Roleplaying Fire Department response times

[KinnyWynny]

1 minute ago, Kappaurel said:

snip again

Once again I must re-iterate I was in the faction since 2019 off and on. I know the challenges, and I've found solutions to the point I've rarely had a bad time in the faction, and yes I've been there, I've been burnt out plenty of times, but I always had an urge to try again and fix the issues. Laying down and saying the medical rp community is small, is untrue, it's bigger than you'd think, and for EMS, it's even bigger. You don't need a good basis of medical knowledge to do EMS, just the portrayal parts down.

 

However I think you're missing some of the points so apologies if this sounds a little mean at points, it comes from a good place.

 

No, that doesn't work like that. Let me tell you how that would work, that faction would be composed by two types of players:

1.  LSFD members who leave to try the new thing, cause they are burnt from LSFD. It would suck, as you predicted, and they'd just leave medical RP.
2.  New players, who would join a new, understaffed and with overall much lower quality that the well established LSFD, it would suck, they wouldn't give medical RP a chance, and they'd just leave the idea forever, without having tried LSFD which COULD have given them a better experience.

My experience with new probies is that they have three POVs, you have new ones with no experience, who get excited and usually stay for a long time. You have people who ditch after they realize they're in probation for a MONTH. And you have people with previous experience, who either A) hate the long probationary periods where their hands are held the entire time, or B) dislike the portrayal of the LSFD.

 

B) is the usual reason for such high turnover rates. The worse thing I can say about the LSFD is they're incredibly inconsistent in quality. You have people who are literally the best roleplayers I've ever seen, and who's portrayal of a Firefighter/Paramedic is second to none. And you have... solo ambulances driven by people who I'm surprised past the recruitment phase.

 

Probation aside, portrayal is a big issue. Another EMS faction has different portrayal, and is more importantly, brand new. The LSSD absolutely improved law enforcement across the server, ask anyone. It improved LSPD's standards, and led the path to future factions. Their portrayal is stellar, and extremely consistent. They also have Paramedics, who's quality of medical roleplay is good but with their own flaws, they go overboard on the details.

 

Man, you haven't seen how it works, I appreciate your good intention... but please, don't talk about stuff you don't know. If we ever try to do that, we get redirected by 911 calls, and if we ignore them for some reason, we'd get within 3 minutes a OFFICER DOWN, PRIORITY CALL in /dep .

 

We don't have the time to do that, and people who like to do EMT RP aren't usually okay with the idea of just.. ignoring calls. The only chance to do that is going off duty, but then we go to the complains about LSFD is not active yadda yadda no one answers. 

Again I apologize I should preface my rants in the future. But I've been there, from a probationary firefighter to a Fire Captain to a Fire Engineer. I found the time to do passive roleplay, I've also ignored my fair share of calls, pulling my rig out of service to wait for a partner, getting groceries with the boys, getting coffee, hanging out at LTD's, getting community relations, while dealing with thousands of calls. The idea is balance, your job is NOT to answer every single call on the books. It's to answer the calls you can, with quality, excellent portrayal and trying to make the experience as fun as possible.

 

 

People don't like medical RP cause it's something they didn't have in mind doing. The thing just went bad for them, either they got ran over by a car, they collided after driving like stupid apes and the other player refused to skip the crash, or they got shot after trying to rob someone (most cases). They just don't want to be there, and even the best EMT would not change that. Moreover, let's not talk about how you are basically requesting that LSFD members have an attitude close to Buddha himself, dealing with people who don't want to RP with them call after call, day after day. That burns even Ned Flanders.

Talk to your patient, ask them questions, get a story out of them. You won't get absolute 100% great experiences. But your experience will improve. I'll give a little story, had a two car motor vehicle collision at Popular street, partner and I get on scene, we split, check up on the first car, he's fine, second car, injury so we help him get out on his own, then we talk to the two, split them up, and ask what happened. Each time we got /huuuge/ rants from each character, it was hilarious, we told the responding deputy, chaos ensued, we transported our dude, and kept asking him questions.

 

I never asked for vitals, I kept my /me's and /do's short. And I focused on the roleplay. I did my little medical RP, IV's, RPed hooking him up to the monitor and gave him a little pain drug so he could act high in the back of the truck. Same guy PMed saying he hated medical rp, but didn't mind this. At no point did I ask for vitals, I interacted. Interactions is numero uno. But that's not what this thread is about.

 

This is not a Mr. Wonderful notebook.

