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1 | | -```admonish warning "Attention: Placeholder!" |
2 | | -This section is a placeholder, pending a design-doc being created by the related work-group |
3 | | -``` |
4 | | - |
5 | 1 | # Medical |
6 | | -Responsible for causing patient's skeletons to disappear |
| 2 | + |
7 | 3 |
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8 | 4 | ## Concept |
9 | | -> A high-level conceptual overview of what this department does. This is generally 1-2 paragraphs and should reflect a high level view of what this department brings to the player and the game. |
| 5 | +Medical as a department is primarily tasked with keeping the crew alive and healthy. |
| 6 | + |
| 7 | +The challenge of that very simple task is that the crew lives in a tin can that is prone to very bloody and violent accidents and disasters. |
| 8 | +It's medicals job to be able to respond to a variety of different injuries and deaths, from a variety of different sources and to diagnose and cure so that the crew can get back to work or at least limp their way to the evacuation shuttle. |
10 | 9 |
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11 | | -## Player Story |
12 | | -> A short (1-2 paragraph) story from the perspective of someone playing a role in this department. This is effectively a story of the ideal experience of a player interacting with these mechanics/systems. |
| 10 | +The tools medical uses should be scarce, but never scarce enough to halt the department, should be time consuming such that death is dangerous, but never time consuming enough that there's a lot of waiting involved in healing, and should keep medical constantly moving, but not so constant that it becomes overwhelming or unreasonably swamped. |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | +Given the right tools medical should be able to deal with most bodies coming in, but there should always be a clear line of when a body is unrecoverable. Some wounds are too grievous, too rotten, too deliberate to recover from. That's what the morgue is for. |
13 | 13 |
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14 | 14 | ## Design Pillars |
15 | | -> A group of simple high-level ideas that embody this department. These are usually expressed with singluar words or short phrases, but may also include a *short* one sentence explaination. Game pillars are what makes the *identity* of the department. |
| 15 | +Medical as a department needs to have consistency to work. But things should never be so consistent that they become mundane. |
| 16 | +In order to maintain this balance, there are a number of design pillars that must be upheld. |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | +### Pillar 1: The severity of wounds should match the danger of the source |
| 19 | + The difference between a common workplace accident and getting shot to pieces shouldn't be one number being higher. Getting stabbed by a pen 100 times should never be equivalent to getting shot. |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | + > Common injuries should be easier to treat, almost trivially so. |
| 22 | +> A crewmember should be able to walk into medical, get a band aid, pill and lollypop for their trouble and then be on their way as to not slow down the department or the rest of the round. |
| 23 | +
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| 24 | + > Uncommon injuries and injuries that are to be expected from doing your job should be harder to fix but nowhere near impossible. |
| 25 | +> A salvager might lose a limb or two as an occupational hazard. Provided they haven't bled out or gone into shock it should be as simple as reattaching the limbs and undergoing a blood transfusion to get them back to work. |
| 26 | +
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| 27 | + > Rarer injuries that are the result of workplace accidents, or lethal antagonistic behavior should require special attention to deal with. |
| 28 | +> An engineer sunbathing in the singularity might require most of their organs to be replaced, an atmos tech who forgot to wear their suit and blew up the burn chamber might need reconstructive surgery, a security officer who got bombed or shot to death by a traitor or nukie is going to need immediate intensive care to get their heart started again and to wake them up from a coma. These types of injuries should come with the risk that recovery may not be guaranteed if the station is in disarray, to encourage safe workplace behavior. |
| 29 | +
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| 30 | + > And most important, if someone really wants you dead then medical shouldn't be able to reverse that easily. |
| 31 | +> Round removal is an important part of round progression, and the threat an antagonist poses to the crew is directly linked to the damage they can do and how difficult it is to reverse it. An antagonist should be able to intentionally and permanently remove a target from the round and the station will have to manage that loss in the same way they might lose a machine or valuable item important to the station. |
| 32 | +
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| 33 | +### Pillar 2: Damage shouldn't just be flavor |
| 34 | +Damage types, Wounds, and their effects shouldn't just be flavor. The type of damage you take, how and where you take it should matter. |
| 35 | + |
| 36 | +The wounds you recieve should determine your state, whether you can stand, whether you're bleeding, whether you're conscious and whether you're alive. Damage numbers shouldn't be what kills you, rather it's the effects of that damage that kills you. |
16 | 37 |
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17 | | -> Pillars are there to act as guides when creating new mechanics or interactions, they serve as the measuring posts to make sure that what you are trying to do will fit in the department gameplay. |
| 38 | +> Getting shot with a bullet causes you to bleed, damages your organs, and causes your body to fail you. Radiation burns your flesh and shuts down your metabolism poisioning your body slowly, getting blasted with a laser kills cells and leaves wounds highly suceptible to infection. |
