Psychology Reworked [Idea/Expansion]

[KrulPax]

Currently, Psychiatrist faces a lot of problems. Similar to other roles that are heavy on roleplay, it has to constantly struggle to stay relevant. But while other roles get a bunch of low effort tasks that are appreciated by the rest of the station (Bartender, Chaplain, and Chef), or simply can enforce relevancy onto others through shenanigans (Clown and Mime), the Psychiatrist unfortunately has no means to attract people. Sure they are a Roleplay Role, and that shouldn't be stripped away from them, but it's important to address the issue - because they don't bring any kind of benefit to the station, they will most of the time be unable to do their job even ONCE during the shift, which is probably worse than even Barber of Librarian. Those feature suggestions aim to introduce some low effort tasks that will attract the crew, and also provide opportunities for Psychiatrists to roleplay, pulling them out of the mud of irrelevancy and putting them somewhere between Bartender and Chef, which is not bad all things considered.

New Tool of Trade: Brain Pattern Scanner
So, you know those Psychiatrist Sofas? Like how it is in the game, for example, those are pretty important in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud was first to use one of those babies, after he noticed that when he positions himself behind the patient, hidden from his view, and the patient himself is forced to look up at the ceiling, this helps them not censor themselves as much as they would because of some doctor staring at them.
I'm making this big ass introduction to inform that those couches (known as Chaise longues) are very important symbols for psychology, and I would like to propose the idea, that with technological progress those tools were also outfitted with advanced brain-scanning electronics, that would enable psychiatrists of Space Station to access features that I'll describe later. They would function like this - they would still appear as a Chaise longue, albeit futuristic one, but at the back, where the psychiatrist is sitting, there would be a monitor. When someone buckles themselves to the Scanner, not only does this look adequate in a roleplay sense, the sofa can be then clicked by a psychiatrist (or someone else) to open some options, like a sleeper.

New Threat: Psychological Traumas
The premise is simple - every time someone puts themselves in a stressful situation, they have a chance of developing a psychological trauma. For example, watching someone die while not being a medical or security personnel will give some Trauma Points. Those experiences will stack, and every minute this invisible to the player currency has a chance to be spent on a random Trauma, that can range from simple stutter to having a split personality and more, the more severe traumas brought with more points. Those points will slowly decrease by themself, and even if a big bunch of those accumulate, they might not even get spent, every minute the game will make a check for the player if it wants to "buy" a trauma for them. And if they do, the player will get NO notification about developing one. Therefore they might be in for a surprise when they find out they have a phobia of security or something like that.
Now, when that happens, this is where the Psychiatrist comes in. Not only psychiatrist's presence decreases Trauma Points at a much faster rate (which will make those who visit them less prone to developing a trauma), the Brain Pattern Scanner not only will inform you that trauma has been detected, but will also have a "Threat Trauma" menu, where all possible traumas will be listed, and psychiatrist can choose one of the options to start a procedure that will get the patient rid of the problem. The Scanner cannot however tell you what kind of trauma has developed - this will be your job to deduce based on what the patient tells you. Now, some of those might be extremely easy, if someone is unable to say a word you'll be sure that they suffer from mutism, but if someone for example develops a split personality (which might a fun minigame for a bored ghost who might be randomly invited to be the second half of someone's brain), this might be more tricky. And yeah, you could just go through all the entries if you're completely unsure, but that'll be just a waste of yours and the patient's time, so as a psychiatrist you'll have to show ingenuity and ability to analyze problems.

