One of my characters, Jane Sierpenski, has an eye patch and a medical record that shards of shrapnel heavily injured their eye and their arm.
It’s an explanation for a gameplay quirk in which I will not carry a rifle unless entirely necessary, because I think limitations like that can force out a more interesting story. In the same vein, occasionally as a Survivor I’ll roll Med or Eng and refuse to use a firearm due to a trauma.
It’s all well and fun to allow other players the space to play as protectors, fulfilling the same niche of “support NPC to protect” as a less well-armed Corpsman, to give a more widely expressed gameplay style example, but how does one justify injuries that would force a character to only use a sidearm 90% of a time in the lore?
With my character of Sierpenski, the closest I’ve come to a somewhat thought out explanation that nobody has called me out on or even questioned yet, but that I’d like to explore.
Would shards of shrapnel in a specific material like lead make treatment of an area more difficult? Could such injuries be justified as “beyond Imadozaline” or, perhaps, that it’s simply more specialized of an operation than to perform right during the Distress Response the Almayer performs after Operation Tychon Tackle?
Could it simply be justified via the ingame mechanic of Long Pain, or is that reaching?
I quite like my eyepatch. I just don’t want to be a snowflake about it. Grounding a character in the world is a must to engage with it in a manner more than superfluous, and I’d absolutely love to abide by the setting while retaining these quirks that allow me to play in such a manner.
Also playing Squad Leader without a Mark 1 to point man when my men are fearrp’ing is fucking agony I love the flare belt but no matter how much you support them sometimes they’re immune to coercive action to PUUUUSH PLEAAAASE
That is not really snowflakey. That is a reasonable reason to have an eye patch. Now, if the eye patch was given to you by [Insert Aliens Character] then it would. Having a eye patch is a reasonable response to an eye injury.
I think that the best way to consider CM lore is that those magical medicines do not exist, they are purely gameplay feature and there actually are no such things as “bicardine”, or “kelotane”.
Just a remnant of vanilla SS13.
Even advanced “godstims” have in-lore explanations. If you get in-game papers about stuff like nervestimulating, or bonemending, it comes with a description that says what it does to the body and how, this being fairly believable in the setting. Unlike bicardine and the like, aforementioned Star-Trek wonderdrugs.
On one hand we have standard issue medicine that makes large lacerations simply close themselfs without any other help, akin to X-Men Wolverine, or Deadpool. On the other we can’t reattach cut off hands, or feet, even though such thing is possible right now by surgeons IRL.
The rules are a bit opposed to major fluff injuries pre-round due to:
“All personnel employed by the USCM are mentally stable and physically fit for duty.”
Because of that I don’t think there could be a good physical reason for a marine to not take a longarm.
Only mental scars remain as options, or just personal belief. As a medic you can say you already carry a lot of heavy stuff so that you don’t want to carry full-sized rifle, even though CM doesn’t have weight system, marines can hold a city block of metal sheets and move just as fast as when unburdened.
You can say you are more of a pacifist and since we don’t know what we will get before drop, you can safely assume in character that you will be facing humans.
You can be superstitious and say that longarms bring bad luck, or a wannabe cowboy armed only with revolver.
Good post. I would like to clarify that I never drop unarmed, and never posit that as a Marine I can’t use a rifle, it’s just that using one kicks like a motherfucker on a wounded dominant arm and thus I carry sidearm unless things get dire enough that I need to pick up a long arm. Rule-abiding!
Perhaps you could justify it with some silly lines like “Ugh, this damn eye… This’ll be my last deployment, hope it’ll be an easy one…” and “Distress beacon? Great, just as my contract was about to end,”, the idea being that during your last operation, you got the injury and you just haven’t gotten around to getting the necessary surgery to fix your eye. Or that you have, but the severity of the damage means it’s healed very slowly.
