Problem: GMs have long acknowledged that first aid is not adequately developed. What first aid does is very niche (halt or slow the bleeding of external wounds), and it doesn't scale past a few hundred ranks. At high levels of skill, the only viable method of training first aid is the jarring practice of keeping "pet bleeders." While many players might choose to stop training first aid once they reach maximum effectiveness, this is not an option for Empaths (who need 990 ranks of first aid for 200th circle).

The skill may need to be renamed in order to broaden the concept. Some options may be "anatomy" (though that really sounds like it should be a lore), "applied anatomy," or "natural medicine" (as opposed to the supernatural healing performed by Empaths). One person has proposed the name "chirurgy." I personally don't like that word, as it is just an ugly, archaic word for surgery, and player characters don't do anything that resembles surgery. (Empathic healing obviates the need for surgery.)

Additional Medical Applications

• Allow the skill to halt (or at least slow) internal bleeding.
• Allow the skill to treat (or at least mitigate) disease and/or poison.
• Tie the effective use of alchemical remedies (and possibly even poisons) into the skill. (For example, an unskilled user might use too much or too little of the medicine, possibly wasting doses or causing more toxicity than needed.)
• For Empaths, allow the skill to act as a mastery skill that makes it easier to use the high-level abilities of wound redirection and/or wound reduction.

Combat Applications

While I understand (and agree with) the GMs' reluctance to make combat more of a "one stop shop for all your training needs," there are some possible combat applications. Any experience gained from combat would require an appropriately challenging opponent.

• Your knowledge of anatomy allows you to debilitate your enemy through the use of pressure points. (This could be tied into the current ANALYZE system or even the anatomy charts used in compendiums. For example, ANALYZE GOBLIN ANATOMY.)
• Your knowledge of anatomy allows you to strike precise, surgical blows, making it easier to inflict deadly wounds and/or cripple an opponent that might otherwise prove too challenging. Again, this could be tied into the ANALYZE system and/or anatomy charts, perhaps with some kind of cool-down timer to prevent an excessive kill rate. (For example, "Recalling your knowledge of goblin anatomy, you aim your scimitar for the Achilles tendon, hoping to hobble the goblin."

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You can always call it Mechanical Lore.

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>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.

>>Absolon: I would suggest Treatment as a name, since it can be applicable to first aid and remedy items in addition to things like poisons. E.g. you give your blade a treatment of stunning poison, or the creature receives a treatment of naphtha dousing.

Not a bad idea.


>>Kuykend9: If we're renaming it, my vote is for "Paramedicine," the thing that 'paramedics,' or Emergency Medical Technicians, use to stabilize people in, well, emergencies.

I also considered "urgent care," but it sounded too modern and didn't adequately exclude supernatural healing from the concept.

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Might be cool to add tasks to hospitals to tend patients' wounds while the autopath is healing him-or-herself. Could have added incentive for empaths, or during invasions. These could generate extra FA xp, giving an alternative, and more useful, way to train FA at higher levels.

>> Might be cool to add tasks to hospitals to tend patients' wounds while the autopath is healing him-or-herself. Could have added incentive for empaths, or during invasions. These could generate extra FA xp, giving an alternative, and more useful, way to train FA at higher levels.

Instead of just "do the thing FA does already, but to NPCs," how about 'tasks' modeled around the template of the new crafting systems where players can make rolls of bandages, splints, slings, etcetera for the hospitals, learning FA in the process. Maybe have the supplies available at the hospital, and you have to <roll cloth> to make bandages, <bind planks> to make splints, <tie straps> to make slings, and so forth.

I

I'm going to float a radical idea there:

Can first aid be merged with skinning into a new skill called anatomy?

It makes sense that hours spent reading compendiums of anatomy chart would help you skin better, if anything.

Also, both skills are survival.

If they are merged, bandaging self wounds would primarily use anatomy. However, bandaging wounds on other people could use both anatomy and empathy, giving empaths a huge bonus in tending the wounds on other people.

It just doesn't feel right having a lot of 'pet bleeders' just to train the skill effectively. The very concept of a pet bleeder takes some immersion out of the game.

