Critical Condition Crawling

[phyvo]

Initially I liked this idea but as I am thinking more about it I'm kind of skeptical. As I understand it crit has two main functions: one, give the person in crit a timer on how long they can do things before seeking medical attention themselves. Two, to give medical staff time to reach and treat said person before they die and have to be cloned. As described this "middle" crit stage does not give the wounded player much agency, so it leans heavily towards just being another form of deep crit. Crawling on the ground is not *that* different from falling over and over as you try to make your way to medbay.

So I am not sure what this adds that cannot be dealt with with some simpler combination of the following:

• Reducing RNG so that crit is more predictable for all players.
  
• Continuing to change crit threshholds.
  
• More liberal use of debuffs like weakened, slower movement speed, or drop-item emotes like "you cough up some blood!" at the middle stage of crit to make it more debilitating without having to code a new crawl state.
  
• I looked in the code but it appears that being weakened does not appear to do anything to attack damage in melee. That could be a good thing to add in terms of zombie people in crit being a threat to others. If you're starting to have a heart attack it's conceivable that you can shoot someone dead with a gun, maybe with reduced accuracy, but you're definitely not going to win a fist fight.
  
  

Kind of in general I think the goal of crit should be:

• First, establish a point where you *will* need to seek medical attention eventually or you will die. This is low crit. You can keep your abilities more or less but you are on the clock.
  
• Second, establish a point where the player might handicapped in general (the simple movement debuff from being wounded), but their ability to attack others and do difficult tasks (like healing oneself) is more greatly impeded. This is to encourage retreat. Item-drop emotes, weaker melee attacks, and reduced gun accuracy could come into play. The winning player in a fight is saved from the zombie-esque attack threat but still wants to finish off the opponent to avoid complications like the wounded player getting healed. Players would know that they are close to shifting into deep crit when they start actually falling down every 4 seconds.
  
• Thirdly, there's the point where you're down and need the assistance of other players to not die.
  
• Also, crit should be pretty predictable for the sake of all players. Exact time of death can vary but there should be less RNG in terms of what procs in each stage of crit and how often, and there should be a predictable amount of time that it takes to go from low to deep crit without medical attention.
  

I dunno, these are just my thoughts. I think it's important to consider exactly what behavior we want to be encouraging in players when they're in crit and try not to spend more time than necessary with players lurching around slowly with little to no agency. SS13 is not a simple health system FPS shooter but it's still a game.