Lessening lethality of pain

[UltraNumeron]

Yesterday we had a round where I misfired a PKA mining, and had my foot fractured while otherwise being overall a healthy, strong Unathi. Then proceeded to fall over repeatedly every few steps from this advanced stubbed toe, the pain spiking and eventually causing a heart attack and killing me. And then later in the round observing and seeing a pair of antags get into a scuffle from which they physically recovered quite well with little left in wounds, but then proceeded to have heart attacks from the pain despite being mostly otherwise fine and even while having painkillers in their system.

So while this may be a wee bit of an ided, I do feel its a discussion worth having since it is quite silly how lethal pain is here. Getting heart attacks from pain especially from things like relatively minor wounds is neither particularly realistic, nor does it serve much of a purpose to the story or gameplay of the round instead mostly just taking character out of the game from otherwise nonlethal injuries.

Which I can kind of see making sense for it being intended as punishment for things like repeatedly tasing or stunning someone recklessly, it comes up too much from regular wounds and makes the usage of less than lethal weapons in combat overly lethal.

So what are your thoughts? Is it still worth having pain be lethal, rather than just a system of feedback and stuns/knockouts?

Edited July 21 by UltraNumeron

[ASmallCuteCat]

I feel like pain should only be lethal once it gets to the extremes - like critical/fatal levels of damage and injury. Someone getting a pain-induced heart attack from having 6 broken body parts and severe burns everywhere makes sense, but someone getting a pain-induced heart attack from a capsaicin scrubber surprise is just silly (this has happened once before, someone died while AFK because of an unlucky scrubber event)

There was a semi-recent round where someone got caught in... I think, either a tear gas grenade or a stinger grenade from Security, they got unlucky with RNG, and died of a paincrit heart attack.

I agree, pain's lethality should be toned down. Personally, I think it should still have lethality at the extremes, but only at the extremes. Otherwise it should range from mildly inconveniencing to leaving you flopped on a couch like a swooning Victorian-era damsel in the throes of hysteria, but not to the point where med has to babysit you because you might die.

Edited July 21 by ASmallCuteCat
i swear i can english

[Evandorf]

1 hour ago, UltraNumeron said:

 advanced stubbed toe

I’m not dismissing the intent of your suggestion, but even though it might seem minor in-game a foot fracture is not something a normal person would be able to walk on and ignore the pain. There should be more alternatives to mitigate pain in this situation, like additional ways to create makeshift splints or making it so crawling doesn’t use the foot, but I’d be hesitant on changing the pain balance.

I would also not want to rob systems of their complexity; like any other mechanic, pain management and medical knowledge in survival situations is a learned skill. It makes sense that not everyone on the ship ICly and OOCly would be prepared for it and it gives greater weight to those who have medical training. If you’ve seen antags go down with painkillers in their system then that might very well be a bug, but there are a lot of variables at play. Worst case scenario, ahelp and staff can rejuv you if necessary. We are more than willing to help people who die to BS.

[UltraNumeron]

44 minutes ago, Evandorf said:

I’m not dismissing the intent of your suggestion, but even though it might seem minor in-game a foot fracture is not something a normal person would be able to walk on and ignore the pain. There should be more alternatives to mitigate pain in this situation, like additional ways to create makeshift splints or making it so crawling doesn’t use the foot, but I’d be hesitant on changing the pain balance.

I would also not want to rob systems of their complexity; like any other mechanic, pain management and medical knowledge in survival situations is a learned skill. It makes sense that not everyone on the ship ICly and OOCly would be prepared for it and it gives greater weight to those who have medical training. If you’ve seen antags go down with painkillers in their system then that might very well be a bug, but there are a lot of variables at play. Worst case scenario, ahelp and staff can rejuv you if necessary. We are more than willing to help people who die to BS.

Well yes, though it should be noted that the fracture already slows you down heavily and makes you keel over every few steps (Which i mean kind of makes sense you can still limp forward or crawl even if your legs busted) 

The issue here is not so much the complexity of the system but that the system has a common lethal outcome for conditions that would generally not be considered lethal. Pain should still be painful of course, but do we really want pepper spray, a broken limb or just already healed injuries to give you a heart attack from just something like pain? If a certain thing is not lethal enough without pain heart attacks, it should be lethal in a different way rather than tie such a commonly used system to it.

And finally, I must disagree that admin intervention is a good solution for gameplay systems like this, often times the situation has already involved others and become part of the story and to have essentially divine intervention occur breaks immersion (and so is usually not done). While in situations that have not been involved in the story, while it can be useful it is still a bothersome crutch to a system to need it manually operated by an admin.

