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I'm against emagged maintenance drones entirely. Maintenance drones are meant to be silent synthetic engineers, tasked with preforming repairs and minor engineering projects. They're small, fragile, but sturdy enough to wield the tools they carry. Mechanically, drones serve as a way for players to enter the round and provide an impact on the station, but without severely impacting other characters with their interactions. In return for sacrificing sociability, drones are given an array of tools perfect for the solitary engineer player, who finds pleasure in the zen state of mind that comes with preforming station repairs and building engineering forts. Overall, the niche maintenance drones fill is one of solitude,with the only player interactions being with other drones or the occasional assistant who thinks drones make good hats. Emagged drones takes the entire concept of maintenance drones and flips it on its head. Emagged drones are a nightmare to fight, armed with an incredibly powerful melee weapon that breaks bones in a few hits, and is capable of knocking down walls. The average crew member will surely die in a one on one fight with the average drone. Drones take no movement speed penalties from damage, have no bones that can be broken, are usually assumed to be trustworthy, and protected by the "cute" factor that surrounds mobs like Ian and Runtime. Drones have access to the entire station, be it through airlocks, vents, broken down walls, or even space. They can access all electronics like how a borg or AI does, allowing for a drone to completely lock down a department. There is no indicator that a drone is emagged, unless it's been caught in the act or if it has its drill out. The list of advantages emagged maintenance drones possess goes on and on. To sum it up, emagged maintenance drones are highly mobile, extremely deadly, and have a very big impact on the round. Maintenance drones are also subject to the "antag sympathizer" symptom that so frequently arises with conversion antags. Antagonist sympathizers are players who willingly allow themselves to be converted into an antagonist. This frequently happens with revolution, shadowling, and cult rounds. Players have become increasingly adept at *accidentally* getting captured by a conversion antagonist, to the point where most cases of antag sympathy goes unnoticed. Higher server population makes getting accidentally caught even easier. Shadowling rounds are filled with the type of player who wanders around maintenance under the guise of hunting for shadowlings, when in reality the player is looking to become a thrall. Maintenance drones are subject to the same problem. Ghosts can find a traitor with an emag, then join as a maintenance drone and seek that traitor out. While drones are supposed to avoid people, many drones will allow themselves to be picked up and worn as hats. An antagonist sympathizing drone will simply hang around a traitor, who can easily scoop up the drone and emag it in some dark corner. While antagonist sympathizers are a cultural problem rather than a mechanical problem, an easy solution is a mechanical one: remove emagged maintenance drones.

Another thread made me think of one of the greatest flaws in Medbay that promotes powergaming. Why is it that ANYONE has access to the chems fridge? As long as the fridge is stocked, it allows anyone to come in Medbay and completely bypass doctors to heal anything aside from complex things that meds alone can't fix. I think it should be like the Nanomeds(son) and only people with medical access should be able to use it. Maybe even just putting the chems fridge in a room that only medical has access to. Move it up to where one of the pill bottle lockers is. Or the "medbay locker room" right behind the reception desk. That way in EXTREME emergencies the CMO can give the door(s) emergency access so anyone can use it, but it would put the fridge in a more secure location under normal circumstances. I feel this change would reduce powergaming and allow for more RP opportunities...and make less doctors go SSD because they are bored or aggravated that everyone is doing thier job for them.

Title says it all. An emagged maint drone is a ventcrawling, all access, killing machine that is SUPPOSED to be a role that isn't even interacting with the crew beyond just repairing stuff. They also can't be blown remotely. Even borgs and, argueably, traitors are easier to deal with compared to these. The diamond drill can decapitate even armored people in 2-4 hits. So. I am not just a whiner, here's my suggestion: 1. Emagged drones do NOT get a means to kill people. 2. Emagged drones CAN be remotely blown. and 3. maintence drones have 30 health at most. meaning they die very quickly.

