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Cogwerk's Ailments! The end of Crit! A glorious new day!
#1
For those following along in the SA thread, you already know that Cogwerks is working on new ailments caused by specific damage types, in an effort to improve the job of doctor. You might also have seen my latest post, which is what I'm here to discuss with you today!

Gentlemen and gentleladies! I ask you today to imagine... imagine a world with no crit. With no endless black screens, with no lack of gameplay as a gameplay element. Imagine a world where you're conscious, if not fully abled, right up until you finally take your last breath... I say it is possible! And I say that Cogwerks has shown us the means to do so!

Here's my idea: Give each damage type two associated ailments. One that happens when you take 50 of that damage, one that happens when you take 100. The way things are now, if you take 100 damage total you drop into crit. Period. One the one hand, this new idea would mean that you could coast along with 25-30 of each type of damage, and make it above the crit threshold scott-free!

However, despite the major hoops you'd have to jump through for that to happen in the first place, you'd still have to contend with ailments. Once one of those types passes 50, you're screwed. Let me illustrate my point, using Oxygen damage, and the possible ailments Pneumonia and Emphysema:

Take enough O2 damage, and you contract pneumonia. Your movement speed is slowed, (By the same amount you previously would be slowed for 50 total damage, under the Crit system) red text flashes letting you know that breathing is ragged. And you start to cough. On it's own, annoying but not completely debilitating. Once your O2 damage drops below 50, you have a chance of it going away, or you can get some cheap pills that will fix you right up from a doctor.

Once you top 100 O2 damage, though, then shit gets real. The coughs are frequent, terrible spasms rendering you barely better than a cluwne. Talking is simply not going to happen, not with your lungs as raggedy-ass as they are. And when you do get up, you can't run. You have asthma, stupid pubbie, running is for healthy people. You can slowly walk your ass to medbay, and try to sign to a doctor that you need radical surgery, or use a note to bribe some chemists for pills to mitigate the worst effects. Either way, you're not in crit, but you're also going to have a hell of a hard time actually doing anything.

Similar ailments could be added for the other three damage types, with the 100+ being crippling, and the 50+ being annoying... unless you have more than one, in which case it's still pretty damn crippling.

Imagine it, though. You take a fuckton of damage, and are sitting at 150~ total. No more black screen. No more dead silence, and waiting. You can scream at passerbys that you're fucked, or yell in the radio where the doctor needs to go. You can limp to medbay, or hole up in QM and hope your fellow Quartermaster knows how to use that scalpel he stole effectively. You're as able to take action as you were before, but you're not out of the game like you were before. And best of all, it will be fucking awesome to be a doctor.

Medbay is full of patients, you diagnose their symptoms, check them over with the health scanner, and prescribe a regiment to combat their ailments. A borg drags in a burned miner, and oh shit he's starting to code! Grab some epinephrine and strap his ass to the table, you need to operate now!
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#2
Seconding all of this. here's some possible illnesses for the other damage types

Brute: Brain trauma, turns you into a retard, causes nearsightedness and some other shit
Burn: x degree burns, you take extra damage when hit
Toxin: The sky's the fucking limit.
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#3
Actually, I thought up two for Toxin that I thought would be pretty perfect. Chemical Hypersensitivity and Sensory Hypersensitivity.

Chemical hypersensitivity is fun. First off, your addiction thresholds plummet. You can become addicted to soda with one or two sips. Also, every 5-10 units of a chemical you take causes an extra point of toxicity damage. So two sips of Grones, you take another point of damage. Pop a 50-unit pill to try and heal, you take 5 extra tox damage. The only thing that can help is a stomach pump, or a fucking ton of activated charcoal.

Sensory Hypersensitivity is nasty, though. Basically, everything gets amped the fuck up. Low lights make your eyes hurt, normal lights cause reduced vision, and if you get flashed your ass is blind, full-stop. Pain is a sense, and it's more intense as well. double damage from brute or fire damage. And you better believe that sound is going to suck too. Anything above a whisper has a nontrivial chance of giving you a migraine. And if someone screams, it acts like a vamp or abomination scream, you get knocked out. Too much toxin damage, and you better put on a blindfold, slap some earmuffs on, and find someone who can drag you to medbay for an immediate operation. Alternatively, you can keep the earmuffs on, put on a pair of sunglasses, and hope like hell that you don't take any damage from anything until you can get your hands on some industrial-strength painkillers.
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#4
I think these are actually really damn cool, and given that medical code is being toggled with right now, NOW IS THE TIME TO CONSIDER THEM. Seriously, so many good medical ideas have been labeled unusable with "Medical code is a mess no thanks" but now it's actually being played with!
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#5
For brute damage, what if the ailments are broken bones, and which bone breaks depends on where you're hit? Get a leg broken and you start hobbling your ass off and can't run at all, break an arm and it might as well have fallen off for all the good it's doing you, though at least you aren't bleeding, crack a rib and you take small amounts of damage running as the shards poke against your lungs(or major, depending on how bad the break is), and a skull fracture meaning you're more likely to get knocked out/get braindamage from headshots.