[Evandorf]

4 hours ago, UltraNumeron said:

Well yes, though it should be noted that the fracture already slows you down heavily and makes you keel over every few steps (Which i mean kind of makes sense you can still limp forward or crawl even if your legs busted) 

The issue here is not so much the complexity of the system but that the system has a common lethal outcome for conditions that would generally not be considered lethal. Pain should still be painful of course, but do we really want pepper spray, a broken limb or just already healed injuries to give you a heart attack from just something like pain? If a certain thing is not lethal enough without pain heart attacks, it should be lethal in a different way rather than tie such a commonly used system to it.

And finally, I must disagree that admin intervention is a good solution for gameplay systems like this, often times the situation has already involved others and become part of the story and to have essentially divine intervention occur breaks immersion (and so is usually not done). While in situations that have not been involved in the story, while it can be useful it is still a bothersome crutch to a system to need it manually operated by an admin.

I don’t disagree that certain things like stingers and teargas need to be tweaked but I’d tackle it at the item level and not the overall lethality of pain. If we adjust pain according to the more extreme cases then minor issues become negligible and ignored.

As for admin intervention, I meant in regards to bugs but the occasional breaking of immersion is unavoidable.

[VeteranGary]

I think the best solution is preventing cardiac arrest from occurring above a certain brain activity, heart health, or blood pressure. I agree getting cardiac arrest from serious but not fatal wounds is kinda silly and it can be round ending. I've had a case where getting shot in the hand gave me cardiac arrest and consequently killed me, just because it spiked my bpm enough to RNG asystole.  People already go into paincrit from ignoring injuries such as broken bones, or ribs/shrapnel which damages organs the more you ignore it, and it makes more sense to have increased risk to go into cardiac arrest in those circumstances instead of something like a limb injury.

[Evandorf]

3 hours ago, VeteranGary said:

I think the best solution is preventing cardiac arrest from occurring above a certain brain activity, heart health, or blood pressure. I agree getting cardiac arrest from serious but not fatal wounds is kinda silly and it can be round ending. I've had a case where getting shot in the hand gave me cardiac arrest and consequently killed me, just because it spiked my bpm enough to RNG asystole.  People already go into paincrit from ignoring injuries such as broken bones, or ribs/shrapnel which damages organs the more you ignore it, and it makes more sense to have increased risk to go into cardiac arrest in those circumstances instead of something like a limb injury.

Make it so that if you’re above a certain brain damage you pass out for a decent amount of time. If below then you go into cardiac arrest. Maybe make the limit around 50%. 

[Jasorn]

I'll throw my hat in the ring as a mining main, the amount of deaths I've witnessed from only fractured feet/legs is pretty sad. I've had talks with people that play mining or medical whats better, some have said allow splinting on voidsuits, but I think the root cause is just how quickly you get put into heart failure from seemingly a minor injury. I agree there needs to be a cap per injury on the pain, as stated above if you're broken bones across the board sure, but one without any other ailments should have a cap.

[Shimmer]

13 minutes ago, Jasorn said:

I'll throw my hat in the ring as a mining main, the amount of deaths I've witnessed from only fractured feet/legs is pretty sad. I've had talks with people that play mining or medical whats better, some have said allow splinting on voidsuits, but I think the root cause is just how quickly you get put into heart failure from seemingly a minor injury. I agree there needs to be a cap per injury on the pain, as stated above if you're broken bones across the board sure, but one without any other ailments should have a cap.

Even allow to crawl would solve this issue. Crawling to prevent the pain from triggering and eventually killing you.

 

Generally pain kills in an odd way - if you get hit with a stinger, you will (eventually) die. IMO stingers shouldn't be lethal tools lmao

[UltraNumeron]

Yeah I agree that at the very least pain should not kill at high brain activity.

[MattAtlas]

A lot of separate problems are being bundled up into one in this thread, when it's not really the case.

First of all, tear gas and stinger grenades are a completely different problem, reason being that they will stack your pain to incredible thresholds (over 250+ just for standing in a tear gas grenade for too long). The reason this isn't fixed is because capping pain brings with it some pretty big problems itself. The reason for this is that pain is stored individually on each limb, and it is uncapped. I tried capping per-limb pain a long time ago specifically to solve this problem and what would happen is that capping pain on the limbs essentially makes officers unable to stun people, since each limb will be capped at, say, 50 to 75 pain damage or something, so if you keep stun batonning someone while aiming for chest, it will never surpass the limb's maximum pain damage threshold, and thus never get to the required 200 to stun someone.

As for the rest, you could theoretically up the threshold for the heart to stop.

	// If fibrillation, then it can be PULSE_THREADY
	var/fibrillation = oxy <= BLOOD_VOLUME_SURVIVE || (prob(30) && owner.shock_stage > 120)
	if(pulse && fibrillation)	//I SAID MOAR OXYGEN
		pulse = PULSE_THREADY

For reference, shock is the sum of pain and painkiller effects. You could up the shock_stage threshold here and I guess it'd be a good thing to try out.