Doctor Archive
Thread: New Concept for Poisons/Diseases vs Cures
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Lucreel
Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:33 am
#1
Hello,
I've been thinking for awhile about the issue of combat medics poisons and diseases vs doc cures. On the one hand, if you make Doc cures very effective against cures, you kind of kill the point of combat medics. On the other hand, if Doc's aren't effective against poisons and diseases, it's kind of pointless to give Docs the ability.
Various approaches have been taken to this problem. Here's my concept of how I think it should work. Instead of fast, hard-hitting poisons/diseases that can be almost instantly cured, poisons and diseases, and the cures to counter them, should be researched, and the poisons and diseases should be slow-acting. That is, consider that a combat medic researches and develops a new poison or disease. They hit people with it. It now starts to slowly act on the victims. For poisons, since it is slow acting, perhaps it inhibits the ability of medical professionals to heal the target - not completely make someone unhealable, but maybe it reduces stim effectiveness by 50 to 80 percent. Doctor comes along, and gets a 'sample' of the poison or disease from someone who is affected by it, and goes off and researches an antidote for that specific poison or disease, or possibly there could be families of poisons/diseases that an antidote would counter to greater or lesser extent. The ability of the Doctor to successfully find an antidote, and/or how quickly they could find it, would be a function of how high level the bio-weapon is (which would be a function of the person who developed the bio-weapon and the resources used). Perhaps part of the research would be the doctor using an analyzer to find out what organic and inorganic component were used in the manufacture of the bio-weapon (note this would *not* include what resources were used to make components - just the final assemble of the bio-weapon schematic), and possibly the Doc would have to use the same resources in assembling the antidote, along with the sample of the poison/disease (so that the system could know what poison/disease this antidote would be tied to). Perhaps, as mentioned above, the antidote would be 100 percent effective against that specific disease, and somewhat effective against other poisons/diseases made with the either of the same resources. (I'll give an example below to make this more concrete).
The only other issue would be how the TKM /meditate ability would interact with this. In order to make it so that this isn't useless against Teras Kasi Artists, I suggest that if this change were adopted, the meditate ability be slightly altered, so that it doesn't remove the poison or disease, but *while* the tka is meditating, the effects are temporarily suspended, damage and wounds are healed, but as soon as the TKM stops meditating, the poison/disease takes effect again and starts damaging/wounding. Maybe *very* slowly the TKA could completely remove the poison or disease. Maybe for a high level poison or disease, it might require 1/2 hour or 45 minutes of non-stop meditating to remove.
When it comes to NPC/animal/monster poisons and diseases, things would work similarly, but slightly differently. I think that for some period, all the animals on a planet would have the same disease (a natural plague circulating around the planet), so that for a given planet, a Doc would need only one disease antidote (also see below discussion of antidote dispenser tool), and same for poisons - one per planet for a period of like 2 weeks. NPC's (like Rebel/Imperial mission NPC's and droids) might use a differet poison and disease than the animals, but during a two week period, these should also be standardized among all npcs/droids of that type. That is, from a role-play perspective, the imperial and rebel labs make a production run of the latest developed poison/disease for the faction, and all npcs/droids are equipped with that one poison and/or disease.
Antidote dispenser tool: this would basically be a 'container' object for cure posion, cure disease, and state cure stims. One of the complaints of Doctors, for a long time, has been the massive number of things we have to carry in our inventory, making it difficult for us to carry other items (furniture, clothes, armor, food, spice, weapons, etc). While my suggestion about poisons and diseases makes this problem worse, by needing different antidotes for different poisons and diseases, if the devs were to also implement the tool, this would be alleviated somewhat. As I envision it, instead of having every antidote for every state and poison/disease be seperate tools with their own dispensers, there should be a universal tool, into which you could load something like 20 or 30 medicine vials at a time. The medicines for curing states and poison/disease would now come in vials, which you load into the tool. Once the vials are loaded into the tool, they no longer consume inventory space (although the tool might consume a couple units of inventory). Additionally, there should be a medical bag, as has been proposed before, that spare vials in crates could be stored in, that wouldn't consume as much inventory space as all the seperate crates. Or put another way, they would operate similarly to current packs, which you can equip, which take up some amount of inventory space in main inventory, and then have their own inventory limit. These would be equipped in a different slot than backpacks, so that you can still have a backpack, and would only accept crates or vials of medicine.
This proposal could probably use some refinement, but I think as a starting point, it's a cool idea for how CMs and Docs could be balanced against each other. What do you think?
I've been thinking for awhile about the issue of combat medics poisons and diseases vs doc cures. On the one hand, if you make Doc cures very effective against cures, you kind of kill the point of combat medics. On the other hand, if Doc's aren't effective against poisons and diseases, it's kind of pointless to give Docs the ability.
