Thou Not Special Anymore - [Medical Job Changes]

[Triogenix]

3 hours ago, Roostercat said:

surgeons being great at, well ,surgery.

This is the issue. Surgeons are supposed to be a job which fills an incredibly narrow, but required, niche in medical. The wiki job guide for surgeon is about a paragraph, because you can easily sum up their duties and responsibilities that quickly, and adding anything further would simply be filler taken from other pages like the overall guide to surgery. Because of this niche and the lack of real work most of the time, surgeon is the most played medical occupation, but nearly always played in a way where it bridges over to also fulfilling the duties of Physician since there's rarely one. This occupation merge would just be codifying the most popular playstyle in medical that has been present since I first joined and was playing 4 rounds a day in the department.

For that reason, I support it.

[Dreamix]

I don't really play med much, but I am against this, just because I hate to see more jobs getting removed. It makes everything more boring and bland, and removes potential characterization and specialization for characters. Won't really be able to play an ordinary medical doctor who does not know surgery - surgery, uh, which myself I really dislike and find boring, personally.

I am against removing atmos tech as well, for the same reason. And also chemist/pharmacist, since I did see some people argue for removing these as well, and allowing any physicist to make chems, since chemists are kinda rare.

 

Or something like that. I don't really care all that much, but I guess I just wanted to voice my opinion somewhere. Job bloat is bad, but so is abundance of responsibilities or expectations for a given job.

[Boggle08]

Most of the issues that our current system needed to fix seem absent. My only concern is superdoctoring at this point. Merging the two roles together will reduce a large chunk of concrete rules for delegation into just informal etiquette. It'll be less cut and dry when someone is being greedy, and more circumstantial. I think most of the playerbase can be trusted to play fair, but there will always be people that take what they want if there's nothing stopping them.

These changes could be fun to try, but they will lead to issues that'll need policy to address.

Edited August 17, 2022 by Boggle08

[Peppermint]

Still feel it's a problem that exists more in people's heads than reality. The removal of flavour has not benefited the quality of roleplay offered so much as once, and I don't see how further stripping things away makes it better. 

[Faye <3]

2 hours ago, MrGodZilla said:

however, have you considered why first responders are inclined to do general care in the first place?

FRs shouldn't be doing GTR things period. You can, and will be bwoinked for it if someone notices unless literally no one else (physicians, CMO, surgery) can attend the GTR. FRs who do GTR things shouldn't be.

[Carver]

I wouldn't care about people being greedy or anything. The dependence on surgeons can be miserable during low-pop when you only have a physician who isn't allowed to do everything he could to help someone. This is where the reunification truly helps the most, low/dead pop.

As it stands it doesn't currently feel like the different medical roles specialize in different parts of treatment, more that it feels like Medical has RTS unit tiers where the basic troop is the FR, the tier 2 troop is the Physician and the tier 3 troop is the Surgeon who performs well above the rest. The lower the 'tier', the less it feels like they can actually truly do something to help a dying individual - for FR this isn't a huge deal since their niche brings them outside of medical, but for Physicians who dwell in the same realm as the Surgeon, it feels like they're a worse Surgeon in just about every regard when it comes to saving people.

[nonno_anselmo]

I started playing in february 2019 i think and stopped around late 2020 i now very sporadically play due to time constraints. During this time i played only exclusively physician (Owen Barnard) and had much time to reflect on the issue that is being discussed in this thread also thanks to the inputs of medical players with which i was able to interact with at the time.
Inb4: "wow, fuck off none cares about your udnecuated opinion you chairoleplay relay main dingleberry"

I managed to see both the previous surgery superdoctor concept in action aswell as the response to the presented chart. Frabkly oan issue with people superdoctoring as surgeons has always been the fact that a physician's role in the gtr (and trauma physician, when it existed, in the ICU) was never enforced by anyone in the same way a job boundary like that of an engineer doing atmospherics. This implies that anyone doing physician job as a surgeon was always brushed off as "he is a surgeon so the player is more experienced" "he just wanted to help" "medical is a team game" (note: you do not need a team to inject tricordrazine and mortaphenyl) "he would have administered chems in the OR anyways" "it was an emergency".