New Benefits: Psychological Experience and Brain Conditioning
Now abilities listed above will be freely available for everyone - even if there's no Psychiatrist onboard the station traumas can be still handled by someone who knows what they're doing. But, that doesn't mean that Psychiatrist features have to stop here - introducing Psychological Experience. Every time Psychiatrist does something related to their work, like healing Psychological Traumas, or just talking one on one with people (with different stuff like if the patient was laying on the bed, if there was blood or gibs around and other modifiers affecting the score) will slowly accumulate psychiatrist the "Psychological Experience". This is another type of currency, that - when we build up enough of those - will enable us to perform the Brain Conditioning Procedure on anyone we choose using our trusty Brain Pattern Scanner. Brain Conditioning will be in essence the reverse of Psychological Traumas, and it will be a completely randomized positive feature for the patient! This ability will be similar to genetic powers, but with some major key differences. First of all, those are always at least neutral, so no need to be afraid you'll suddenly develop a Swedish accent for the rest of the game. Secondly, those powers will be brain/psychology oriented, and I hope for it to be just a random quirky feature most of the time, so in most cases, it'll just be some kind of useless junk. Thirdly, one brain can have one Brain Conditioning round per round, and those "powers" will be completely randomized, so there's no way to pick any of those consciously. So really it will be just a little quirky ability for Psychiatrist to reward someone with probably useless, at best very situational power that will never go away like it's the case with genetics or virology, and while it doesn't sound very useful, those points will build up when Psych is doing what he is supposed to do, and reward for their endeavors is an interesting client magnet for those who are looking for new thrills. And who knows, maybe those skills won't be as useless if you are creative enough, maybe this silly ability to understand Spider Language isn't as silly when Terrors decide to attack the station, maybe the ability to wake up whenever you choose will be the perfect bait for the enemy, maybe many more of those abilities could turn out to be useful if only put in the right context...

Most of those Traumas can be probably safely pulled from other station builds, but introduced to the station as features of Psychology, rather than issues handled with medicine. Brain conditioning can be however more creative - it should however be something that is either not that useful (ability to change into clown cursive speech pattern at will, ability to move faster under boxes), barely useful (mime ability to place walls if you refuse to speak long enough, immunity to psychological traumas) or useful in only very specific situations (complete magic immunity, ability to understand and speak one random language). I'll not be listing my ideas here, I'm sure you get what I'm drinking too, but if the project gets a green light I'll be happy to share my suggestions ;)

Also, getting cloned will finally have some kind of a debuff giving a bunch of traumas, since getting cloned is a pretty traumatic experience in itself...

I am confident that those suggestions will elevate a Psychiatrist from a character that struggles to attract people to roleplay with a character that will have a respected place in any SS13 round, while also having a bunch of quirks to not be simply a problem solver. This is however a very rough draft of this idea - I decided to not go in-depth about what kind of traumas and brain conditioning possibilities would there be, as well as I decided to not give too many examples of how would the Trauma Points and Psychological Experience be acquired. This draft aims to rather create a solid building block of an idea, that can be then expanded upon by adjusting those variables. I am open to all kinds of criticism and suggestions on the matter, and I hope that one way or another, a Psychiatrist will be made more fun to play (even if not necessarily thanks to my suggestions).

[Kiyahitayika]

New Tool of Trade: Brain Pattern Scanner - Sprite work, with coding required to place it in-game. Would be cool to see Psychiatrist get something "new" for once.
New Threat: Psychological Traumas - Mmm, this is a bit paternalistic and forces roleplay. For some people (and fictional characters), death isn't going to have the same affect. This Also, it would be heck to code...not impossible, just ... super-duper-sized heck. (I do want to point out that "split personality" is not a diagnosis that exists.)
New Benefits: Psychological Experience and Brain Conditioning - Skimmed this, tbh, think it sounds cool!

Overall Thoughts:
Yeah! Psych is a boring role that's...boring. It's heavily dependent on Roleplay and, in that way, is similar to IAA and Magistrate which suffer from similar issues. Examining the psych's role and maybe giving them a gadget or two could be a good idea.

[Kiyahitayika]

This is still currently beyond my coding level at the moment, but I want to keep this fresh. @KrulPax , you and I spoke a week ago on Discord.

New Threat: Psychological Traumas
I could see this functioning like Addictions or Diseases. That sort of stuff. Could you work on writing up what you're thinking of more specifically (e.g. name of disorder/illness, cause, treatment, symptoms)?