Being a responder to a person's worse day is the motto of emergency responders everywhere.

 

 

End of the day LSFD, people want to do this, but if you knock yourselves down, and claim the whole server hates the roleplay, I have news, not everyone does, just the way it's done currently, there's plenty to improve, and there's plenty to have fun with. You don't have to answer every call, and you don't have to be everywhere, focus on your scene, ignore the depts if you're on your own. People can cope. And never, ever, solo on an ambulance if you can avoid it.

[Kappaurel]

3 minutes ago, KinnyWynny said:

snip

 

I'm going to agree with a single thing here. Asking vitals is something I've never done in this month as probbie, and is something I will hardly ever do, unless someone who outranks me forces me to (never happened before). IMO it doesn't serve much for the roleplay (it has a brutal importance IRL when treating a patient, but here we are not treating a patient, we are providing RP... and that doesn't provide much for the RP, imho again. Same as you don't roleplay in JSA to put people in prison, but to give law roleplay)

 

About the faction thing, we'll just agree to disagree.

About the nice RP of groceries and whatnot... I do think the server probably changed a lot since you left the faction, the volume of calls is higher every day that goes on.

 

And finally, about the responding to a person's worse day... we are not first responders IRL (well, some are, but, that's not the point). I don't come to this server to deal with shit and with people who don't want to RP anything and literally just AFK through the whole process. 2 days ago we had 2 ALS units and a BLS probbie duo stuck in a situation with a guy who DIDN'T WRITE A SINGLE LINE OF TEXT BACK TO US, only thing he did for the roleplay was getting out of the car when asked to, and getting in the ambulance when asked to.

 

I'm here to have fun, same as every other person, not because i RP an EMT/Firefighter I need to deal with this shit. I refuse, I didn't sign up to be a staff member and be on duty to teach others (I do teach and help a lot of people in my free time, be it in game with their RP, or in discord in the support channels; but that's when I decide to do it. My LSFD membership shouldn't FORCE me to). i signed up for LSFD to do Firefighter and EMT roleplay.

[TheSenate]

To simply write off medical roleplay as “nobody likes it, therefor let’s minimize the amount of medical roleplayers and factions” is selling ourselves short.

 

What people hate is the current system of medical RP, which dates back longer than any active player can probably remember in prior communities. The system is lazy and relies entirely on the patient to make everything up, their signs and symptoms, vitals, etc. Not only do the vast majority of patients lack the medical knowledge to accurately portray these scenarios, but they often also lack the motivation. Most medical roleplay originates from unplanned physical trauma (MVAs, beatings, stabbings, shootings). Players are usually still emotionally distraught and unhappy about the situation when first responders arrive on scene. Unlike in the real world where most people feel a sense of relief, players here see it as part of the punishment and they want this unplanned roleplay to be over as soon as possible. 
 

Now of course part of this issue is the fault of the players and the community. Many players here have this idea that if they didn’t plan it or if something doesn’t support their future plans, it’s terrible and should be frowned upon or swept under the rug. Part of the nature of our community and roleplay it provides is it is a dynamic environment and sometimes, just as in real life, things will happen you didn’t plan on and might not enjoy. You might get set back, or thrown off track. That’s part of the experience, that’s what makes the server dynamic and enjoyable. You shouldn’t plan on everything going your way, learn to embrace adversity.

 

The other part of the issue though is regardless of players attitudes towards the situations that land them in the arms of medical providers, the system we currently practice of asking the player for every little vital sign and detail is obsolete. It places an unnecessary burden on the player to form a clinical judgement with regards to their own condition when what they should really be focusing on is the roleplay outside of it. I think this is where having a good medical script (like seen on SS13, or even ArmA 3 for all that is holy) would benefit the community greatly. Rather than being forced to see walls of /me’s you don’t even understand or care to understand, let the script take care of it, let the medics have their fun, and you roleplay -around- the script. You’re conscious and the script is telling you that you’re in pain? Scream, be an asshole, demand pain meds, whatever you want. Not in pain? Shoot the shit with your transporting medic, time not spent answering /me’s and /do’s is time spent having meaningful dialogue with other characters. 

 

Does having a script take choice away? Yeah, it does. But honestly if we’re going based on the books, you already don’t have much choice. Outside of skipping RP the server requires you to roleplay injuries and it also requires you to roleplay dying from said injuries if they are severe enough (not a CK). So in the grand scheme of things, you really don’t have much choice to begin with. 
 

