Interesting speculation about a healing-based MMORPG:
Picture an MMORPG just like the ones today, but everywhere you see combat, replace it with healing. A six-man encounter would be a surgical operation that required teamwork. Soloing would be a brilliant doctor doing drive-by diagnostics. Raids would be massive experimental treatments.
Rather than spawning mobs, spawn ill people. Instead of weapons, have medicines. Instead of managing aggro, manage fever. Instead of armors, we have disinfectants.
Quests would include tasks to find and gather new plants for pharmaceuticals, and bespoke missions to fix the sanitation in a remote village. Puzzles might involve finding the standing water where the mosquitoes are breeding.
You can level up by building up immunity to the most common diseases. Your abilities are new forms of intervention and diagnosis; some classes might use homeopathic medicine, others might be trained in a Western mode. And death? Well, that would be a case of fighting off the infection youself, and failing.
You could go pretty psychedelic and “virtual” on the visuals, if you chose, with plenty of full-screen particle effects to keep the “fight” interesting. You could even, if you wanted to betray the Hippocratic Oath, have Dr vs Dr combat biowarfare.
How would it play?
Exactly the same.
Which is all very nice, but … well, I wouldn’t play it. Does that make me a violent or evil person? Too bought into the clashes of physical conflict that make up the core of so much escapist fare (and myth and literature)?
I dunno, but City of Healers just doesn’t quite do it for me, for all that I (a) think doctors and other medical professoinals can be heroic, and (b) frequently take an Empathy power set.
Though it would be interesting if, amidst all the healing above, there was a call for a specialized subclass, security/guard types that would provide physical protection to most physician players, guarding them from wild animals, or drug thieves, or bioterrorists, or deranged patients, or lawyers, or rogue government agents trying to shut the clinic down.
“R U a FTR? HLP on Mish!”
That could be fun.
(via BoingBoing)