood oxygenation. Maybe arterial bleeding could be made a bit weaker (though apparently it was inconsequential before and buffed). Don't personally think survivable people makes for bad gameplay but many do get annoyed at how often a person could survive under brainmed under very dangerous conditions.

Do want to say that overall brainmed is a fun addition to me and I am not a fan of pointmed.

[KingOfThePing]

Weapons are deadly, bleeding out can happen fast. Taking fights is a risk. I dont see the problem 

[Hendricks]

I concur with King. It should be this deadly. Every firefight should be life or death. 

[TrickingTrapster]

I agree with Schev. Especially since the removal of onstation cloning. The point of joining here is to RP. You can't RP when your character is dead. Cloning used to be a way of getting characters back for RP, even if it was abused to shit and back to validhunt antags. You can't tell someone to just 'play another character', mental states don't work like that. If I join a game to play my bartender and some random bullet from an antag firefight flies in and hits, kills my character, and prevents me from playing, I can't just switch to another character. I logged on to play a specific character, not all of them. Death should be a thing but it should not be a punishment for playing certain roles or for literally being in a certain antag round. I find all this to stem from a mentality I've seen creep up over the time I've been a part of the server: The apparent 'need' for something called 'realism'. Which never seems to be balanced with both viability as a game mechanic or the fun factor, in my opinion. For example, I doubt the idea was had that in real life, you talk in real time, as opposed to having to type out the whole sentence first. So bleeding out and you want to say things, and you're almost done typing but OOPS unconscious and your entire message was lost because you pressed enter. Stuff like that is also super infuriating to me and I think stuff like that should be taken into account when developing systems like this. People should not need to take fast-typing lessons to play antag or security. Less death in this game is a good thing, not a bad thing because 'muh realism'.

[Scheveningen]

RE: Cloning, I'm glad it is gone. It had other questions of game balance and otherwise taking the consequence out of people being murdered. And lore I guess but that's not as consequential as the game being sensible and fun at the same time. Death is very serious now - but it is often annoying when it comes too easily not because of believability but how gamey bleedout meta can be. It is very possible to slow down the rate of bleeding out and etc as I mentioned in my initial post, and likewise to put the hammer down on exponential bleeding events.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/9592 I will say this PR in its test phase was pretty damn good at lowering projectile lethality, though I feel it doesn't do enough (what I mean is out of scope for the PR anyway) since armor is still one-dimensionally shitty - not that it is anyone's fault that it is shitty, armor is just designed shitty. It's just how it is. As soon as it gets merged the inner wroth inside me will be satisfied.

[MattAtlas]

This is a problem with no solutions. It's easy to say "It should be less X" but until someone can come up with a way to do it with a PR to match, it's going to stay as fiction in a forum thread or an angry discord rant, simply because you're going to have to swing towards one way or the other. And if we swing to the way you're saying, we'll get this kind of thread, again, but from the other side.

Also, it's impossible to do something that only affects a specific scenario, Everything you change with the medical system will affect basically every situation in this game. This is why antags are handicapped by nerfs aimed at security - because every situation you can think of has an exact equivalent on the "other side", so to speak.

Once I'm done with Goonchat, I'll look into testing out and making bleeding less lethal, and perhaps making laser rifles less instantly punishing, along with looking into giving antagonists a way to replenish their lost blood. Organ damage is another tough nut to crack that I haven't the slightest clue to solve, anyway. The reason I've hesitated for so long is not only burnout but also because making excessive changes all at once is kind of bad from my point of view, and awkward.

Edited August 10, 2020 by MattAtlas

[CampinKiller]

I do think that the blood oxy level at which brain damage occurs should be lower. 85% is like 99/65, which is definitely low, but not going to kill you. My blood pressure irl tends low anyway, and I've been dehydrated before and had a BP of like 85/39, which isn't good, but it wasn't causing me to die either.

[Myazaki]

56 minutes ago, CampinKiller said:

I do think that the blood oxy level at which brain damage occurs should be lower. 85% is like 99/65, which is definitely low, but not going to kill you. My blood pressure irl tends low anyway, and I've been dehydrated before and had a BP of like 85/39, which isn't good, but it wasn't causing me to die either.

You take brain damage at 85% blood, but the damage is capped at 4 from this effect.

[The7thLain]

I think that the bleedout meta is fine and the oxygenation system we have atm is workable, however, the lethality of lasers should be addressed. A single shot from a laser rifle to the chest should not take away like 15% of your blood oxy and pop your lungs, and in my experience as a medplayer, it very well can. Brainmed is built around oxydep and the mechanics surrounding it, so I do not think that a bleedout meta will ever go away entirely. I am neutral on my thoughts for the "meta" as a whole, but I agree with the sentiments in this thread about some weapons, namely lasers, needing to be tweaked some in terms of the amount of blood they remove and potential organ damage they can deal, even through armor.

