Half-baked pathology rework idea: Pathogen Stability

[Podrick Equus]

Had this thought just recently, not sure if anything would come from it but I wanted to post it somewhere before I forget it.

So! Everyone agrees that the main gripe with Pathology is that it enables a level of grief higher than what most people like to deal with. Part of this is how obscenely difficult a potent pathogen is to deal with before it murders/cripples 90% of the infected.

My proposal: Add an additional stat to a pathogen called "Stability". This stat cannot be directly modified by using the manipulator, but will be present and clearly visible on the machine. A pathogen's Stability determines its chance to roll to decrease the stage an active pathogen is at and work towards curing itself. A pathogen with High Stability would have very little chance to decrease a stage, and a pathogen with Low Stability would have a very high chance to decrease a stage, perhaps even multiple times in quick succession. If it would go from stage 1 -> 0, then the pathogen would cure itself and be removed from the infected, and render them immune to that disease. Note that this doesn't directly reverse the pathogen's progression.

Now, what determines a pathogen's Stability?

If your pathogen has Good Symptoms, its Stability goes up. More Good Symptoms = More Stability and Less chance of curing itself.


If your pathogen has Bad Symptoms, its Stability goes down. More Bad Symptoms = Less Stability and Higher chance of curing itself.

If your pathogen has very High Stability above a certain threshold, it would essentially be permanent and no longer roll to decrease in active stage. But this would be a good thing, as it has a lot of good symptoms!

Because its still important for Pathology to be possible for antagonists to utilize(*gasp), I do not believe that there should be a threshold for instant curing through Low Stability. However, a pathogen with very Low Stability would likely cure itself within 10 minutes of infection anyways.

Thoughts?

[zjdtmkhzt]

Though the concept of needing to find and add beneficial symptoms as a traitor strikes me as a little change, I could see this concept working in theory.

However, some other changes have already been made since patho was disabled to try to deal with the issue of harmful pathogens being too strong.
Firstly, curing has been made easier by making it so that keeping a pathogen suppressed for a period of time will make it go into remission.
Also, pathogens now have a limit on how many symptoms they can have (based on the microbody type and the tier of the symptoms), so they old pathogens with pretty much every t5 that could be easily gotten via mutation spamming (which has also been removed) should be a thing of the past anyway.

Also, I feel like making pathogens just have a random chance to go into remission adds too much RNG to an already RNG-heavy system. (Even for harmful pathogens. Traitors are people, and they wanna have fun rounds too, and not have to hope to not get hecked over by RNG.)

[kyle2143]

The idea of adding stability to pathogens is basically exactly the same as how stability functions in genetics. Generally speaking, bad genes raise your stability, good genes lower it.

[Erev]

Lets try to avoid reusing systems? Especially in the same department.