Today, I'll ninja Felonius place. We are going to talk about magic healing, recovery time tied to the injuries, regeneration of lost limbs and other situations such as pain or getting used to cybernetics. The question/s: When healing can be considered well done, without the use of magic? There's enough recovering time until the pain and wounds fade off? Floran players rp enough time the loss of their limbs before they even regenerate? Healing is basically the treatment/surgery a character must go to stop losing blood or even saving their life to get away from the Reaper's embrace and start recovering. Recovering is that space of time between the character lets his bones join, wounds close, either by having a more or less normal life as they only need bandages, casts, crutches, etc; or staying first in bed as they can't even walk around without risking their health again. Regeneration of lost limbs: special case for florans and glitch. They are the only ones who can lose limbs and recover, within limits. First, a guide reviewed by staff made by Khaltor to understand why florans have said ability: Today, those will be the main focuses, how they can be rped making sense and when it doesn't, but other matters can arise. The opinion: Healing is done in-site if it's trivial with proper tools/materials, or taking patient's to a medical facility with proper equipment to treat his/her wounds. Transportation is not the problem, I've even seen proper stabilization prior it. Minor injuries aren't a issue either, patient's life is not even in danger. The issue is healing serious wounds/surgeries. For starters, is widely known Ailanthus healing sap which stabilizes patients and accelerates their recovery to a very fast rate with no downsides as an answer to drysap (which does have a downside, at least, not even useful to heal, see here), and up to date it's unclear how it works. The glitch, though I haven't seen any, can suffer from the same issue. They need repairs, and unless some glitch has a place dedicated to store spare parts for himself, it takes time to create a replacement, including everything inside it, and I think we can go deeper and talk also about calibrating the replacement, particularly if it's a lost limb. As for surgeries, I haven't seen any made by other players, (except Mars confirming a death and pulling out a bullet from a Wolf, done by wild west method) but I have conducted a few trying to take care of every detail from start to end, including gathering tools and necessary materials, procedure, and stitching/bandaging to let it recover properly. One more thing to consider is the patient's race: humans, hylotls, etc. doesn't have the same organs or placed at same sites in different races. It requires a true professional to treat any possible injury on different races. How to solve this? If you are a patient and you don't know the doctor, check how he/she works. As said, issues are focused in surgeries. Make sure to tell him every wound your character has providing all possible info, and keep track of yourself in case he forgets something, i.e: Surgeon: *stitches cut made at chest, finishing operation* Patient: ((dude, my left arm is still broken)) Surgeon: ((forgot, going for it now)) Advice: think carefully before doing a medic/doctor. Races, expertise in different procedures, and which ones it has knowledge of. Examples: The only time I had to help healing a floran through healing sap, it was literally placing patient's body in a barrel with said sap, and leave it there. Two florans treated equally, and procedures done in...5 minutes each one?. One lost both legs, the other floran one. Of my own procedures, the biggest derp which I forgot and had to do right after surgery and bed-rest was restoring blood through IV (and we were two conducting the surgery). There were broken bones, a fissure at skull, bruises... it's easy to lose track when it is complicated. Recovering is perhaps the main issue with most players. After being properly treated, there's something called recovery, while your wound/limb has a bandage/cast/crutch/etc. which I have seen most players doesn't care much to rp. Usually, the ones who mainly cut their recovery out are the ones in bed-rest breaks it mostly, reasons discussed in inprisonment thread. To add a possibility, because the player doesn't like the place, a transfer is perfectly possible in most cases. The healing sap, nanowraps, or other methods may accelerate recovery, I remember someone asked me accelerating a several weeks process by a few days (got another treatment later in a place with supposedly more advanced equipment and rolled with it), but as unacceptable examples: 'Oh, this cut heals in few hours 'cause nanowrap bandage'. My favorite: A floran got shot up pretty badly at liberty Mills(ripped of a guy's arm and was eating it in a public place) having to barely escape the planet, and in less than 24h, he was again in Mills fresh as mint, and even considering his armor he was shot at legs, an arm, and chest. Examples: A broken bone doesn't take some days to heal. A slash at your chest is not fully recovered in two days. A small cut in your finger doesn't fully heal in hours. Regeneration of lost limbs is, as previously said, a special trait for glitch and florans. I can accept players even make them for it, as long they follow proper recovery if they get a severed limb, but recovering in hours/few days when you even have the possibility is slapping a lot of characters in the face. Example: Following the previous healing I had to help, I heard both florans had their legs (clearly not narfball's) regrown in 3-4 days. This has been said too many times. If you don't want to see yourself in a situation like this, don't put yourself in a dangerous situation. If you are one who got dragged in, I apologize for your situation, but follow a proper recovery, please. Extras: Pain: Even after being properly tretaed, serious wouds and operations come with pain while recovering. Few players rp this. Cyber limbs: All right, let's say you had funds or someone enough budget to replace you lost limb by a cybernetic one (Feeliiiiith... we still love you). After the operation, the character can't simply use the new limb as his/her old leg. While this is not a common procedure nowadays, reasonable time to get fully used to it should spin around two weeks.
