Advanced First Aid

[Elystole]

First Aid determines your skill at treating and tending injuries, such as using bandages to dress wounds or applying a splint to a fractured leg.

I think it'd be great if the severity of wounds you can treat improved at a certain number of First Aid ranks. For example, I'm quickly approaching 1000 ranks, and at some point I'd like to be able to slap an untreated bandage on a moderate wound. Maybe I could even treat a bad or severe wound one day, or maybe I could treat them but only by using two or even three bandages due to wound packing. Poultices would still be the go-to treatments for these kind of wounds, if only because of how long it'd take for them to heal without a poultice, but it also sucks when you blow a 104 on a moderate wound since comfrey can be hard to find and all poultices are player-made.

Just a thought to reward players who invest in the skill instead of running to a thaumaturge all the time. You can treat a lot of pretty bad wounds with nothing but medical tape and gauze.

[jilliana]

First Aid determines your skill at treating and tending injuries, such as using bandages to dress wounds or applying a splint to a fractured leg.

I think it'd be great if the severity of wounds you can treat improved at a certain number of First Aid ranks. For example, I'm quickly approaching 1000 ranks, and at some point I'd like to be able to slap an untreated bandage on a moderate wound. Maybe I could even treat a bad or severe wound one day, or maybe I could treat them but only by using two or even three bandages due to wound packing. Poultices would still be the go-to treatments for these kind of wounds, if only because of how long it'd take for them to heal without a poultice, but it also sucks when you blow a 104 on a moderate wound since comfrey can be hard to find and all poultices are player-made.

Just a thought to reward players who invest in the skill instead of running to a thaumaturge all the time. You can treat a lot of pretty bad wounds with nothing but medical tape and gauze.

I think he hit the nail on the head. It is a bit disappointing to learn that we can't really do some fancy healing at higher ranks, so some of us just sort of give up and slack off on trying to improve our first aid.

[Alexander]

I would request more complex and severe wounds before more advanced first aid. Perhaps it would be impossible to stand or walk on a majorly wounded leg without first applying a splint, for instance.

[Elystole]

I would request more complex and severe wounds before more advanced first aid. Perhaps it would be impossible to stand or walk on a majorly wounded leg without first applying a splint, for instance.

I think the more complex wounds that you're talking about are sort of hand-waved under the umbrella of bad or severe wounds for ease of play. Bad or severe wounds already penalize movement, attack, or perception based on where they're located. I and the things I fight have had difficulty standing back up with leg wounds. I think it's not a 100% penalty because otherwise it'd be impossible to retreat since you then couldn't stand to run away and you can't bandage wounds while hostiles are present, and it sort of works because there are documented cases of people running on broken legs.

Similarly, I think that the various steps involved in actually treating these wounds are hand-waved under simply bandaging the wound to keep things from being overly complex. It'd add an additional layer of tediousness if, in order to treat a bad or severe wound, I had to not only forage, grind, and assemble poultices beforehand but make sure I was carrying around enough splints. That would further restrict first aid's usefulness when I would like to see it improved.

[Alexander]

I could not understand a plain, untreated bandage healing a remarkable wound with any noticeable speed, as that is the purpose of poultices. Untreated bandages can already be used to stop bleeding, which is very useful.

On the idea of splints, perhaps applying one would partially negate penalties to standing and dodging. It could be useful in emergencies to forage a branch and splint a majorly wounded leg, and this could require more advanced levels of first aid skill to accomplish.

[Elystole]

I could not understand a plain, untreated bandage healing a remarkable wound with any noticeable speed, as that is the purpose of poultices. Untreated bandages can already be used to stop bleeding, which is very useful.

Not with any speed, no. Poultices definitely rule as far as speed of healing goes, and I'm not looking to replace them. 101 and 103 only heal minor wounds, but they heal them faster than untreated bandages. If an untreated bandage could heal a wound, it would still heal it at the untreated bandage rate, but that's better than nothing. Moderate wounds in particular are in a weird spot: You can't treat them with an untreated bandage, but they aren't bleeding.

For comparison's sake, look at thaumaturgy: Templar can heal scrapes or light wounds, and Templar can also heal moderate wounds with a bit of a boost from Lightbearer. But if you have a bad or severe wound, a bleeder, you need a Monk. Bleeding wounds are a more difficult class of wound. Untreated bandages can heal scrapes or light wounds, but they can't do anything for moderate wounds. I would like to see First Aid receive a boost at a certain number of ranks (Templar get Lightbearer at 200 ranks, but I think the first aid boost would require more ranks than that) so that you can treat moderate wounds, even if bleeders still require poultices.

Moderate wounds really are the most annoying type of wound: You usually don't get a bad wound (60 points of unmitigated damage) or severe wound (80 points) unless something goes seriously wrong since most things don't do that much damage in a single blow, but moderate wounds (40 points) are fairly common. That means you're either using a poultice or running all the way back to town, and the encumbrance changes have made that more ornerous than it used to be. Especially if you're someone who goes pretty far afield.

Also keep in mind that, unlike virtually every other resource in CLOK, the amount of comfrey (or other herbs, but mostly comfrey since every poultice requires it and 102 and 104 both require three pieces of it) available at any given time is limited. I can fill wagons upon wagons full of metal ore and lumber, but there's only so much comfrey available and once someone picks it, that's it for a while. And there is not enough comfrey for everyone if we're using poultices with any regularity.

[criticalfault]

Another reason to make at least one of the other poultices take something that doesn't include comfrey!

[merin]

Advanced herbalism task.

It could work like the farming -- you buy a pot, forage some comfree and plant it. You would of course need capped herbalism to even have a chance at getting the seeds/reproductive portion of the comfree/arnica/fraer root/yora root, however, once you obtain that, pot it and grow it.

Then, when it's harvesting time, you can attempt to harvest it based on herbalism and farming. The better your herbalism, the more you can harvest of it and have a chance of getting high-grade comfree which will boost it's potency while growing it, plus the amount you get from your harvesting it with farming?

[Elystole]

It could work like the farming -- you buy a pot, forage some comfree and plant it. You would of course need capped herbalism to even have a chance at getting the seeds/reproductive portion of the comfree/arnica/fraer root/yora root, however, once you obtain that, pot it and grow it.

Whoever successfully pots comfrey will make a killing. I paid 5,000 a piece for potted cooking herbs, and those don't do anything but flavor my imaginary food. Or the infirmaries could start raking in the riln by selling poulticed bandages. Players have an overabundance of riln, but they don't have a lot of time to spend wandering across the entire Lost Lands hoping to find enough comfrey to make it worth the trip. I wear plate (which I hate and it makes me feel like a giant tool) solely because otherwise I'd spend more time foraging than training.