This is the only game I’ve ever played where people seem to see the medical aspect as undesirable or boring. On SS13 medical was often the number two department right behind security in terms of staffing, occasionally number one. On ArmA we never had any shortage of people wanting to be medics/corpsman. Medicine is an exciting field when you give people the right tools. But relying on this ancient system of having an OOC medical Q&A between patient and provider is what is actually driving people away from it.

[DasFroggy]

11 minutes ago, TheSenate said:

Does having a script take choice away?

 

Not really. Two or three doses to get a lethal injection of lead poisoning, and Chester's waking up in minutes ready to bang with his crew. 

 

11 minutes ago, TheSenate said:

On SS13...

 

...where death is permanent, and medical intervention is essential to avoid being removed from the roleplay experience for hours...

 

11 minutes ago, TheSenate said:

On ArmA...

 

...where there are actual, tangible consequences for indiscriminately killing other players...

 

A script won't work. Unless you tell people that they MUST survive their injuries or they'll be CK'd, they'll just PK out of whatever script you force on them. An RPG script will. not. fix. this. problem. We're not Arma strict with how people can behave and deaths aren't as long lasting here as they are in SS13. To the contrary, death is more often becoming the quick and easy way to get out of unpleasant roleplay situations. It's been the GTAW easy button, to the point that rules have been added to address very specific situations that people have tried to use it to get out of.

 

Your optimism is appreciated, but as Kapp said it so elegantly... "This is not a Mr. Wonderful notebook."

 

Edited August 21, 2021 by DasFroggy

[Terrabyte]

mayb that attitude shown by people in fd is why people dont like fd

 

U sound like you all hate being here

 

why not go do something else if you dont take charge and try to change stuff for the better?

[TheSenate]

6 minutes ago, DasFroggy said:

 

Not really. Two or three doses to get a lethal injection of lead poisoning, and Chester's waking up in minutes ready to bang with his crew. 

 

 

...where death is permanent, and medical intervention is essential to avoid being removed from the roleplay experience for hours...

 

 

...where there are actual, tangible consequences for indiscriminately killing other players...

 

A script won't work. Unless you tell people that they MUST survive their injuries or they'll be CK'd, they'll just PK out of whatever script you force on them. An RPG script will. not. fix. this. problem. We're not Arma strict with how people can behave and deaths aren't as long lasting here as they are in SS13. To the contrary, death is more often becoming the quick and easy way to get out of unpleasant roleplay situations. It's been the GTAW easy button, to the point that rules have been added to address very specific situations that people have tried to use it to get out of.

 

Your optimism is appreciated, but as Kapp said it so elegantly... "This is not a Mr. Wonderful notebook."

 

Death is not permanent on SS13, it lasts 1 round (roughly 2 hours in most cases). You can rejoin the session on an alt at any time, you aren’t completely removed in that sense. You could easily replicate the same effect here by adding a forced time-out period after a PK if that’s something you deem important. 
 

My goal here however is to get rid of the current system though that is obviously broken and borderline non-functional in many cases. We need a better solution than what we have now.

[DasFroggy]

23 minutes ago, TheSenate said:

Death is not permanent on SS13, it lasts 1 round (roughly 2 hours in most cases). You can rejoin the session on an alt at any time, you aren’t completely removed in that sense. You could easily replicate the same effect here by adding a forced time-out period after a PK if that’s something you deem important. 

 

Sounds good. Let's do it. If a player has their character PKed, their account is put on a forced time-out for an hour or two. That'll definitely make people value surviving encounters.

Edited August 21, 2021 by DasFroggy

[i dont wanna od in LA]

29 minutes ago, Terrabyte said:

mayb that attitude shown by people in fd is why people dont like fd

 

U sound like you all hate being here

 

why not go do something else if you dont take charge and try to change stuff for the better?

 

[Anders]

42 minutes ago, DasFroggy said:

 

...where death is permanent, and medical intervention is essential to avoid being removed from the roleplay experience for hours...

 

Someone clearly hasn't played SS13. Get  cloned into monkey, go monkey. 

 

I've had nothing but good times and vibes with the EMS/FD when I have interacted with them. If it's a matter of lacking resources, contact the senate

[DasFroggy]

13 minutes ago, Anders said:

Someone clearly hasn't played SS13. Get  cloned into monkey, go monkey. 

 

A bit hard when Atmosia's finest (me) is being absorbed into the singularity with half of Atmosia's hard earned territory. Not much that can be rescued from the crushing forces of a bad engineering team.