[CampinKiller]

19 hours ago, Myazaki said:

You take brain damage at 85% blood, but the damage is capped at 4 from this effect.

I had someone at 50% brain activity from ~80% blood oxy. Their only wounds were a fracture and some blood loss, but no internal

[Playbahnosh]

"You should expect to die at any time without any reason" is not a valid thing on a HRP server like Aurora. Sure, I would expect to be randomly gibbed out of the blue on a no-RP meta server, but definitely not here. People come here because they want some semblance of realism and narrative in their game, and people like me actually enjoy RP-ing medical stuff, injuries, etc. But that needs players in medical who actually want to RP at all, and not just silently jab you with needles or yeet you on the OR table without as much as a word. Bedside manner is part of RP!

And that brings me to my main reason: the RP and SS13's actual gameplay. Yes, realistically people can die instantly, from pain/shock, and bleed out in seconds if the wounds are dire enough. But on a HRP server like this, instant death from a shot that wasn't even meant for you just kills RP. Sure, you can just file these away as "collateral damage, cope!", etc, but that's not a valid reason. By just the raw mechanics of the game, even if medical can be made aware of the injury, by the time they can respon and actually start to stabilize someone, they are long dead. Hell, with the current changes, people would die half the time even if they got hurt in the middle of Medbay, let alone a clumsy miner out on the 'roid. RP-ing fights, injuries and medical stuff is a huge part of this game, and we gotta at least give people a chance to be saved and RP. I'm not saying death should be made impossible, but instant death or migh-as-well-be-instant omae wa mo shindeiru type deaths should be reduced. Again, I (and I think most people) don't mind being taken out of the game and spend time in medbay while the docs desperately trying patch me up, if that means my injury results in quality RP and I can take part in it. As it's been said, dead bodies don't spark nearly as much RP as someone teetering on the brink, and with a great save from medical you can even come back and play the person with the near-death experience.

In short, instead of instant death change it to knockouts and debilitating injuries, make medical work for their pay, spark RP and let them feel horrible when they lose a patient as opposed to "well brainmed is brainmed, nothing to do, you ded".

[WickedCybs]

I find that is how the current iteration of brainmed already works. People take a long time to die. "Instant death" only happens if someone is specifically trying to kill you, usually with attacks to the head. Medical is extremely powerful and only fails to save an individual if they're stretched thin with a mass-casualty incident or lack staff (principally a chemist, surgeon and to a far lesser extent, paramedic). Recent changes that have made brain decay less punishing have also had people surviving a lot more than they have did before. Lasers are also far less lethal than before, only dealing damage without rupturing lungs on every hit now, causing pain and melting blood to lesser extent.

Medical is a very mechanics heavy job, like engineering. People focus on what has to be done to save someone a lot, and that's why I think roleplay tends to just not surface a lot. Becomes routine. On the victim's parts, they usually want to get out ASAP as there's other things they want to do and medical roleplay is far from their minds. Adding afflictions that stay with someone even after their entire skeleton shatters and they are brought from 5% brain activity back to one hundred (I honestly see this a lot.) would just be massively unpopular, as evidenced by the brain traumas. Sounds cool, can be annoying. Being in medical is a bad thing would be the mindset. Health doll green? It's back to engineering or shooting raiders. Even medical players feed into this. Getting chased out after the green scanning machine says you are 100% okay or told you may "stay" while the Doctor goes back to lobby sitting while leaving you alone happens more than a little bit.

I really do enjoy where brainmed is currently at. As for the roleplay situation, people need to be the change they want to be in my opinion.

[Lordnesh]

50 minutes ago, WickedCybs said:

Medical is extremely powerful and only fails to save an individual if they're stretched thin with a mass-casualty incident or lack staff (principally a chemist, surgeon and to a far lesser extent, paramedic).

This has been my experience with one exception. The other reason people tend to die is when medical can't get to someone in time. Sometimes people die through no fault of theirs, but sometimes they do. Sometimes they stop and chat with the crazy cultist when they should be running. Sometimes an antag dies because ERT curbstomps them to death while they're on the ground. Death isn't inherently the end of roleplay. Sometimes it's a turning point in a narrative. Your death only means nothing when you mean nothing to everyone. And chances are, if you end up doing on my surgery table, you meant something to me. Deaths always impact my character, shakes them out of their usually devil may care attitude. Especially avoidable deaths.

