Pathology - Now With Friendly Aspects!

[Mordent]

1. Certain players need to have more passive resistance if not complete resistance to certain megadiseases that pathology makes. Making a megadisease =/= the complete anahilation of the crew, but rather a very significant cull, like 75% if left untreated. The remaining 25% will have to be killed by other means, which may mean creating a seperate disease that would target their specific immune system. Could easily tie this immunity into blood types, removing blood type selection and randomising it every round. Currently it just doesn't seem balanced right.

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2. If you're neutral and are trying to get benefits just for yourself, there should be a way to engineer the disease specifically for you, and would lie dormant in others.
3. If you're bad guy, bioterrorism could be engineered so that it targets specific people. So you may have a hit on the captain, you design a disease that passes dormantly from person to person until it reaches the Captain, who'd get a less than wholesome reaction from being infected.

I love the idea of tying it into blood type, whether that be being able to target certain blood types only (e.g. mix blood of a certain type into the pathogen at some point in the process and it keys to that type). If you want it to affect yourself you can use your own blood, if you want it to affect your target then you can check their blood type in the medical records and either use their blood or find someone who has the same type and use theirs.

Tying into the number 2 point above, I think you should be able to have blood-borne diseases, namely ones that only transmit via blood transfusion/injection (or possibly if you have an open wound and bloody clothes). This way you could inject just yourself and those you trust with your "boon" pathogens, in much the same way as geneticists can hand out the good mutations to certain people.

Going back to the blood types thing, to avoid a single disease wiping everyone out you could have each pathogen only affect certain blood types anyway, or have reduced effectiveness against certain blood types (e.g. higher tier symptoms only occur in type A+. Type A- gets only up to middle-tier symptoms, and other types only get the low-tier symptoms). The type that it affects can be tweaked by letting it stew in a petri dish with a certain blood type for a while.

If you want you could have it gain potency to blood types over time in this way, letting the truly evil pathologists eventually make a super-virus. This should take in the order of tens of minutes to hours, though, maybe having each type it's keyed to taking longer (the first could take 1-3 minutes, the second 3-5 minutes, the third 5-10 minutes, the fourth 10-15 minutes, the fifth 15-30 minutes, the sixth 30-60 minutes, etc.). If it's released early you don't affect the whole crew, but the longer you wait the more diminishing returns it has.