The Uncertain future of the Physicians

[Rothgar]

I think you're blowing this tremendously out of proportion, but I've never had Herbalism or Medicine as a skill on my characters, so I honestly don't know.

As far as I can make out, Medicine will be a guildskill, and will force people to the Medicus to get treatment. Herbalism will cease to be a guildskill, and everyone will be able to do it. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, a large amount of the higher-tier Herbalism items would be nigh-impossible for Joe Blow to get without some sort of QP or monetary backing from a Guild or set of characters. If people are blowing you off, or simply blowing off injuries in general, it's probably best to report it to the Imms, or to the Order, respectively - arguments could be made for both sets of reports, based on how critical those things were.

Maybe I'm just spoiled. As an Orderite, if I lack RP, I can simply walk into a room and make it. It's very rarely about the skills that I possess, or the rank that I've got - in the last few days, even, I've largely been down Southside, and it's been incredibly refreshing and rewarding trying to make up reasons for being down there, as well as meeting the characters that work in that area.

[Voxumo]

In the end, we needed to separate in some way caring for plants from knowing about medicines and from knowing about perfumes. They are linked yet separate branches of knowledge.

I can't agree with this bit. There were people selling items needed for chandlery that are a part of herbalism, not just myself. I still strongly believe the only reason those who play chandlers were in favor of this is because it means one less item they have to buy from another person, or interact with. Herbalism in the real world is more closely tied to medicine than to any other field. The two have always gone hand in hand.

Honestly, I think the best change would have been removing tending and harvesting of plants from any skill. Anyone could grow a pineapple, and then sell the products of said pineapple. This would have allowed better utility for florists, and made it so that physicians and chandlers, even cooks, would have to buy from sources, just like in the real world.

As for the bit about waiting around, yeah I agree much of the order, knights includes, is about waiting around for something to happen. But doesn't make it any less valid.

I think you're blowing this tremendously out of proportion, but I've never had Herbalism or Medicine as a skill on my characters, so I honestly don't know.

As far as I can make out, Medicine will be a guildskill, and will force people to the Medicus to get treatment. Herbalism will cease to be a guildskill, and everyone will be able to do it. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, a large amount of the higher-tier Herbalism items would be nigh-impossible for Joe Blow to get without some sort of QP or monetary backing from a Guild or set of characters. If people are blowing you off, or simply blowing off injuries in general, it's probably best to report it to the Imms, or to the Order, respectively - arguments could be made for both sets of reports, based on how critical those things were.

Maybe I'm just spoiled. As an Orderite, if I lack RP, I can simply walk into a room and make it. It's very rarely about the skills that I possess, or the rank that I've got - in the last few days, even, I've largely been down Southside, and it's been incredibly refreshing and rewarding trying to make up reasons for being down there, as well as meeting the characters that work in that area.

In regards to the higher-tier herbalism items, they don't so much require money or qp, it's just about finding the source, and oftentimes that was only poisons. Poisons have some incredibly hard to find items, Scented oils and whatnot in herbalism just required finding the plant you needed... which this change won't solve that issue as many of those plants only show up once in a blue-moon.

As for walking in and finding rp... Well Rothgar you play an orderite, an inquisitor to be exact. Those roles come with a certain level of authority, of fear. Physicians have no such authority. I can walk into a room and go "Have you been bled lately?"... just doesn't have the same level of authority or impact. And I'm sure if I was a freeman I probably could find some rp downsouth if people were willing to play along, but that's not a luxury I have.

[Delphine]

And I'll be honest, when i first joined the physicians on this character, I did so just for herbalism. I had no interest in getting involved in medicine as I've been there, done that. I was prepared to skip out on the physicians as soon as I mastered herbalism. But after spending a decent amount of time in the physicians, I changed my tune. I was one of those people I now despise.

I think that's why a lot of people have joined the physicians, to be honest, which I think is one of the things staff was trying to fix with this change. Wouldn't you rather have people joining your guild because they WANT to be there rather than feeling like they HAVE to be there? Who intend to just skip out once they've used the physicians for dat sweet herbalism gain like some cheap whore?

I wouldn't want that myself. I won't speak for other people by naming names, but I know that this was a complaint I had heard from at least one physician's player - that they were tired of people treating the physician as some necessary second job that they never wanted to have in the first place.

Re: No one wants to RP with physicians.

I don't think anyone expects you to just stand in the Triage all day and twiddle your thumbs while waiting for someone to come in with a wound. I don't expect that. If people DO expect that, tell them tough titties. That's boring. To be honest, I've seen FAR more Madison RP than I ever expected to see with a non-combatant character and every time I've had to roll up in there IC, there's been no one there. And that's cool. That's what messengers are for. I don't expect someone to just be waiting there on the OFF CHANCE I get IC pew-pewed again.

