Right now, the medpaks are really expensive and a one time use, no matter what size.
The next up is insanely expensive and not something most would walk around with.
If this touches to much IC please nuke the thread or edit the original text.
I'm wondering if medpaks could have more uses for their price, or just lower in price.
Or new things? Anything really.
Discuss.
Flash-cloning already exists, give people the ability to go to a hospital, pay a fee, and have a limb cloned and re-attached to their body. (This means you can dismember people more freely without forcing them to commit suicide or get expensive chrome to replace stuff like tongues, teeth, lips, ect) With the advent of cloning whole bodies, partial cloning like this should be super easy and extremely cheap, even for complex organs.
In corporate areas, there should be mounted wall defibs in certain junction areas, and near security rooms. These exist in real life.
Large medpaks being a one-time use sounds like it may be an oversight. They didn't used to be that way. Maybe the changes to bleed heals did not take medpak size into consideration and assumed all medpaks were the basic ones that were one-use anyways.
It would be a big increase but would make a lot of sense to me to have the smallest medpaks good for a day's work (call it a single gang fight's worth) and large medpaks good for a week's (2-3 of the above) which would of course be many, many, many times the applications they have now (like 15x?), but it's pretty reasonable I'd say given the huge empty gap between them and the kitbags. Also they're huge.
I also think Be Alive shots make sense and would cover a currently non-addressable niche which is when characters are maximally depleated and the only option is to carry them which is fine but a Not Hulking Bruiser option wouldn't hurt.
I don't think increasing the number of uses is for the best, though. I think one of the ideas is to not just have something cheapish that can heal groups of people up all the way. Making it so people might have to break off and become more vulnerable and more opportunities for danger and conflict.
The shot to keep people in a resurrectable state for a minute or two longer would maybe be something cool and beneficial.
Tongues, teeth etc being fixed by doctors has been something that's historically been done. But I don't think we should introduce the idea of insta-cloning limbs rather than getting chrome or living without them. This is already experiences a lot of no-selling by people in different forms, imo. I'd prefer it not become something that's just 'eh, shrug, let me go get it cloned real fast'.
Lasting consequences are important and good RP.
That's a fair point, though the issue I am seeing (or I don't know if it's an issue really but it seems to be frustrating for the medics) is a somewhat typical situation faced by them (ie. a couple of bleeding and unconscious gangers) results in them just bypassing the paramedic fantasy entirely and being body draggers because there isn't even a hope of enough on-site treatment being available.
These medpaks really were originally balanced around people treating themselves for the longest time, so one application made a lot more sense for the era… but moving them to 3rd party treatment probably should have included some tweaks.
All of them, with some variations and personal touches, had similar types of dreams they were in pursuit of in their careers; namely their own medical practice and also once which was mobile so they could treat on-site in an exciting way. Medical characters now can correct me about this if I'm wrong but it almost seems to me that we do the opposite track that so many doctors seem to aspire towards, that they have barely any on-site gameplay to begin with and get more and more contained to fixed locations they have no real ownership or agency over. When was the last time anyone was even able to drive an ambulance, let alone owning one?
To a large degree I think this is a symptom that medical characters have always been understood and balanced as a background to combat characters, the experience and balance of the combat came first and the experience of the medical characters was at most an afterthought. Medicine in Sindome has the superficiality of depth but I don't think having a lot of items associated with it makes it fun necessarily or serves the fantasy of being a responding medic riding the line between life and death. It may be impractical to talk about new systems or new mechanisms for gameplay for them now, but I think it's completely practical to approach ideas for them with existing vehicles, existing places, job roles, and their extant tools that could do a lot to improve their fun and fantasy without that much development effort.
Again medical characters can chime in against this opinion if I'm off the mark but it seems to me an obvious way to enable this would be to make medical characters more present in the field and more and more enabled to handle treatment there as they progress in skill and career, rather than the opposite.
Put more simply, there's too much stuff with too little functionality between it for what it all costs, and I feel this silos medical roleplay either into a gear (and mechanics) lite dragger play or gear-heavy ivory tower cyberneticist (due to how valuable and difficulty all of it is to collect together to squeeze some gameplay out of it).
More specifically I believe biochip reticulators, cyberware multitools, synaptic stimulators, optic modulators, appendage surgery rig, and occiptal foreceps, and acoustic reticulator should be either collapsed into two items (e.g. cyberware surgery mutltool and universal reticulator) or have their prices adjusted so that they could all be reasonably purchased together as a kit (something like a 75% reduction in price). Each of these has a tiny amount of mechanical gameplay tied to it but having so many of them means a huge chunk of actual medical verbs get isolated on very niche and expensive equipment.
Likewise I think nanite hive repair kits and neurolink debugging kit should either be one object or priced as though they could be purchased as one (ie. halfed). Likewise the MedRite syringe and the nanogenic hypodermic.
There is a lot of actual mechanics available for this of roleplay and I don't think it needs to be walled off with high costs and difficult to acquire tools. The days of cyber medicine being a money printer for PCs are long, long past and so I'd say their gear deserves a bit of a specific look over.