Lets approach this from an in character, roleplay perspective. Lets say that I am an assistant, who has just shocked himself while trying to hack the hot drinks vendor. My hands now charred stumps, I rush to medbay, walking in as some other patient walks out. Rather than asking for a doctor to fix me, I jab my burnt digits at the medicine locker, pulling out a patch. I apply it to my burnt hands, which regain some of their original color and shape. Seeing that no one has stopped me from accessing the medical locker, I decide to take a few other patches for myself, as well as some painkillers so I can get high later. Because no one has stopped me yet, I decide to steal the CMO's cat, because apparently it's just free game in medbay today. However, the medical vendors scattered around medbay stop my looting spree, as they have ID locks on them. I scratch my head and think, *Why did they bother to put locks on these things if the fridge is free game?*. I wander out, my bag full of pills and patches that will likely never be used by someone who actually needs them. Alright, lets break down this little episode, and hopefully I'll get you to see why the fridge being unlocked is so ridiculous. Anyone can treat themselves. Doctors? Pffft, who needs them. Anyone can undermine the doctors by throwing themselves into a cryotube or stealing some patches from the vendor. Anyone can help themselves. If the fridge is unlocked, of course people are going to steal from it. The fridge and all of it's goodies are in an easy to reach spot, free for anyone to take. It's a blank check for powergaming. Why not steal a few synthflesh patches? Players who resist powergaming will stop themselves from stealing all the synthflesh patches for themselves, but with our high population it's not logical to assume that every player will abide by an unspoken rule. The vendors have locks, while the fridge doesn't. Why? Who knows. I can't imagine a doctor allowing a patient to take a bottle of medicine back home with them in real life. Stopping medicine thieves isn't easy. Unless a doctor with a syringe gun or the CMO with their baton is nearby, detaining a thieving assistant isn't easy. Stealing from the fridge is as easy as waltzing into medbay, rapidly clicking on what you want, then hitting the door button and escaping into the hallway.

Go for it I'll just slip you and throw you into the door for access. No problem my friend.

Alright I'll be proactive. Instead of addressing one of the issues that leads to powergaming we are yet again forced to fight fire with fire. Any time I work Medbay I'll just grab the wrench from cryo, move the fridge into the medical supplies room and patch the hole in the wall with metal from some of the chairs lying around. If anyone breaks into the room I'll report them to sec for B&E, trespassing, and petty theft (oddly petty theft under space law shows someone stealing meds from this exact room). They'll get 20-30 in the brig and people will learn to live with it. I suggest anyone here who shares my view does the same.

I understand the concern there, but you could apply that same reasoning to insist people should have access to anything. What if there is a hull breach in Medical? That's an urgent situation. Why can't I waltz into engineering and take their stuff and fix the hole myself? Why can't Medbay do it's own research to upgrade it's own sleepers if science is being stupid? Why can't science just go down to the mining asteroid and mine themselves if the miners aren't doing it? If Cargo stucks, why can't I just walk in and use the computer to approve my own orders? The entire point of SS13 is the forced co-operation. You shouldn't be able to just walk into a department and do someone elses job if they are incompetent. You always have options to get around an incompetent department. You could find someone with medical access to help. A roboticst could fix your brain damage surgically. Botany might be able to make plants to help. Science could make Mannitol, if they wanted to. Maybe the Brig Physician has his own stash. I don't like this idea of "I need to be able to do ______, because what is ______ department is incompetent?" Then, you overcome it. You don't get to just waltz in and do it yourself.

Sometimes the best way to get things nerfed is to prove you're right by abusing the hell out of it (Within the rules, of course). You see antags exploding corpses every round and I bet you a PR will go up to restrict access to the chem locker pretty damn quick. I actually dislike SR quite a bit, in pretty much every way it's designed, including it's potential to be weaponized. I'd get rid of SR entirely and add a surgical procedure to apply Mitocholide to the heart to reset the defib timer, if it were up to me.

Preach it. I think part of the reason why people think all doctors are incompetent is because people don't know what competence looks like. I recall one time when I got a corpse in with 250 damage and I started using truama kits and patches to get them below 180 and a fellow doctor started actually insulting me and calling me an idiot for wasting medicine on a corpse. And no, he didn't apologize after I revived the person in front of him. Often there are multiple treatment options and whenever you use one, invariably someone will question you on why you didn't use another. I've also been questioned for reviving people with 20-30% blood and IB (I was resetting the defib timer), Putting people into sleepers 'for no reason' (Clearing addiction), 'Ignoring' injured people (Treating a more serious case first, because triage is a thing), and many other things.

ZN23X I approve of this. The other day I heard the CMO criticizing (and rightly so!) a person by saying ..."Do you have a degree in medicine now?" " Do you want me to give you an operathing theatre as well?" (..response from person) .. " Shall I give the the CMO position since we're at it?" I am TIRED of people running into med bay, or a clown telling me what I need to do to cure him, like seriously, why ARE you even in here with me if you can do it all yourself? Might as well put the fridge outside in the corridor with the current attitude of a lot of players. Yes I know, much salt but it's the truth.

