I’ve had this thought on my mind for awhile, that most people just use caster classes ICly like Priests,etc. As the medic/heal source. And never really think of practical medicine or medical practices, Surgeons, Doctors, “Combat Life Savers”. What do you think on it? And how do you think Medical RP could be possibly evolved or expanded upon?
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What I think is that most people probably aren’t remotely qualified to write out proper surgery, while any random bugger can write /me glowy heal hand light holy you healthy
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We use both. We have casters on our payroll IC that are official priests and healers and the likes, but we also have a lot of less magically minded/trained folks around that have picked up some general first aid here and there or have a knowledge of herbs and their uses for legitimate and less legitimate ends.
Both have a place in the lore of the setting, and I think both can have a place in RP too and lead to some interesting things!
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Alchemy is critically underused - people forget that you can literally just carry around a keg of Get-Better Juice. ![:skull:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/skull.png?v=6" ":skull:")
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In the Howling Fjord campaign earlier this year the Horde’s infirmiary was an amazing testament to mixing the two together. For the most part although most of our medics were priests and shamans, we all used normal first aid, blood transfusions an alchemy before we used magic to solve our problems on the premise that our powers were mainly for quickly patching up wounds as they come in battle, and anyone who came back to the infirmiary wounded required proper treatment.
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This is likely strong headcanon but I like to imagine rangers scouts and others of the sort prefer to use non-magic field healing just since healing via spells is loud both visually and auditorium. And when you’re off the field you go to the healers who can treat wounds in proper manner using magic.
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Back in my day, my healer had magic, alchemy and first aid skills to tackle nearly any problem. They never quite could handle the people who insist on staying injured for some cute nurse interaction, nor the people getting hurt for the sake of it.
I still vividly recall the woman with her throat cut sending me angry, indignant whispers for trying to save her life. That sort of catastrophic physical trauma kills in less than a minute, ya know. Milking it isn’t an option.
Ultimately, mutual consent is important. Do you want to be healed and if so, to what extent? You can’t demand that I fix every boo boo either as bandages and mana are finite and maybe the other guy with ribs facing the wrong way need more urgent care.
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That’s usually the problem, I don’t understand why there’s those few people that milk their injuries that could kill their character in reality for god knows how long, such as a throat cut, how deep is the cut? Are they using pressure from their hand to slow down the spillage of blood to stop themselves from gurgling on their own blood itself? Strange examples always come up, and it’s like most people who have received these injuries just usually end up walking or talking normally the moment after. Like if someone breaks their leg, sure a Troll has their regenerative capabilities. But the other races usually have to put up with a splint and such for the span of weeks as would be ICly, her walk it off like it was no more than “A flesh wound”
I prefer to use both in conjunction to one another and am more towards the gritty side to combat medic RP, like sticking a finger into an arrow wound to find the head in the middle of a battlefield type stuff.
My character is big on alchemist concoctions and ointments and practical things even though she uses the light. Personally I believe using both methods in conjunction makes for some interesting RP.
I do have a small tumblr guide that I’m working on that has a bit of it all in it but its fairly new so there isn’t much content.
Anyone who ever had the pleasure of roleplaying with The Good Doctor Fyne of the Iron Vulture can attest to how well medical RP can be pulled off, with proper knowledge of medical history and a good degree of flair for the dramatic.
But it requires for you to do your homework and really get an understanding for the subject.
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Don’t forget to ask people if they want to sit through the whole surgery and medical procedure before you do it. There’s been cases where I’ve witnessed two hours of detailed Forsaken surgery RP. Not everyone wants/likes this sort of RP, so keep that in mind.
I for one find “mending RP” incredibly tiresome as it is unless it actually adds something to character development for whatever reason. Usually I prefer to offscreen it. Having to sit through several long emotes of medic RP makes me want to put a gun to my head.
The person in question was incredibly well prepared. I even think it must have been a med student or something, but still, I hated witnessing it. Good medic RP doesn’t mean it is fun for everyone involved.
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Let alone the mixture of time. Like is Antiseptic Bandages exist in game (Thanks wod) you can assume that medically we are at least at the point of 19th Century medicine, weirdly enough. To hell even afew parts of 20th Century medicine, so th whole mixture makes it difficult to get your head around as to whether “Would they accept this treatment as RP?” Or “Is this too modern for the game and lore?” The multitudes of factors makes it bygone annoying to whether it’s more simple or not.
That and whether it disinterests both the emoter and the patient. It’s why it makes it a sad yet extremely potential side of RP as a whole.
No, he was a librarian. Being a student of medicine is an advantage in medical RP, but I’d say being a student of medical history is moreso.
Afterall, World of Warcraft isn’t your Grey’s Anatomy or House MD simulator, we’re not dealing with an arena of contemporary medicine.
Rather, as a medical RPer, I’d encourage exploring older medical paradigms such as miasma theory and humorism. They make for much more in-setting realistic approaches to medicine, especially considering the focus on Alchemy and The Four Elements in the setting.
