Debilitating Injuries

[Kintsugi]

The point of this thread is to gauge community interest and to generate discussion around the concept of debilitating injuries - anyone on Aurora who has experienced serious injuries ingame and survived will know that the health system in Aurora is not quite as sensible as it could be. Critical injuries, once healed via surgery, chems, or other treatment option, are essentially non-concerns. Due to the way the health system works, a character who gets down to 1% brain activity after losing half of their blood and breaking all of their limbs will be perfectly fine once they've recovered, in spite of the severity of those injuries and the timeframe of treatment.

While some things ingame, such as bone repair and soft tissue regeneration can be explained by advanced futuristic technologies, this nonetheless is not very conducive to roleplay or gameplay in my opinion. It lowers the stakes of combat and encourages players to engage in risky behavior, as their wounds are meaningless so long as they don't die. Many people are familiar with playing security or other combat-facing roles and being treated for critical injuries multiple times, only to return to the fight immediately.

A potential solution to this problem would be to add permanent debuffs after suffering significant-enough injuries for the duration of the round. Examples of this would be bones that were broken and surgically repaired being twice as fragile for the rest of the round, organs losing some effectiveness (especially stamina regeneration and capacity for things like the heart and lungs), or traumatic brain injuries after suffering massive brain damage that cause confusion and decrease overall abilities. The idea here is to add consequences to severe wounds which individually are not crippling, but nonetheless make you less effective, especially as injuries add up. In general, I believe this system would be an overall boon for gameplay and roleplay.

[ASmallCuteCat]

I'd love to see a system where there's more wiggle room between "I'm at 100%, yay!" and "it's over, black tag me" The downside is that not everyone enjoys injury/recovery RP, and so it shouldn't be forced on players.

There's been chatter recently about how med gameplay tends to follow a meta with optimal things to do, and just like others have said I agree that it's because if you make a mistake or try something new, and your patient dies, that's it for them. They're removed from the round. It's very all-or-nothing, which in itself doesn't really encourage experimenting or deviating from the meta.

The mechanics and balance of PVE and PVP and spaceman health aren't exactly my forte, but thoughts I've had were:

- Bone repair surgery takes time to "set", a patient who's had bone repair surgery will need to avoid being damaged in said body part for X amount of time or the bone will rebreak. If the broken bone is a limb, the limb must remain splinted and/or they can't use said limb for X amount of time.

- Spacemen heal slower and surgery steps takes longer, but they also bleed out slower and die slower.

- Sitting/lying down will reduce the amount of pain you're in, maybe even resting on the floor will reduce the pain by a small amount

- Pain doesn't immediately vanish as soon as an injury is healed, some of it lingers and you have to keep it in mind before you go running back into combat (so if you take too many injuries, there will be building aches and pains that build)

I don't know how feasible any of this actually is, I understand programming about as well as I can eat Saturn with a fork and knife

[Rookie Eyes]

As far as interest goes I'm 100% interested in seeing some form of mechanical reinforcement for injuries that would realistically require a recovery period even assuming futuristic reinforcement. Honestly, even if you were 100% physically healed after a fight that wouldn't mean you wouldn't be more cautious of getting hurt for the simple fact that it was probably pretty traumatic (attacked by a greimorian, hivebot, shot by the antag, even just getting beaten up badly enough takes a toll psychologically on people.) I don't think there's a feasible way to represent that in-game outside of just RPing it so Cat's suggestions are probably better.

My worry is that if we're going to go with "opt-in" style mechanics such as simply being less healthy post-surgery then you'd just run into the same issue of the dark-setting corpo-command member telling your injured miner/officer/etc. that it's too damned bad and to get back out there. I think if we use mechanics then the mechanics should be something that do have a hard reinforcement such as Cat's suggestions that basically tell you "You're recovering/you're seriously hurt." Things such as having difficulty standing, slower movement speed, being 'woozy' from surgery/medication, etc. 

 

I also think it could also be something that's just narratively enforced instead such as the rules for when execution is ok, or the rules regarding taking announcements at face value. Why not just tell players that you're also expected to bear in mind when you're hurt, recovering, etc. and likewise for officers under your IC command in the case of HoS/Captains?

 

I think this could result in at the very least the rest of the ship getting more involved with violent gimmicks if not other options being explored once you realize your mall-cop team are all recovering. 

[Boggle08]

I'm usually skeptical of "realism" proposals because when they don't work, they end up just slowing down or obstructing the pace of the gameplay, which leads to frustration and all the effort getting reverted.

A change to the medical system like this alters the nature of how rounds play out for medical, security, and third party actors such as odyssey characters or regular antags. A system like this needs to account for when medical is critically understaffed or lacking crucial positions. It also must account for instances when medical is hit with a sudden influx of patients from some kind of high-intensity cataclysmic event. Slowing down the time it takes to fix patients, or making medical more interdependent is going to lead to more frustration, more waiting, and more corpses when a small team is stress tested by a full security department + antags and bystanders. 

The way rounds play out will be affected. Security relies on medical to be a revolving door of healing to get them back into duty, and command/the rest of the crew relies on security to directly address a problem, so they don't have to. Antags, Event coordination, and Odysseys modulate their play accordingly. There will be an adjustment period if something like this is implemented, but I think the server culture will be able to adapt.

This just leaves the civilian roles with occupational hazards. Science, Mining, Engineering. These roles don't usually get hurt because they're doing something of narrative significance. It's usually because they're doing something with mechanics, and they get rudely interrupted by a mistake, or a fucking space Eel. This is where a system like this has the potential to be extremely fucking annoying. You aren't getting hurt as an outcome of narrative or RP consequences, you're getting busted up because you forgot to wear your funny yellow gloves, or fucking space Eels. Whatever you wanted to do that round gets rudely interrupted by an ingame system, and the injuries you now have prevent you from doing the thing you wanted to do with a different system.

I don't like recovery ward RP either. That's just the last thing I want to mention. If you're in the middle of a busy round for medical, they aren't going to RP with you. If your character doesn't have friends, a department or a clique to check on them, you'll get no visitors. It's an extremely passive form of RP, and every time I've seen a member of medical try to impose it without a mechanical reason, it usually ends with the doctor in question sheepishly letting their patient go.

Edited June 6 by Boggle08

[CatsinHD]

I'm going to echo much of what Boggle and Cat have said already.

I think lasting injuries are fine insofar as they do not HARD BLOCK the ability to continue interacting with mechanics/gameplay. Lingering pain, fragile bones, etc are fine. I like this. Theoretically, you can introduce other items, such as fragile organs being less effective, but that can be brutal. The key to all of these is that they do not necessitate you sit in medical if you don't want to. You can get up and leave, fight again, etc. just now with higher risk/less effectiveness, a risk that goes away in time. It should be a trade-off for urgency (or for sci tech/ops orders).

Much to what Boggle says, recovery rp is very hit or miss. Medical is often too pressured to take extra time. Sitting on a bed sucks. This is why medical tries to be as efficient as possible, why it even has a meta. Fixing that needs a medical overhaul (see Matt's plans) that is outside the scope of this topic. Just something to keep in mind when brainstorming. I'd rather trade-offs that do discourage recklessness.