It would actually be much better for Medbay if people self-medicated with Cryo and not meds from the fridge. Cryox restores 12 Burn/Brute per tick with a 0.4 metabolism rate, which is 30 Brute/Burn per unit. On top of that, Cryotubes inject 10x as many reagents as you put in, making whatever you put in 10x as efficient as it would normally be. For example, if you loaded a beaker with 1 unit of Cryox into the tube and then waiting for it to empty and scanned the person, you'd see just under 10 units in their system. This means that when you are using a Cryotube, 1 unit of Cryo will heal 300 burn/brute damage. Of course, that's not being fair since you can't actually have that much damage and still be alive, and Cryox doesn't work on the dead. Also, unless you actually empty all but 1 unit from the beaker, it will inject at least 2 units into patients deep in crit since it doesn't stop injecting until they are at 100%. But either way you slice it, it is always far more wasteful to use medicine from the fridge while in Medbay than it is to throw yourself into Cryo, regardless of the amount of damage you have. Yes, but they may not have access to get those things. We aren't saying people shouldn't be able to use medication, we are talking about restricting access. No other department allows civilians to walk in and take their resources. Why is every other department allowed to secure it's resources but Medbay isn't?

I think emagged drones should just be able to be blown using the console which would force them to go stealth and not just blatenty act with few repercussions considering they can sit in vents and electrify doors all day with virtually no risk whatsoever.

I don't know how this devolved to resulting in piles of bodies in Medbay. This sometimes happens even with the chems fridge where it's currently located, with everyone having access to it, when it's well stocked. It doesn't make sense to argue that restricting the chems fridge would cause this to happen when it already happens with an unrestricted fridge. At times the station is so chaotic that an overwhelming amount of bodies piles up regardless of how competent or incompetent Medbay is. Everyone dies, sometimes early, sometimes unfairly, and sometimes you cannot be brought back for one reason or another.

Of course you want to do that in game, but when we outside the game talking design, we don't design in order to help ourselves never die. We choose to place obstacles and dangers into the game to make it interesting. I'm saying that the risk of an incompetent Medbay is a vital part of the gameplay experience. Yes, having an incompetent Medbay is a threat your character and it should be. It should be something that makes people say Oh shit, we don't have competent Doctors, this a major problem we need to fix. Not We don't have competent doctors but that's okay because I can just do everything myself.

It sounds fine in theory to restrict medicine distribution to doctors only but all-access to the chem fridge is simply a quality of life feature. Though some people may be fascinated by giving a 5 minute long explanation to a newbie doctor on how you need him or her to get you some mannitol because you can't stop saying things like 'LOL2CAT', personally in a situation such as that I'd much prefer to be able to self-medicate. That isn't to say I am unwilling to help new players, but sometimes you're in an urgent situation. The fact is if you're being seen to by a competent doctor, they'll be giving you the correct medicine anyway. As part of the MRP nature of Paradise, we don't have rules against false-ignorance when it comes to knowing job-specific information, people are able to self-medicate and to treat others and are allowed to know how to. This isn't to say that I would barge into medbay and do everything for myself, but having the ability to do so in the presence of total incompetence, as is not uncommon in medbay, is a great relief to me and a great boon to expediency, when its required. Having said all that, I much prefer the idea of stricter overdose limits and some moderately harsh penalties for OD'ing on regular healing meds. To me this seems a more natural solution to both; people necking all the meds in the fridge in one go and also to limiting the self-service approach that you frown upon, as people will be more cautious about how much of each medicine they should be consuming. Though this change itself would bring with it its own implications for needing more consistently a competent chemistry team, which as it is, isn't all that common either.

Here's a guide I'm (Jack Newman) working on for virology. https://fiddle.jshell.net/dvew76q9/21/show/ It's in the in-game library in 7 pages (books) in the library, search for VDQ. Working on this guide to virology has brought to light one major fact; most virologist intentionally create murderboning viruses and don't give a rats ass about their job. Not unexpected, just that this guide changes nothing. Hopefully a few can benefit from this. The idea is to keep using X to switch hands while repeatedly injecting with a pipette from symptom generating beakers for each symptom level between 3 and 6 and examining the PANDEMIC for 2 positive symptoms from each of the level (and seperately ABM from level 3) to reduce the time spent in virology to between 10 and 20 minutes for an experienced virologist, down to about 2 minutes as a perfect run of luck and 5 minutes for simply good luck, 15 minutes on average.