Fixing the lack of depth: Medical

[Luke Cox]

This is meant to be a more focused continuation of this thread, which devolved in to pure, unbridled autism.

In its current state, medical is without a doubt one of the most shallow and unrewarding departments to play. In real life (and no, I'm not arguing on the grounds of "muh realism), medicine is complicated as fuck and requires time and effort to get right. People have also complained about a lack of lethality, and that can be addressed here. Medical's problems are as follows:

1. "Fire and forget" nature: Currently, all people (not necessarily even doctors) do is dump someone in either a sleeper or a cryotube and push a button. Any idiot can do that, and most of the time it's not even the MDs. "Fire and forget" was one of the big rationales behind moving to the supermatter engine, and
2. Lack of consequences: All injuries do is make you move slower. If you survive the initial incident, you will almost always live.
3. No presence: Nobody cares about medbay. Medkits are the entire department in the part. Nobody gives a shit when medbay is blown up.
4. Unused systems: We have a great surgery system, a dedicated operating theater in medbay, and yet it's never used. Why!?

The following is a list of changes that I feel would make medical a much more integral part of the station:

• New damage type: Laceration damage I suggested this in the past, but I think that it's worth bringing up again. Deep cuts should be differentiated from bruising. Knives and other sharp objects cause this type of damage, and it causes much more bleeding than brute damage. The bleeding can be halted by using a surgical stitching kit, and the wound can be healed with synthflesh patches.
• Make severe wounds require surgery: Severe wounds like gunshot wounds should require more than slapping some patches on. Deep cuts should require stitching (1-2 step surgery, can be self-performed albeit slower), bullets should have a chance to embed (would require surgery to remove), excessive toxin damage should cause organ failure that requires transplants, etc. Could add additional surgical tools, depends on how deep we would want to go.
• Rework/remove sleepers and cryotubes: Sleepers cut out almost all of the work required for medbay to function and render chemistry borderline useless. Put them behind high-level R&D. Cryotubes shouldn't heal. Instead, they should serve to keep critical patients in suspended animation until treatment is available. Basically life-support.
• REMOVE MEDKITS :This is probably the most controversial change I'm proposing, but in my opinion is the most essential. Currently, if you have a medkit, medbay is completely unnecessary. Medkits should only contain gauze, emergency suture kits, and epipens.
• Remove bruise packs and ointments: As it stands, you can burn nearly to death and fix yourself with some drug store burn ointment. This is stupid. Those types of wounds should require attention from an actual doctor. Chemistry should be responsible for manufacturing drugs. They're under medical and not science for a reason. Medbay can have a few pre-made chemical patches lying around to tide them over until chemistry is up and running.

Medical could easily one of the fastest-paced jobs on the station, with rich and deep mechanics. Medical could actually be an appealing target for antags to sabotage too. There's no reason to carry on with the snorefest that is the current medbay. These changes would make injuries actually matter, require chemistry to be productive, and turn MDs from being borderline useless to being among the most valuable crew.

[kevinz000]

Sweaterkittens is working on a medical overhaul Ibelieve.

[iamgoofball]

Sweaterkittens is working on a medical overhaul Ibelieve.

I've got the design doc for it, I'll probably crank something out over the freeze.

[Luke Cox]

Sweaterkittens is working on a medical overhaul Ibelieve.

Any word on what it entails?

[cedarbridge]

Sweaterkittens is working on a medical overhaul Ibelieve.

Any word on what it entails?

From what I remember from reading the doccument (I actually have it right here but effort to move over a couple tabs):

Two tiers of medical treatment for injuries. Personal/ad hoc and medical. The first is your standard rambo style "tie a stick to your broken leg and call it a splint" emergency stuff. It works in a pinch but not as well, for as long and without complications like a properly done splint/cast would. Medical grade injury treatment requires actual medical staff and facilities/tools to perform but work better and don't have the complciations that the lesser method has. Medical grade stuff cannot be done self-service and will require at least another person who knows what they're doing.

Various stages of injury. Moving away from "is damaged" or "is not damaged" and instead giving support for stages of brute injury (bruised, bleeding, broken bones, etc). Each stage will be progressively more awful for the victim and/or require different treatment to recover from. That means no more running around on fire for a solid hour and then slapping some burn cream on it.

Moving away from miracle cure medkits. Right now, nobody gives a shit what the medic does or doesn't do in medbay because they can just run past them and loot medical storage for those sweet one-touch-heal kit items. Instead, medkits will be moved to do what they say on the tin, provide first aid supplies. You should be able to bandage injuries without outright curing bullet wounds with bandaids.

