Does anyone else feel unsatisfied with being doctor on Paradise?

[TerrorOnTheSeas]

I went one round as doctor and it was very depressing. 99% of my job was putting people in the sleeper, using a burn/brute automender, cryoing people, or cloning them. I feel like playing doctor is way too "easy" on Paradise and doesn't really encourage roleplaying between the medical staff and the patients. I actually prefer the medical system on /tg/ because doctors have to put in a lot more effort to fix people and especially to bring people back from the dead.

[Sadhorizon]

Those are the easiest ways to do medical, yup.

Our medical gets fun if you start to mess with chemistry more.

Feed your patient some something from the fridge instead of using a mender next time!

 

If you want to avoid cloning people, you can try messing around with Lazarus Reagent. It's certainly more challenging, and if you get good at it, it's even better than cloning (in some rather edge cases, but still!)

I might also mention, cloning is slowly being reworked to require more effort to use.

 

As for RP being lacking, I must agree. But it's due to timers being extremely strict in medical. Either a defib timer, timer when a chemical is in someone's body, timing on surgery etc. Unless you type fast, RPing with those around is just hard.

[zwan1990]

Remove cloning when?

[ID404NotFound]

one round I started a blood drive, giving crew who donated a cookie and juice after taking blood. People were very confused at the beginning, but it was fun.

I've also started getting chef to make me lollypops as early as possible, to give to "good patients"

[Eric6426]

Even with para's simplicity there's a lot of players, specially many new ones, of which there are often a lot of, that struggle with even our basic system.
Many cry about cloning, I played my fair share of medbay, sometimes (see: Midrounds and similar high-amounts of murder) make cloning necessary for an overworked meday. Removing it without anything to replace it would just be a strain on meday and keep a lot of players out of the round permanently past defib timer, since SR'ing everyone isn't all that fun. (Most vox don't get revived if they're past defib, in my experience, because SR-damage surgery is a lot unlike just defib)

I'm not all too used to TG but its far more complex than I think would work here, if a chemmaster is difficult to learn I don't think having people learn about concentrations and tons of chem machines/medical hijinks would do much except make medbay a missery for med docs and crew alike

That's not to say you can't strive for it though, I'm just saying that its a really big thing to ask and it'd need a lot of rework, attention and detail, or it'd just be an absolute mess. Namely because on an extended or normal tot round medbay won't have many issues, but when a clingtot messy round starts to get out of control they're going to get overwhelmed.

While I do love roleplay we're also an MRP server with a lot of newbies - Many of them will not know how to roleplay, and struggle. Not everyone will put up with it if its a thing that is forced for doctors to do with patients, instead of just letting them engage in roleplay if they wish, and doctors can snap back at people for it. Same with making it more difficult, it'll make newbie doctors get snapped at by crewmemebers ICly and OOCly for taking a while or being bad at treating them fast - As we have a lot of action in rounds so people don't want to spend 10 minutes in medbay.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Eric6426

[TheBadPerson]

I’m less a fan of arbitrarily making medbay harder, and more a fan of adding features. I would love to see things added from tg code like brute/burn surgery, and revival surgery. It would allow skilled medbay players to operate under duress, and reward learning the intricacies of medbay. 
 

Everytime this topic comes up people tend to forget that the rounds are 2 hours long on average. A bald medbay has a tendency to make rounds pure pain, despite how easy paradise medical is in comparison to other codebases. 
 

For that reason I think the focus should be on rewarding experienced med players with optimized and flexible procedures if they care to learn them, rather than taking the easier options away. 

[procdrone]

the way the damage, shock and crit, considering this is a text-based game, if you're typing/trying to RP, you aren't doing anything else; and the conditions become worse, timers expire, and people die when you blabber on.

So yeah, you just have to focus on fixing people. it might be a thankless job but at least you never find yourself bored on most rounds. (for example, engineers who are almost always bored).

And yeah while basic stuff is usually well, basic to fix, sometimes you get a patient so fricked up much more effort is required. for example, reviving vox or slime people past their timer. There is a lot of surgery involved in reviving dead organs and limbs.

This hurried style of medbay also works for the players on the receiving end. I'm sure people want to continue playing the game, not spend half the round in medical because medical is too complicated to practice efficiently, or because procedures take an arbitrarily long time. Gods know enough people experienced malpracticebay.

[Eric6426]

5 minutes ago, procdrone said:

Gods know enough people experienced malpracticebay.

When entirety of medbay sticks slimes and vox in cloner, doesn't work, and DNR's them
God those are always funny from how painful it is to watch, since the cloner tells you 

[Endar]

Medbay is fun when people are dying

[BottomQuark]

I think adding features for medbay for non-emergency situations could be a good way out of this.