I feel for you. I'm sure this is probably one of the toughest guilds to play as far as making up RP goes (that doesn't revolve around people coming to you with their boo-boos). But I can think up a few scenes off of my head that you could do. Most of them involve dead bodies. That are fake. Pure RP dead bodies. I will try to come up with some RP that does not involve dead people.

• BRING OUT YE DEAD. I'm sure the Madison sees their fair share of dead NPCs. People who just SADLY don't make it off the operating table. Or that whole leeching thing just happened to go horribly wrong. Hire (via trade if short on coin) some big, burly PC brutes to come help haul off your "dead." You don't care what happens to them once they're out of the Madison. You just don't want them there anymore.
• THERE IS A SHORTAGE ON XYZ AND WE NEED IT NOW. Short on some sort of REALLY IMPORTANT MEDICINE HERB? Why not run a ST going on a grand quest to find it? If you're not short on it, pretend like you are. Or maybe you're on a quest to find NEW, exotic medicines you've never heard of before. You might not find it, but hey. Adventure to the great unknown and all that.
• WE NEED MORE DEAD. Oh, snap. You got rid of all those corpses and now you need cadavers for the bebe physicians to practice on. Hire a brute squad to go, uh... find some more dead people. You don't care where they come from. FAKE RP DEAD PEOPLE PLS. No one likes corpse rot. It was so last season. This could totes tie in with those 'let's go beat up bandit' STs that sometimes happen. "Bring me back some of those bandits, please. I want to, uh... cut them up into pieces."
• RECRUIT FOR THE PHYSICIANS. Like that health faire you want to do IC. Do the health faire. Teach people about health. Try to recruit more physicians. You need people to cut on those fresh cadavers you just got before they go bad.
• HOLD A SEMINAR. Like Nadya explaining what to do in case of poisoning at the Council Meeting. You guys could turn that into a RP event. "Dis is the right way to make yourself purge. No no, you need to do THIS to gag." Just think about all the people you could gag for fun. Or, you know. Something else that doesn't involve gagging people.
• I'M OUT OF IDEAS. But I like even numbers.

[Voxumo]

In regards to your bit Delphine, those are great ways to help physician rp... If the guild was a tad bigger, or if we all didn't have such vastly different schedules, I could see trying that. Though yeah I till definitely plan on doing the health faire even with this massive drawback.

As for the first bit you brought up... I''d rather have reluctant people whom I can maybe turn to the side of the physicians than have no chance at that. Like I had a person recently join the physicians. We had a nice series of letters, some subterfuge and eventually an actual meeting that likely never would have happened if they weren't somewhat forced to join the physicians, or brotherhood, to learn herbalism. It created rp that wouldn't have been possible given current circumstances.

It created conflict... and this game suffers from a lack of non-combat related conflict. Conflict that doesn't equate to "I will kill you your actions"

[Temi]

Thanks for editing things down some. I didn't want to respond at all because the negativity was off-putting, especially in the first version, and I need to be able to respond politely. We did think this through, and we think that it will be for the best. It has been a long, ongoing issue with crafters who use materials they didn't have the necessary access to. Yes, I think it would have been better if players had embraced reaching out to other players and networking to get everything they need, instead of trying to do everything themselves. But we tried that, and it wasn't working. No one was embracing it - you noticed yourself that no one was buying these things from your store, despite needing them. This shouldn't affect you if no one was buying before, aside from cutting down on the constant OOC tension.

Now, it's an important thing to remember that this is not Joe Blow we're talking about. I'd say Joe Blow is under 36 level skill. This is someone who has decided to become a master in working with plants. The difference is that the person who decides to become an herbalism master can now choose from additional backgrounds than physicians and thieves. Or they can still be a physician or a thief. It opens up options. It has already not been limited to the physicians though - that poison knowledge is out there - the thieves know it. The physicians can denounce those who are growing poisonous plants and creating poisons and teaching others how to create poisons - that's all RP which remains the same and nothing has to change there. The only thing that changes is code - it's no longer code that blocks it rather than RP.

I honestly don't think this will explode into tons of poisonings. Thieves have already had access to it and we've seen somewhere in the proximity of 0 poisonings. There have been no poison deaths. Poisoning attempts have been pretty rare. If these increase, I'd actually be happy. A 100% increase is still pretty small total numbers. And it will probably be the physicians who get to help those victims out. If things go absolutely crazy to a point that it's bad for RP, we will definitely look at rebalancing things.

I recognize that this does take a monopoly away from the Physicians, but it is the part of the monopoly that made no sense for healers. It should also mean less people joining the Physicians who don't want to be there. Physicians should continue to have all of the options they had before - we didn't take anything away - it just opens those options up to some others as well.

That said, if we got certain recipes on the wrong side of the divide, we can take a look at adjusting those. We are also open to additional things for physicians, if they make sense and help RP in general.

[Famine]

To be honest, I had no idea poisons existed until this thread. This is great.

