Medical priority for crew over hostile non-crew

[Flpfs]

I've seen and played several rounds now, and others may attest with their own experience, where medical personnel prioritize treating mercs/pirates who are barely more critical than crew, or security officers.

Unless all danger has passed (green alert), this logic makes no sense. You need security personnel and other vital crew (engineers, crew militia) as up as quickly as possible to deal with the remaining hostilities, and so why would you treat non-crew first?

You may argue that it is not ethical, to which I agree. However, remember that we're inserted in the context of a megacorporation where the ship's command can literally turn people into machines without a trial. I believe that it would make way more sense in our corporate dystopia setting that the crew, which actually works for and provides value for the megacorporations that employ and pay medical personnel, to be treated first than some random pirate.

So, seeing as it (in my point of view) makes sense both from a gameplay perspective and a lore perspective, I propose that a new IC policy be created, where Command may order that crew treatment takes priority on blue alert or higher. What do you guys think?

 

[BravoBohemia]

While I haven’t seen it personally, one would think the people you live and work with on a daily basis would take priority for medical care over the guys who were shooting at you not five minutes prior. I don’t know if it necessitates an IC policy change as you’d probably get more than one antag main malding that medical is just leaving them to die but I don’t disagree that crew should take priority over non crew if they’re in a similar state. 

[N8-Toe]

This is the kind of thing I think is best left up to IC and in round. To create RP and conflict there

[Fluffy]

I think that a relevant command (CMO, Captain) can already order that, also, from an OOC perspective, losing John Sol retired Marine now part of the ISD isn't the end of the world, the gimmick just goes on, losing the only/main antag turns the round into glorified extended, and having it down and waiting usually means at best that the flow of the gimmick is halted until you get around to heal him up, and at worst that it escapes cuffs and gets shot down irrecoverably, so ultimately I am not in favor of this, though I could potentially be in favor of this in case the antag threat level is increased (something I'd like to be) or the introduction of a dynamic game mode that replaces the antags as they go down.

[Boggle08]

Oh, just yesterday I saw a fellow meddoid chase after two traitor crew guys trying to heal them when they attempted to pass through medical. Even while security was in pursuit of them, and they were storming out of medical, he was right there between everybody chasing after them with his hypo

Months earlier(which has to be my personal favorite for this behavior), The HoS got teleported into port maintenance, endured a torture session with a traitor, and ended up killing the guy at the expense of getting fucked up. I was with security as engineering, and we brought a responder with us. While the HoS was standing in place, shaking violently from the adrenaline, we nudged the EMT  to stop staring and help, whereupon they hyperfocused on storing the body, ignoring the twitching bleeding HoS in front of us.

I think the reason for this behavior is because more injuries = more gameplay. Because antagonists usually come out more fucked up than the crew does, the triage priority in their brains is biased towards antags. I think policy is the best solution, and it needs to be reinforced with central command announcements to imprint it into medical's brain.

[kermit]

I don't really think this should be enforced as a policy and should be left up to command in-round.

Medical shouldn't have to pick favourites from either medical or security, and simply treat whoever's most likely to be taken out of the round. The goal is to keep everyone in-round. 

The IC lore reason of dystopic megacorporate setting was mentioned, but if you're keeping the setting in mind, it probably makes more sense for antagonists to be saved over officers, as antagonists can be interrogated to unveil security flaws, gather information on the opposing party, whatever fluff you can think of. An officer can just be replaced alongside a sad but 'they were so heroic' message sent to their family. 'Security are more valuable than the antagonists' is a bit reductive. As a captain, I generally remind Medical to actually follow triage and, if it is the antagonists that are more heavily injured, to prioritise them, because those are the ones I need alive to get information out of, not the officers who've just served their function aboard the vessel and probably aren't going to be needed again. Different characters will have different outlooks and justifications for prioritising or deprioritising antagonist treatment – why remove nuance by forcing a decision via policy?

The gameplay side of things mentioned was you need your injured crew up and out of Medical as soon as possible to go back out responding to antagonists. Throwing triage out the window for a policy which prioritises crew, especially officers, just reinforces medical being a revolving door for security: come in injured, immediately healed and hunting antagonists again, no consequences from previous injuries. It'll result in less crew deaths, further preventing things like militias/evacs/DBs/deltas, which are already rare, and are dire situations I find interesting to have my characters interact within. Antagonists lately have already been encouraged – by some security players themselves too – to go for head PBs and to kill confirm, because this is really the only way you can win any ground as an antagonist and contribute to round escalation, as Medical is already incredibly good at ensuring security can get straight back into the fray.

Edited June 16, 2023 by kermit
slimmed down

[Boggle08]

On 16/06/2023 at 06:48, kermit said:

[snip]

There isn't any clever or intentional design motivating this behavior. The problem is that people are storming past their crew members in favor of antags regardless of context. It happens too often and too quickly to the point where command can't catch it(often because they're too busy dying to enforce anything). It could be a code red, no-holds-barred situation that concludes in a messy mercenary shootout at 2:30, and the medical team will still play irrational favorites. 

There's nothing IC or lore friendly about this, it's people who aren't being aware reverting back to their programming. Look at canon events, people don't do this shit because it kills people from sheer negligence. If they play games, their friends get PKed and they might even get hit with an IR. Both OOC incentives and IC policy incentives right there. We could use some of that.

Having some kind of policy outline for people to be aware of, and be subject to in egregious cases, is enough to autonomously regulate this behavior. Because no one is calling each other out, or applying the social pressure necessary to keep it to reasonable levels. 

Edited June 17, 2023 by Boggle08