[CLOSED PR] Removes numbers from health scanners on RP

[github_bot]

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todo:
- [ ] Fix sleeper
- [ ] Add a way to force a numeric scan (for admin stuff and maybe the surgical computer)
- [ ] 2nd/3rd/4th pass on adjectives
About the PR
No changes to Classic.
Changes health analyzers and similar to use adjectives rather than hard numbers or percentages:





Why's this needed?
"Doctor she has 109 brute damage!!"
"I am 54% healthy"
what does this even mean
Ideally people will use more accurate/less gamey medical terminology for injuries.

Changelog

Code:

(u)aloe
(+)Health analyzers and similar on the RP servers now give adjectives rather than hard numbers for health scans.

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[Waffleloffle]

I like this a lot... it'll make it a bit harder to treat people since you can't perfectly ration your medical chemicals but I think for rp that's a good change. I like when doctors need to pay attention to their patients

[DisturbHerb]

Am generally happy with this change, so long as it doesn't touch the surgical computer's damage value displays. Arpee.

[Cal]

Agree with charge and agree with surgery pcs keeping exact numbers

[Zamujasa]

Crossposting what I said on Github:

I said this in the admin channel as well, but I don't like it.

it's going to annoy people with "great, how much is none/minor/major/life-threatening, what do all these words mean, and why are they changing position so it makes it harder to read at a glance"; the thresholds aren't clear, and you can conceivably be dying with three "minor" and one "major".

People already dislike the Health Implant HUD because it severely muddies the ground between the standard 100-80-60-40-20-0 health meter scale by replacing it with four even less clear icons; this is doing that, but for everyone.

There is also the obvious slipperly slope argument to be made; do we have to start obfuscating reagent amounts from scanners?

[DisturbHerb]

There is also the obvious slipperly slope argument to be made; do we have to start obfuscating reagent amounts from scanners?

I don't personally think this is going to be the case. Reagent volumes make sense as discrete quantities, I can pull out a beaker and measure out exact amounts of stuff. Damage or health, as represented in the game, is an abstraction as these qualities are harder to quantify with exact numbers. Sure, maybe the level of technology we're at in our universe allows us to quantify them with exact values, but it is significantly less of a stretch to measure the volumes of chemicals inside a container than it is to measure how many health points a complex organism has after being stabbed in the chest.

[CatzCatzCatz]

I'm kinda iffy on this one seeing as how regardless of what's shown, people are still going to reach for the automenders until it stops healing. Considering that the PR is to address doctors going "He's got like 40 Brute damage" and "They're forty percent alive.", perhaps we should keep the numbers but allow the health scanners to dish out medical flavor text like "Bone Stability at 49%, please apply calcium." and "Subject has a high amount of foreign objects in the bloodsteam."

[aloe]

There is also the obvious slipperly slope argument to be made; do we have to start obfuscating reagent amounts from scanners?

I did think about this, and to makes more sense to me to have exact reagent amounts; we use defined units of chemicals all the time, but defined units of injury aren't really a thing that exist or make sense to exist. It's reasonable to say "this person has 20 units of piss in them" or whatever, less so for "this person has 20 units of brain damage".

(tbf you could use blood oxygenation level or whatever for oxy damage but I'd rather be consistent one way or another)

edit: other people posted while I was typing >: (

[Cleaverwolf]

Don't think this is a great idea. While it's a bit odd that people will throw out percentages and say "I've got 54 brute" Rp-wise, the inconvenience and guessing game that would come with a change like this is not worth the trade-off. Having a lot of adjectives will be hard to memorize, whereas on the other end having too few will make treatment an estimate game.

Keeping numbers AND adding this could be a solution but... what's to stop people from just using the numbers still? It does convey more useful information, even if ever so slightly.

[Zamujasa]

that argument doesn't make much sense when a reagent scanner is capable of divining the entire contents of human bodies. it makes enough logical sense to me that a device specifically made to scan someone's health would be able to tell accurate-enough levels of tissue damage and oxygen saturation. even now we have health-monitoring devices that are capable of telling you blood oxy levels with a clear percentage


the "problem" as i understand it is that people in-game are using discreet numbers instead of being more vague or "role playing" harder about the actual extent of one's injuries. i feel this is an extremely heavy-handed "solution" to that problem that solves it by making everyone's jobs worse.

i do not think this is a problem at all, but even if i did, the solution is likely to enforce and nudge people into not doing that. we already tell people not to use txt speak or refer to the game as a "round". this would just be another part of that.

but, again, i think this whole thing is silly.


e: apologies if i'm coming off as particularly harsh. not trying to be, just very opinionated.

[rdcb]

Agree with Zamujasa. Especially confusing for new medical players who don't know what any of the words mean, categories seem too broad.

Consider: "Welcome back, you had 12e6+5 burn damage, how?" vs "Welcome back, you had fatal burn."
First sentence seems more descriptive y'know? Second just feels like "yeah you burned to death, okay." That kinda number could be the one thing that impressed a new player enough to stick around.