This leads to:
1a. Players not pointing out to staff when overstepping ensues, thus not being any punishment
1b. This loops back with people taking more freedom
2. The favoring of "customs" over actual "rules"

A physician's role has always been, wilfully or not, nebulous with the general rule being "your job is surgeon without surgery". Normally this implies that the player opts for chemicals, splints, trauma kits, wheelchairs, TLC, painkiller prescription medication and glasses, leaning on a gardener for any healing chemicals. Even making medical mixes inside IV needles and your hypospray. However the aforementioned solutions have never been mentioned as it is not intuitive and not needed when a surgeon is present. There has always been two was of healing: the chemical route and the surgical route. The surgical route having an exclusive on healing bone fractures as it cannot be chemically healed; the chemical route however has always been handicapped by the lack of available tools unlike surgery who has access to their kit right out of the gate and that can only be improved through science laser scalpel variations and upgrades.

Surgeon has always been the no-nonsense, factory medbay role, while physician who is more roleplay focused due to the time constraints of metabolization and a focus on patient wellness beyond the simple physical ability of one.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

All of this implies that the physician relies on a pharmacist or the exploratory chemistry office, this is not the case. A way to help the physician role more desirable and playable is to give it the tools by planting in medbay, inside of safe cabinets, i am talking about  limited (3, bottles as an example) copies of basic healing chemicals. I assure you this will not put pharmacists out of their job. Diluting and sharing ground painkillers and handmaking tricord has always been a thing experienced physicians players should be taught to do in the absence of a pharmacist. Giving physicians the tools to actually treat patients, at least through an expansion of the medical vending machine and cabinets would definetly make the role more desirable as it always had to be much much much much more resourceful than a surgeon or a FR who have their full set of tools already decked out in their office. These cabinets could even be physician-locked for that exact purpose. i would go as far as giving hypodermic needles only to first responders and physicians and removing the possibility to do any surgery ever from the physician role.

This very thing, the whole medicine cabinet proposal, has been proposed and garnered a lot of support from medical players in this very tread.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nothing has been done in the past years to enforce or define a physician role, this treatment has only been reserved for the surgeon role and although it should've trickled down to the physician as well it has not had the impact everyone was hoping or expecting although i did see a sensible impact at the time. This is likely going to horseshoe back in a couple years when people want more diversity in their medical department, I can only hope the player count will be enough to entice this need.

Roostercat's prediction is, speaking from (not valuable) experience, likely to become true as the flow of injuried is never enough to warrant a steady line of work that can satisfy gameplay and will lead to competition and difficulties between people. This has happened before when surgeon was physician+trauma physician+surgery and this is very much of a reality even in the MRP and LRP servers i play on, moreso in the first that the latter.

 

Please do more to define the physician role, increase mechanical diversity through sensible and enforceable bounds instead of removing them altogether and treat this option as a nuclear one. As of now any improvement on these dimension will help. I am aware this post is more on "why we should remove the surgeon role" but, In My OpInIoN, the issue lies in the aforementioned reasons and i hope this has given you the perspective of someone who plays physician and that would prefer having his role not be merged with s*rgery. I am open to any question, curiosities, critiques, anything to further this metaphorical pustule of an argument that really needs to pop one way or the other.

 

Also consider making an actual feedback tread for the github merge.

-1

 

edit: i remove 1 also and added In My OpInIoN

Edited August 18, 2022 by nonno_anselmo

[KingOfThePing]

2 hours ago, nonno_anselmo said:

Also consider making an actual feedback tread for the github merge.

This is the actual feedback thread for the github PR.

[Bear]

On 25/02/2022 at 15:48, Peppermint said:

Surgeon overstaying their lane? Let staff know instead imo.

Very much this.

Removal of surgeon is only going to worsen the superdoctor take tenfold. Medical always has been plagued with heal mains who overstep and always will, these hard limitations help cull some of that. I don't see this be a positive change, to be honest, rather something that will only make it harder to play in medical when there is more than 2 doctors on. Especially when trying to introduce a new character.

[KingOfThePing]

After thinking about this for a few days, I came to the conclusion that I am not supporting this idea, for the reasons the opposed party has already brought up. I dont think there should be a super doctor role, despite the "problems" this can bring during lowpop.

HRP also means that you sometimes have to improvise with the bad hand you were dealt.

[Confused rock]

I'm not sure what you mean by that, because HRP also means there isn't really much room to improvise. If you don't have a surgeon, then you just can't fix the things that require those surgeries. Same with the lack of a pharmacist. 

[Bear]

Not everything needs to be fixed. Life threatening injuries can be covered by both roles. The rest may just require you to roleplay being injured.

[Jakers]

I feel like HRP is becoming more and more about creating powerful characters while streamlining time to chair rp rather than creating stories or game from the events of a server. Yeah it's shitty if you made a bad play and got yourself maimed with inadequate medical staff, but you must have made a conscious decision to take the risk.  