To rebalance the actual ability of stopping bleeding, the action could be rescaled so that there exists a non-trivial roundtime associated with tending.

I think that's a super easy and reasonable solution.

An addendum to the Anatomy skill proposition:

Hunters can perform an AUTOPSY on a dead creature. Instead of yielding a skin, the corpse is consumed, and a small amount scholarship, appraisal, anatomy experience is added, based on the difficulty of the creature.

This helps closes the training gap from lore primary/secondary guilds when hunting and survival/weapons/armor primary/secondary guilds.

>>This suggestion is advanced every couple of months, though I'm not sure it's ever really been commented on.

I think they've mentioned in the past that they're not fans of merging those two skills since one is rather fleshed out and one just needs TLC to stand on its own.

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Even if they aren't merged. I really like renaming first aid to anatomy. It would be a huge boon to empaths as healing could train it as well as empathy, it would be an argument for learning more from charts, and it would expand the breadth beyond tending. Studying cadavers (empath guild or recent kills), for example.

>>Enfo13: Can first aid be merged with skinning into a new skill called anatomy?

This has been suggested before, but it poses some problems: namely, that it would give a lot of characters with high first aid but low skinning a dramatic boost in earning potential. While I would personally love to see my effective skinning ability jump from 228 ranks to 690 ranks, I can see how it would be problematic for a bunch of characters to instantly get a huge boost in a skill that can only be trained in combat and is one of the biggest money makers for hunters.

In theory, they could do what they did with hiding and stalking and cap the new "anatomy" skill at 130% of skinning, but then I would lose 57% of my effective ability with first aid-related tasks.

Therefore, I think the more difficult approach of renaming the first aid skill and expanding the current uses for it skill is the better one.

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>> it would be problematic for a bunch of characters to instantly get a huge boost in a skill that can only be trained in combat and is one of the biggest money makers for hunters.

You're missing a massive detail here. If First Aid and Skinning were merged into Anatomy, it would not be "a skill that can only be trained in combat;" the new skill (Anatomy) would be trainable by tending wounds, or by skinning, or by reading anatomy charts.

I do agree that it's a more complex process than merging Hiding and Stalking was, but I still think that the idea has legs.

I

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"Could be worse, I could agree with Pureblade." ~ Samsaren

>>Kuykend9: You're missing a massive detail here. If First Aid and Skinning were merged into Anatomy, it would not be "a skill that can only be trained in combat;" the new skill (Anatomy) would be trainable by tending wounds, or by skinning, or by reading anatomy charts.

Right, but you're taking a skill that was previously only trained in combat (skinning) -- and one that is a huge money maker -- and effectively giving players a bunch of free ranks in that skill for actions performed outside of combat.

If skinning weren't such a big money maker, this would be less concerning, but it isn't necessarily good for the game as a whole to give a bunch of people an instant and dramatic boost in earning potential.

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I think doing some average of Skinning and FA, or 130% of the top, would be fine - I don't know many guilds aside from Empaths who have higher FA than Skinning. Even if Empaths could suddenly skin way above what they were before, they aren't killing those critters unless they have the combats to back it. If they have the combats to back it, they probably have the skinning to go along with it anyway. My Empath can skin whatever he kills, for example.

>You'd be surprised by the number of characters who can't skin at level.

I would indeed be surprised if it was a significant number. Do you have anything to back up that it is a significant number?

>characters whose combats are significantly higher than their skinning ranks.

This is the only thing that really matters, and only if their FA ranks would increase their ability to skin. It doesn't matter if their FA exceeds their skinning by more than 30% if they don't have the combats to back it up.

>>That's even worse. It's like allowing braiding grass and making origami teach locksmithing. You're essentially making a skill with risk associated with it (can you kill this critter, can you safely disarm this trap, etc) and removing all the risk while reaping all the benefits (being able to safely open boxes, for example).

Can I make an observation that might be surprising: training first aid is dangerous. Three of the four deaders I've seen in my hunting area in the past week have died because their pet bleeders got infected. I guess you could say that they should have paid more attention or that they should have built in script checks. But the same can be said of hunting in general. Unless you are overhunting and are not paying attention to how your wounds are stacking up (for stuns), hunting is a relatively safe activity.

