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The line between reality and science fiction!


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Okay serious talk for a moment though.

We obviously don't RP everything to a fully realistic degree, since that would mean not only every admin having to become intimately familiar with the biological workings of a human being and the effects of combat injuries on the body, but also things like BTs would take actual months before you'd be able to even close your fist, and a simple GSW to the abdomen would land you a several week TK.

But we take liberties because in the end we're here to have fun.

 

Of course we strive to have some level of realism; like all good lore, it has to sound like it would make sense to the common person. I'm sure if we asked a surgeon to look at what I've written about BT surgery he'd chuckle and say "that's cute", but to someone who hasn't a damned clue about surgery they'd look and go "well, at least I don't see anything that's obviously terrible".  Realism is good to some degree, since realism means we have to actually learn things.

When I first joined medical I knew jack shit, now I know a lot more. I have to say, learning to perform my combat medic duties was some of the most fun I had on .net in 2018.

 

But sometimes we run into things we rarely face, like I don't know, spinal damage that requires neurological physiotherapy. Something we obviously aren't taught in our standard CLS courses.

But of course, no combat medic would be taught many of the things we know, like performing intricate nerve surgery to attach biotechnological limbs, or the rehabilitation process that follows. 

Not to say that we'd necessarily have been taught physiotherapy and so we'd just 'know it'.  (although an argument could be made that we would be taught it when we took our BT surgery course, since it includes rehabilitation)

 

So where do we draw the line?

Obviously we can't fix everything, because that'd be boring (unless we had to actually learn to fix each specific instance I guess), but I'd argue things like spinal injury would not be uncommon for the MI to deal with.

If we take a logical step and say "Well today our militaries don't deal with them a lot," that's probably true. However, we as the MI deal with giant hulking space knives that hurl us around pretty often, so I'd argue we probably deal with a lot more bash damage than IRL (same as we deal with a lot more limb loss than IRL) and therefore things like physiotherapy wouldn't be some entirely niche field like it is today.

Just like how BTs aren't a niche field in the MI, unlike today.

 

And that's the human aspect of it, we also have to consider that we're in 2299 on a space ship that can  travel across the galaxy in the same timespan as ships sail across the globe today. This ship of ours produces more power a day than a million modern-day NYC's spend a day (roughly). I think it'd be a safe bet to say we'd have a lot of technological advances across the board, not just in the medical department.

We even see it working in SST1 when the biotank straight up fixes Rico's fucked leg in what looks like minutes, which I see as a hint that their medical technology is far superior to our modern day.

So ask again, where do we draw the line?

We have a case here where their injury roll was not a PK, yet if we were to take it realistically we cannot deal with this patient right now and would have to discharge him, which is a PK.

In this case it may be reverted in post to something lighter, but I'm more interested in what our policy is for the future.

 

Personally I'm for saying that, with help from technology, we devise a way to RP fixing these unusual cases that aren't PKs. We write that extra bit of lore each time. We do as we're already doing, splitting RL and Scifi together to create something that isn't just some mind-numb jumble of words but has some attachment to reality; something to actually learn, without requiring you to actually have to learn the real deal to the point of having to spend potential hours reading medical texts.

In the end, I feel Medical should be a learning experience that's fun and rewarding in the same way I felt when I was learning to be a medic. Grounded enough in reality to be exciting and interesting to learn, but not so grounded in reality that you end up getting bogged down in it.

 

Mind you, this is specifically for cases that are NOT supposed to be PKs, AKA the outcome of the situation is that the character is NOT discharged (effective PK).

What are your thoughts? Because maybe I'm just an idiot, but I wanna know it, and I wanna know what you think. Hopefully together we can strive for improvement and spark some conversation.

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The situation with Lawson and his spinal injury was ultimately resolved after speaking with Kris to where it was lessened. Yes, you are correct, we do have enormous medical advances, but we still basically use the combat procedures and things that current combat medics do with very little changes. We do things essentially the same way they do things today. This extends to nearly all forms of medical roleplay. Basically, the only difference is the biotank and BT's (and even BT's are not too far of a stretch from what we have today with replacement limbs). The reason for this is to actually give medics something to do, at least in my opinion, otherwise, we wouldn't even be a faction when you could just say 'It's the future so we can do all of this with biogel packets boom not wounded anymore'.

 

There is a difference between realism and science fiction. However, the point of medical is to roleplay it and be realistic and not just saying "Oh yeah we can do all of this". ICly we can explain that we know trauma surgery and things like that because we train for ICly at the senior level of medical, but, as medics, we are not trained in everything just because it's the future. Now, normally this problem is bypassed by saying that we have what is essentially a fully fledged trauma center and standard hospital on the ship. But, due to the current plot situation, we don't have the staff. Even right now, I'm saying fuck it and just saying we have a lot of these supplies because admins continue to dish out these wounds and the supplies we have is kinda vague in general.

 

When it comes to medrp, you get out of it what you make out of it, if you want to do balls to the level of the wall of medrp that's fine, but, there is a fine line between just saying you can do everything and being reasonable with what you can do as medic.

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This wouldn't be a case of 'we can do everything' though, as I detailed above.