To fix these you could either get a splint/bandage and wait for a bit for the bone to mend on it's own, or swing by medbay to have a doctor set and fuse the bones back together for you. This wouldn't heal the brute damage you've taken, which I guess would represent soft tissue trauma as well.

Speaking of soft tissues, how about we make toxin's ailments deadly in their own rights? The first stage could be any of what Bravo suggested, or maybe anemia. You'll bleed out longer and faster, and you'll get constant messages of feeling tired and weak, and maybe you won't be able to punch to well, either. The second stage should definetly be necrosis, with your flesh starting to rot away as the massive amounts of toxins in your system eats away at you. The cure for both would be a total body flush and maybe a blood transfusion or something. Maybe give medbay a dialysis machine for this purpose?
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#6
Oh man, blood transfusion is a great idea! In medbay, with a trained doctor, you can just hook them up to the toxin flusher, and run them through in a minute or two. But in hobo medical...

I love the idea of an engineer holding a watering can filled with various people's blood he's scraped off the floor, stabbing his buddy with a knife frantically. "WE GOTTA GET THAT BAD BLOOD OUTTA YOU FIRST, BRO!"
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#7
I would love this. I play MD a lot, and this is what I like the best. When someone comes crawling in saying something like "Shit, I have been shot. There's a detective coming in behind me with shrapnel in their stomach, and I have to take his bullet out, inject him with some saline, then run out after the detective, grab him, preform really fast eneprine injections to stabalize him then rushing him back to medbay, taking the shrapnel out, and moving on to the line of beat up assistants that need help, and then chilling in medbay refilling my medkit, feeling good that I helped so many people. I wholeheartedly support the idea of no more crit.
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#8
As long as it's balanced in such a way that antagonists aren't continually screwed by it, I'm down.
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#9
Yeah, as long as dudes can still be knocked down, knocked out, and stunned I don't mind. And if crushing their throat prevents them from talking like it does now.

Fuck tg for letting you talk while you're being choked
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#10
Morphing_Dwarf Wrote:I would love this. I play MD a lot, and this is what I like the best. When someone comes crawling in saying something like "Shit, I have been shot. There's a detective coming in behind me with shrapnel in their stomach, and I have to take his bullet out, inject him with some saline, then run out after the detective, grab him, preform really fast eneprine injections to stabalize him then rushing him back to medbay, taking the shrapnel out, and moving on to the line of beat up assistants that need help, and then chilling in medbay refilling my medkit, feeling good that I helped so many people. I wholeheartedly support the idea of no more crit.

This is precisely what I am aiming for. I want triage to be a fun thing and have crit handled more as a medical emergency with some chance of hope instead of 'welp, hello ten minutes of black screen, might as well succumb.'

I'm doing some local testing today of putting the coma state at -75 health. 0 to -15 is mostly just going to make you slow as all hell, -15 to -60 puts you at significant risk of going into shock (a health analyzer will report this and tell you the cure), and -60 to -100 has a risk of going into cardiac arrest. Both shock and cardiac arrest, if left untreated, will rapidly kill you if they reach the higher stages.

You'll also faint and gasp and collapse from shock and get a lot of unpleasant messages and generally be as useless as current crit unless you are on a shitload of drugs, but there will hopefully be more excitement and fun from this instead of just staring at a black screen having no idea what's going on.
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#11
I fully volunteer to test this by standing in the middle of medbay and having greyshirts toolbox me senseless.
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#12
all in favor raise your hand

( everybody raises their hand)
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#13
Captain_Bravo Wrote:I fully volunteer to test this by standing in the middle of medbay and having greyshirts toolbox me senseless.
I volunteer to be the greyshirt.

Also this idea is wonderful.
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#14
Early testing, the patient was awake until -80% health but fainted and collapsed a lot, and due to shock frequently couldn't speak.

Untreated shock took them into cardiac arrest and the rapid oxygen loss from cardiac arrest killed them about thirty seconds after it started. There is just about enough time to react with an atropine or epinephrine injection after cardiac arrest starts, if it starts near someone who is prepared.
A dose of either of those drugs helps to stabilize the patient and prevent cardiac arrest from triggering.

CPR, epinephrine, or any of the oxygenating drugs (salbutamol, perfluorocarbon) will also stop the loss of oxygen that occurs in crit. A dunk in the cryo tube would also likely keep them alive but it currently won't cure the lingering deep-crit effects.

Total time in crit from two shotgun blasts: three minutes. Total time unconscious: about twenty seconds.

[Image: N4cdXEg.png]
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#15
Beautiful.
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