This is what I had suggested in another thread. It would be the same with illnesses, IMO. You could recognize symptoms at lower levels of first aid (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain) but only at a middling level or with a medical textbook handy would you recognize the stomach flu (and how to likely treat it). At even higher levels one could recognize that it’s gastroenteritis and the likely culprit for how you got it, as well as even more treatments for how to deal with it effectively. This could intermingle with survival to show “home remedies” at appropriate levels.
A question I want to address is should we allow, like the poisonous mushrooms from scavenging, scam fixes for illnesses? A big part of the lore, after all, is skepticism and conspiracy. Mirroring what we have going on currently in America there’s A LOT of scam medical fixes taking advantage of the conspiratorial reaction to national issues. Think Alex Jones’ immune boosting pills.
Are we about to let survivors with low medical skill kill themselves with Jilly Juice?
I’m curious how we should handle medications too, because raiding a pharmacy is only as good as how much you know. If you only know name-brand cough medications everything else is a guessing game of “the blue ones” or “the round white ones”. Since meds ingame come as charges in the bottle should we use the name on the bottle? Because this means eventually players will know Amoxicillin is used to treat strep throat, regardless of their PCs medical skill. Or should we change medications to (like in NEO Scavenger) colored pills in pill bottles, using the storage system. This could be simplified by adding bottle seals (as a state like canned goods) but instead of freshness it offers surety that you’re getting what you are looking for in the bottle. Higher gambles would be opened bottles in drug cabinets and full pill organizers.
This means that we can make the margin of skill much higher to recognize lone tablets and capsules since survivors could reliably use unopened bottles to identify the contents, so long as they don’t empty them out into the same bag.
That would boost it to mandatory imo… which makes sense from a realism standpoint but idk how fun that would be.
Same with ranged>melee mentioned earlier in this thread. It makes sense that ranged combat is superior because in game because it is irl too. But it’s less fun so in the end the devs have to decide and the community as to mod if they want it different
most of the off the shelf medicines people can tell what they are but maybe introduce some much more powerfull antibiotics and other drugs (steroids?) that can do more powerful things
it could also augment the high end cooking skill for drug making because it might be easier to make crack if you used some specific medical drug as an ingredient (i think this is how irl drugs are made)
Meth and krokadil yes. Crack no. But you open up an interesting line of thought which is new street drugs. We could definitely have some weirder future street drugs. We already have some interesting ones that would work great in thd game yet to be implemented such as artificial cathinones and N-bomb. For reference N-bomb is the stuff that caused a guy to eat a dudes face in Florida a decade ago.
Plus there’s plenty of reason to believe new weird drugs would come about in 20 years. Fent is pretty new, for example, if another artificial opioid.
As far as realism for the sake of fun? Do the same thing as the generic guns mod. If you don’t like the complexity then we have the option to play without it.
i remember hearing about a drug that made your crazy and also stopped the mental blocks on the body. maybe we could have pain immunity, near infinite stamina, but with extreme hallucinations and would cause a lot of damage to the body when it wears off?
you people are forgetting that most medicen that the survivor doesn’t cook up themselfs come with discriptions on the box and a leafled explaining what it is, how and whatfor it should be used.
Not if it’s stolen from a pharmacy or sitting in someone’s medicine cabinet… only namebrand meds sold at grocery stores are prepackaged with instructions. All the labels and instructions for pharmaceuticals are made and printed each time to be tailored to the physicians instructions. Unless the survivor has a lexicomp account they’re probably SOL.
That would be the difference between an over the counter med and a pharmaceutical, or a cough syrup without codeine and one with it.
CDDA isn’t vaguely set in some inconsistently-defined future date anymore, though, it’s been explicitly set in the present day for like a year or more.
Is that true? I thought it was 2040 specifically. Now that I’m looking though that may have changed. Welp! Fair enough. No goofy star trek drugs, but I would still like to make my own stovetop combat stim ampules.
That’s a possibility, but I’m not arguing to make it overly difficult. I’m just thinking about medication identification at this point. Also, what skill would let you tell the difference between water and acid? Cooking? Survival? That gets silly fast.
I think we can also assume most syrups would be labeled appropriately in their bottle and can leave them be.
Really, you only need to give ambiguity to pills and possibly some street drugs because it’s far less likely to find cough syrup outside of its original container in the real world, but you’re very likely to find pills sorted piecemeal into other containers, either to be taken on a schedule or whatever reason.
To clarify, in the pharmacy, behind the counter, you’d likely find industrial sized bottles labeled for sorting by the pharm tech, but they would not have instructions for use or brand names. In front of the counter you’d probably find assorted OTC meds for colds, allergies, stomach issues, vitamins and supplements, and minor first aid stuff, as well as candy, lotion, snacks, and maybe a selection of beer.
In the US antibiotics and pain meds (excluding NSAIDS) won’t be sold OTC, thus would be behind the counter, and in CDDA, behind the steel shutter, probably.
I recently did a maid start and apparently they have an infection to start with. I cheated in 3 antibiotics until I could find some. Took her about a week and a half to recover. She had slow healer as well.
