Request For Comment
Responsible Strike Team
Team Body Builders
Proposal
BodySystem and its adjacent domain is changed to use the following concepts.
- Calling the pool of damage soaked up by the Body “Strain”
- That the Body passes on “excess Strain” to organs.
- That organs, not the Body, cause a mob to enter Crit or Dead.
Impact
- This would work identically to the current system for the time being.
- This allows us to better control how people take and heal damage via new gameplay systems in the near future.
- This makes organs, which are the main thing Surgery will work with, more complete.
Explanation
Currently a mob’s Body tracks damage after being passed that damage by the mob’s Damageable.
The Body tracks its own damage thresholds, the impacts of that damage, when the Body’s mob should enter crit, and so on.
Organs then via their own operations cause effects on the Body. For example, metabolization of medicines heals Body damage, or the lungs inflict or heal airloss damage.
For any kind of surgery system to make sense, we need to pull stuff that designers instinctively have stuck on Body into Organ entities instead. This is the “just finish the Body System lmao” approach that has been advocated since the pausing of Newmed development.
For this we need to be clear what damage remains on Body. We can’t do a giant refactor all at once because it would take years and probably fail. So we need to cross the valley in a series of small jumps.
This “jump” would make it clear what the “damage” the Body tracks is called and the role of that damage, and the overall pattern of how Body is getting refactored.
The difference at first is minimal - the actual first step of this is to move “are you in crit due to damage thresholds” to an Organ, probably the heart. But by giving the damage the Body takes a clear name we’re making it clear that “strain” isn’t the same thing as a structure taking structural damage.
In the future, “strain” will be the assorted wear-and-tear that is healable without needing medical equipment - so the things you can sleep off, or speed up with medicines like ointment for burns.