18 | 39 |
|
19 | | -> To acheive this you want pillars that are concrete enough to get your concept across but broad enough that there is some room of interpretation and discussion. |
| 40 | +> A bullet to the heart should eventually cause you to pass out from lack of blood circulation, a baseball bat to the head should knock you out, traditional mob states of "crit" and "dead" should be applied based on your wounds and not number values. |
20 | 41 |
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21 | | -### Pillar_1: |
22 | | - > Breif Pillar Description |
| 42 | + ### Pillar 3: Treatment should be reactive |
| 43 | + Nobody likes doing the same thing over and over again. That's boring! As much as possible injuries should be dynamic and interesting. |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | + > There should be no cure all medicine that is always the correct option to use. |
| 46 | +> Any that could exist should be limited by drawbacks of side effects, scarcity or exclusiveness. If a medicine is extremely strong and very generalized, it should also be so rare that it's only used for emergencies or otherwise come with such severe drawbacks or limitations that its uses are niche. The vast majority of medicines should be just one tool of many you'll need to cure a patient of their wounds. |
23 | 47 |
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24 | | - ### Pillar_2: |
25 | | - > Breif Pillar Description |
| 48 | +> The cost and complexity of a treatment should scale with the severity of the wound. |
| 49 | +> It should never be a numbers game of just do the same thing x100 because this wound is 100x worse! Simple wounds should be treatable with one and done solutions while more complex wounds should require the use of specialized tools and problem solving skills to be fully treated. |
| 50 | + |
| 51 | + > Wounds should almost never be static. |
| 52 | +> Even small wounds should be something a crewmember would want to seek treatment for. A crewmember continually building up even small injuries without treating them should suffer appropriate consequences to their neglegence. |
| 53 | +> Wounds should affect other wounds. Even small injuries should have an effect on other injuries you take, such that leaving any wound untreated comes with some risk. |
| 54 | +> Severe wounds should need to be addressed immediately with first aid, and require genuine treatment in the near future. A crewmember should never be able to ignore even one bad injury without facing deadly consequences. |
| 55 | +
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| 56 | +> Treatment should reward reactivity. |
| 57 | +> First aid should almost always be possible on a crewmember provided you have the right tools and provided the wound is fresh. If left to fester your options should become more limited and the difficulty of treating the wound should increase. |
| 58 | +> Severe wounds left untreated should progress into more wounds and scale in their symptoms. A patient left to tend their own wounds should eventually die outright. |
| 59 | +> A doctor keeping a close eye on a patient and giving them a lot of attention should have an easier time responding to new developments of their injuries. The progression of wounds should make sense such that if a wound gets worse while it's being treated, it should generally be easier to deal with compared to a new wound that appears on an untreated patient. |
| 60 | +
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| 61 | +### Pillar 4: Medicine should be interesting |
| 62 | +Players should want to know how to be a doctor, not only for the purpose it serves but for the depth and complexity involved. |
| 63 | + |
| 64 | +> Everything from treatment, to chemistry, to surgery should have mechanical depth where knowledge and creativity is rewarded and experimentation is encouraged. |
| 65 | +
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| 66 | +> Getting the best numbers should be mechanically discouraged by having a wide variety of options available. The same injury might call for different treatments depending on context, some poisons might suit some situations better than others. Any "best of their class" meta items or tactics should be discouraged through complexity and should never so heavily outweigh the simpler options that it becomes a burden to not understand them. Not knowing the meta shouldn't put you at a major disadvantage. |
| 67 | +
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| 68 | +### Pillar 5: Information is a resource |
| 69 | +The information that is communicated to a doctor should be something doctors have to actively try and get. Medical scanners shouldn't be an end all be all. As with Pillar 2, no treatment should be a cure all, and therefore no source of information should trump another. |
| 70 | + |
| 71 | +> Getting information from a patient should be the fastest and easiest way to diagnose, but not the only option for obvious reasons. |
| 72 | +
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| 73 | +> Handheld items should only give some of the story, with the rest having to be intuited through knowledge or context. |
| 74 | +
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| 75 | +> No information should be completely obscured. There should be fallbacks in case other methods of information gathering fail so that a medical player never feels stuck. These fallback methods should be always available but should be inconvenient so players don't rely on them and instead learn to master their medical skills. |
26 | 76 |
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27 | 77 | ## Objectives |
28 | | -> What is this department's objective when it comes to the round? Do they have a unique failure condition? If so, what is it? How does this department's objectives interact with the rest of the station? |
