Wounds, injuries, impediments

I brought up this idea in a few threads. Originally the idea of capping stats came up in a suggestion of how to treat things like hunger in the game. That then went into a suggestion of how to treat blunts vs. sharp weapons. And a suggestion on weather effects. Bowen also just started a thread on diseases, poisons and infections, I hope more people contribute to that topic on that thread; but maybe that could be seen in this context, too.

* * *



* * *

As described here and elsewhere a cap would put on your stats maximum and show visibly on your bar. That would prevent your meter from refilling until you specifically threat it or the effect wears off. But you would have to still refill it, recover it, after the injury or wound was removed. Some of these effects would also grow over time, like poisons, hunger, and bleeding.

Bleeding would create a cap on health until the wound is treated, but Bowen noted that the most immediate effect would be on stamina -- so I'm suggesting above that the effect on stamina would be a stamina hit, rather than a stamina cap. Something that can be recovered on its own.

"Confusion" could be a "mana injury".

I think this system has multiple advantages, as described above. It makes the player more visually aware of what's happening, especially in the example of cumulative effects like poison or hunger. You don't get surprised at the last minute that you're going to die. It gives a bigger role to healer, and creates a diversity of treatments, and benefits to rest. It creates a cost to battling, though addressable, even if the player survives the battle. That will help deter PK'ing. And lastly, it allows realistic effects on the body without heavy micromanagement.

 

Now why didn't I think to put stat caps on my list of effects? Shame on me!

Confusion gives me a thought.. *ehem*.. since I don't normally follow PvP topics perhaps this has come up but since combat can be so hectic some games don't allow for friendly fire because of how easy it is to make that kind of mistake depending on how the combat system goes.. if SotA had something similar then I have two ideas..

1: Randomly change the appearance of 'friendlies' to look like enemies that occur naturally in an area for just a second or two..
2: Temporarily enable friendly fire coming from the 'confused' character.

 

Yea I was thinking confusion as more of a debilitating poison effect, or from a Confusion spell. Something specifically targeted to a mage to frazz him.

 

hmm ok I was thinking of a non-magical effect.. If we're talking mage specific then I would think spell failure or casting a random spell might be interesting. You think you're casting a fireball and you end up casting a heal instead.. whoops! Trying to cast heal? Suddenly you turn your friend into a goat.. That's be amusing.

 

Or just screen blur, so that you couldn't be entirely certain what you were looking at. The more the UI depends on us recognizing what we see, the more not being able to see it hurts us.

 

Burning is another example of a cumulative effect. You're in fire, and you burn until you get out of the fire. Although burn damage should naturally heal and not be a cap in itself.

For bleeding I was thinking somewhat the same thing. Wounds from bleeding should naturally heal, but the bleeding needs to stop. Small wounds should have bleeding time out really quickly, while large ones would take a while so you'd want to get a healer.

 

I liked it when a bandage could heal wounds, cure poison, and raise the dead.

 

For realism, those types of wound can take a very long time to heal. Some sort of healing salve applied to the burns would be appropriate, rest and food for the blood loss. If we are going for realistic injury and not "this magic potion will restore your HP."

 

Realistic injuries would offer a great deal of interaction (and would make combat much more interesting). A few things worth noting on the subject:

1) Healing your wounds cannot be any harder than being resurrected, lest players kill themselves after each fight/duel out of convenience.
2) Realistic healing needs to be balanced with utility. Nobody has 4 hours to spend vomiting or lying in bed in game, however we also don't want simple HP pots (the current year is 2013, not 1997).

 

Agreed on both points. Though there will be die hard RP guys who WANT to carry around three hundred different methods of healing, a great many players will opt for the fastest/most convenient/most compact arrangement for healing that they can get, and it makes sense that they do so. Real people do the same thing. We trim down our first aid kits to be as lightweight, small, and easy to use as possible.

And I do foresee players running to a safe place and arranging their own deaths any time that healing their injuries becomes more complicated than rezzing. Just the simplicity and convenience of one stop shopping to heal all wounds will imbalance things in favor of this option, so if the pile of sustained injuries gets complicated, many WILL opt for death, and that cheapens the system.

Now, SINCE SotA appears to contain magical circumstances, and indeed magic... SINCE it seems that some degree of magic will be in the hands of the player characters... I put forward that magical cures will exist, and will most likely be part of the explanation of how I can, for example, get my ribs broken and a lung collapsed and not only not die, but likely heal myself and be ready to continue my adventures. Ever. Because that kind of injury could easily cripple someone for life even today, in the real world.

