Thoughts and suggestions on medical department

[Glamurio]

I always wished for there to be a pharmacist job since it's the kind of role I'd actually love to play as and can't wait till a dedicated job like that gets added.

We have a pharmacist as a special job, complete with access to Medical and Science. I have voiced my opinion before that I think adding them as roundstart could be an important step in the direction of combining Med and Sci in the MedSci department.

[gleb09]

It's a pretty trivial solution to make doctoring more viable than cloning. You make cloning take more work. The clone comes out in crit with damage in all sections, limbs missing, organ damage etc. who cares if players moan? Players want the easiest way out possible even at the cost of gameplay.

Interact with another department?
No thanks, I'd rather have all of that department in this one so I can do it myself.

Medbay often gets bombed?
I don't want to prep the medbay in case that happens I'd rather everything already be here before the round starts.

People use the cloner because it's too good and make doctoring easy. I want more people to do doctoring. Medkits and portamed are strong and make doctoring easy. Let's get rid of medkits and portamed.

[Kotlol]

It's a pretty trivial solution to make doctoring more viable than cloning. You make cloning take more work. The clone comes out in crit with damage in all sections, limbs missing, organ damage etc. who cares if players moan? Players want the easiest way out possible even at the cost of gameplay.

Interact with another department?
No thanks, I'd rather have all of that department in this one so I can do it myself.

Medbay often gets bombed?
I don't want to prep the medbay in case that happens I'd rather everything already be here before the round starts.

People use the cloner because it's too good and make doctoring easy. I want more people to do doctoring. Medkits and portamed are strong and make doctoring easy. Let's get rid of medkits and portamed.

This is the problem with SS13 in general.
It's independecy vs interaction and gameplay.

Some jobs are more independ but are needed like science.

With medbay... it's the most difficult one to balance. Cause any changes to it... will be at the determinent of other players. Wich flows over to the other problems.
Like if medbay can't heal the engineer, the engineer can't fix medbay if it gets damaged.

I think this is why medbay is a prime target to being attacked. Cause disable medbay... you can disable everything else.

[Egregorious]

Hadn't thought about it, but your takes on cloning are very accurate. It is oftentimes easier to literally clone someone than it is to keep them from dying. This should never be the case. I also vehemently agree with SR becoming commonplace, that's a band-aid fix. Honestly, cloning should just be more dangerous. I want more weird birth defects, missing limbs and organs, spawning as weird mutant races should be the norm, that gives everyone a motivation to avoid cloning at all costs, especially on RP.

From a game-mechanic perspective, the catch-22 with cloning is that it needs to be at its most accessible when things are already off-the-walls. The issue with flatly applying significant cloning defects is that defects become more of an issue the more of them there are, i.e. the more you use the cloning machine in succession. This means that when things are already bad and medical doctors have many things to already be doing, that's when defects are making cloning an issue. Which is the opposite of what you want.

You want cloning to be at its most useful when everything is going wrong, and at its most problematic when medical doctors are free to deal with the consequences. Such that doctors have more to do when things are quieter, and have less to worry about when they already have tons on their plate to deal with.

The simplest way to do that, I think, would be to make defects accumulate in the cloner over time when it's not used, applying them to the next clonee and then flushing themselves out. Is it 30 minutes into a quiet shift and Bongo the Clown offed himself with the russian revolver? He's going to come out wiith a plethora of now-chronic medical problems and needs to be taken care of for a few minutes just so he can stay alive. Conversely, did half of medbay just blow up, none of the doctors on shift know what they're doing, and 5 corpses are piled up in the lobby? The majority of those clonees are going to pop out just fine, because the cloning machine has had a chance to 'warm-up' after the first corpse.

You could even add a module to the machine that warms it up manually, allowing people to clear away all the defects, so that in the case of the latter scenario the first clonee isn't the sacrificial lamb. It goes without saying such a module would need a big cooldown and/or a use-limit, but that also means you can sprinkle warm-up modules in adventure zone areas or mining treasures for people to potentally help medbay out with.

But this idea would maybe encourage people to off themselves or kill their fellow doctors just to reset the defect accumulation, I don't know.

[Lord_earthfire]

This means that when things are already bad and medical doctors have many things to already be doing, that's when defects are making cloning an issue. Which is the opposite of what you want.

You want cloning to be at its most useful when everything is going wrong [...]

Actually no, at this point you want a shuttle call.

You want cloning for the few dozen deaths that happen at round start when antags gather their first blood/charge/bounties/feasts and you were not there at in time to get them to medbay. Or to clone the chef thst accidently suffocated in the freezer during a brawl with a monkey.