 

My problem with medbay is that it's 90% of the time in 1 of 2 modes:

- nobody is dying for half an hour and there's nothing to do for doctors mechanic wise

- literally half of the station just died oh shit of fuck there's 15 dead bodies per med doc and they all need to be cloned NOW

I think bloating medbay mechanics would make the "mode 2" really unfun for literally everyone.

But I would welcome some features that give medical doctors things to do in "mode 1". Like chemists make chemicals, virologists make viruses, geneticists do... Genetics?

But med docs don't have that much to do if it's calm. Watch suit sensors maybe? Get some cool tools from RnD maybe? Neither takes that much time and usually is a job for 1 person.

I didn't play for some time so please correct me if I'm wrong tho

[procdrone]

 

4 hours ago, BottomQuark said:

geneticists do... Genetics?

It's actually funny, but the cloner is the supposed duty of the geneticists, not doctors.

But what could the doctors do on downtime? What kind of tasks that are useful so anyone bothers doing them?

[Skajaw]

11 hours ago, procdrone said:

 

It's actually funny, but the cloner is the supposed duty of the geneticists, not doctors.

But what could the doctors do on downtime? What kind of tasks that are useful so anyone bothers doing them?

Well I havent played for a long while now, I dont think much changed but downtime, especially on lowpop was basically hoping for the worst or RPing with other doctors. You can check on the ORs, cryo tubes, blood bags. If there's no chemist, make some chems yourself ( if there's no cmo to let you inside, breaking into chemistry only requires a wrench after all).

So besides checking on equipment bothering science for some IMS or do paramedic work, there're no really usefull tasks. Many roles have this problem though, you cant keep everyone busy the entire round. Doc might be boring many times but if shit hits the fan, you'll wish for 5 minutes to relax.

Maybe some praying to a mean god during extended rounds will cause some havoc and gets rid of the boredom...

[BottomQuark]

15 hours ago, procdrone said:

But what could the doctors do on downtime? What kind of tasks that are useful so anyone bothers doing them?

I have no idea :^)

 

I thought about making a machine that can drain people of blood for cash since the money is somewhat more scarce now. And make it so it needs to be operated by someone. Doctor places empty blood bag in machine throw a person inside and done. Would need to be secured against abuse with monkey people tho. But then again how often would people use it? No idea.

I am not a creative person lol 

Edited August 24, 2023 by BottomQuark

[Rythen]

Yeah I can't really put my finger on exactly why but I don't find that I enjoy doctor as much here as on a server like CM.  Not to say that our medical gameplay doesn't do a lot of stuff right, I think it actually does, I just don't find it as rewarding to play personally.

On CM your concern is playing efficiently so that patients don't permanently die since if you lose a patient by not healing them fast enough, that's it, they're gone.  There is a huge sense of urgency to save them in time but also a great feeling of reward when you do.  You actually feel like you are saving them from no longer being in the round, if you don't heal them they will die.  This means that learning to be more efficient feels super rewarding because you can literally save more lives and stop them from permanently dying.  And there are also many different methods and steps for treating the same things.  You can use surgery to treat things faster but need facilities, you can get better pills, know which pills you use.  You need to understand dosing so as not to overdose people, etc.

On Paradise in comparison it doesn't really feel like doctors are saving people because once the body is recovered there is realistically no risk of them actually being permanently dead.  Being more competent in the job lets you get people out the door faster but it doesn't really feel more rewarding.  There was never any risk of losing that patient, eventually you are going to heal that person even if it takes a bit longer.  Even if they permanently die, just stick 'em in the infinite cloner and they are good as new.

Our situation isn't the same as CM though.  We don't have as many deaths and also don't have people dying in the same circumstances.  On CM there aren't people trying to murder you and hide your body so your body is likely to be recovered quickly if it is possible to do so.  On Paradise, antags murder and hide bodies so if we didn't have a cloner then these people would just be out of the round.  Right now we don't have the sense of urgency and risk that I find rewarding as doctor on CM but even if the cloner were removed you still wouldn't often have it due to the differing circumstances that people are dying in.  People showing up already unrevivable doesn't fix anything and is just worse for everyone.

So basically I'm not proposing any solution and this was just articulating my personal opinions on why I don't personally play medical doctor as much here and what is fun to me in doctor role may not be the same fun for others anyways.  Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Edited August 24, 2023 by Rythen

[Endar]

Well lets compare how we heal people on the different codebases then.

when someone comes in with brute or burn you just use a mender then throw it away once empty(because you do not know to how fill it with synthflesh no doubt) or if you are busy stick them in a cryotube(which you did not set to the lowest temp no doubt) our ways to heal brute and damage are limited mostly topically for balance reasons probably

Our rounds last around 2 hours while on cm they last 4 hours, our medical system is more "fast" and "easy" because when someone gets in medbay you are probably going to deal with the same case of IB, sometimes a fracture but its always the same shit scalpel hemo retractor fixovein cautery, variety is the spice of medbay(the guy who said that was fired for breaching the SOP)