Another thing of note is the distinction between fields and skills.. Are you a doctor or do you simply know first aid? If it is the latter, how skilled are you? Is it just basic emergency aid, keeping people alive while they get proper care? are you a field medic able to treat more serious wounds and save people, but being otherwise useless when it comes to sickness and anything long term? Are you a vet, transferring your skills with animals as best you can to bigger more sentient creatures? what races do you understand enough to not accidentally kill when you are trying to help them? Most anyone can learn some first aid, but it is important to know what skills that implies and what skills it does not. If you are a doctor, what kind? what is your field of study(most doctors only have ONE)? what races can you realistically treat? If you are a doctor, are you also a surgeon? If so, what kind of surgeon(again, most don't specialize in more than one area)? If you are an established medical professional, what is your thesis on, what does your character want out of his medical career? being a doctor is RARELY a passing skill or hobby someone has, it takes years of commitment and study to be even half decent at it, meaning TRUE doctors should be exceptionally rare in the sector. And if you are a doctor, are you a healing doctor, or a researcher? If you are a researcher, again, what field do you study? are you trying to cure disease? Create better stims and antibiotics? if you are a researcher for medicine it is a tad unrealistic that you would also be a researcher for tech and weapons and the like, those being completely different schools of study. And no matter how good of a researcher you are, research takes TIME as well as needing a team and the appropriate resources to do it effectively. A one man research team sounds laughable at best.
As far as the healing/recovery thing I fudged it myself because being stuck in a bed for three-five irl days is fucking UGH, just kill me instead you know? Yeah it adds to 'da realism' but NO ONE WANTS TO BE BORED. This could be easily remedied by having someone fun engage you while you were bed ridden, maybe some hospital shenanigans, or maybe some new blood nurse borked your treatment and now its a fight for your life to get treated properly. As for having doctors go into very specific fields we simply don't have the player base to do so. Its a lot easier and convenient to have doctors with a more broad field of medicine to pick up the slack, or fuck even just have NPC's around who cover all that shit.
If you followed the link to imprisonment thread, you could read, apart the idea of transfering patient somewhere else, the first ones of making staff talk to the patients, etc. from Twitch post. And yeah. Everyone wants the fun part that can involve a fight but not the possible recovery time from injuries taken, aka void consequences, and I'm honestly tired of that part in particular. If by any chance you were just involved, well bad luck. While it's true staff has to be active an talk on what recovery time you should take, you can also talk OOCly to get some visits. If you don't want to be bored, you can also work for it. If you don't get any answer THEN you may complain about it, but if you don't move either it hardly can go to any place. It's not a prison, and usually the surgeons have been so busy and even stressed rping the operation that they don't even think of it. It happened to me. And I had players who didn't even complain on staying, and contacted me through PM's regarding their chars and what could be done.
Recovery is a big thing. Anything that happens to a character really should be played out. Got shot in the shoulder? There's no way in hell you'll be perfectly okay just the day after getting the bullet removed. Break a leg? No, not going to heal in 24 hours, though you might have a cast and walk around with crutches. If you don't want to get hurt, don't fight. If your character likes getting into fights, be prepared to be hurt and suffer consequences. Don't dodge everything so you won't even have to recover, and don't just take some hits and then pretend they never happened. I had a character on another server who got his arm burned by some acid. It was treated, of course, but that didn't mean the area wasn't going to hurt. It hurt to touch and it just hurt in general. He still has the scar on his arm. tl;dr Yes I agree that people doing this shit with no consequence is irritating and shouldn't happen. I'm not a medical person, so I'm just not going to touch on how doctors/surgeons should act since I don't have the faintest idea how they do.