[KrulPax]

@Kiyahitayika I was inspired a bit by TG traumas: https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Guide_to_Traumas , so those traumas could be a bit pulled from here, but here's an example of how this would work in-game:

An extremely smart and beautiful CMO gets beaten up by security hard. This experience gives her a bunch of Trauma Points, and, unknowingly to her (not even a vague announcement like tg does), she gets the "phobia of security officers" because the game randomly decided to spend points on that. The traumas could have levels, that increase over time, with different effects depending on the level. Our CMO is currently on level one of the trauma, and she starts noticing strange behavior - every time she hears something related to security or sees something related to security her character shakes a bit, drops something, or becomes mute. If she leaves it untreated, the level will eventually rise, and effects along with it - she will now scream at the sight of security, or close her eyes, or violently lash out if they come closer. She will therefore notice that something is wrong, but her Health Analyzer doesn't scan anything. So CMO being a smart CMO goes to the therapist. Now, the therapist will then have to figure out what kind of trauma CMO has based on her story alone - a good therapist will probably ask what was near the CMO when she fainted and what kind of words did she hear. After that brief questioning, the therapist will then direct the patient to the Brain Pattern Scanner and will be presented with a list of all possible traumas, with descriptions when selected. He will then have to select the correct one and click on the "Threat Trauma" button, to begin a quick treatment of the CMO's brain. After that, CMO is finally rid of the trauma and ready to be fabulous again, thanks to the Therapist and their new and cool purpose in life.

And here's an example how I'd list those traumas with all the features going along with them, as you asked me to do:

Name: Capiophobia
Description: Fear of being arrested, law enforcement and security
Cause: Higher chance of getting it when having negative experiences near security, especially being beaten up by them
Symptoms: Level One - slowing down, dropping items, and/or becoming mute whenever seeing or hearing stuff related to security or arresting.
Level Two - As above, with screaming, closing eyes, and erratic movement involved as well.
Level Three - As above, including fainting and involuntary attacks when security gets close enough. Possible heart attack as well.

Treatment however would always be the same: choosing a correct Trauma in the Brain Pattern Scanner and hitting that "Threat Trauma" button. That's partly because I feel like overcomplicating it even more would be terrible for everyone involved. ;U;

[Kiyahitayika]

From Discord:

Trauma Points? I like that. Really like that. It'll be ... a completely new system and a heck to code and I don't know when I'll be up for it, though I am definitely open to other people helping with it and it being a group project. Anyways, giving people "points" when they see people die could be done on _species.dm where the handle_death proc is instantiated. Or it might have to be each individual species' .dm. Either way, it would look for anyone within the dying player's oview and run something like:

for(var/mob/living/carbon/human/C in oview(8))
   C.addTrauma(2)

[blinkdog]

@KrulPax mentioned this on Discord:

so I found PRs for some stuff that could potentially be used as a stepping block for the hopefully future Psychology Update I've been proposing, and it's an already developed system of traumas:
Citadel-Station-13/Citadel-Station-13#4246
Citadel-Station-13/Citadel-Station-13#4420

[Kiyahitayika]

Oh Gods. Assigning this to myself.

[Kiyahitayika]

https://discordapp.com/channels/702308041881813142/791544537750437898/795688934293241887

Components:

Brain Pattern Scanner

• Diagnoses Mental Health issues
• Yo, this can do "Brain Conditioning" procedure too!

Points: Psychological Traumas

• I was thinking of having these be like Disabilities where you could choose these at in Character Setup
  --> Different people have different responses to traumatic situations, different people react to trauma differently, are affected by trauma differently
  --> So, you know how Desert Rose, for example, has Nyctophobia as a "Quirk" you can choose for your character? I was thinking of something like that! What are your thoughts? Haven't looked at your linked PRs yet.

• Linked PRs:
  --> Brain Traumas tgstation/tgstation#31727
  --> [Ready]Brain Trauma additions tgstation/tgstation#33405

• "Trauma Points"

• Generally, I'm against "Split Personality" as it is very often misrepresented in media. The mechanic Pax describes sounds fun, though. Hmm . . .

Points: Psychological Experience

• Built up in Brain Pattern Scanner:
  --> Patient lying in bed
  --> Other things, yet to be determined

Uses Points?: Brain Conditioning

• Can "reverse" Psychological Traumas
• Similar to DNA Vault effects:
  --> "One brain can have one Brain Conditioning" per round
  --> whatchu mean spooder language?
  --> Ability to wake up at will <- sorry, pax, this might be OP, let's workshop these with other folks

Requirements:

Spriting

• Brain Pattern Scanner (looks like Memory Den thing from Fallout 4, I guess)
• Action icons

Coding

• Possibly a "points" system to support "Psychological Experience" and "Psychological Trauma"
  --> Points system already in-place for Loadout Menu, use as basis.