If shit finally hits the fan, you want the people to die and stay dead.

Cloning should be there to take care of the accidental sub 20 minute death. It should not be a crew-dispenser during an end-of-round rampage or a nukie-attack.

[Egregorious]

Actually no, at this point you want a shuttle call.

You want cloning for the few dozen deaths that happen at round start when antags gather their first blood/charge/bounties/feasts and you were not there at in time to get them to medbay. Or to clone the chef thst accidently suffocated in the freezer during a brawl with a monkey.

If shit finally hits the fan, you want the people to die and stay dead.

Cloning should be there to take care of the accidental sub 20 minute death. It should not be a crew-dispenser during an end-of-round rampage or a nukie-attack.

I think I haven't managed to be clear, because your examples are prime for what I mean. I shouldn't have accidentally suggested the cloner be more powerful at any point, when all I really mean is that it should be creating problems when they are manageable.

If there a few dozen deaths at round start you don't want all defects to be so debilitating that everyone who was cloned has to sit in an extra queue for 20+ minutes waiting to be fixed up so they can continue playing. You also don't want the cloning of the chef to mean so little that "stick him in the cloner" is the only interaction that happens in that scenario.

I'm not suggesting the cloner be any better than it is now, I'm saying that from a game-mechanic perspective making sure the downsides to it are at their highest when they are managable promotes the best interaction. If using the cloner is only much of a detriment when doctors have other things to do, the detriments are more of an annoyance than interesting problem; if using the cloner has trivial detriments, like it does now, it discourages medical interaction. The detriment to using the cloner should be highest when no other problems are present, to encourage other medical interactions.

In my opinion getting people to die and stay dead with respect to cloning is less about the mechanics of the cloning process itself - assuming it's not easier than it is now - and more about antagonist's abilities to subvert the cloning machine, whether directly or otherwise.

[Kateaclysm]

I don't mean to start any comparisons or arguments but I think the problems cloning causes are why cloning in general was tossed from a majority of TG-branch codebases years ago. Having really enjoyed the medical system of TG, it's generally a lot more engaging to be able to fix someone up post-death and revive them, rather than just hit a button and clone them when they die. It can be genuinely engaging to have a lot of people to revive over time, since post-death revival is a much more involved process over there... But there's also the nuance of 2 hour rounds versus our 90 minutes to consider as well.

[rando212]

As someone who has what I would consider veteran-level experience as medical doctor, I might as well throw my thoughts in.


To me, one of the most important things about balancing any job, in general, is making it fun, and not only fun for new players but fun for players who have a lot of experience as well. This is obviously not an easy thing to do and several concessions usually have to be made for a job to be new player accessible. Still, in my opinion, medical doctor could really do with systems that are more advanced and allow for a player to be able to find out new things and still have fun after hundreds of rounds.


One thing I have noticed over time is that at least for me I have the most fun playing doctor when I treat someone who is near death because rather than just pulling the auto mendors out and sitting there for thirty seconds or so I actually have to think about what information my scanner is giving me and make a plan for how to stop them from dying. Unfortunately, this is an experience that is exceedingly rare and that has to do with two main things one is the fact that the time period where someone is at a point of near death and just being dead is only really one minute or so so it is very likely they will just die before ever even seeing medbay. And, the second point I have is that healing in Medbay has far too many mechanics that are very effective and non-interactive. Both of these issues are exactly easy to fix but I think are the key to having a medical doctor experience that is extremely fun even hundreds of rounds in. I mean think of it this way when you watch a medical TV show do they show the dozens of cases that involve some variation of "here are some pills now get out of here" or do they show the cases where they are having to help some guy with 5 different diseases and is cut in half. To me playing medical doctor right now feels like a hundred cases of handing out some pills and one case that involves thinking for more than two seconds.