Edited August 25, 2023 by Endar
prettier to look at <3

[TerrorOnTheSeas]

20 hours ago, Rythen said:

Our situation isn't the same as CM though.  We don't have as many deaths and also don't have people dying in the same circumstances.  On CM there aren't people trying to murder you and hide your body so your body is likely to be recovered quickly if it is possible to do so.  On Paradise, antags murder and hide bodies so if we didn't have a cloner then these people would just be out of the round.  Right now we don't have the sense of urgency and risk that I find rewarding as doctor on CM but even if the cloner were removed you still wouldn't often have it due to the differing circumstances that people are dying in.  People showing up already unrevivable doesn't fix anything and is just worse for everyone.

So basically I'm not proposing any solution and this was just articulating my personal opinions on why I don't personally play medical doctor as much here and what is fun to me in doctor role may not be the same fun for others anyways.  Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

On /tg/ you can still revive long-dead bodies by doing brute/burn tending surgery and then replacing the heart if necessary, we could implement something like that. basically like what you do for slimepeople now but for everyone.

Edited August 25, 2023 by TerrorOnTheSeas

[Eric6426]

31 minutes ago, TerrorOnTheSeas said:

On /tg/ you can still revive long-dead bodies by doing brute/burn tending surgery and then replacing the heart if necessary, we could implement something like that. basically like what you do for slimepeople now but for everyone.

As someone who's played slime for a long period of time, and played medbay enough to have seen vox and slime corpses past defib timer...
... Medbay's not gonna bother, even if its empty sometimes they will not try because its really hard and time consuming, then the person can even just not want the revive or be off to play T-spider by the time you actually revive them.

Albeit the surgery sounds like a pretty decent thing I doubt medbay would do it over cloner, or just not doing it, like they do with slimes already. 

Like people have said above, medbay's split between pretty calm and repetitive small healing or panic-everyone-is-dead-heal-everyone-bodies-everywhere. I'd lean more towards adding more for doctors to do in the more mild times, not adding more in the panic times.

Because let's be honest most people will just clone someone over doing 2 surgeries for revival, it do be just the most effective and faster process. Can't blame people for using it.

[Rythen]

On 8/25/2023 at 12:58 PM, TerrorOnTheSeas said:

On /tg/ you can still revive long-dead bodies by doing brute/burn tending surgery and then replacing the heart if necessary, we could implement something like that. basically like what you do for slimepeople now but for everyone.

I would much prefer if reviving people actually took effort rather than just sticking people in an unlimited healing machine to give them a new body.  Didn't realize /tg/ didn't have the cloner.

On 8/25/2023 at 1:34 PM, Eric6426 said:

Because let's be honest most people will just clone someone over doing 2 surgeries for revival, it do be just the most effective and faster process. Can't blame people for using it.

This is only because it's an option and has no real limit on using it.  If the fuel for cloner was actually limited in some way rather than being an infinitely renewable resource then it would be something that needed to be used sparingly rather than for any case.

On 8/25/2023 at 1:34 PM, Eric6426 said:

As someone who's played slime for a long period of time, and played medbay enough to have seen vox and slime corpses past defib timer...
... Medbay's not gonna bother, even if its empty sometimes they will not try because its really hard and time consuming

I think part of this is because non-cloner revival only applies to a handful of races and so the process for doing it isn't even common knowledge and people don't have practice doing it.  If it was something that had to be done more often then I don't think people would struggle with it, take as long, or entirely avoid it.  This is just a guess though.

Edited August 27, 2023 by Rythen

[Eric6426]

11 hours ago, Rythen said:

I think part of this is because non-cloner revival only applies to a handful of races and so the process for doing it isn't even common knowledge and people don't have practice doing it.  If it was something that had to be done more often then I don't think people would struggle with it, take as long, or entirely avoid it.  This is just a guess though.

Slippery slope time wise, though:
Past defib timer, doing SR is generally pretty fine, damage from it is minimal, maybe you have to do 1-2 surgeries tops post-SR usage.
But were it to pass like, 10-15 extra minutes? Body's going to be fucked as hell. Reviving a vox that was dead for 20 minutes after defib timer is basically a 10 minute endeavor on surgery alone due to post-SR damage. While a 1h and 30 minute dead human just pops into cloner and exits freely.

But agreed, if cloner was a little less basic to refill, eventually needed SR to be used for revival or similar things that you noted, it'd probably make it a little less "put in cloner or ignore" style.

[Rythen]

16 hours ago, Eric6426 said:

Slippery slope time wise, though:

Well I'm not really suggesting any change be made without looking at the whole medical system as a whole.  It's possible that if cloning were more limited then other things would need to be tweaked.  Less reliance on cloning is just the direction in my head that seems logical but I donno exactly how would be best to get there.