Even when not hunting, pet bleeders pose a significant burden. They hinder your actions, preventing you from training other things well. The burden is even worse for empaths. First they must use customized scripts or plugins to efficiently take all wounds from people who want to keep pet bleeders, instead of the nifty "take all" command (though this is easily remedied by a "take all [nonbleeder]" option. Empaths are also unable to use spells like regenerate, fountain of creation, heal, when cleaning themselves. For most empaths, this means first-aid training time and heavy healing time are mutually exclusive.

Meanwhile, my empaths can manipulate a few creatures and have Empathy go to mindlock without fighting over patients, and training alot more skills at the same time for TDPs. Dare I say combat empaths have it easier than non-combat empaths.

>>This has been suggested before, but it poses some problems: namely, that it would give a lot of characters with high first aid but low skinning a dramatic boost in earning potential. While I would personally love to see my effective skinning ability jump from 228 ranks to 690 ranks, I can see how it would be problematic for a bunch of characters to instantly get a huge boost in a skill that can only be trained in combat and is one of the biggest money makers for hunters.

While this is true, I think there are a few mitigating factors.

1) I think the "earning power" of ranks is encapsulated in the combat skills needed to kill the creature. So skinning is not the sole skill is the money maker, as there are other things that drop coin, gems, and boxes that can be substituted.

2) For most people, skinning will be ahead of first aid, even for the survival terts like clerics and paladins.

3) A lot of clerics and paladins have low skinning because they tend to hunt undead things that usually cannot be skinned. Even if they could switch over to a skinnable, they might prefer to stick with their undead critters.

4) If we dangle the autopsy option for scholarship and maybe appraisal from skinning at the cost of sacrificing the skin, they may forego making money from the critter in favor of experience. In fact, this might actually be a huge platinum faucet stop overall on the economy, preventing inflation.


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Ultimately, I would love for first aid to be fleshed out as a skill. In fact, I prefer enrichment over a simple merge.

However, history teaches us that's not the way with DragonRealm development. GM coding time is scarce. There have been more combined skills than skills fleshed out over the past two decades. The exception is the mechlore split, which to this day, is not finished yet.

Ideas (even the good ones) that improve the use of first aid off the top of my head, sort of walk all over the domain of emapths. For example, I would love it if an Anatomy or Treatment improves and gets trained by the application of alchemy potions, but that means less wounds for empaths. It would be awesome (and finally add some backing to the titles of witch doctor or chirgeons) if a first-aid skill allowed players to perform operations or surgery, setting bones etc, but ultimately that walks all over the empath as well.

In the end, it depends on how easy it is for GMS to get it done. If merging skinning and first aid is incredibly difficult as another poster has suggested, then expanding the use of first aid, however many years (or decades) it might take, might be the only option.

> It caps early now, but who knows what those ranks will be able to do once first aid is properly developed. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not a fan of taking a 67% hit on my ability to perform current and future first-aid related tasks -- not to mention having to re-earn the TDPs. (And on my Empath, I don't care to have my anatomy ranks "grandfathered" to my current circle, 153, when I have already done the work to meet the first aid requirement for 195th circle.)

Okay. Average of both then or the cap of both with the remainder going into bonus bits. I think the numbers can be worked out far more easily than waiting for a brand new system to make it to the top of several already packed lists.

While I'm not going to comment on most of this, we already have a bunch of people in game who learn specific skills, including first aid and skinning as well as their very own special skill, during their examinations of corpses. They like anatomy a lot, and several of the things that they get up to are pretty similar to autopsies -- at least in part.

Empathy or any other magic-ish skill learning from fiddling with corpses (any more than they already do) really sort of doesn't match up with the game lore for anything other than Thanatology. Also, I'm not so sure that Empaths or anyone else really want to make themselves act any more like those guys than certain chunks of the game lore already point out.

Just sayin.

-Persida

I just wish first aid was useful. Past about 600 ranks nothing has changed in what I can do or rt. I still cant tend internal bleeders. I still cant bandage my missing hands. And almost impossible to train at this point.

First Aid: 1081 62.13% clear

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