The first issue I mentioned was how players who are in Medbay are either fine enough 49% of the time dead 49% of the time or actually in a state of near death 2% of the time. Now the obvious solution to this is to make players live longer in crit but this has some obvious flaws like making all antags have an even harder job keeping people down and making basically any sort of event meant to hurt or kill players less effective and therefore this type of solution would be way too disruptive to the "meta" of the game and wouldn't be ever merged. In my opinion, what could be done is to make it so there are more "states" of death, we sort of have this already with SR where you can revive someone before they are rotting but after they start rotting you have to go to the cloner or borg. Instead of just having two "states" of death I think having something like four or five could be far more interactive. Something where a player who is only 0-2 mins dead can be revived using some drug or device like defib and requires healing up the damage they already had. Then, a player who is dead for 2-5 mins would require more set up like having to cut open their chest to access there heart directly and having to deal with extra organ or brain damage from being dead for a while. and obviously, you can see where this goes to having more and more intensive procedures needed to revive someone the longer they are dead. This would also obviously need for several systems to be revamped such as cloning to become harder SR to become less easy to make or possibly be completely remade for use in a later "state" of death. Also, this would need the time someone died to become easier to know possibly a text message when you examine the body such as "there body still feels warm to the touch" for recent death and etc, as well this would give opportunity for inter-department mechanics with scanner upgrades that give time of death that require materials. Another common point that would go against this would be that having increasingly difficult mechanics for reviving wouldn't be easy for new players to get into, but I feel like this would be a good opportunity for cooperation in the medical department to happen as right now medical doctors usually handle people one on one and rarely does a medical doctor need to ask for help in any way. This could lead the way for doctors on hand to consult each other about a patient if they do not understand what to do or even for newer players to handle alive people and recent deaths while more experienced doctors handle longer ago deaths. Overall, I feel as though the medical department sees far to many cases where someone either walks in not in critical and gets healed in ten seconds with little thought from the doctor or someone gets dragged in dead and gets cloned in ten seconds with little thought from the doctor. A system that requires more effort and allows for doctors to interact with more "extreme" cases and get that satisfaction from being able to heal someone by thinking and making up a plan and putting it to action would be far more fun then the current system we have.


My second point on how to make the medical department more fun to play is to remove or nerf the many different non-interactive tools doctors have. By this, I mean as of right now most if not all of the best ways to heal someone involve littearly zero thought from the doctor and in fact, doesn't even requires them to be there. One example of this is the cryo tubes which not only automatically heal people of all four basic damage types but also organ damage but also does this arguably faster than a medical doctor who is manually healing can. Another example of this is cloning where as people have mentioned you can decide someone is too far gone being -100% and just wait for them to die and throw them in the cloner and they would not only pop out at full health while you get to walk away but they would be healed two to three times faster then if you were to manually heal them. A final example are the sleepers which once again not only heal people automatically of every damage type but also require zero input from the medical doctor at least here manual healing is faster but still not by much. Now think back to these three examples and what is a common trait? None of these methods of healing are in any way fun or interactive for the doctor, now this wouldn't be a huge issue if all these methods were garbage and did not heal much but these methods are also some of the best ways to heal someone. As a medical doctor you could spawn in take off your clothes and all your tools and only use cryo, sleepers, and the cloner to heal people and you would not only have no case where you couldn't heal someone but you would be one of the best doctors in the medbay and I really hope I do not need to further explain why that is not fun game design. So what solution do I propose for this well in my opinion it already exsits if you go to the wiki or open a nanomed you will see your classic meds like burn and brute refills, charcoal, and epi but what about those twenty other chems no one uses. I believe that all we would really need to do to fix this issue for medbay is to make the non-interactive methods of healing less effective than interactive ones and create tiers of medicine doctors can use. Nearly all of this exists already we have teirs of medicine basically the chem wiki even gives you examples of "stronger" chemicals to use but the issue is is that they are very hard to get and are usually less effective or barely any more effective then the basic healing chems.


(creating a new paragraph because I have a lot of thoughts on this and I am having trouble organizing) So the TLDR if you want of my plan would be to nerf objects like the cryo, sleepers, and possibly dialysis machine as well as possibly nerfing the basic healing chems like silver sulfide and stypic powder, and changing the current "advanceded healing chems" as well as adding more. This would create a system where new players can still easily learn how to heal someone and experienced players have a more complex back end to learn. Once again in my opinion this all exists but is just in a state of near uselessness or is just not worth the trouble there are interactions like atropine and epi that heavily reduces the chance someone dies in crit but why the hell would you use that when cloning is easier and quicker. There are chems like pentetic acid that trades lots of tox damage for burn and brute but whats the point when throwing them in the cryo works just fine and doesn't require begging chem to make a chemical that's already annoying to make. All the tools to make a advanced medical system exist they just need to be brought to the surface and refined as well as there to be a use for them as once again even if this is done it doesn't matter when there are machines that do your job faster and let you just walk away.


Overall I feel like medical doctor as a role has a huge chance to be increadibly fun and complex while not being inaccesable to newer players but is bogged down by just plain out unfun mechanics that have to be used because they are either the only way or are just way more effective then manual healing. As well, because of these mechanics such as the cloner cause the most fun part of medical doctor being the weird and extreme cases that give that satisfaction after saving someone from what should have been near death to be skipped over in favor for near-instant healing at zero cost or thought to the doctor player.