Though not as eloquently worded as I would've said, this mirrors my feelings on the matter quite exactly. NOW; Best solution I can think of for this? More alts! Alternative characters to play when injuries occur would make longer down-times sting less, and maybe even a few of those alts could be more doctors, who knows?
The problem with fudging recovery is that it results in lazy roleplaying. Not the fudging itself, but combat in general. Recovery is part of losing and sometimes winning a fight. If you simply shrug off serious injuries like they're booboos, then you're essentially making fights inconsequential, taking out the danger in them. Not just does this make fights pointless, but it means there's even less a reason to be concerned about things. It takes the serious implications of injury out of the picture. At most, you usually manage to earn yourself some badass scars. At worst, it has literally no effect on your personality as a character. Being able to lose and regenerate limbs, to instantly recover from gunshot injuries and large/deep cuts (not to mention shrugging them off), being able to magic away broken bones. These are things that shouldn't happen. And while you shouldn't be confined to a bed, there should be some weakness, vulnerability, disadvantage to getting hurt. There should be something that actually develops your character, rather than being shrugged off as 'too much work' or 'too boring' or 'too weak.' If you're going to be a fighter, there are costs that you have to consider. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
I want to remember that hospitalization doesn't come ONLY from PC fights. Although we have a large number of military/merc/fighter types, there IS some civilians that actually get hurt. Last one I can think of is Kitty (what happened later is a complete different story), which was talking wtih Corson, and someone wanted to shoot Corson, but she was the one taking the hit cuz being in the middle. No fighter, no target, she just got involved in it. I mentioned that possibility, and even if it's rare to see around, keep that possibility in mind, please. You are as edgy as a sheet of paper regarding combat situations, and healing involves more than them.
To be fair, sometimes you do have to make concessions as far as this kind of thing goes, because a lot of people don't have the time in the first place to spend five days RPing out bed rest. Besides, this game takes place four hundred years in the future, when things like stasis pods are clearly shown to exist, so given the right access to facilities it's mostly-plausible that you could have someone on their feet after, say, a broken bone comparatively quickly. As far as healing sap with no drawbacks or magic four-hour limb regrowth is concerned, though, that's just powergaming.
On the subject of recovery, take into account on how wounds will effect your quality of life after healing. Thanks to being shot in the legs Wavemaker is going to have chronic leg pain for the rest of her life, similarly, if a chunk of your arm gets blown off you should see at least a somewhat large decline in that arms functionality in regards to strength, motion, etc.
I'm not saying you have to spend weeks in bed. But the fact that most people shrug off injuries is... problematic. It's another thing that reinforces the "I'm an invincible super badass, nothing can hurt me, I've been near killed five times now and look at me. I'm invulnerable! I don't fear anything! -Flex flex flex.-" mindset. And that's a really, really really really really really really really really really really really really bad mindset.
Then you place a problem for the rest of rpers, which is called a precedent. This patient who has his wounds treated in less time than the rest, will tell someone, and the word spreads out, thus EVERYONE wants it because 'someone did it'. And not every facility has the same machinery to work with (much less stasis pods. Not even every faction has access to them!).
All in all; recovery time is something, that, much like the fights that cause most injuries, are up to personal preference. The people who want long recovery times and serious medical RP are going to do as such. While the mega-fighters who want to be action heroes are going to handle recovery with as much tact as their combats. We can always try to find a middle ground; Something productive? Let's try compiling a list of common injuries, and base recovery times. List them on a chart that adds and decreases times and severity depending on; -Resources -Hospital/Staff Grade -Cause of Injury (a molten lead round is going to be a bit tougher than a classic brass jacket, for example. Much less plasma or Electricity) and so on; if we'd like to see an enforceable system? We need to create one that the community can agree on as a majority.
With all due respect, if some guy decides to come into some place, ICly start shooting people randomly, and I have to let one of my characters get shot as a result of the other person's actions, then what? It's not like I can just say, "No, I don't want to be shot", because I don't think the consent rules apply to non-lethal stuff like that. But now, if you put into effect some of the things that have been said in this topic, that character is out of commission for days or weeks, all because of something that wasn't in my control. I mean, really, I'd rather just be able to quickly heal and go about my merry way with whatever I was doing with that character before, not spend days or weeks RPing recovery or having to use my alts.
