Hidden Diseases

[Phoenix Rising]

Diseases aren't dangerous, or something that even get roleplayed. There is a obvious and beautiful visual effect when you first contract one and your health bar becomes brown, but during this phase the disease is still incubating. Mechanically we know it will get bad, but ICly at this point we have not yet shown any symptoms and should not know that this specific bite has infected us any more than any other bite.

It is probably not easily done other than by changing the disease file itself or replacing diseases with custom diseases, but what I'd personally love is if the health bar no longer became brown and there was no visual to diseases. If at all possible I'd love to not see the initial fortitude save roll at all either, but have it be a secret roll upon contraction. This way somebody only knows that they've become sick once it actually incubates and they begin to feel the symptoms. It could be coupled with a message in the combat log when the target takes their ability damage to encourage people to rp out specific diseases unique sicknesses, or for physicians to diagnose and identify one disease from another.

[zDark Shadowz]

I know from what I've been doing in alchemy sometimes there are diseases that have a delayed contraction.

What you're suggesting could be doable if diseases were put into a unique power on hit (if they aren't already since EFU already uses a custom disease system) that runs a script which delays the contraction of the diseases. From there the non-visible fortitude roll (which one prefers to be visible so that players don't think it's a disease which bypasses rolls entirely) could be made and the disease penalties applied if they failed it.

How diseases are saved onto a character has that brown bar hardcoded I think. Short of saving variables to the character in the DB (such as the bank account) it's likely easier to use that to carry things over if someone logs out and 'misses' that delayed execution outlined above, though I've personally never customised diseases in toolset, just integer-coded puzzles and flashy randomised vfx scripts :)

Physicians can use the /c diagnose tool on people to see if they are afflicted at the moment, so they can already do what's listed in your last sentence, haven't had the opportunity myself to use it though when the cure-all Tonic is a nice quick fix.

[Vlaid]

That's actually a pretty cool idea. I like the idea that you can't tell you're infected until the first round of ability damage or whatever shows.

[Random_White_Guy]

Having played a heavily diseased based PC, it was rather irritating watching people all start to heal immediately upon infection. Incubation periods (at least for the PC cast "Plague system" diseases) would be awesome if they wouldn't activate right away but were still infectious.

So it'd be something like

A catches it, doesn't show
A spreads it to B and C
A starts to show
B and C start to show

etc.

[Saturnalia]

I seem to remember that there were once contagious diseases that did not show with the classic brown health bar, but instead would have text based symptoms and would do things like slow move speed or mess with your stats. Slime sickness etc. Not sure what happened to that.

[Pentaxius]

Yes, this would go a long way into making diseases more meaningful IG. I would even suggest that some of these plagues have a percentage chance to resist the removal spell, but do not come with feedback whether or not the player was cured.

 

[Vlaid]

Yes, this would go a long way into making diseases more meaningful IG. I would even suggest that some of these plagues have a percentage chance to resist the removal spell, but do not come with feedback whether or not the player was cured.

Maybe school focuses could do something like that? I'm not really sure how the disease spells work currently (they are random by default) but being able to pick which disease you inflict would be neat.

[TheShadow]

My meaningful contribution: MAKE TALONA GREAT AGAiN!

I have personally seen diseases used to excellent effect, but it is primarily contingent upon people not noticing or being able to cure a disease.

I personally believe that the initial fortitude save should be shown, accompanied by a flavorful text.

What i also believe should exist, is different methods of curing different diseases: "health" potions are a one hit cure-all which detracts from the value of them.

[granny]

I agree that the VFX to start showing only after real stuff starts happening. It was not funny to be hunted by infected people that instantly knew that some random rat appearing in the middle of nowhere was actually infected and it was actually meant to infect YOU, who were passing by.

Also, maybe a Heal check would be nice to be put to the side removing more disease serious diseases.

#grannyapprovesthisthread