Final note: if anyone actually cares to code anything like this I would love to give some of the ideas I have.

[Snowy :D]

it's generally a lot more engaging to be able to fix someone up post-death and revive them, rather than just hit a button and clone them when they die.

This is the #1 reason why I don’t like cloning in its current state. I couldn’t have said it any better.

---

So the TLDR if you want of my plan would be to nerf objects like the cryo, sleepers, and possibly dialysis machine as well as possibly nerfing the basic healing chems like silver sulfide and stypic powder, and changing the current "advanceded healing chems" as well as adding more.

What’s wrong with the dialysis machine?

I’m interested in the idea of advanced healing chems, but I’m a bit worried that making the base healing chems less efficient will end up increasing doctors’ over reliance on cloning.

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My personal idea for an alternative method of revival would be some sort of revival bed that prevents bodies from decaying when buckled into it and shocks them back to life when interacting with it. 2 of them can be found in medbay and they can be mechscanned. I don’t have many other ideas for these but I think that they are a fair and beginner-friendly way to revive people outside of cloning.

[JackMoloney]

I was going to make a long and exhaustive list in terms of issues with Medbay, however, they can all be summed up in a single sentence: 

"Medbay has been fool proofed into boredom through simplicity, and changing it would take forever."

Saying anything else would be disrespectful to other posts, as I'd just be parroting them, and I'm stating this as a medical veteran with extensive medical and chemical knowledge. Did you know a chilled beer drip can heal toxic damage faster than pentetic acid?

In short, +1.

[Kotlol]

I was going to make a long and exhaustive list in terms of issues with Medbay, however, they can all be summed up in a single sentence: 

"Medbay has been fool proofed into boredom through simplicity, and changing it would take forever."

Saying anything else would be disrespectful to other posts, as I'd just be parroting them, and I'm stating this as a medical veteran with extensive medical and chemical knowledge. Did you know a chilled beer drip can heal toxic damage faster than pentetic acid?

In short, +1.

If medbay wasn't simple, it had a higher barrier of entry. If it has a high barrier of entry, no one plays doctor. If no one plays doctor, anyone damaged might as well be a walking bullseye for antags.

I do agree it's been foolproofed, but it has to be foolproofed. Without foolproofing, during chaos the doctors are always gonna be overwhelmed.

This is why in "MY OPINION" , we need to tackle medical/cloning and such as food/hunger does.
You "CAN" get a cheap snack and drink from the machines for a simple fix, but never will it give big buffs or fill you in 1 go then like getting a well cooked meal from the chef or something well grown by botany.

It took me a while to think, but this is how i see medbay's mechanics "suppose to function"

- Automenders, cryo, cloning is the standard. It gives no buffs and infact doing this constantly starts doing decay, making it easier to reinstate those wounds.
You aren't fixing the problem, you are patching it.

- Actual doctoring will take more time and effort, but it has no side effects and downsides and may even give buffs.
Insted of your brute damage being mended away, doctors remove it and strengthen your body. Causing your tissue to be able to resist damage better for a short while.

- If you don't want durability problems, you got to robotcists to get organs replaced. You will be locked out of chemical buffs.
Simple as this.

- Genetics gives genetical buffs/debuffs, they can be left alone as it is.

In my opinion.. we need the simple tasks so the station can function. Especially if medbay gets blown up for the 200th time. There needs to be an easy way to doctor people... but have it be a downside. Just like cloning starts showing defects the more you clone... the more someone gets healed with a mender, the more tissue damage remains and thus start taking debuffs as insted of taking 5 brute per punch, it becomes 7 or 8 or at worst 10.
But with the right doctoring.. for atleast 5 minutes that 5 brute is only 4 brute.

This is what we need. Those who "CHOSE" to go out of their way to stay in medbay, gets results. Those who want to "CHOSE" to opt out can visit a robotcist. Those who want to get a quick heal and suffer the consiquences "CHOSE" this.

It feels better to CHOSE your options, rather then "Mender me doc" as your only option.

[Egregorious]

- Automenders, cryo, cloning is the standard. It gives no buffs and infact doing this constantly starts doing decay, making it easier to reinstate those wounds.
You aren't fixing the problem, you are patching it.

