Diseases, Poisons and Infections

I realize this subject is pretty hard core but with all the talk of medical herbs and the implementation of this idea being relatively low tech I thought it was worth bringing up for a concentrated discussion on the matter.

As far of the affects negative ways you can be affected by various ailments.. I think it's more or less straight forward. So let me just put it out there.. these are all going to be mostly stat debuffs. Although other effects could be pretty interesting.. I'm mainly brainstorming as I go so bare with me..

Stat debuffs could affect the character in a number of ways.. including skill efficiency. If a stat is used in calculating success or quality.. temporarily lowering that stat would effect your skill roll.

Other affects could include

nausea,
blurred vision (done with a shader)..
maybe throw in a drunken stagger animation or two..
distorted hearing (audio effect)..
temporary loss of HP, str, dex, int, mana..
str/dex loss could include stumbling of a 'fumble' effect in combat.. ie: dropping your weapon (ok I know THAT won't be popular)..
visual effect on skin.. ie: skin tone, blisters etc.
temporary paralysis
temporary deafness
slowed movement
lowered max encumbrance

All sorts of interesting things you can do with a little creativity.

Diseases

Diseases would be caught mainly through contact. Airborne disease could make interest events but we probably wouldn't want to go there for simplicity's sake. Mainly I'm thinking you could contract a disease through your typical fighting of certain monsters OR from going through swamps unprepared.

Poisons

Pretty obvious.. someone puts a point on the pointy end of their weapon and sticks you with it.. it could theoretically be possible to poison food or drink but as it falls into the realm of PvP this could easily be abusable.. but could make an interesting RP tool.

Infections

A little more specific. If you take damage and allow it to heal naturally without any kind of treatment at all, then you run the risk of infections.

An additional thought.. since the idea of rotting food has been brought up before, eating said food could possibly result in a disease or poison effect.

One of the benefits of putting things like this in the game is to expand on the usefulness of herbs, alchemy, non-magical healing skills and healing based magic. It can get pretty boring after all when one spell or potion cures all.

On balancing these.. I think the risk should be relatively low most of the time. Swamps would increase your risk of disease and infections.. but you wouldn't want everyone being afflicted all the time and of course managing avoiding these shouldn't feel tedious.

And if anyone's wondering why I put this under skills and combat.. well infections and poisons are combat related.. healing would be skill related.

 

Aside from wondering if this would be asking too much of the programmers/computers running the program, I'm all for it. An entire cottage industry could spring up in towns near major sources of infection gathering the appropriate mats to treat the disease. An interesting notion of the old world was that plants could be used to treat illnesses that the plant, or a part of it, resembled. Alternately, if a part of the plant resembled the part of the body that was affected by a disease, that indicated usefulness. Not strictly true in the real world (Foxglove does not resemble a heart), it could become true in SotA, giving researchers a great way to deduce what they were doing. Another interesting notion is the modern naturopathic belief that plants that grow IN an environment tend to have healing effects on conditions originating from said environment. This is probably a very good idea, as having a fever caused in swamp A) be treated only by a moss found deep in cave B), which happens to be eighteen days travel to the north, would result in a great many fever deaths.

 

I like that approach to finding the right treatment. You could start the game with very little to not documented natural treatment. It would give players that much more to explore and experiment with but with clues as to how something might be useful.

I don't expect a lot for EP1.. something simple.. a working framework with maybe 1 poison, 1 disease, 1 infection or what have you.. that can be expanded on later.. but what I like about this from a technical standpoint is that it can have a ton of variety but still be relatively simplistic. Equations don't need to be complex and once the framework is in all they'd need to do to expand on it plug in some data.. (assuming they'd have a simple editor for it). So that's what I'm really hoping for right now.. something they can do that's fairly inexpensive that would be very easy for them to expand on after launch. Heck even *I* could code this.. or most of it.

 

A few further thoughts..

Not all treatments need necessarily be complete cures. Some possibilities..

Reduced symptoms..
Shortened symptom duration by % time remaining
temporary cure X amount of time

If you really wanted to expand on this in my original thread suggesting herbs and non-magical healing (I believe it was) I suggested a % chance of addiction on some herbs which would incur withdrawal symptoms.. and similar effects might also be applied to hangovers for those who get especially drunk.