You could also say it’s due to some spiritual or moral concern, that you believe the body is holy, and to modify it with bionics would be sacrilegious. Of course, you better hope you never get de-limbed…
Honestly? There are some roles that support a bit more RP regarding injuries or medical conditions but being near unable to wield a rifle as a marine would be honourable medically discharged grounds. The eyepatch, yeah that’s fine
Frankly i view the super meds we got as being more so a thing for gameplay and not really Lore. ( So more or less i am same page with Cabal.)
Now i will go as far as saying that THERE is very good treatments in Lore that can fix a great many things. but only if treated before shit starts to heal wrongly, I.E a poorly set bone being miss shaped. What’s more i like to think the UA’s VA is dog shit and the Almayer crew are getting substandard treatment.
Then that’s not even taking in account cost… to get the treatments privately, lets face it the Crew of the Almayer are dirt poor.
Like one of my Jed ‘The Burglar’ Llora took a machete to the head back in the day before he join the USCM in a gun trade gone bad. This left him with a mild case of brain damage which he has made a near full recovery, except for the fact its left him eyes that stay nearly always stay dilated.
This cause him to rather sensitive to light, so he is always wearing per of shades or welding goggles. The way i see it is, he got subpar treatment leaving him like this and B, it can be fixed but he doesn’t got the cash to pay for the treatment.
Last off its a mild enough case the USCM doesn’t see the need to discharge Jed.
Your guy’s got some Riddick shit going on and I kinda love it. Hell yeah.
Another solution I’ve found to my problem that worked quite well on a Shiva’s Snowball round was simply that you only need to one-hand a shotgun to PB with it and an underbarrel flamer is not only very useful, but doesn’t feel like it’d produce much recoil.
So, this is I guess somewhat tangential, insofar as it focuses more on equipment limitations than strictly injuries, but given the nature of the discussion, I feel its sufficiently connected.
Since the dawn of actually being able to two-hand all weapons (once upon a time, guns like pistols and the M39 could only be used in one hand, I’ve essentially never taken a rifle, for primarily character reasons. Klepto prefers light, compact weapons, to the point where he used to fully chop off even the folding stock on his M39, and for a stretch of time deployed with nothing heavier than a kitted out 88M4. He dreads the very thought of hauling around a Mk1 or, gods forbid, an HPR
Admittedly, he’s never been a frontline fighter, more a skirmisher or support role (particularly given that he moved up into RTO and eventually IO), but still. Likewise, he eschews helmets because he learned to fight without one (prior to enlisting) and still feels most comfortable that way.
Granted, he’s still physically capable of using a rifle, if he has to. Lingering injuries from Tychon Tackle seems a rather plausible explanation, though obviously that only works within the immediate context of this exact moment in the timeline. Maybe that’s enough for you, but if you want to think longer term, I think anything that doesn’t fully exclude use of a rifle is fine. Give them cause to not want to use one, even if they technically can, and you’re no worse off than any of the plethora of oddball equipment choices that are regularly made by the Falling Falcons
one of the most fun things about the CM SS13 universe to me is that it has these dumbass magical things i can explain away with my own creativity
there’s still plenty of reasons for your character to get an eyepatch or maintain a prosthetic arm when it’s probably feasible for them to grow them a whole ass new one on Luna or something, be it for religious reasons, because they haven’t had time to do that yet, or just because your character ‘thinks it looks cool’ and has managed to find ways to dodge the marines from getting them a fix
it’s also worth noting that Tychon did just happen and most of the marine element of the Almayer is either dead or wounded - whenever i roll foxtrot i always try and RP it as being wounded and debilitated in some way.
Calling foxtrot is quite literally digging into the medical leave pool for more rifles to put on the frontline
Someone’s gonna have to answer to a board of inquiry for that one…
Nobody has ever expected a medic to pack a real weapon in my 6 years of CM - you only get dogged on if a MD/Sighting happens and you’re still reviving/kitting instead of blamming the Xeno, even if it is a 9mm 1911 or a mod88