Had an idea for a PR but wanted some feedback, basically MDs and Roboticists would start with them. MDs and Roboticists would be unaffected since they have them already, but anyone wanting to job transfer into MD would need to get one.
Not having one would mean you fail surgery steps. I would toy around with the numbers, but basically this would stop chemists and psychologists or anyone else from being able to walk into medbay and print off tools and do surgery just as well. It would also mean sec officers can’t just do surgery themselves and would have to rely on medbay (cope) or their brig physician.
It never made sense to me that my character presumably went to medschool and learned all this stuff while anyone else that just grabs a hemostat, scalpel, and a bedsheet can magically do surgery just as good.
Is there anything I’m missing here or overlooking?
Is random people doing surgery enough of an issue to warrant nerfing it? Also, how would people get the skill chips for it if they got a job change, and what would prevent non-med people from obtaining them?
gets a lil’ chip inserted in their brain and suddenly that medschool is useless in comparison
i do think this is a cool idea but it should just be people without skillchip have a higher chance of failing steps rather than failing them every time
i like this idea, since it makes medical more relevant, but this would probably conflict with the robo job skillchip since you can only have one job skillchip active at a time. I agree with mason that it should be a bigger fail chance but not 100% fail. Remember to add a box of em for CMO like the other job skillchips
How are you planning for this to interact with ghetto surgery?
If we were an HRP server I’d +1 this. It’s a cool idea but I don’t really think this is an issue ingame to the point where it’s needed. I hardly see anyone in non med/robo do surgery anyway, and when they do it’s for some gimmick where they don’t really negatively impact the shift.
this is simmilar to the situation with engi skillchips, door wires were made departmental and engi skillchip to see what wires there are was added. Maybe this could be somthing simmilar where doing surgery without the skillchip is worse but having the skillchip also makes you better than normal, so maybe a 10-20% boost in surgery speed or somthing.
Sorry if I didn’t word the OP correctly, yeah I’m just talking about dropping surgery step success from 100% to like 80% or something for standard surgery tools. Ghetto surgery wouldn’t be touched, just leave the fail% exactly the same. This would just nerf regular surgery tools so people without the skillchip won’t be able to perform surgery on the same level, and hopefully encourage ghetto surgery more.
I was under the assumption that this was the reason skillchips were implemented in the first place, so engineers could do their job better than other random people who are just transferring into the department etc. If they were added purely as a balance thing, then that would be something I overlooked when I had this idea lol
Maybe add them to HOP’s PDA vendor? (I thought they could get them anyways, I didn’t realize outside of the crappy funvendor ones, spawning in with one was the only way to get them lol)
Medical is a department with the worst barrier for entry against crew from outside of a department doing it’s job. Anyone with surgery tools printed from the autolathe is as efficient as a MD on surgery, for chemistry you just need a machine and no gear, the same for Virology.
The Engineer skillchip is valuable enough that I seen a drop of people that would join as Atmos, buy some insuls and then just do both jobs as Atmos access is way more valuable than Engineer.
A MD surgery skillchip will nudge the bored Psychologist/Virologist away from just becoming an extra MD 10 minutes into the shift.
—Ideas guy spam below—
Decreasing the success rate of surgery tools without a chip would be nice and stop paramedics asking people to rest on the floor so they can heal them with tend wounds.
You could buff the surgery table success chance above 100% so if people need to do ghetto surgery the surgery room and maint medbay are more valuable. (wouldn’t work as efficiently because tables are shit easy to build.)
Another option is to link it with gloves, lower the success chance without latex/nitrile to make it harsher but still possible for people outside of medbay to do surgery, straight up raise the fail chance to 100% if you have chonky fingers because fuck you Insuls paramedic and fuck you golems augmenting each other.
Maybe instead of making success skillchip dependent surgical finesse could be a skill similar to cleaning, mining and gaming? The tricky part about implementing an actual surgical skill is gauging what surgeries should give experience to prevent operating on dead bodies until you reach legendary level, but if you could find a way to keep it relatively balanced it would help remedy the issue of people ignoring doctors to do everything themselves.
I personally really don’t like this because it just incentivizes MDs to just tend wounds every time someone comes in instead of working together with chem and using medicine.
One thing I love about playing MD is the high skill ceiling that comes along with utilizing medicines. Using mannitol, inacusiate, and occuline to avoid performing three separate surgeries completely. Using strange reagent to skip out on having to do organ manipulation etc
Heartwarming: Fulpstation Mentor re-invents the Medical skill (which got removed because people would stay in a surgery room for 20 minutes healing a burning plasmaman body just to get a 0.5x multiplier)
Offtopic: Engi skillchip is only with station engineers and not atmos, but do you still see people go for the department/job just for the skillchip.
Personally I feel like people value any jobs with maints acess. I have never personally noticed someone rolling engi just for the chip (RCD and jaws exist to do the same job and rcd is usually quite quickly researched)
On topic:
I feel like the success reduction would be a good thing although it comes with the balancing issues of having ghetto tools and innate success chance reducers and that can be tricky to keep in line if you want an ok-ish chance for ‘normal’ surgeries and a ‘hail mary’ type chance for something more harder
I believe that is the whole reason ghetto surgery exists. People shouldn’t be able to just head over to cargo or waltz into med storage to print off tools. The skill chip wouldn’t make it easier or harder for ghetto surgery, it would only effect the 100% success chance you get from using standard surgical tools without a skillchip, so hopefully we would actually see people using ghetto surgery more.