Herbal treatments of various kinds play into other skills and suggestions involving herbs such as smoking and medical teas.

 

Some poisons can have health effects, others stamina effects. There could also be a "confusion" effect that impedes mana, and even a poison that creates confusion or delirium. Mental diseases should be one form of disability.

I just created a thread putting this thing in perspective of the "wound system" I've been suggesting involving stat capping.

 

And I just said over there I should have included stat caps as a possible effect. For that matter the healing cap would .. well that'd fall under temporary loss of HP come to think of it.

On the confusion I posted an idea in your thread but since you bring it up I'll post it here too.. and that's another great possible effect.. Assuming that SotA has a way to prevent friendly fire.. a 'confused' character might have friendly fire from them enabled.. so they could accidentally injure their buddies if they got into a fight.

Oh.. another possibility on confusion might be randomly converting words into gibberish. I was thinking about that for awhile when thinking about temporary hearing loss or distortion. Anything that affects audio should also blur or mix up spoken text.

 

I've frequently observed, and had my observations confirmed by many, that nausea is far worse than pain. And one of the most common effects of both poisoning and disease is nausea, as well as other...tummy troubles.

A debuff that had the character have a chance to fall to his knees puking (and yes, it can get bad enough that you'd do that even if in combat) would be a VERY scary thing for many players, and the cure would sell like hotcakes. Or loperamide even.

 

For the sake of the game I don't think we need to make a distinction between a disease and a virus. Just give something a name.. symptoms and a cure and I think we'll be good.

 

Two handy, small, resources for the DevTeam:
(A) A Field Guide to Germs, Wayne Biddle, (c) 1995.
(B) The Little Book of Pandemics: 50 of the world's most virulent plagues and infectious diseases, Dr. Peter Moore, (c) 2007.

There will be other vectors including insects and animals, biting, contacting, and contaminating your food/water. Vectors will include health personnel (ask Dr. Semmelweis, who was de-frocked for pointing this out to his peers).

I'd lump 'parasites' along with 'diseases' and ignore a viral/bacterial/multicellular differentiation -- TMI.

@MalakBrightpalm: There's also the exceedingly powerful and debilitative effect of a forced 'purging' of the lower system, as in explosive amoebic, bloody, dysentery; or the intense form of cholera. ("Go and clean your armor. Now!")

Been there on a horse-packing trip, a week into the Tetons. Thank God for liquid lomotil, it kept them from having to arrange a helicopter rescue (in 1972). Been there, done that, never again please.

 

How are you going to display nausea? vomiting would be more likely

 

Apart from puking there could be a drunken like animation for walking.. being unable to run..

 

Diseases could also affect magic -- increased sensitivity to certain types (fevered? Fire-based spells are much nastier; hallucinating? greatly susceptible to illusions...or completely oblivious to them) is one possibility. Throwing magic spells could be harder if you are shaking/hoarse/voiceless/sneezing. (A very useful low-level protection against mages: carry a bag of pepper or very irritating spice, and break it open near their face when they're inhaling. Non-violent, strictly speaking, but incapacitating. Worked well with many guard animals, too.)

Magic could also be less effective on the infected (as the 'bugs' get their own little resistance -- or perhaps some diseases evolved to thrive on the new energy source, as nature will exploit any niche).

It might even be a trade-off some would seek when about to go up against magic-powerful but combat-weak mobs; get the magic-absorbing illness for an acceptable, but minimal, drop to combat potential and greatly increase your relative effectiveness.

Different areas/climate should have different illnesses, too -- and the more isolated any area has been over time, the greater the chance of disastrously devastating new illnesses. (Ref: Plagues and Peoples, William McNeil.)

 

That brings up an interesting subject.. Illusion magic.. Worth a topic all it's own. I had thought about hallucinations I think but it seems like that could be pretty hard to implement and you're limited by existing content.. but it could be really fun and interesting.. like instead of seeing the person next to you you see a giant worm.. or you see a twin of them doing the exact same thing.

Effecting magic could be as simple to influencing anything that might be based on concentration (which could have other affects as well)..

