Hey all. I’ve some ideas for the game concerning the medical system. I intend to present them in 3-4 parts, this being the first.
Having played a variety of MUDs and conventional games, I’ll say that in nearly all of them, the medical system has been unsatisfying and very rudimentary. The only medical system in a game I’ve liked is SS13, Cybersphere Mud comes second. In most games medicine just involves usage of the heal command, a skill test, and a few recipes for advanced drugs/cures/potions that the medic can craft. Now, especially in a role play intensive Mud, playing a medic is mostly sitting in bars or combat if your character is statted and skilled to participate in it. Now, for someone whose character is, at its core, a healthcare professional, the experience is mediocre.
To prevent this, what I am proposing, is to make the medical system in-depth and robust, so those characters that are designed to be healthcare providers either main, or sub, have lots of things to do.
Firstly, medical professionals ought to be tiered: a medical subclass/package capable of basic first aid, or assisting other, higher tier medical professionals to improve rolls, that most anyone can take in addition to their mains. For example this could be a military corpsman (combat medic) , or the banker that took a CPR course etcetera.
Secondly, we’d have paramedics, nurses and auxillaries. They could have a basic/intermediate medical skillset as their main, and this class could be available to everyone or locked by karma/roleplay points (like how Armageddon and Harshlands do it for certain classes/roles) at staff discretion.
The third tier would be Physicians/Surgeons/Cyberneticists etc. These would need higher roleplay points/karma (again, if staff decide to go that route) and have advanced medical skills, far, far beyond the basic. The number of 3rd tier Medical specialists may have to be restricted to keep them rare and valuable.
I proposed a roleplay point system for 2nd and 3rd tier because these aren’t skills someone can pick up overnight. It requires years of study and training, so they’d have to be ‘main classes’.
This system could also be applied to other fields such as engineering (amateur tinkerer <Technician/mechanic < Engineer) or combat (martial arts enthusiast/firearms enthusiast/Security Guard/Bouncer/Thug < Police/Colonial Militia/Corporate Security/Regular Government Military < Government Spec Ops/Police SWAT)
Thanks for reading. Feedback is welcome.