Pestilence and Disease

[Cindrak]

Thinking of ways to make life harsher on Zalanthas, it occurred to me that everyone seems to be pretty healthy... too healthy, for some of the living conditions out there. A quick survey of our apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic world turns up several of those beloved Horsemen: Death is certainly there, as is Famine, and War hasn't been seen in a while but you never know when he might turn up and make a big splash... so where is Pestilence? I see all these midden heaps in Allanak, corpses strewn about, cramped living quarters, lack of hygiene... where's the disease? Adding disease and the necessity to quarantine to the already volatile class relations would make for some spiffy conflict.

The way I envision it working is, you code up some common diseases and their symptoms. Additional custom diseases can be added as easily as spells. Randomly, every so often, a single PC or NPC is infected with one of these diseases. The likelihood of getting a disease would be much higher in certain places (the 'rinth) than in others (the noble quarter.) Newly infected persons walk around haplessly distributing the contagion to their friends and loved ones. Have different ways that different diseases are communicable, e.g. air-borne, touch, water supply, sex. Then after a while the symptoms set in. People all around this person suddenly are sick too. Public hysteria ensues, during which the templarate mandates a quarantine of the infected persons. Some people are accused of having the disease even though they don't, and are thrown in with the sick ones (where they will most likely get it for real.) Then, depending on how deadly the particular disease is, some people die, and the rest get better.

Before anyone gets all panicky about that point, I would imagine most of the common diseases would not be deadly in and of themselves, just moderately to severely debilitating (good symptoms might include blindness, loss of motor control, paralysis, incoherent speech, hallucinations). Symptoms such as increased rate of hunger or thirst could cause those without the means to drink or eat more to die as a side-effect of their symptoms. And not being able to see or walk would make it very difficult to get the 'sid to feed yourself, if you don't have people who are willing to take care of you at the risk of getting sick themselves. It would be cool if deaths from disease were mostly preventable (no one wants to waste away to an inevitable death by some coded process), but made survival that much more difficult.

The common (that is, auto-generated) diseases might not be all that contagious, so they would only affect a few people at a time. But every now and then imms could elect to infect someone with a strain of something really contagious, and sit back and chuckle as the outbreak becomes an epidemic, which becomes a pandemic.

Obviously, this would be a fairly major undertaking, but an enterprising coder might find it a "fun" project? Hmmmm?

-Cindrak

EDIT: The RP fun that could be had with this need not be stated

EDIT 2: Ah, maybe there's already support for this, or some of it. It'd be neat to see it get used more, in that case.

[Elgiva]

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8683

EDITed to add: I think nothing stops you from RPing this out without any code-change. At least that is what I do.

[Cuusardo]

Additional custom diseases can be added as easily as spells.

How can you be so sure of that?

[Cindrak]

Additional custom diseases can be added as easily as spells.

How can you be so sure of that?

Because if you set up the disease code to work that way, then it will be that easy. The spell code was set up to work that way, why not the disease code?

-Cindrak

[Rhyden]

Cindrak,

I'm no uber, l33t coder but before I'd go claiming how easy it is to change the code, I'd get in contact with one of the Armageddon coders if they allow it and possibly go over what's 'easy' and what's not.

Another option would be a simple email to the staff, asking whether such an idea could be implemented into the code. If you have any sort of outline for this code, I'm sure the immortals would love to take a look at it.

[Larrath]

I think the game could benefit from mild, hardcoded sickness.
It doesn't even need to have any serious effects, just a mildly contagious disease that would make people's nose run every couple of hours or give some unpleasant coughs will be enough.  Or there could be a tiring sickness that would make one lose +1 mv whenever they walk.

This idea should be at the very least explored, though I'd stay away from making more severe (blindness, heavy hallucinations) sicknesses.

Zalanthas is harsh, but sometimes it's best to go with more subtle things.  It's okay to just have a minor annoyance somewhere and not an insanely lethal epidemic.

[Cindrak]

Cindrak,

I'm no uber, l33t coder but before I'd go claiming how easy it is to change the code...

Argh, read carefully please!

Obviously, this would be a fairly major undertaking, but an enterprising coder might find it a "fun" project?

I am not saying this would be an easy project, OK? I think it would be quite difficult, in fact. When I used that dread word, "easy", I was referring to adding new custom diseases, and I was saying the system should be SET UP so that adding custom diseases was easy. If you code it so it's easy to add diseases, then it's easy. By definition. It's the coding up of a flexible framework like this that's hard. Very hard.

EDIT: Removed some unnecessary invective.

-Cindrak

[Ali]

Roleplaying out catching a small illness like a sore throat or cough that goes away in a few days is cool, but it seems like people probably don't do it as often as I would imagine it really happens - they don't want to be sick, or just don't think about the option being there (hell, I know I don't...it doesn't often occur to me that I can choose to be sick because I usually don't CHOOSE it in real life )

There're a lot of little viruses that could go around to make characters feel a little under the weather without totally killing playability, and very rarely something major could flare up and we could see how people handle it. I think it'd be neat.

Of course...then you get the people who would hear rumors of a plague spreading and go "Oh no, I don't want to catch it and die a horrible death! I'm going to go sit in my virtual house eating my virtual food and drinking my virtual water for a month and hope it's gone by the time I emerge!" *grin* I hope the caliber of players here, though, would be happy to play along if something huge was happening across the city or the known world (mmm, SARS...)

[joyofdiscord]

In the background of a certain character, I wrote up that he's rather susceptible to certain ailments.  He had a pretty long bout with one of them, self-medicating with fervor.  It was definitely fun, and I'd recommend it.

[Cindrak]

I think nothing stops you from RPing this out without any code-change. At least that is what I do.

It's all well and good to roleplay out your own illness, but what about infecting others? Do you walk into a room and ooc "Ok everybody, I'm roleplaying being sick with a highly contagious disease, so now you're all sick too. Here are the symptoms you will be suffering from for the next IC week..." Leaving aside how tacky this is, how many people do you think would go along with it? For something like epidemics, you need coded support for it to work.

-Cindrak

[ashyom]

We have had epidemics before, but we reserve these for unique Rpts because we don't want to inflict undue duress on PCs by having a regular outbreak on a monthly basis (even though I personally think that'd be spiffy).  If PCs were getting sick on a regular basis via coded means, that would get old pretty fast, OOC-wise.  You'd run into situations where, as soon as your infected PC entered a popular hangout and emoted being sick, everyone would find excuses to get out of there.  =P  

What you can do is pick one of the known diseases on our disease page, rp the effects, and then use heavy-handed emotes to try encourage other PCs to "catch" it.  If they don't, their loss.  If they do, great.  

emote turns his head to look at the ~neighbor_PC with watery bloodshot eyes and abruptly sneezes brown snot all over !neighbor_PC!
:twisted:

[Cindrak]

We have had epidemics before, but we reserve these for unique Rpts because we don't want to inflict undue duress on PCs by having a regular outbreak on a monthly basis (even though I personally think that'd be spiffy).

I thought 'undue duress' was what we were going for around here

[Bhagharva]

Did someone summon me?

We do have a large variety of maldies already. I am of the mindset that believes you average Zalanthian is made of tougher material than your average Earthling. This means, they probably do not get sick as much. So any sickness is more likely to be something that would be devastating here. No colds or flu on Zalanthas.