Some emphasis on using roller beds, possibly with the inclusion of hard light roller beds. Turbo dragging a wounded dude to cryo/sleeper is silly. Make dragging people around slightly harder/slower but also raise the possibility of increased injury. Stealth nerf to esword drag murderboning since dragging victims around will be more cumbersome but it should also cut down a bit on medics chasing injured people being dragged by their metabuddies to a cryo tube and encourage more medics to take up on-site EMT.

Changes for sleepers to move them away from being magic healing pods and towards being stabilizing/diagnosing machines. Hand scanners are fine for seeing superficial injuries, but full damage profiles including internal damage require a sleeper scan.

That's just a few of the things I remember from discussing it with SK.

[XDTM]

I do like the idea, but every time it's proposed i see it get shot down due to people finding it boring/frustrating.

[Steelpoint]

The only main problem I see with that system is how to handle certain antagonists like Nuke Ops and Wizards.

It'll all depend on the specifics once we see, if we ever do, a detailed outline of the plan and how it works in game, and seeing in game, even if its just in a PR form.

[Luke Cox]

Sweaterkittens is working on a medical overhaul Ibelieve.

Any word on what it entails?

Good shit

Looks pretty damn good. Is there an ETA on when it's expected to be done?

[Reece]

What about medical bots? Would you be buffing them by letting the bots do high level medical stuff, or make them largely useless.

[Shaps-cloud]

I'm wary of any medical overhaul that wants to just shove surgery in more things on account of how clunky and tedious surgery is to actually do. Artificially extending how much time each patient takes to treat isn't the best way to add more depth

[Super Aggro Crag]

I love 2 heal

[imblyings]

Rules wise it's gonna be a pain. /tg/ is fast damage, fast heal. We're also pretty fast paced, a lot of things can happen in ten minutes compared to other codebases when it comes to player actions.

ghetto self-surgery would make this sweeter though

[darkpaladin109]

While I'm all up for a more in-depth medical system, I'm afraid that it might just not be good for tg, given how fast our rounds usually go on higher pop. It'd just worsen the load the medbay would get in a crisis.

[Steelpoint]

Would be interesting to see medbay go from our current 'what's a crisis' to 'wow we have a real crisis that can't be self solved by our medkits!'.

[CPTANT]

One of the problems is that the doctor job is absolutely useless.


You have basically NOTHING to do except wait in medbay for someone to get hurt.

Most other jobs have at least something else to do. This is one of the reasons why merging chemists and doctors is a good idea.

[XDTM]

Playing devil's advocate, they could also go 'i'm dying of several broken bones and there are no competent doctors to help'.

[XDTM]

One of the problems is that the doctor job is absolutely useless.


You have basically NOTHING to do except wait in medbay for someone to get hurt.

Most other jobs have at least something else to do. This is one of the reasons why merging chemists and doctors is a good idea.

That pretty much goes for security as well. They have nothing to do until the antag shows up, although they can take it out on the greytide.

[CPTANT]

One of the problems is that the doctor job is absolutely useless.


You have basically NOTHING to do except wait in medbay for someone to get hurt.

Most other jobs have at least something else to do. This is one of the reasons why merging chemists and doctors is a good idea.

That pretty much goes for security as well. They have nothing to do until the antag shows up, although they can take it out on the minor IC crime.

I would say that is partly true, but the situation for security is pretty different due to the role they have in the game. Doctors just go "no I want to press the sleeper button" when someone is brought in.

[Screemonster]

The biggest problem with low-RP style gameplay with complex medical is what happens when it becomes easier/simpler to just clone a new body than it is to treat an injured one. The instant that happens you'll start to see a sharp uptick in euthanasia.

[cedarbridge]

While I'm all up for a more in-depth medical system, I'm afraid that it might just not be good for tg, given how fast our rounds usually go on higher pop. It'd just worsen the load the medbay would get in a crisis.

The problem is you're entering a cycle. We can't extend round times or slow the pace of the game down because rounds end too quickly. Rarely is this caused by the round itself actually being over but rather that the antag has been ID'd and nobody wants to bother fighting back/repairing damage and would rather move on to try to roll for their turn to end the next round instead. The other PR that removes stubbed toe shuttle calls along with a more interesting medical/engineering system would go a long way. Engineering could probably use something also to encourage station repair. I've long advocated for a little extra end-of-round spam to comment on the state of the departments after the shuttle leaves. (robots made, % tiles cleaned, % station powered, etc.) Making medical a more interesting process than "use bruise pack" and require more knowledge than "don't press the morphine button" will go a long way to making medical more interesting.

One of the problems is that the doctor job is absolutely useless.


