Introducing
TREKMED
But guyon trekchem was bad and-- Ok imma stop you right there.Abandon all notions of how trekchem worked, abandon the idea of chem = heal damage type, abandon the idea of toolbox = brute 100 brute = crit.
We are going to boldly go where no medbay has gone before!
So this medbay system is somewhat inspired by star-trek the hit sci-fi series created by Geene Rodenberry, it's aim is to make injury and healing a more compex system that doesn't involve "You broke a toe, sit the fuck out until someone does surgery on you" or "in order to do surgery please click the following sequence."
First of all, lets talk about damage. As it stands combat in ss13, despite being called "robust" is INCREDIBLY basic. You have five major damage types. Brute, Burn, Toxin, Oxy and Clone. If any of these damage numbers combined go over 100 you enter crit and if they go over 200 you ded. Effectively you have a health bar, most games that have a health bar have a simple "recover health bar" mechanic and for what it's worth you might as well replace medbay with a third chemistry dispenser and just dole out synthflesh, charcoal and rezadone where appropriate. So how do we change this? What would be a more interesting system than raw health?
To provide a suggestion I turn to a mix of games, both video and Pen and paper each with more than just a standard HP system but each very very different. We have in the one corner, Dwarf Fortress, I wager that almost nobody here hasn't heard of it and if you are one of the few that haven't, it's free and you totally should. Now while the deep complex simulation of DF wouldn't work very well in SS13 and probably burn the server box to cinders there ARE elements we can take. Firstly in Dwarf Fortress, being alive is tied to your organs and body being intact. You can hack every limb off a dwarf and cover them head to toe in burns bruises and scars and so long as they have air in their lungs, blood in their veins and a brain in their skull they can keep going. I move that "being alive" in ss13 should be tied to being intact, namely so long as your brain can get oxygen via blood then you shall live. Not simulated in minute detail mind you but as an abstract, so longs as yer lungs, heart and brain are intact you are alive. You already "die" in a logical fashion if any of these are removed so yippie we are already on our way!
Second is a very out of the blue suggestion by way of HareBrainedScheems 2018 TBS game "Battletech" which if you don't know what it is, like big stompy mechs and turn based strategy kinda like XCOM then I recommend checking it out. In battletech your mechs have limbs, armour, and components mounted on internal structure. Each limb has X amount of amour, shred that away and you get to the creamy internal structure, destroy a limbs internal structure and bye bye limb. IF it was the head or cockpit your mech is now fuk'd. Some attacks can breach the amour and go right for the components, if you shoot a weapon it becomes unusable, destroy a heat-sink and the mech runs hotter, destroy the reactor or engine and watch the mech flop like a marionette with it's strings cut. You can liken armour to "flesh" and components to "organs" and structure to some manner of internal damage that will eventually make that limb become enfuckenated in some manner if it gets too high.
External damage would be fixable topically, ranging from light cuts, minor burns to bruises, apply some manner of first aid and carry on with your day. Internal damage would require medical treatment and organ damage is go fetch the surgeon and a priest.
To add one more layer to this I turn to the Fantasy Flight games series of Warhammer Pen and Paper RPG's (Both 40k and fantasy) and make note of their idea of "critical damage" if you take damage over your HP cap the bleed off becomes "critical damage" Critical damage is a scale from 1 to 10. 1 being "Your hand hurts real bad and you drop your gun" 4 being "Your hand is fucking mangled and you need a doctor to fix it" 7 being "your hand is fucking gonzo" 9 is "You fucking die from massive trauma" and 10 is "You die so hard the blood and bone shards rip into anyone standing nearby". While a 1 to 10 scale of damage isn't a good idea in ss13 I think we can take some hints from this in that health can be less binary of "Fine/not fine" and more along the lines of taking more damage to one area will cause ineffectiveness to unusable to destroyed and each requiring a new level of treatment in order to fix, this critical damage could be likened to traumas eventually resulting in complete destruction of the limb,k each trauma adding more and more risk and pushing you closer to death either via blood loss, organ damage or reducing you to chunky salsa one bit at a time.
These three to four stages can be summed up as the following for my idea for medical. Light damage should lead to heavy damage should lead to severe damage should lead to critical damage. Light damage can be treated in the field, if a robust spaceman plays it careful and doesn't burn their hands on too many light bulbs they can keep themselves healthy. Heavy Damage can easily be treated with medical attention but is difficult to cure on its own. Severe damage is going to require a trip to medbay with it's FANCY ARRAY OF NEW TOYS (I'll get to these) and will require a short stay. Critical damage is "You are in the process of dying, get to a doctor ASAP if you can still move." the core tenet of this here system is "the only death is brain death" Until your brain dies, you live and you might even be up and mobile assuming it isn't in the process of literally dribbling out your ears. This may make people harder to kill via random clumsy blows or easier if you apply esword to face.