[Voxumo]

Yes, I think it would have been better if players had embraced reaching out to other players and networking to get everything they need, instead of trying to do everything themselves. But we tried that, and it wasn't working. No one was embracing it - you noticed yourself that no one was buying these things from your store, despite needing them. This shouldn't affect you if no one was buying before, aside from cutting down on the constant OOC tension.

This bit worries me if this is the mindset. I mean doesn't this go against the very thing staff limited guildskils in chargen for? To reinforce interaction between players instead of having a player being able to do everything by themselves?

I'd rather have the chance somebody would buy from my store, than have zero percent chance. That's like somebody having a disease and being given a small sliver of hope for a cure, even if that cure never comes to be. It's that false hope. And it does effect because now I'm sitting on a useless building that I am being taxed for, with stock no one has any reason to buy now, except of course if rare plants remain as rare as they are now, but even that rarity hasn't helped.


As for the poison bit, yeah I completely agree that it would be nice to have more poisonings, though I think a large part of the lack of poisonings could be because maybe people don't know where you are suppose to get many of the ingredients. A venom sack of a viper from daravi? Where on grid would one even begin to look for that. I only know of one source and that is because I used to play that source, but wouldn't contacting that source be abusing ooc knowledge?

I still think poisons should be linked to medicine, for reasons stated in prior posts.


As for the joe blow bit knowing how to grow exotic plants... I suppose when put that way it does make sense, but I still feel it waters down the pool a bit when everyone has a chance at being professional plant grower extraordinaire. But I'm also one who believes in stricter restrictions which isn't exactly a popular view.

[Delphine]

On the subject of "no one wants to buy the stuff," I just... I have to sound off on that.

Cat knows herbalism. She's known herbalism. She learned it on grid. NO ONE KNOWS SHE KNOWS HERBALISM (well, except two people in-game... and everyone OOC now) because she buys all of her stuff. Like those bulk crates of rose oil from Arkadios? Those are the shit. Who wants to grind 25 vials of rose oil when you can just go buy them. What's the point of being a gentry with gold to burn if you're not going off and spending it on crap you don't really need.

For the record, my mention of Arkadios up there wasn't an attempt to plug a merchant store vs. a non-merchant store, but as I mentioned in the OOC chat, Vic... I had no idea you had a store. Your store is VERY out of the way (I stumbled across it one day by happy accident! I didn't realize it was your store until you sent me a letter IC and I saw the blue rose in your seal and put two-and-two together because I'm smurt) and I've never seen it advertised or heard you bring it up IC. GRANTED. I've been playing for two months. Well, not even two months yet. Almost two months. So please take that with a giant heaping of salt. In the almost two months I have been playing, I haven't seen it advertised nor heard you bring it up. As someone who works in Public Relations IRL, promoting crap is my job so that's just something I'm hyper aware of. You gotta constantly be plugging if you want to stay top-of-mind as we say in the industry and there are plenty of ways to plug without being obnoxious about it.

(And I agree that I think poisons should be linked to medicine myself, for the record. I just wanted to touch on the "no one wants to buy stuff" point as the main topic in this reply because I buy ALL THE THINGS. Granted, I'm one person. But we're out there.)

Also, I buy bouquets in-game. Flowers are the shit. Cat buys them all the time.

Alright, here's what you need to do. Create Valentine's Day in-game. Make it somehow a religious thing. Sell a crap ton of flowers and candy. I'm being 90% tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you get what I mean. There's plenty of ways to create a market for flowers and crap. I'm happy to help you brainstorm OOC on these sorts of things.

[Voxumo]

Alright, here's what you need to do. Create Valentine's Day in-game. Make it somehow a religious thing. Sell a crap ton of flowers and candy. I'm being 90% tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you get what I mean. There's plenty of ways to create a market for flowers and crap. I'm happy to help you brainstorm OOC on these sorts of things.

Maybe the next time the kissing festival, which I basically amount to ic valentine's day, rolls around, we should plan something. And by we I mean the game in general.

And the funny thing is, last night I actually finally finished the header for my shop, that I would use on advertisements. Not having a proper header, ie Ascii art, has been a large part of why I haven't made flyers or whatnot. Though I have advertised it in rumors before.

[Delphine]

Alright, here's what you need to do. Create Valentine's Day in-game. Make it somehow a religious thing. Sell a crap ton of flowers and candy. I'm being 90% tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you get what I mean. There's plenty of ways to create a market for flowers and crap. I'm happy to help you brainstorm OOC on these sorts of things.

Maybe the next time the kissing festival, which I basically amount to ic valentine's day, rolls around, we should plan something. And by we I mean the game in general.

And the funny thing is, last night I actually finally finished the header for my shop, that I would use on advertisements. Not having a proper header, ie Ascii art, has been a large part of why I haven't made flyers or whatnot. Though I have advertised it in rumors before.

I forgot the kissing festival was a legit thing xD But yeah, there's plenty of ways to push that sort of stuff! And I'm always down for more IC events! I'll start going through the list of festivals on the wiki and brainstorming ideas for the game in-general when I get a free moment.