With the Arachnids being our canon main enemy, I reckon we get a lot of cases of arachnids bashing into people. I figure physiotherapeutic services would be very sought after in the SST universe specifically for this reason.

We have to take the logic and reason of our universe into account too, not just pull from reality. That's what we do with our BTs. We know they're a canon thing and that many people have and get them in the MI, so having someone on our medical team being able to do BT surgery isn't some speciality; most medics will likely learn it as they progress the rank. Physiotherapeutic services are a niche and a speciality in the real world, but we don't live in the real world in SST, so why would they be here?

This may be in part due to us not facing bugs as often anymore, but one way or another we don't face the spine-crushing kicks from Arachnids very often probably because the first type of injury you imagine coming from an arachnid isn't a punt. It's probably decapitation of limbs. The second injury you think of is probably stab wounds, or the other way around. That's what we usually see from bugs, but I'd argue that it makes just as much sense for us to frequently see blunt force based injuries too, canonically speaking.

 

Also there's no reason to say 'fuck it', we have a forum where we can jot down and track the kind of supplies that need tracking (such as BTs).

We RPed having a lack of supplies before, like a lack of BTs on the Zion (and a lack of the facilities required to attach them anyway). I had to cauterize a person's thigh artery with a hot piece of metal I got from the Engineers on the Zion because we lacked the equipment to properly deal with it. And we RPed the chances for infection that gave, and the shoddy nature of the work which meant more pain for him. And later when we got equipment, we redid surgery to ensure his artery would be fine. That's a lot of rp from the lack of supplies.

 There are people who've walked around with eyes missing for weeks because we hadn't gotten any eye BTs from our supply runs. And I RPed that; we just got the upham, we have jack shit, you're gonna have to work with an eyepatch for a while. And they did.

If the adminges give us injuries that we don't have the supplies or equipment to deal with, then we don't have the supplies or equipment to deal with them, simple as that. They will go undealt with until we get what we need. If their condition requires immediate action, we'll do what we can with what we have just like we would've irl.

 

Besides, physiotherapy definitely falls under "giving the medics something to do." Even today, technology does many of the things that we'd previously have to do ourselves, and while yes we still learn to do them manually, technology exists to assist us and lessen the chances of error. Why our scanner beds wouldn't be able to read and diagnose spinal injury when they seem perfectly capable of diagnosing just about any other physical ailment is beyond me. While our tech cannot do the physiotherapy for us, I damned well reckon they could help guide us on what type of physiotherapeutic procedures a patient requires, with some human input to verify of course.

In the end, it still requires us to learn about a subject before we can proceed, and gives us RP to do. Quite intimate RP in this case.

I don't see that as a bad thing.

Edited by Jun Nagase
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I think you and I have a different interpretation/belief of how medRP should be done. Personally, I take no issue with medics serving the roles of multiple members in a normal hospital provided they have adequate training to do so. But I also believe that there are some fields of medicine, like physiotherapy and especially spinal/neurological physiotherapy, that are too extensive and specialized for a medic to be well versed in it enough to provide proper care. I simply don't buy that as feasible. A counterpoint could be well we do surgery, something that is complicated. We do, but, a vast majority of the surgery we do is not in fact terribly complicated and usually is more tedious or machinery makes it much easier than it would be in today's world. It is something I believe that senior medical personnel could feasibly learn over an extensive training period. 

 

As I stated earlier, normally, this is not at all an issue and we can often say that we have medical personnel who are able to do these more advanced things because they took the years required to learn some incredibly complicated fields and gain the experience in them. We don't have them because of the current situation of the plot. Before Lawson's injury was lessened and the problem rectified, Lawson could have quite easily been transferred to an actual hospital that can provide that advanced level of care and problem solved. And as I stated earlier, there are some medical fields or procedures that I do not believe we as medics could feasibly be able to appropriately administer because we wouldn't have the time, schooling, experience, etc. If you wanted to make a character who was, that's perfectly fine, but I doubt that a Senior Specialist who has spent all of his time in the field and only done trauma surgery would be able to accurately deliver the extensive and complicated physiotherapy procedures. I say this to avoid people starting to say their medic basically can do anything required of them no matter rank or realism about it, or common sense, and consequently, people just do less and less medRP or really RP because of this.

 

However, all of this could be refuted by quite reasonably arguing it is the future. I really tread carefully around that and prefer to use current medical knowledge and procedures as much as possible for the sole reason of we can be much more sure about the treatment and likely outcomes. The only time I use and want the reason 'future technology' to be used is purely to reduce things that would normally take months of time to heal or recover, an excellent example is the biotanks.  Then why doesn't Lawson's physiotherapy, for example, fall under that? Because that is not a matter of time as much a matter of expertise and knowledge that once again, I do not think we would have. Furthermore, I think this is an argument and debate that you and I could go back and forth on whether or not a medic would know X or know Y, but, I choose to have all medics lean towards the more modern approach to medRP that is what I deem more realistic. I've said really all I want to and provided reasoning for why I have medics conduct themselves this way and it's not that I'm ignoring you because I'm medlead, I just think that this debate is not going to go anywhere except a circle.

Edited by SgtMcMuffin
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