You have basically NOTHING to do except wait in medbay for someone to get hurt.

Most other jobs have at least something else to do. This is one of the reasons why merging chemists and doctors is a good idea.

Alternatively, we do what's proposed and make the doctor more interesting instead of removing the role. The fact that they don't currently have much of an immediate round task isn't a huge deal since players taking these jobs KNOW there isn't anything to do until the sick and wounded come in. Hell, if you really wanted to we could add roundstart random minor injuries or minor illnesses. (why wait for midshift for your appendix to try to kill you?)

[Dr_bee]

Maybe make serious injury less deadly and more debilitating? Sure. the basic medkits and sleepers can keep you fighting, but you need surgery to handle the more serious issues.

I always make comparisons to goon, but they have a similar fast paced style of gameplay but also have combat cause injuries that require surgery. For example, bullets imbed. they are easy to remove, just requiring a scalpel and a suture, but they still require another person to fix.

If you make SERIOUS damage caused debilitations that have a reduction in max health, movement penalties, and damage over time, doctors have something to cure. If you want to heal yourself, you will have to keep dosing yourself with meds to hold off the debilitation.

So basically Security and antags will be hopped up on painkillers while fighting, and then medbay gets to clean up the mess. FUN.

[Jacough]

Most other jobs have at least something else to do. This is one of the reasons why merging chemists and doctors is a good idea.

And then you have like four or five doctors fighting over the chem dispensers and screaming at eachother because someone wasted all the energy on them mass producing meth and shit.

[CPTANT]

Most other jobs have at least something else to do. This is one of the reasons why merging chemists and doctors is a good idea.

And then you have like four or five doctors fighting over the chem dispensers and screaming at eachother because someone wasted all the energy on them mass producing meth and shit.

It is basically impossible to run out of chem dispensor energy and there are two of them. This is literally a non-issue

[FantasticFwoosh]

The fact that its infinite is a issue, its just infinite healing/destruction via chems. If you ripped it out, people would go across the hall to over consume milk in the bar for basic brute damage etc. Ripping it out is a interesting proposition because what would we replace it with? (limited stash of chems that has to be replenished?)

[cedarbridge]

The fact that its infinite is a issue, its just infinite healing/destruction via chems. If you ripped it out, people would go across the hall to over consume milk in the bar for basic brute damage etc. Ripping it out is a interesting proposition because what would we replace it with? (limited stash of chems that has to be replenished?)

We just dial back the roundstart regen. It was a fairly recent change to allow roundstart chem dispensors to produce an almost instantly recharging amount of chems. They required stockparts upgrades like the sleepers do to reach full power potential (capacitors as I remember.) Just dial back the recharge rate to mean chemists have to strike a balance between doing their job properly and turning the chem locker into a meth den.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Or unhook the chem dispensers from the mains and make them run on batteries only so that they could figuratively be used in a blackout too.

[Luke Cox]

What about medical bots? Would you be buffing them by letting the bots do high level medical stuff, or make them largely useless.

Those would probably need to go

Rules wise it's gonna be a pain. /tg/ is fast damage, fast heal. We're also pretty fast paced, a lot of things can happen in ten minutes compared to other codebases when it comes to player actions.

ghetto self-surgery would make this sweeter though

Ghetto self-surgery to partially fix your wounds would be an option, yes (i.e. self stitching)

While I'm all up for a more in-depth medical system, I'm afraid that it might just not be good for tg, given how fast our rounds usually go on higher pop. It'd just worsen the load the medbay would get in a crisis.

That's what the cryotubes are for. You shove people in them until they can be treated.

[cedarbridge]

What about medical bots? Would you be buffing them by letting the bots do high level medical stuff, or make them largely useless.

Those would probably need to go

Not really. We just move the medbots away from spawning bicard/omnizine/whatever magic heal chem and instead move them to stabilizing patients while actual help arrives. This might not even be required since nobody really relies that much on medbots in the first place, but buffing them to replace medics would defeat the purpose of the rework if robotics can just turn out dozens of mini-surgeons.

[FantasticFwoosh]

You could nerf cryoxodone into the ground to be a ultra stabilising agent that simply makes you immune to taking further damage rather than a abusable heal all chem. Technically you could survive in space on cryoxodone in a state of statis constantly blacked out or asleep.

Statis cryo sounds better to me anyway, with all this rich old dudes who want to live forever in centcomm, 5% chance you'll find some pasty old & ckeyless centcomm official in the tube already 1% there will be a underwear wearing escort in the other for blackmail RP purposes.

[cedarbridge]

You could nerf cryoxodone into the ground to be a ultra stabilising agent that simply makes you immune to taking further damage rather than a abusable heal all chem. Technically you could survive in space on cryoxodone in a state of statis constantly blacked out or asleep.

