Wound treatment suggestion

[Valor]

Hello all,
I have a simple suggestion that should also be very easy to implement and more realistic than current solution.

Currently when you treat a wound, if you get a good roll (whatever you consider with your skill) no matter how large or severe your wound is you will never ever touch it again. This doesnt seem very logical as wounds need repeated treatment until they get healed. Also if you never treat your wound it will never get worse.

My proposal is twofold:

After you roll on "regeneration" in the morning, to see if your wounds improved, the state of each wound can worsen. Larger wounds and untreated wounds will have higher chance to worsen the state.

Wounds in critical state will have chance to actually increase the injury penalty and grow bigger.


This would mean that wounds (mainly the larger ones) will need daily attention, and not treating your wounds can be fatal.

[Tom H]

I believe healing time is enhanced by treatment, hence the designation 'Treated' fades in a day or two. It's possibly true that you won't die from NOT treating a wound, unless it's bleeding. I've had dogs, for instance, so crippled they would not even eat, yet, they always fully recovered. I've treated companions and dogs for bleeding, as well as myself.

You CAN die from freezing and starvation, so, it's clear we're not immune to mishap. Ever catch a cold? The flu? I suppose one could test the theory by doing nothing about those.

[PALU]

You can treat wounds once per day (or twice, of you consider cleaning and dressing to be two attempts). However, once a treatment attempt has resulted in the best treatment state you can achieve, further treatments can at best succeed in not making it worse, and often result in a worse state, so the only benefit from further treatment is meta gaming by training the Physician skill.

Wounds can kill you through bleeding, but if that is staunched (through treatment or on its own) it will eventually heal completely on its own. Poison can kill you, but I don't believe disease can, currently. If you've suffered severe blood loss treatment can be dangerous, as it can reopen the wound to cause it to start to bleed again.

The current wound model is definitely fairly basic, and I believe the dev page mentions expansions to it, at least in the form of scars.

The most basic improvement to the current model would probably be to let the effects of treatment fade back to a basic "natural" level so you're encouraged (beyond training) to clean and re-dress wounds regularly. From there it could expand to include worsening effects and negative effects from the lack of treatment.

[Dungeon Smash]

Is it currently possible for wounds to become infected?

[PALU]

I don't think so. It's never happened to me, anyway.

[Tom H]

Aye, I've had bleeds re-start, once, and I was already bad off at the time. Hmmm, I can't recall if bleeding ever stopped without actual treatments being applied.

I've had the flu worsen considerably once and my illness malus jumped to 50%! For the flu, I don't recall there being a way to dress the illness. My course is to get to a village quickly to see a sage. Then I run home, start a fire, and drink prepared liquids that purport to affect the lungs, etc. Of course, there are those quest-given cure-alls that might deal with the flu. Never tried one of those.

[PALU]

I've had bleeding stop on its own without treatment both on my characters and on dogs and companions (and a lot of cases on enemies and prey). I think it's safe to clean wounds prone to reopening if you know the blood staunching incantation and apply it immediately unless you're almost completely out of blood, but without it and being seriously low on blood I don't take the risk (when in a somewhat better shape I make sure to have suitable blood stemming herbs on hand).