The point isn't to be "Out of Commission." The point is to react realistically (or at least react in a way that builds character). I'm not talking about people getting patched up and walking off. I'm talking about people getting shot and the very next day being not-shot at all. No pain, no stiffness in the area, no bandages. They slather some magic medicine on there and keep on trekking. There's no consequence. Speedier recoveries are expected. Medicine's more advanced. The problem is when it's abused. Regenerating limbs with almost no effort or time, using intensive cybernetics with no adaptation period, simply sticking someone with a syringe of Space Fluid™ and having their wounds vanish... It trivializes the fighting so many people love so much. It means a harrowing battle in which you take down your opponent at great personal cost no longer has personal cost. It's plain bad storytelling. Why be angry when having your arm lopped off is a favor, rather than an injury?
Because I don't want my passive characters, who don't exactly live by the sword at all, to get their arms lopped off and for me to waste days or weeks RPing their recovery, when I could be doing other, more interesting things with them that will also build character for them.
You are all over thinking this I think, what they mean by RPing out injuries and recovery time(at least so far as I can tell) is still you doing whatever you normally do in the server. Except now you may walk with a limp, or be in a cast or a brace, maybe your arm twinges in pain occasionally when you interact with something because of that wound in your shoulder. You aren't out of commission by any means, but the injury still has meaning and an actual tangible effect that people can see. My character got shot in the chest a while back, he still mentions pain and tightness in his chest from time to time, but it doesn't impede his actions to any noticeable degree. He is still present in the server, but his injury carries some weight that has meaning and impact on him as a character.
I know, I'm sorreh, I tried that the first time he got robo-limbs. But I had no idea how long it should take. I'll make sure to do it properly next time. *Slinks back to corner*
1. It's just a mixture of healing herbs, a regular pain relieving salve, which wouldn't even cut off a day from the recovery time, it just helps the healing process somewhat, but not enough to matter in OOC time. 2. Sap tanks/baths do not accelerate the healing, they stabilise the Floran, it makes sure they don't run out of sap, which is why they'll have to stay stationary untill they are recovered enough. I do understand that many of my "Cocoon-kin" abuse Floran regeneration and other medical technologies to cut the recovery time substantially. But I do believe it's unfair you point out the Ailantus tribe specifically. Most Floran players seem to do this. My character lost her lower body in a C4 explosion. Due to circumstances i had to fastforward recovery OOC, but IC it took a very long time for my Floran to recover from this, and the few first days after she was walking around she still had to adjust to it. Even calling out the Floran specifically for abusing their natural ability to recover faster than other organisms is unfair. I've met Glitch who lose arms or get stabbed, do not feel pain from it, and repair it simply by welding the metal back together. This shouldn't work, because the inner workings of a Glitch is robotic, with a bunch of circuitry and wires (it is described so in the lore / item descriptions). Repairing an arm would take resources and quite a lot of time, since it's a tedious ask, and likely, it'd hurt. (Glitch feel pain, i has proof (SoonTM)) I would propose a general wounds system which would set a specific recovery time for the "normal" races, and a seperate one for the Floran and Glitch. I believe that Glitch could recover faster than Florans, but they'd need to gather the resources to actually replace their broken parts. It's more than just welding. Florans would be slower in their recovery, but all they need is to be stabilised, and perhaps fed. (When the wounds are within reason, no decapitation nonsense) Then make some modifiers to speed up the recovery system, using medical science as an excuse. Though it's less likely for a Floran to enjoy the convenience of modern medicine, because other races' medicine is bast on animal based humanoids. They'll have to use their own "techonologies" which would be hard to actually create, since Florans are more prone to reverse engineer existing tech, than to invent their own new techonologies. Glitch could receive assistance from their peers when repairing themselves (a glitch who lost both his arms can't fix them) The "normal races" are more likely to have advanced medicine. It is unlikely that New Chicago, for example, would have a hospital that would be capable of actually treating Florans properly, since they're so completely different from humans. Every race should more or less recover the same time, but Glitch use their repairing, Floran regenerate, and the other races use advanced technology or cybernetic replacements.
I'm not 100% sure if it began at Ailanthus, but if it was, it set a precedent. And I know for a fact some healing tubs had to be blown up ICly for ignoring their own rules, then being replaced in a flash. It just takes someone to do before it spreads out.