A thought I had been toying with off and on is potential 'bonuses'.. like the inability to feel pain so you'd last longer in a fight but you'd take more damage that might not kick in until later.

 

Regarding persistent effects on PC's or NPC's...

If the intent is that they only be used in combat, and it's all magic-based, when the source dies, the effect should die. Specifically, if a character puts a disease, poison, or DoT or similar effect on an NPC, that effect should last for it's entire duration as long as the character is alive and presuming the target doesn't cure it.

However... a few unfortunate side effects I've seen in other games as a result of these mechanics; effects lasting past death on players, and curing priority in NPCs. In some implementations, NPCs calculate threat of debuffs/curses/negative effects on themselves based on total damage. As such, diseases, poisons, and DoT's rank the highest threat compared to all other effects, and as such, are the highest priority. This leads to a situation where an NPC will do nothing else except try to cure themselves, trivializing their offensive combat scripting. In other words, they will never cast "Death Touch" because all you do is cast one disease and then interrupt their attempts to cast Cure, continually. Been there, done that, don't want to see it again.

The second issue I've seen with persistent effects is different rules for PC's, vs. NPC's, as the source. This means when an NPC dies, their effects remain on PC's, but if a PC dies, their effects are cleared from NPC's as soon as the PC dies. Whichever way you want to do it is fine, as long as it's the same for both PC's and NPC's. Having it be different is eternally frustrating.

Now, if the source of the disease or poison is NOT magical, that's an entirely different can of worms, and infections are something that need to be very carefully implemented. Attributing source to infections that spread can be problematic. NOT attributing source to infections can also be problematic, especially if the effect contains a damage over time component, significant stat debuffs, or similar strong negative effects.

Non magical diseases and poisons, myself, I would see as debuffs of various flavors for diseases, and proc buffs or DoT's for poisons, in their simplest form. Proc buffs if they're on weapons, and DoT's if they're negative effects on characters. Poisons can have a large range of effects (EQ2 is a good example) but ultimately, it comes down it whether or not you can poison other peoples weapons or not, with or without their consent.
In practice, it's often far nicer, easier, more flexible, and more fun if "poisoning your weapon" actually grants you a proc buff of a limited duration, so you can use any weapon you want and/or cancel the buff at any time, should it be necessary to swap weapons or you run into a creature whereby having the poison proc would be very bad.
Some poisons proc interrupts, stuns, debuffs, damage, DoT's. It makes sense that if there is going to be a huge variety of foods, herbs, reagents, flowers, crops, etc, that there should be any number of potentially negative effects derived from them, and used to create poisons.

 

You know what my first thought was on reading this thread, in game first aid classes Sad but as I am a first aid trainer that's what my first thought was

 

I hadn't really considered magic based afflictions but I would agree those should always wear off on the death of the target. Whether or not a non-magical affliction wears off I think should depend on how the death is handled. If the PC (or NPC) is revived on the spot then the affliction should remain since it's cause by something physical in the body. If it's something more akin to UO where you essentially receive a new body then the affliction should be cured since it resided in the old body.

Also agreeing that PCs and NPCs should follow the same rules. As for the constantly casting cures that's a matter of writing good AI. If it were me I would always prioritize the enemy standing within striking range as a priority.

I do not think this concept should only apply in combat but when afflicted you should suffer through the symptoms at all times until cured.

 

Yes, I'm for all of these.
Well maybe not right at first, I think the game could start off a bit easier and then bring theses types of things as we move through it.
And to go along with this, there could be a doctor skill.
The doctor could study medicine to know how to cure these things and would hopefully have the medicine on hand.
And I agree most should be stat debuffs until cured.
You could still heal yourself but maybe hit points would go down a bit faster.

 

Non-magical healing skills of some nature have been confirmed several months back.

 

Yea what I mean is having at least two kinds of healing
1. Fisrt-Aid
2. Doctor needed

I'm not sure if you mean you can heal all of these while in combat or not.

 

Wouldn't a doctors healing be an extension of first aid. I mean I know we joke about it and I know there are some doctors who are really bad at it but in reality they SHOULD know everything I know as a first aider plus more. They should be able to do CPR, treat a burn, treat a snake\blue ring bite, treat a fracture etc as well as then be able to go into the definitive care for these