| 78 | +Medical is arguably the most important department for the crew round flow wise. If a player can trust that the medical department will be there to catch them when they fall, they're more likely to go out and make mistakes, and mistakes are fun. A player shouldn't feel like most mistakes will result in a permanent unavoidable death or that medical is useless in regards to preventing crewmembers from dying permanently. |
| 79 | + |
| 80 | +If a player is an antagonist, medical should be one of their larger worries alongside the worry of getting caught or killed. An antagonist should feel it necessary to confirm kills on their targets and take extra steps, or have extra tools at their disposal, to ensure medical is unable to revive their targets. Depending on the antagonist, these steps should take some effort. If medical is doing their job, an antagonist shouldn't ever become a mass round removal machine unless that is the explicit design goal of said antagonist. |
| 81 | + |
| 82 | +Doctor's should be as neutral as a crew aligned job can be. Their focus should be on tending the wounds of anyone who comes into medbay so long as they are crew. It's their job to ensure that whether it's a security officer, antagonist, or passenger being dragged in, they will try to keep them alive so that the round can continue to progress for as long as it can. |
| 83 | + |
| 84 | +An experienced doctor should never feel overwhelmed, but their work also shouldn't feel mundane. Each patient should be a puzzle to solve, some more simple than others but none feeling impossible or discouraging to solve. Intuiting and gathering information should be their most important skill, such that they always have to put some effort in to do their job well. |
29 | 85 |
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30 | | -## Progression |
31 | | -> How does the *gameplay* of this department change over the course of a round? Are there unlocks? Are players collecting/spending resources? Is this progression tied/related to other departments? If so how? |
| 86 | +At the same time, medical shouldn't have such a high learning curve or barrier to entry that it becomes obtuse. Tools should be intuitive, information should be immediately understood upon being received and the potential solutions obvious. While problems may worsen over time, the stress shouldn't be about "I have no clue what to do" but instead "I'm not sure which option is the best one right now". |
32 | 87 |
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33 | | -## Flow |
34 | | -> How does the *experience* of the player change over the course of a round? Are players constantly running around putting out fires or are there breaks in the action? Do players need to wait on other departments as pre-requisites for their own gameplay, or is this department fairly self-sufficent? |
| 88 | +As the round progresses the tools medical has should scale with the increasing danger. Science and cargo should be opening new doors for medical through the acquisition of new technologies and resources. Meanwhile the amount of patients being treated, the severity of wounds coming in, and the amount of bodies in the morgue should match the scaling resource gain. Calling evac should be a matter of practicality and the evac shuttle should have resources which help keep many patients stable for transport to centcomm to encourage calling evac once the situation spirals out of control. Medical should transition into trying to save as many lives as possible over trying to keep the station running. |
35 | 89 |
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36 | | -## Mechanics |
37 | | -> What major mechanics does this department use and how are they connected to this department. |
| 90 | +Most of medical should be limited to their department. Their best tools should be static so that a traitor can't run around with the equivalent of a full medbay in their pocket while a security officer has to get in the medical bed queue. Nobody should be able to become a perfect one crewmember walking medical department. At the same time, a doctor should be able to reasonably handle treating a single patient or a group of patients on their own. Given the nature of the game, there's a very high chance there will be more bodies in the department than there are doctors. |
38 | 91 |
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39 | | -### Mechanic_Placeholder1 |
40 | | -> Each mechanic should have its own subheading and should contain a *short high-level* overview of the mechanic and how it is used by this department. Each mechanic should also link their associated design document as the subheading. |
| 92 | +What isn't departmental exclusive should be distributed by medical if possible. It's not practical to send an MD with salvage to make sure they're getting their wounds patched up, instead medical should be able to distribute first aid supplies that are powerful enough to ensure a security officer, or salvager survive long enough to wrap up what they were doing and limp back to medical. Paramedics should be applying first aid to injured crewmembers so they can have a better chance at survival when being dragged back to medical. |
41 | 93 |
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42 | | -### Mechanic_Placeholder2 (Not Implemented Yet) |
43 | | -> Mechanics that are unimplemented should be marked with (Not Implmented Yet) and should link the associated design proposal if it exists. |
| 94 | +During downtime inbetween treating wounds, medical should not be idle and should have things to do. These shouldn't be busywork tasks designed to distract, but rather optional tasks which each job chooses to perform. Doctors should have surgical training dummies at their disposal, and tools to give the clown implanted pie cannons instead of arms. Chemistry should be experimenting with chemicals, trying out new and creative recipies, or making chemicals which science can use to print their gadgets. The paramedics should be keeping track of crewmembers and ensuring that first aid supplies are available to the station. The CMO should be ensuring that medical is stocked up and ready for anything which the shift might throw at them, as well as training new interns and should have the tools to perform both tasks. |
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