This being the case, while the real world can be a great model of how our remedies can work, there will likely be some pretty powerful stuff out there for quickly getting me back in the game. I'd rather not see it so saddled down with restrictions based on what can be done in a non magical world that it is unusable in the game. I vote for there being treatments, bandages, and cures that can be applied in the field and achieve total success in the field, that same day. That way, I am motivated to heal myself to full, because it can always be done. Yes I'll have to use the appropriate methods, but one of those methods will be magic.

 

One easy way to make sure people don't just kill themselves to get out of injured statuses is for characters upon Res to retain their previous injuries.
(Not saying to do this, just saying...)

Conversely, there should be a way way for someone playing by themselves or on during non-peak hours to be able to heal injuries. Maybe they heal naturally, but having a player who is a healer speeds up the process. That way it 'encourages' you to interact with others and RP... but if you want to just go around and kill things on your own you could. It will just take you longer for your stat effects to go away.

I am hoping the game will strongly encourage RP... but still be fun for others who aren't as into that as well.

 

This idea fixes the problem of suicide healing very well. UO had you ressed at very low health and it worked excellently. I'd rather have more than just health (mostly because I want to be a healer), but the idea is the same.

 

I'd rather have different bars for different types of injuries.
Yea each type would effect your hit points.
But some types could be healed easily while others might need camping or even a doctor to cure.

 

Yea, I agree with Aurora's suggestion. I'm going to hope resurrection isn't a cakewalk either, though.

 

There's always the chance of either the drop-off effect (you feel much worse simply because of the relative difference), or the 'rebound' effect (when the ameliorative wears off, the hidden effects have had time to 'stack' into more potentcy). So the 'caps' and 'minimums' may have counter-bounds for when the temporary benefit/detriment wears off. That's why its usually wise to get the treatment and prophylactic/supportive care going before the person hits their personal 'wall'.

Been there, done that too many times.

 

There's room for the 'hands-on', directly curative approaches of chiropractics and restorative massage (seifukujitsu). For blunt trauma in particular, and for shock, these are effective. But...is it worth having another healing skill?

 

I've never seen any technique other than surgery have a real beneficial effect against gross trauma. Since we seem to be likely to have magical healing, that will be the best course for treating injuries, and will follow it's own rules, as the devs lay down. I can see a general "Healing" skill that can be applied in addition, but any mundane treatment technique will be overwhelmed by things like severed arteries, shattered (not just broken) bones, and deep infections.

In order for the characters to realistically treat the types of injury we are likely to sustain in the daily life of adventuring, PvPing avatars, we will need either medicine much more advanced than what exists on Earth today, or magic.

 

This is a good point. Even at 120 healing, bandages are still just bandages, and to enlighten the healing system to the degree necessary to make healing realistic is to make in game med schools, surgeries, and a boat load of other things that go too far for most players.

To get the best of both worlds, what if "healing" were not about bandages or magic, but rather both. If healing entailed a degree of physical item based healing in addition to magic, we would sidestep the realism problem while also offering many options for treatment. The addition of magic would allow mechanics to treat shattered bones like broken bones (so that you can just reset the leg bones and heal fuse them back together magically, for example, rather than performing reconstructive surgery) without requiring a stretch of the imagination.

 

The simpler solution is keep injuries simpler. There are reasons why most games don't have specific types of injuries.. it's a LOT of work and each new type of injury presents it's own problems. I'd rather be able to use magical and non-magical healing separately and be able to get by with one or the other.. nothing wrong with using both but it shouldn't be necessary.

That said I wouldn't mind a little variety beyond simple HP loss but we need to keep it relatively simple.

 

Yea, I agree with you; no matter what is done, it has to be simple and easy to remember and use.

But speaking of this topic -- and your thread on diseases and infections -- in my readings of magical and medicinal ingredients, I've been reading a bit both about humorism and some other ways that things might be categorized by Medieval medicine. Humorism of course, divided the temperaments into black bile (melancholy), yellow bile, phlegm and blood. But I'm also reading, analagous to the four humors, the components of the material body were put into four categories -- flesh, heart, bowels, and bones. There's also a plant called buck-bean or bog-bean that was specifically used to treat an ailment called "rot", which was stuff like gout and scurvy that would rot away the flesh, which I assume somehow corresponds to the "flesh" part. It would be interesting if healing potions somehow were applied along the lines of humorism, into four parts. "Cure" potions would treat blood (from poison), "Heal" poitions would treat flesh (wounds), and there might be one for disease (bile/bowels), and one for mental ailment (black bile) or one for bones. Or something like that.

Note, I'm not really suggesting this, because I haven't thought out how it might work in the game. I'm just putting it out there because I think its an interesting idea.