So where is the TREK in trekmed you ask? Well in the medbay.
In Star-Trek doctors use an array of cool looking space age tools that do and don't work depending on how dramatic the scene currently is, or inject a cocktail of fancy sounding drugs from various coloured tubes that almost never work if the episode is sitting at 00:20:35. However what's fun is how many ways their is to try to heal someone. A common sight in TNG era star trek are small handheld devices with names like "Dermal Regenerator" and such. Well Space station 13 is in the far flung future, why are we still using band-aids and patches anywho? I say we GUT the standard first aid packs of their dull little patches and pills! Each first aid kit will now contain two specialized devices, A dermal regenerator and a ermaline applicator. These are reusable (gasp) rechargeable (shock) build-able (faints) devices that hand out a small amount of FREE HEALING!!!
"Guyon, what the fuck are you smoking!?"
Here's the catch freindo, these little doodads only heal brute and burn AND only work for LIGHT damage. They close surface wounds, heal minor bruises and soothe 1st degree burns. Each application might heal 5-7 damage and have enough charge for 6-10 uses before needing a recharge. This does mean that if you never take more than (ballpark figure) 30 brute/burn damage on a single limb, keep an inducer on you at all times, never ingest and toxins and never get hit by a weapon that can punch though your fatty out layer like eswords, spears and bullets then yes, you'll never have to see a doctor! Assuming you have the patience to apply one of these things to yourself six times in a row taking an small but notable amount of time (or less if you have a buddy use it on you) per use.
Sooner or later you are going to get fucked, this enfuckening is going to hurt and you are going to have to limp to medbay with a hole in your arm large enough to stow a marker pen. Enter the wider array of TREKTOYS(tm)
A doctor could use one of the various new beeping and booping new machines to fix your shit. There will be the "Deep brute fixer machine" that will fix the deep hole in your torso meats and a big-boy dermal regenerator that will fix your external damage in no time flat. Both of these require the doctor to use it on you from the outside but this is the fastest way to get your ass out of medbay so off you go.
Now imagine if something happens, say you get fucking shot, the revolver is very very good at bypassing your fatty outer layer and even your inner meats and goes right for your lungs. Your lung is now popped and this means your blood is deoxygenating, this also means your brain is going to start dying. Here's where the new chem systems come in, you could take a coagulent to stop the bleeding and a blood oxygenator to slow down the rate of oxygen starvation induced brain death. So you could stagger to medbay and enter a NEW trektoy.
The Biobed, this here lad is a combination sugical slab, stasis bed and medical omnitool. A doctor could pop you on the bed and enable stasis mode to stop you dying, use one of the omnitools to do surgery to expose your lungs, use another to repair said lungs and close you up. Your brain suffered light damage so he attaches a cortical stimulator which is slow but fixes brain damage nicley or might perscribe a course of drugs that helps fix that shit.
Considering that the revolver did minimal external damage the doc points you in the direction of the automated light brute damage machine some engineers built and carries on his day.
The biobed multitool would work a bit like how a wall mounted defib does in that its attached to the biobed. A smexy radial menu lets you choose from various surgical and medical tools for repairing flesh and organs with sci-fi gluon beans or something in addition to your scalpel/hemostat/saw etc... The key point is organ repair is something that absolutly needs medbays resources and the expertise of doctors (or a robust bystander) to fix. The biobed represents the "specialist care" aspect of medbay where the patient is close to being absolutly fucked.
So to give you a shorthand on "tiers" of medbay. Lemmie sum up.
Low damage: Fixable slowly on your own or quickly with medical assistance and dedicated tools, it has no long term consequences.
Heavy damage: Fixable with ghetto tools and medical assistance slowly, or at medbay with specialist equipment quickly. Possible deterioration if utterly ignored but even modest first aid could fix it.
Severe damage: You need dedicated medbay machines and help to recover but you can keep yourself from deteriorating further with the proper tools.
Critical damage: You are in the process of dying, you can at best slow this down and a buddy with ghetto tools get you stable but you need a doctor asap.
A key point is that in current med it's as obnoxious to heal 1 damage as it is 99 which seems pretty dumb. A chainsaw gash should not be as easy to heal as a papercut and vice versa.
