I find it slightly odd that you need an 8 point skill just to find out if a character is actually injured whereas IC you might well notice some hint of an injury if you were looking, especially if someone just took a polearm Triple to the head.
The best example is that the rite Eyes of Suffering requires "two witnesses, both of whom must be injured", but until you do the rite, you can't call Rec Wounds to find out if they are injured or not. To solve this, I suggest letting any character call Detect Wounds at a 10cm range. Detect Wounds doesn't represent any medical knowledge of how serious the wound is, just noticing that X has some form of injury on their body somewhere.
--Jim
- The skill is 'Recognise Wounds', which tells you how many hits someone has, out of how many. Thus it has a very significant pvp use, where it is possible to find out things like 'that person has four hits to the torso, so my backstab will need a venom to boost it if I want to put them down in one blow', for example. If someone is conscious, they can tell you whatever they like about their state of health (including lying to make you waste healing on them, or lying to pretend it's just a scratch when they are dying). If the person is not conscious, an untrained person can only tell they are down, but does not know why. All of this is useful information which you get from First Aid 1 and makes it considered a worthwhile expenditure of XP. -TimB
- For clarity, I believe, the suggestion is to have something along the lines of "Detect wounds" as a free ability, only answer being "ping" if injured. --Tea
- Yep. Any more info would be a Recognise call. The idea here was to solve the fact that we don't physrep minor injuries. Character gets hit on the arm, gets a horrible stab wound or massive bruise. IC, this is obvious. OOC, they look exactly the same. It'd be a neater convention than asking "OOC: Are you acting like that arm has just got stabbed up, or something?". Call it, someone pings, you know they're hurt, they know they might want to RP that out. Detect Wounds wouldn't give you any idea of their total hits, or the seriousness of their wounds, that's for First Aid. Detect Wounds is not meant to represent medical skill but the fact you can see some form of apparent injury. It doesn't take surgical training to work out that knees aren't meant to have arrows in them ;). In response to TimB's thought about faking, I did consider making your response optional to allow for this. First Aid 1 remains useful, in that you can notice someone is injured and then call for someone to work out if it's serious. Plus unlike Detect Wounds, it will catch out someone who is faking an injury or trying to conceal one. --Jim
- I do note as a counterpoint that I've seen groups of trained first aiders completely fail to notice really quite major injuries in simulations. --Tea
- I dislike the fact it tells you the full total of hit points that the character should have because this strikes me as breaking the fourth wall quite a lot (esp when you then IC start thinking 'well I do doubles so I'd need another two hit points...' etc)- I'd much rather see 'I have x hits remaining on this location' and 'this location is uninjured' as the two main calls (even this does obviously leak some of the same info by implication, but it isn't quite so definitive). --Zebbie
- You can tell that they are downed, and that healing will pick them up. This seems not needed given the likely medical knowledge of your average peasant in Albion. Bear in mind that a soldier without FA would not keep me as a friend for very long - any combat-based class really wants some basic medic ability. --Andy
I can see the reasoning for some kind of detection which tells you whether someone is unblemished or whether that 10-hit warrior is looking a bit scuffed. OTOH, even this has potential to be usefully gamed. So while I think it would be really nice to be able to tell whether someone had just strolled in after a relaxing nap or had the tar beaten out of them, I would be very cautious about inmplementing such a thing. Phys-repping limitation more than anything, though we can and do physrep "long term" injuries and scars with makeup that becomes part of the character, and on some occasions short-term injuries with fake blood at the time, depending on kit and washing requirements. --Chevron
Wound assessment is, from what I have gathered, quite a skillful thing to do, so xp cost makes sense - Porange
- I especially disliked the "Eyes of Suffering" rite. To find out if someone was wounded, you needed two witnesses. But they both had to be wounded, and to find that out you needed two witness. And to find that out... --Jacob
- The solution is clearly to stab them both before doing the rite, just to make sure. Alas possibly a little bit more in keeping with sordan than with st john --Malselene
Is this actually a problem? I personally have a larger problem with the fact that the rec wounds call seems to get used fairly frequently at the drop of the hat with little or no roleplay of an examination attached, rather than asking the person IC if they're hurt. Live action roleplay is better with more roleplay than with more system calls. (No offense to the people who do lovely examinations intended - I've just been tapped on the shoulder from behind and rec wounded on spec when completely uninjured a few too many times recently) --Malselene
- Agreed. Rec wounds should be accompanied with at least 5s roleplayed inspection, which the target should be aware of OC (for the case of doing so on unconscious victims). --Tea
Right, to clarify as I see things:
Currently, without First Aid 1 you can't actually tell IC if someone is wounded or not.
This means that using Eyes of Suffering is rather tricky, and also seems a bit silly, given how often people get hit with large axes.
So some form of minor adjustment to what you can do without skills would seem appropriate. The basic options are:
- Fix Eyes of Suffering to only require one of the two participants to be injured, and the priest can always injure themself to then qualify.
- Introduce DETECT WOUNDS or similar as an innate ability of being a character, again requiring a few seconds of roleplayed inspection. This solely allows you to see if another character is injured, not the extent of that injury or their general health.
Note: While it's currently undocumented, any character can check if another character is bleeding by inspection.
- Personally, I don't see particular issues with either as a change. First Aid 1 still has its applications for both PVP and general diagnostics. --Tea