Various approaches have been taken to this problem. Here's my concept of how I think it should work. Instead of fast, hard-hitting poisons/diseases that can be almost instantly cured, poisons and diseases, and the cures to counter them, should be researched, and the poisons and diseases should be slow-acting. That is, consider that a combat medic researches and develops a new poison or disease. They hit people with it. It now starts to slowly act on the victims. For poisons, since it is slow acting, perhaps it inhibits the ability of medical professionals to heal the target - not completely make someone unhealable, but maybe it reduces stim effectiveness by 50 to 80 percent. Doctor comes along, and gets a 'sample' of the poison or disease from someone who is affected by it, and goes off and researches an antidote for that specific poison or disease, or possibly there could be families of poisons/diseases that an antidote would counter to greater or lesser extent. The ability of the Doctor to successfully find an antidote, and/or how quickly they could find it, would be a function of how high level the bio-weapon is (which would be a function of the person who developed the bio-weapon and the resources used). Perhaps part of the research would be the doctor using an analyzer to find out what organic and inorganic component were used in the manufacture of the bio-weapon (note this would *not* include what resources were used to make components - just the final assemble of the bio-weapon schematic), and possibly the Doc would have to use the same resources in assembling the antidote, along with the sample of the poison/disease (so that the system could know what poison/disease this antidote would be tied to). Perhaps, as mentioned above, the antidote would be 100 percent effective against that specific disease, and somewhat effective against other poisons/diseases made with the either of the same resources. (I'll give an example below to make this more concrete).
The only other issue would be how the TKM /meditate ability would interact with this. In order to make it so that this isn't useless against Teras Kasi Artists, I suggest that if this change were adopted, the meditate ability be slightly altered, so that it doesn't remove the poison or disease, but *while* the tka is meditating, the effects are temporarily suspended, damage and wounds are healed, but as soon as the TKM stops meditating, the poison/disease takes effect again and starts damaging/wounding. Maybe *very* slowly the TKA could completely remove the poison or disease. Maybe for a high level poison or disease, it might require 1/2 hour or 45 minutes of non-stop meditating to remove.
When it comes to NPC/animal/monster poisons and diseases, things would work similarly, but slightly differently. I think that for some period, all the animals on a planet would have the same disease (a natural plague circulating around the planet), so that for a given planet, a Doc would need only one disease antidote (also see below discussion of antidote dispenser tool), and same for poisons - one per planet for a period of like 2 weeks. NPC's (like Rebel/Imperial mission NPC's and droids) might use a differet poison and disease than the animals, but during a two week period, these should also be standardized among all npcs/droids of that type. That is, from a role-play perspective, the imperial and rebel labs make a production run of the latest developed poison/disease for the faction, and all npcs/droids are equipped with that one poison and/or disease.
Antidote dispenser tool: this would basically be a 'container' object for cure posion, cure disease, and state cure stims. One of the complaints of Doctors, for a long time, has been the massive number of things we have to carry in our inventory, making it difficult for us to carry other items (furniture, clothes, armor, food, spice, weapons, etc). While my suggestion about poisons and diseases makes this problem worse, by needing different antidotes for different poisons and diseases, if the devs were to also implement the tool, this would be alleviated somewhat. As I envision it, instead of having every antidote for every state and poison/disease be seperate tools with their own dispensers, there should be a universal tool, into which you could load something like 20 or 30 medicine vials at a time. The medicines for curing states and poison/disease would now come in vials, which you load into the tool. Once the vials are loaded into the tool, they no longer consume inventory space (although the tool might consume a couple units of inventory). Additionally, there should be a medical bag, as has been proposed before, that spare vials in crates could be stored in, that wouldn't consume as much inventory space as all the seperate crates. Or put another way, they would operate similarly to current packs, which you can equip, which take up some amount of inventory space in main inventory, and then have their own inventory limit. These would be equipped in a different slot than backpacks, so that you can still have a backpack, and would only accept crates or vials of medicine.
This proposal could probably use some refinement, but I think as a starting point, it's a cool idea for how CMs and Docs could be balanced against each other. What do you think?
Lucreel
Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:42 am
#2
Well, I got to thinking about this, and I realized that, while I personally think it's a cool idea, in terms of the Galactic Civil War, as it currently stands, this would basically be a nerf to CM's, and is probably not a good idea. It *could* be a good idea if devs ever got siege-warfare/city control going, so that one side could control an NPC town/outpost, and the other side could siege it and attempt to take control. In the context of siege-warfare, slow acting poisons and diseases could be a good strategy to 'soften up' the defenders of the outpost. But as SWG is currently played, it would not be usefull.
So, I guess scratch this idea for now.
So, I guess scratch this idea for now.
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