TL:DR turn on your suit sensors and run faster next time.

Edited October 1, 2020 by Lordnesh

[Playbahnosh]

15 minutes ago, WickedCybs said:

People focus on what has to be done to save someone a lot, and that's why I think roleplay tends to just not surface a lot.

And that's totally fine and in-character when you are faced with a triage situation where lives are in immediate danger. Not so much with a simple runny nose or a broken leg.

Yes, medical can be a really frustrating role to play. But that doesn't mean you're allowed to half-ass it. I understand, that the medical role is very mechanics heavy and has the learning curve of a brick wall, even moreso than other roles. That's compounded by spessmans' clunky controls and lag, and as a doctor, you often fight the interface more than the injuries of your patient. Add to that, that medical is a very 0/1 role that is largely dependent on the gamemode. With action modes, medical comes front and center to save lives and patch people up, while in Extended they usually have absolutely nothing to do barring someone screwing up royally in engineering or a miner taking a thumble and such. I played medical a LOT, and it's always the same story. It's okay in the first 10 or so minutes while you set everything up in the ER and if you have a chemist, they are done with the usuals. But after that, it's just hurry up and wait. That's why medical is usually understaffed (or empty) on Extendo and other "slower" modes. People only jump into medical when they know shit's gonna go down and they get to play the hero. Quite understandable, you don't go to play games to get bored off your ass. But that's just how the medical profession is, it's rarely ever fun or exciting, and when it is, you don't get to enjoy it much because you are busy saving people's lives. People, who rarely even throw you a "thanks doc". 

Medical is a very unrewarding and thankless role most of the time (quite like in real life), where even when people show up, they mostly have the mentality of "fix me up and lemme go already, I have fun to have elsewere!". Even if, as a doctor, you try your damndest to initiate some RP, that pisses them off even more, because they see it as you wasting their time. Not once have I been LOOC'd to hurry the fuck up, or had literally dying patients crawl on the OR table and put the anesthetic on themselves just to get it over with. And after a very long, major surgery, they immediately jump up and run out. Every other role is severely bwoink'd when you go full meta/powergame, except this one, because as you mentioned, a lot of people see medical as "the (un)necessary evil". True, the medbay is the only place on the station where people never (or rarely ever) go on their own volition, but IMHO that doesn't mean you get to ruin the RP, especially on a HRP server. I had patients rolled in all the time in critical condition, with severe injuries (but fully conscious), and they just lie there, silently. Even when the game is screaming at them in huge red texts that they are in unimaginable pain. Some of them quite literally AFK and go do something else while their characters are put back into "working order", and it's very sad and demeaning to their attending. It's really hard to force from the player side, because how would you justify ahelping someone who just wants to go back to playing the game they joined for. Hell, I had people ahelping me for taking too long fixing their popped lungs or broken spines, etc.

But the same thing goes for some doctors, who just simply go through the motions. I roll in as a patient, screaming and writhing in pain with serious injuries, and the doctor literally yells at me to "shut up!", then start injecting me with god knows what, dragging me on the floor, throwing me into scanners then yeet me on the OR table without as much as a word. When I questioned them in LOOC, they got angry because my pain/injury RP annoyed them. I mean, sure, you can't expect incredible RP from every doctor, but this (or versions of it to some degree or another) happens with alarming frequency sometimes. If nothing else, people should give it at least some effort.

I know very few people actually likes RP-ing medical on either end, but given this supposed to be a HRP server, at least some degree of medical RP should be enforced I think. Especially with all the updates and tweaks to medical, it's sad to see it go to waste and used as a glorified health vending machine, from both sides.

[Scheveningen]

It's a fucking joke that certain medicine can be called a stabilizer when no chemical in the game even exists that can prevent what is otherwise the sole indicator of life: brain death. If an expensive chemical that exists that can keep brain damage from accruing due to [insert millions of reasons here] it would solve so many problems. Why is this game treated like Escape from Tarkov with how dumb the health system is right now? You have to not only throw so much medicine at one person who is seriously injured but you also have to keep tabs on things that the developers have deliberately removed the ability to be aware of in real-time since the health analyzers are almost useless and many medicinals have been massively nerfed before brainmed was even a thing.

Don't play medical if you want to have fun in this game. All you'll get is heightened blood pressure from trying super hard to keep others in the round, and everyone has their limits.