And they’re much more fun to RP out and require a lot less knowledge of pathophysiology.
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Like don’t get me wrong I believe it can be tiresome a prospect and takes a lot of knowledge in order to carry out most processes, but it’s just overall a shame there isn’t much in forms of general interest due to attention spans not common to last hours. But the expansion of such processes could be studied. Hell I even thought of getting a mini Medical guild or server available event to explore the processes of WoW Medicine/ Medical Processes that could be explored. Public dissection displays, surgical presentations, or even the training of how to deal with certain problems like disease prevention ICly and how to react.
I don’t see the appeal in that. I believe it doesn’t much encourage character development and interaction (as most lecture RP), hence why people rather skip out on it and prefer to RP other things instead. If I wanted to learn more about medicine or similar, I’d just read the appropriate book, watch a video or visit lectures on it IRL.
It isn’t much fun to throw in some /groan emote for an extended periods of time. RP is first and foremost about character relationships and interactions of various nature. For most people, anyway. Could see it working as a niche thing, which is obviously fine. Just wanted to point out why that stuff isn’t explored much.
I don’t really think surgery would make for a very fun avenue of RP. Having witnessed and assisted on surgical procedures I can attest that they’re not very interesting in real life either, unless you’re actively involved in the process or a big surgery nerd.
Having witnessed and assisted on surgical procedures I can attest that they’re not very interesting in real life either, unless you’re actively involved in the process or a big surgery nerd .
I can see how it might appear that way, but from my own (LA)RP experience: execution is key.
A surgery with a patient that is completely motionless (even though it would make IC sense) is boring. It is one person entertaining multiple others.
LARP is a more visual kind of RP, but I had great success in involving others when playing my 18th century “surgeon”. I am always in the field hospital and grabbing people to help out. This goes from “restrain the patient for me, please” to “please take notes for future referrence - in case this goes south and I am sued.”
Espescially the magic vs. reason aspect can work out beautifully. I remember my surgeon actively refusing a shaman entry into the field hospital because, and I quote, “he would not have this superstitious nonsense around his operating table.” The shaman argued that his “mate” is entitled to a healing spell and asked for it, to which my character replied in a snarky voice that “he is in a delusional state from heading into battle without a helmet.”
This kind of RP becomes interesting not due to the surgery, but due to the involvement and additional RP it can create.
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On Corilia - and my other healer characters - I prefer to combine both magical and conventional healing. Magic has a few uses. It’s a powerful on-the-field recovery measure, it is a tool to compensate for your OOC lack of medical knowledge and also magical healing justifies your character recovering faster than one usually would from for example a broken bone - because understandably no RP’er has the time to sit down and wait about a month to get better.
So when healing, I use magic as an instant way to stabilize the wound, and then afterwards, away from the battlefield, use conventional medical procedures like cleaning the wound with alcohol, bandaging/stitching it up. Maybe Corilia will use a poultice she has made with her alchemy or enchanted healing leaves that she keeps in her mane.
With all of this in mind, I think in the world of Warcraft, a non-magical healer would probably be at a disadvantage against magical healers, unless they were truly specialized in some field like alchemy or surgery.
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I’ve played two medic characters in my time, one priest and one shaman. The shaman was insanely more fun because, yes, you can technically use elemental water to heal, but you can get really creative. For example, that character would heat up metal instruments to use them as cauterisation tools, or cool an area with ice to restrict blood flow. Hell, I’ve seen shaman healers become defibrillators for people having heart attacks.
I’m fond of that kind of hybridity, where there is magic involved but you have to think creatively beyond just ‘/e calls upon the Light to heal’.
In all honesty, in my experience, being a practical medic puts you at a disadvantage in combat situations because most procedures take a longer amount of time to perform than the priest throwing out holy heals at everyone getting hurt.
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It’s a good opportunity to enrich your role-playing experience by picking up something mildly or perhaps extremely informative depending on what it is.
Quite like when you’re reading a novel and you receive some general knowledge that you might not ever find applicable but it’s just good to know. Role-playing isn’t about you specifically though, it’s about your character and what ‘they’ might want to learn or not learn.
This type of thing specifically is explored in many role-playing mediums beyond the realm community, because of course, WoW role-play is very niche to begin with and that’s why a lot of people never bother with it because for most people, anyway, it can be quite superficial and superfluous.
If the quality of role-play of an injured person is just for them to groan and not give any weight to what’s actually happened/happening, that’s a poor performance, in my opinion.
Role-play is first and foremost about how you design, conceptualise and develop a unique entity moulded by your subconscious, potentially free from your own prejudices and preconceptions for the purpose of interaction with a world, setting and the people in it. I’m fairly sure that learning or picking up a new skill or set of knowledge falls under ‘interactions of various nature’.
Just my two cents.
Guide for Writing Good Medical RP coming in a few months.
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