- Actual doctoring will take more time and effort, but it has no side effects and downsides and may even give buffs.
Insted of your brute damage being mended away, doctors remove it and strengthen your body. Causing your tissue to be able to resist damage better for a short while.

- If you don't want durability problems, you got to robotcists to get organs replaced. You will be locked out of chemical buffs.
Simple as this.

[...]

In my opinion.. we need the simple tasks so the station can function.

I think you're making very good points, I also think the system in place to make the gameplay function like this already exists; organ damage.

The trouble with organ damage in this respect currently is that it doesn't matter unless below a critical threshhold, and it gets dealt with incidentally by basic healing chems. However, theoretically it is an advanced damage system that causes more permanent deterioration to accumulate over time, which potentially isn't solved by basic doctoring of the four damage types.

This is what I would try to change to make organ damage function as an advanced doctoring mechanic:

- Remove or limit the organ damage that basic chems and cryo can heal, and probably add them to more advanced and specific chems. Perhaps you need something specific like salbutemol to heal lung damage etc. Tie this into buffs if you like, perhaps all organs start out at less than maximum health, and getting them to maximum health makes that organ function better, essentially providing buffs.

- Add more and earlier threshholds at which organs start introducting debuffs. Perhaps a lightly damaged lung reduces stamina regen a little, getting worse as more damage threshholds are hit. This simulates advanced doctoring providing 'maintainance' to people's bodies; they need their organs seen to to keep themselves functioning at 100% after taking damage too many times.

- Make damage to limbs also apply organ damage to certain organs. Damage to the right arm can affect the right lung, damage to the legs might affect the intestines etc. This means organ damage is more likely to ramp specifically based on where someone took damage, and makes organ damage a psuedo-positional damage type. Alternatively: treat limbs as organs, with higher damage lowering punch effectiveness, or making it easier to be disarmed, or just flat out give that arm a chance to drop things when it's in critical condition.

- Probably ensure organs are fairly tanky. If they're going to be taking consistent damage and not being incidentally healed you don't want them to be dying all the time and needing to be flat out replaced too often. When someone takes significant organ damage, they should more likely just be hit with debuffs rather than a dead organ. You want them to be fixable by doctors more often than you want their necessary removal - not that you never want them needing to be removed.


In my mind, this would help keep an easily managable level of doctoring - where most doctors can simply heal the four damage types to keep people upright and going about their business - while advanced doctoring of organ damage lets people keep functioning at 100% even after they've accumulated debuffs through organ damage by taking regular damage over time. It also means that this maintainence only affects those that take damage, and thus keeping out of trouble is still a good way of maintaining 100% bodily functionality.

[Lord_earthfire]

If medbay wasn't simple, it had a higher barrier of entry. If it has a high barrier of entry, no one plays doctor. If no one plays doctor, anyone damaged might as well be a walking bullseye for antags.

I believe this is partially false. This is SS13, a game where people partially go to because if its complexity. A good chunk of our playerbase play jobs solely because multiple systems that are interconnected in a way that provide a challenge and keep playing the same job over and over interesting.

That's why low depth busywork-jobs , like janitor, have actual problems keeping non-new players in them. You got the regulars, but that's about it.

[Egregorious]

I believe this is partially false. This is SS13, a game where people partially go to because if its complexity.  A good chunk of our playerbase play jobs solely because multiple systems that are interconnected in a way that provide a challenge and keep playing the same job over and over interesting.

That's why low depth busywork-jobs , like janitor, have actual problems keeping non-new players in them. You got the regulars, but that's about it.

I think this is just the difference between a skill floor and a skill ceiling. Janitor is an example of a job with a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling - new players can learn very quickly what to do and failure has minimal impact, but it's also fairly easy to reach the point at which nothing is interesting to accomplish anymore.

Meanwhile Engineer is an example of a job with a high skill floor and a high skill ceiling. It requires some learning to accomplish your job at the start, but there's a lot of complexity as to how far you can push mechanics.

Currently medical doctoring has a relatively low floor compared to some jobs; mending the four basic damage types is quite trivial. However, it also doesn't have the highest skill ceiling because the most efficient way to do most things is often the simplest. It's also a job with one the highest potential impacts when performed poorly; if noone is around to know basics well enough, it prevents many people from continuing to play the game.

I believe Kotlol's point is that the floor needs to be maintained to some extent even while the ceiling is raised.

[Lord_earthfire]

I believe Kotlol's point is that the floor needs to be maintained to some extent even while the ceiling is raised.

I agree. What i think is also thst we have to accept that once we start to raise the skill ceiling, more people will die in medbay and likely stay dead for longer.