[Lmwevil]

I think medical is fine right now and quite enjoy it. Lethality is in a good place

[WickedCybs]

4 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

It's a fucking joke that certain medicine can be called a stabilizer when no chemical in the game even exists that can prevent what is otherwise the sole indicator of life: brain death. If an expensive chemical that exists that can keep brain damage from accruing due to [insert millions of reasons here] it would solve so many problems. Why is this game treated like Escape from Tarkov with how dumb the health system is right now? You have to not only throw so much medicine at one person who is seriously injured but you also have to keep tabs on things that the developers have deliberately removed the ability to be aware of in real-time since the health analyzers are almost useless and many medicinals have been massively nerfed before brainmed was even a thing.

Don't play medical if you want to have fun in this game. All you'll get is heightened blood pressure from trying super hard to keep others in the round, and everyone has their limits.

Inaprovaline is the main stabilizer, that is used to reduce brain decay and just massively boost survivability in general, plus every machine is stocked with it. Medical personnel combine this with dexalin+ (need an actual chemist to get this, the easy to access dexalin works in a pinch though but not as well) to get oxygenation at a level where the brain doesn't decay (85% and above) or just at a far slower rate, and then apply alkysine (also need a chemist) to mend the brain. With just these three chemicals combined and a blood or saline drip, you can save virtually anyone that makes it into the department. Freezing the process if it really can't be handled involves the use of a stasis bag. I'll note that even if you lack the alksyine and dexalin+, you can again effectively stop brain decay at least by just ensuring that magic number gets to 85% or above.

Scanners are also very much useful, as they tell you exactly how much brain activity a person has (important), the blood oxygenation (very important as medical aims to get it up to at least 85% as I mentioned before), how much of each chemicals is in the bloodstream and damage types with a handy bolded red for active bleeding zones. Only thing they can't is pinpoint arterial locations and fracture locations, but that is what the bigger scanner is for. What is lacking that could be useful to see is that the scanners don't show a % amount of blood in the body as you have to approximate this based on blood oxygenation if massive blood loss seems to be the issue.

Seems like a lot, but that is how it is for anyone new to a department. A lot of new medical players quickly learn the key aspects, and then it gets far easier from there to save virtual pixels with the rest of them rather than stress, because in the end it really is not that difficult to keep people alive barring disasters, kill confirms and just not being able to get them to the department in time. People survive a lot more things that would destroy them in pointmed.

Other than that, some concerns from the starting post were addressed at least to a certain extent. Mainly how fast a lack of blood can kill you. I find it pretty generous now myself. I actually stayed conscious for five to eight straight minutes while having an arterial compared to how fast those drained the blood out of a character before.

Edit: I am rather passionate about medical so sorry if this comes across as a forceful.

Edited October 2, 2020 by WickedCybs
extra

[MattAtlas]

6 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

It's a fucking joke that certain medicine can be called a stabilizer when no chemical in the game even exists that can prevent what is otherwise the sole indicator of life: brain death. If an expensive chemical that exists that can keep brain damage from accruing due to [insert millions of reasons here] it would solve so many problems. Why is this game treated like Escape from Tarkov with how dumb the health system is right now? You have to not only throw so much medicine at one person who is seriously injured but you also have to keep tabs on things that the developers have deliberately removed the ability to be aware of in real-time since the health analyzers are almost useless and many medicinals have been massively nerfed before brainmed was even a thing.

Don't play medical if you want to have fun in this game. All you'll get is heightened blood pressure from trying super hard to keep others in the round, and everyone has their limits.

This post makes me question if you've ever actually played medical because it's so absolutely wrong in so many aspects it's actually an enigma how you can gleam any of this.

A) Inaprovaline actually slows down brain decay.

B) The most medicine you ever need is inap and dex+. Add saline if they need blood.

C) The health analyzer tells you everything you need (blood pressure and brain activity) except for pinpoint fracture/problem analysis, which is just how it was before.

D) "A lot of medicinals being nerfed" doesn't matter even if it did happen because a significant portion of chemicals was changed in brainmed.

[Valkrae]

Literally just a Defib that can bring someone that's recently had their heart stop back to life.

I don't understand why a futuristic sci-fi space station doesn't have a technology that is readily available in the 21st Century.

[Doc]

3 hours ago, Valkrae said:

Literally just a Defib that can bring someone that's recently had their heart stop back to life.

I don't understand why a futuristic sci-fi space station doesn't have a technology that is readily available in the 21st Century.

Because that technology is not readily available in the 21st century. Defibrillators are used to rectify a number of heart issues, but not a stopped heart. [/firstyearmedstudent]

That said, that's no excuse to not add a sci-fi "resuscitator" or something that does do that.

Edited October 3, 2020 by Doc