Do doctors HAVE to slap someone on a surgery table just to estimate how much longer they're gonna have to mend someone, or whether the number's big enough (see: players rolling very well on oxy rng) that it's not worth mending at all? When all the surgery tables are taken and there's 5 people in fatal condition at the lobby, how do you triage them? Seems like a unnecessary nerf + mechanic difference between classic/rp to me.

The issue of constantly using health numbers seems more of a player-side issue, not mechanic-side imo. Maybe extra specification in the rules instead? "Please try to RP scanner readouts with appropriate terminology."

...Or maybe both? 2 lines, one for numbers, another for damage level?

EDIT: One other thing I forgot to mention- autopsies! I know quite a few people like to do autopsies, which is good for both general RP and sec investigations. As of right now I don't think most morgues have surgery computers. So if you wanted a more descriptive report than what the scanners have, you'd need to do it out in the operating theater proper. What patient would want to see a doctor openly slicing up corpses in medbay? This would be a hindrance to a perfectly fine RP bit that helps other departments.

Sure, you could just add them to the morgue, but really this whole no-rp med issue could be solved with an extra line in the rules and community self-regulation like the azone loot clause. No need for extra PRs, scope creep or general inconvenience for med players/coders.

[BatElite]

the "problem" as i understand it is that people in-game are using discreet numbers instead of being more vague or "role playing" harder about the actual extent of one's injuries. i feel this is an extremely heavy-handed "solution" to that problem that solves it by making everyone's jobs worse.

Heaven forbid we're reminded that we are playing a game :P

[FishyCrea]

Not a huge fan of this change myself. I understand the thought that this change will make people roleplay more, but it also creates a lot of problems for doctors to do their jobs.
Quick summary of my thoughts: We don't need to reduce the information doctors on rp get to present that information in an rp-friendly way.

I agree with the sentiment shared by BatElite and rdcb, this feels like a very dramatic solution to a problem that's minor at best. I don't even think it'll encourage people to RP more. Generally, when someone comes into medbay with light wounds, I'm not really looking at the damage numbers. I'm just looking at what kind of damage they have, and treating them as needed. However, the numbers matter when someone comes into medbay and is already unconscious and/or VERY close to dying. I can't really RP with someone who's dying, my attention's more-so on trying to keep them alive.

I don't think this change is going to dramatically change things, but it's almost certainly going to make playing medbay much more annoying, especially when dealing with toxin damage. If I can't see the damage numbers going up and have to wait for them to cross some arbitrary threshold, I'm basically just keeping someone from actually playing the game by holding them in medbay while I wait to make sure they aren't actually dying faster. Sure, I could slap them on a medical table and go from there, but the stations aren't designed with the idea of each patient getting a medical table. There are like, two/three on each map. I can tell you from experience that those will fill up incredibly quickly.

So yeah, not a fan of this change. That being said, I'm not totally against getting rid of the numerical health readout on RP either, but I think whatever replaces it should provide the same information in an RP-friendly way, not punish rp players by giving them much more vague info.

[sunkiisu]

Okay.. so ive had some time to stew on this, and I'm truly trying to appreciate it from the angle of encouraging more rp oriented interactions with medbay, but I feel like I'm more of the opinion that the downsides outweigh the possible upsides. 

As someone who mains medical, I like it a lot for both the flavor aspect of rping with patients, but also for the mechanical aspect of managing my chems well and micromanaging my time, especially when it gets incredibly busy. Knowing how to identify which patients are the highest risk makes medical less stressful and more fun, even if it isn't exactly true to life in respect to how you would approach someone about it. While in concept i think this could be neat, after trying to use it in practice earlier tonight I felt a bit discouraged and a little like I just wouldnt enjoy playing medical as much anymore if this was the permanent change going forwards. I had no idea how to gauge what the severity actually was because of how vague the damage is.. In the end, it might be personal preference, but I just don't think I'm a huge fan of it, you know?? I feel like this is something that's to be addressed with the playerbase and not mechanics. You can still have a scanner with numbers and percentages and also make an attempt towards a more meaningful diagnosis, but that seems like it should be the individual players decision to make - not everyone commits to the same level of rp, thats just kinda how it goes. 

tl;dr i enjoy rp just as much as the next guy, but this feels like an unnecessary mechanical nerf that would change the exact thing i like about playing medical, and could be confusing to pick up for newcomers due to its vagueness.

[Emimiyu]

What's the threshold for each category? If a hundred damage already count as fatal, I find it troublesome because it means anything over 200 is also considered as fatal. People would still live with damages over 200 and there is a big difference between a 100 and 200. Now, we can always dragged them to surgery table, but as other replies said, we don't have that many surgery tables with computers, not counting the one locked with robotics access. Even if we have chems to make people stay alive, we also don't know which one who really needs it first.