Another point is that each damage stage has its own path to healing and each can be performed simultaneously, four doctors working in tandem can take a semi living pile of mangled jelly and turn it back into a living human far faster than one could.
Another key point is the place of chems and medicine. I think that standard healing chems should git gone, they are boring to make, boring to use and boring to play around. Synthflesh should go, ambrosia gaia should go and charcoal should go. Raw toxin damage should also go, it makes no sense, poison does not work that way and is just a strange addition to the health bar. Poisons and toxins should have some kind of intrinsic effect, heparin being a good example by way of bleeding you out. Curing it would be treating the bleeding while purging the toxin. There are far too many chems that are "Do X" and "Do X but better" formaldehyde and cyanide for example , trim that fat! Make them something unique or cut it out, you ain't gonna need it.
Chems should be moved from "make health bar go up an down" to "prevent, cure or cause an illness of some kind." a good example is the star trek drug hyronalin. It prevents and counters radiation sickness, radiation burns are another matter but a shot of hyronalin BEFORE running around the supermatter room naked would be better for you than one afterwards. This also means we should nix cryo, it's anti fun in all forms, sit in a cell for 10 mins and get some brain dead healing. Nah that sucks, let doctors actively heal people with a 5th element style muscle printer
The machines are something thematic, until now medbay has literally just been about passing out drugs and the occasional surgery. Moving treatment to machines, be they handheld or larger freestanding units takes the burden off chemistry and makes it harder to keep 2 million hp worth of pills in your backpack. These then open up opportunities to be improved by science or sabotaged by traitors and the boop boop weeoow zztz bzzt dit-dit of medbay would be a delightful thematic ambience.
With regards to cloning I've had some ideas. I think there should be a way to get players back into the game but it shouldn't be easy think of it like a respawn timer that you or other players can affect.
Consider if the health of the cloned body was directly tied to the health of the victims corpse, So if you bring in a body with a wounded torso, this translates to X amount of clone damage upon cloning. Just a brain means you have a gibbering cluster of cells that hardly qualifies as multi-cellular life, if you somehow manage to repair a dudes body to full before you clone them then they come back almost fully intact. Higher tier science parts can then compensate for damaged bodies while lower tier ones means you can end up with stuff like a "Poorly cloned liver" where it's filling in the gaps in a crude manner. These "poorly cloned" organs JUST about does the job but you'll want to get a better one ASAP.
This adds a bit of tactical thinking for traitors who may or may not have access to the gibber/crematorium, you could take some extra time and dismember a guys corpse fully so it takes him an age and a half to come back to life.
Cryo was only ever used for two things, healing clone damage and hands off healing. If you take the hands off healing away there's no point in having a cryo chem so there's less point in having a cryo cell. Now if much of medbay's healing is moved to static machines and considering this other thread here https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=23355 we could have a neato setup where chemistry pipes specialised chems for specialized machines, cellular and nervous regeneration as an example I like the idea of some of the top-tier medical tech needing a dedicated and non-standard machine as well as a steady supply of a resource that lacks a distribution system for it at round start. But I can see how this might be clunky in practise, it's still neat to think about.
I'm thinking this could also be an interesting dynamic for augmented limbs.
Pro's
-You take less damage
-You are less vulnerable to this new medical system, steel is STRONG
-Self care is much easier (Screwdriver torso open, change wires, replace plating, remove old cyberliver, slot new one in and close)
Con's
-Healing machines have NO effect on you at all.
-Your brain is still fleshy and medicines that heal it do not work with your metal body very well.
-Every cyborg limb you have counts as "missing" for the purposes of cloning.
With regards to surgery I'd like to see lots more kinds of surgery with less steps and a bigger selection of tools. This ties in with the "multiple doctors" idea in that if one surgical procedure does little but takes little time and effort then one doctor could do most of it about as fast as one doctor can today but four doctors (Or three and a clown) could get it done MUCH faster. For the most part I envisage one doc removing a pancreas, another using a hand-held dialysis machine to purge the blood of toxins, another replacing or repairing the liver and the clown drawing funny faces on the guy while he is on the bed, one using various other tools to keep the guy stable. A single doctor could juggles these tasks and it would take an age but more doctors means less panic and faster care.
For clarification surgery might go "Open abdomen, expose liver, apply scienceobabble beam, close body" seeing as more surgery is required in this here system then easier surgeries would make things less of a drag. With sorter steps too would be nice as opposed to if(do_after(300))
All these ideas subject to change and open for discussion, but it is my belief that if medbay is to change it should change bigly and in one go, none of this piecemeal crap. Rip the plaster off quickly and let it sting.