I've personally focused a lot on the surgery side of things than the physician side of things to make sure I'm quick at my role while making a space for physicians to fill their niche or game. I even recommend chemical/medical route to recovery for anything that doesn't outweigh the risks. E.g. minor brain damage with no broken bones that isn't life threatening.  Hell I'll even let physicians do basic surgery if they're qualified to free me up for high priority patients.  Removal for me, would force me to play a role I don't want to play and probably block me out of medical entirely. I'm not too interested in the other areas so being shoved into because my role covers almost everything makes the game not fun.   

[NotASpider]

Keep surgeon.

Here's the biggest problem medbay currently faces in terms of RP: nobody cares if you powergame medical because they get to live and keep playing. The only thing keeping this (somewhat) in check is the very mechanically distinct roles. There's already a huge problem of overlap in medbay. Why have an FR when a physician can run around? Why have a surgeon when a pharmacist can do everything a surgeon can? Why play a pharmacist when the CMO just makes all the medicine anyway? The answer is more separation of the medbay roles, NOT consolidation.

I say I'm pretty good at staying in my lane. My surgeon is hardcore nerfed in RP but is a surgery powerhouse. My pharmacist will never canonically learn how to use a hypospray or start an IV, and only stabs people with syringes because she's not a doctor. My physician is a GP and doesn't do surgery, also wears high heels to prevent running and being too effective an FR. My FR literally dumps people in med and then dips.

The only reason I do that is because I know how much it sucks to have your toes stepped on. I've had it happen where I play FR and some bored physician decides to run off to calls too, and it is ridiculously triggering when my entire niche is stolen from me. I can pretty much guarantee that removing surgeon will cause that to happen more often. I mean, sure, you could theoretically try to enforce rp limits, but we all know how that'll go. The only way I could possibly see this working is by making the skills system actually affect gameplay, but that's basically just passing the buck of mechanics from roles to skills.

[Fluffy]

-1

keep the roles separated, the surgeon should be invited to do anything outside the OR and the physician should hand over any surgery case to the surgeon, however I'd like to see that if either are missing, the other can cover, IE if the surgeon is missing, the physician should be able to roleplay trying to figure out how to do a necrotic organ repair, which will be non-canon

it makes sense for someone to try to figure out a solution anyways, perhaps apply a substantial penality to perform any surgery step if the round has the surgeon filled, that should be enough on top to make it both RP, mechanically and rule-wise unwanted/frowned upon, and still keep the option open if you're the only poor soul running the entire medbay

My two cents

[MrGodZilla]

Returning to this because there's a poll now and substantially more opinions - I still support the merge. The prevailing dissent I see here is that the merge will create unchecked superdoctors who will steal all the gameplay. I don't think this is going to happen. As it stands, medical is a self-regulating department, nobody has qualms with telling that doctor running out of the infirm to grab someone that there's an FR perfectly capable of doing so. Nobody. At the same time, nobody has an issue telling the physician that there's a perfectly good surgeon who will do the operation, because that's their job, and vice versa. Throw a CMO into the mix and you have someone who will easily delegate the department appropriately.

Physicians have a hard block on their qualifications - they will never do brain surgery or any of the surgeon-exclusive operations because that's not within their capabilities or role. You can and will readily be bwoinked if you do brain surgery as a physician. On the contrary, the line between surgeon and FR overlapping onto the physician is so veiled that there is bound to be overlap in some way, and the community does its best to minimize this overlap. I personally don't mind this overlap as long as its with good intention; the FR sticking around to help stabilize a patient a little further whilst the physician takes over should not be wrong. The physician setting up a patient for surgery and injecting chems during the operation should not be wrong. This is all teamwork. It has overlap, but with good intention.

The point of the merge, to me, is to remove that hard block on physician and make it a catch-all that anybody can mold into whatever they want. After this merge, I would have zero issue with people signing on as physician and plainly telling me, "I specialize in surgery. That's it." This would go both ways, this merge just removes that barrier so that when someone inevitably comes in with 40% brain activity they're not told that their round has to be put on pause until some dashing surgeon rides on a horse to save their round.

Medical is self-regulating. The solution to superdoctors has already been put into practice. People stay in their lanes and those that don't are easily handled.

[Arrow768]

This has been polled from 2022-11-01 to 2022-11-14.
As the option to merge the two jobs did not gain a sufficient majority and the maintainers did not believe it would be beneficial to merge it regardless, the PR will be closed and the topic archived in the coming days
(33 - I dont care; 95 - Merge; 108 Dont Merge)

[Gem]

suggestion has been dismissed by community vote and maintainer discussion.

locking and archiving.