A public service announcement from Blue Saber, Blue Shield Medical Association

Imagine you are a party traveling through the jungles of kashyyyk in search of an elusive predator rumored by the locals to be terrorizing any unsuspecting wookiees who wander down from their treetop sanctuary. You make your way through the bush fighting off kinraths, vipers, and the occasion Kkekkrrg rro. Suddenly you come upon a clearing where you spot a sickly looking tach lying in a pile of leaves. It is shaking, feverish, and disoriented. One of your party members decides to put it out its misery. Piercing his vibroblade at the creatures chest, he splatters blood all over you. Disgustedly you wipe it off and try to forget about the gruesome scene you just witnessed. Deciding to call it quits, you head back to your ship to return to your shop on coruscant to sell off some of the exotic fur pelts you collected. On your way there, you notice that you have developed a small cough. Thinking nothing of it, you continue home and walk right through the crowded plaza, coughing occasionally and unknowingly spreading tach flu to everyone. Congratulations, you have just started a pandemic.
Such a scenario could implement many skills that would make the medical field much more relevant than merely installing cybernetics. By adding in random diseases with small % chance to catch and spread them (perhaps through cough or contact), it would create a need to give doctors their own high level skills such as:
Taking samples from patients.
Testing the samples in a lab.
Developing a vaccine/cure for the disease.
Manufacturing syringes/pills to treat specific diseases.

By making the symptoms start off mild with progression over time to moderate or severe, players will want to see their doctor as soon as possible. Hope you have health insurance!

I really like this idea and all the possibilities it opens up (especially for Medical), and I’d like to hear an Imm weigh in on it.

yeah this is an awesome idea and opens up all kinds of RP/quests and even financial merchantile upsides!

I support this idea, it would open up a lot of options. The tricky thing might be to make the events rare enough to not flood the entire galaxy with seven highly contagious diseases while also making it common enough for doctors to actually be able to profit from it.

Would be cool if we had 100-200 regular active players instead of just 40-50, but as it stands, I dunno.

You’d have to modify it to include NPCs as well, so that doctors can go doctor almost on a quest like basis and players can get infected as a consequence of interacting with a planet that is currently having some kind of issue, and local governments can create incentives for doctors to come clean up a mess, this way the infrastructure will already either be in place or on its way to cure players who get infected.

The way I’d probably design:
A set of 4-5 random standard viruses and illnesses that can have outbreaks that can be eased by doctor skills, almost like diplomating on a planet, except it’s not caused by other players. It’d fuck with taxes and eventually support so governments would want to hire or staff doctors to deal with it, if left unchecked, could lead to blockading or embargos. Players who visit the planet and interact with NPC’s have a chance to become infected with a bog standard maladict that can be cured with doctor created drugs.

THIS WOULD BE:
Cool and could probably could happen.

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Mutated strains or “exotic” viruses that imms would start, either by creating infected NPCs on a planet that begin to infect PC’s and other NPCs. The virus would basically be a bit or vnum, and one sufficiently passed around, would begin showing up on diagnose scans and generating symptoms; involuntary coughing fits, fevers, cysts. They’d eventually hinder stats and combat ability and if left untreated coma and DEATH. This would require some high level doctoring and RP and various diplomatic gestures to resolve.

THIS WOULD BE:
Cool as an event, once every three time lines, and also never happen because it’d probably take like a thousand lines of code to do right.