Statis cryo sounds better to me anyway, with all this rich old dudes who want to live forever in centcomm, 5% chance you'll find some pasty old & ckeyless centcomm official in the tube already 1% there will be a underwear wearing escort in the other for blackmail RP purposes.

The first half of this is already a strong consideration however, cryo interacts with cloneloss as currently the only viable way to complete the cloning process. So, while it is within the general plan to make cryo a stabilizing freeze tube, it will still have the ability to heal clone damage.

[iamgoofball]

I'll PR this tonight

[cedarbridge]

*screams in medical*

[Luke Cox]

I'll PR this tonight

I hereby rescind all my criticism of you, you glorious autistic bastard

[cedarbridge]

Just thought of something. Crutches that let you move at normal/duffle speed but take up the arm slot matching the side a leg is broken/missing on.

[Luke Cox]

Just thought of something. Crutches that let you move at normal/duffle speed but take up the arm slot matching the side a leg is broken/missing on.

Fund it

[FantasticFwoosh]

#DRAINTHEMEDBAYSWAMP #IAMGOOFBALLSWARONDRUGS #IWASFROZENTODAY!



M.M.G.A

---

Just thought of something. Crutches that let you move at normal/duffle speed but take up the arm slot matching the side a leg is broken/missing on.

> Well there are a whole host of alternative prosthetics if you want to outright throw away cyborg compatibity including wooden peg legs/fake wooden hands for cosmetics, cyborg prosthetics are too strong anyway and detract from actual surgical work which is RP rich and now practically rich that kor basically endorses us to rip apart dead bodies for spare organs (because kor refuses to let us buy organ coldbox crates from the space chinese, i was upset that PR got closed down)

The first half of this is already a strong consideration however, cryo interacts with cloneloss as currently the only viable way to complete the cloning process. So, while it is within the general plan to make cryo a stabilizing freeze tube, it will still have the ability to heal clone damage.

Don't forget that if your clone is undercooked and has breathing/health problems you have a teeeny weeny bit of time before the statis cryoxodone wears off and they start to become concious and limber again, just enough to drag into a nearby sleeper or apply medication to. Stiffness is to be expected.

[CPTANT]

Just thought of something. Crutches that let you move at normal/duffle speed but take up the arm slot matching the side a leg is broken/missing on.

Noob, IRL you are supposed to use a crutch on the side of your good leg.

[Luke Cox]

While we're at it, we should probably discuss how ghetto medicine will work. So far we have emergency sutures, crutches, and epipens.

[oranges]

>goof is balancing it

lol good luck getting it merged

[Luke Cox]

The best case scenario would be if goof just made it and never touched it again

[cedarbridge]

While we're at it, we should probably discuss how ghetto medicine will work. So far we have emergency sutures, crutches, and epipens.

There's a more complete outline in the docc but that's SK's thing so I'll let them post it if they want.

[Luke Cox]

While we're at it, we should probably discuss how ghetto medicine will work. So far we have emergency sutures, crutches, and epipens.

There's a more complete outline in the docc but that's SK's thing so I'll let them post it if they want.

Do you have a link to the original doc?

[cedarbridge]

Do you have a link to the original doc?

but that's SK's thing so I'll let them post it if they want.

I'm not sure how much of it will actually stay in the current planned version so I'd rather not post an inaccurate file.

[iamgoofball]

i'm following the doc as much as possible since they considered the balance

[Luke Cox]

If goof is only coding the mechanics and framework and not touching balance, I think we'll be fine

[cedarbridge]

http://pastebin.com/fDnJHuhc

Full design doc here. There are a lot more discussion points and development ideas but these are the ones that made it into the original doc

[Luke Cox]

http://pastebin.com/fDnJHuhc

Full design doc here. There are a lot more discussion points and development ideas but these are the ones that made it into the original doc

Welp, this thread was redundant then. That looks like everything I was hoping for. Looking forward to seeing goof put it together.

[cedarbridge]

http://pastebin.com/fDnJHuhc

Full design doc here. There are a lot more discussion points and development ideas but these are the ones that made it into the original doc

Welp, this thread was redundant then. That looks like everything I was hoping for. Looking forward to seeing goof put it together.

Not entirely. The structure is all there and the basic concepts and direction are there. SK and I spent over an hour just chewing on additions and expansions for it. There's a ton of design space in and around the framework the rework sets up.

[cedarbridge]

I'll PR this tonight

Goof you promised!

[iamgoofball]

I'll PR this tonight

Goof you promised!

life happens