House M.D. Mafia - Doctor Test Round - Feel free to jump in!

[Shadow Dancer]

/in if I may.

And search his damn home, if no one has done it yet.

[Shadow Dancer]

- assume the anti seizure was just to stop the seizure. He has since been off.
- matt p, this is where my lack of medical research comes in. Assume the blood test simply indicate a lack of kidney function.

Yeah, this is where this mechanic gets a bit meh. The general concept is great (and House is a flavour I'd like to play for a change), but you need to keep it simple in a way that makes the game still accessible to players without extensive medical training.

[Shadow Dancer]

Antihero - the temperature is 98.8 degrees.

That's about 37°C. right? So pretty normal.

[Shadow Dancer]

So his house is a dumb. Am I right to assume that if there had been any signs of the obvious like drugs, potential toxic hazards (like stacks of old batteries or whatever), spoiled food or vermin, you'd have told me, right?
So what about the "sludge" business? Sludge is moist, so did I get that from the drainpipe in his bathroom or does that mean there is actually a lot of moisture in the house? Like, is the roof leaking?

[Shadow Dancer]

Okay, some one else can check the sludge for fungi then.
Instead I am going to get a bit more history.
We don't even have any real patient history so far, as far as I can see.
So I want to ask the patient about any prior illnesses he or any one in his family had (including the alleged wife of course), and also when those happened and where he was in the last couple of years. He must have gotten around at least a bit. Is there a list of all the yard sales he went to? And finally, did his alleged wife allegedly live in the same dumpster he lives in when she had her alleged miscarriages (and again, how long ago exactly was that, allegedly)?

Since every body lies, I'd also like to search the archives for all available medical records that could confirm whatever he answers to the above questions (so this I assume is considered my action then)

[Shadow Dancer]

accustic kidney failure? What the heck did you do with that ultrasound?!!?

[Shadow Dancer]

The misscarriages were apparently due to pre-eclampsia.

Where'd you get that from?
Also, I am pretty much already tracking down the wife/trying to confirm the story. Maybe yo should run a whole-body-scan instead (we all know House loves whole-body-scans )

[Shadow Dancer]

Would we be able to if there was a chance her health was in danger? Not get her in necessarily for the husband, but for possible contamination of the wife?

It wouldn't matter, you'd be breaking confidentiality. Especially considering you don't know for sure that she's been exposed to anything. You can't just toss his rights aside, then demand she come to the hospital for nebulous testing.

This is House flavour. Nothing is gonna stop us from doing nebulous and illegal things

[Shadow Dancer]

So "search his home" does not at all include any clues that his walls are falling apart?! I'd consider checking for mold and sources of toxins, checking the water etc. standard procedure for a House house check...

[Shadow Dancer]

Lead paint is one of

the

most basic things they check for in basically any House episode (or at least regularly enough that you can assume they are doing it off screen when its not explicitely stated that they are doing it).
I don't know, I don't really like the idea of introducing a random element... Things usually tend to just work for House ;D. I think you should rather just set risk factors (allergies, cross reactions, police patrol checking his house, character and backstory of patient...) beforehand and just bring them into play when the situation arrives.
And I think you should be more clear about the whole searching the Home business, which actions are automatically included, which aren't (checking for mold? Lead paint/pipes? Asbestos? Diet? Drugs? Other household articles, like cleansers?). And there should be an option to state what one wants to sample right on the spot. It's probably alright to make that require a second action, though, since lab analysis of samples is of course needed as well. But just telling "here's are some samples of random dirt" is not really helpful...

[Shadow Dancer]

Guys, I have one more idea: How would you feel about upping the votes required to 80%... or dare I say, immunity to the player who first diagnoses and treats the patient?

whoever is better at the ddx mechanic is going to have a pretty significant upper hand in the mafia game.
getting a good diagnosis at lylo could be an automatic win for scum. conversely a townie fucking up and making themselves disliked at lylo is an autoloss (which would bug the shit out of me if i were town and lost that way).

come to think of it, it's pretty antitown to even engage the ddx mechanic at lylo. maybe drop that part of the game when it gets to that point?

Not ddxing probably means the patient dies... I guess if no one does anthing about it, every one should end up hated ;P

[Shadow Dancer]

I'll try.
So in this case we had a house search and it didn't really have any hints about the disease. The hint was in the man's job, and we could have deduced without the house search he could have found lead-based paint and painted his house with that. But I was thinking adding, for instance, that the paint was cracked and there's a paint can/stuff from garage sales stored, it would have become more clear there could be lead-based paint in the house. However, saying that will point to the diagnoses and makes it easier to solve the case, and that's not really what you want, right? So I was thinking the more specified stuff could come up in a second house search, and to make sure players don't figure out what the diagnosis is in 2 periods (1 period for global search and 2nd for specified search with more clear clues) I was thinking putting in a cooldown of at least 1 period (but maybe more) so that players will also have to do tests on the patient and can't fall back too easily on clues from the searches.
Then a second search, where a player will have to specify what to look for or where to look, could turn up more clues.

In this case it would be something like what you wrote for the first search, then someone thinks of fungus and needs to go back to check the damp places for mould and the fridge and stuff like that. Maybe the first search could hint to 'a damp house' and then the 2nd search would turn up fungus. Maybe also the first search would never include samples, samples will have to be specified in a next search. I mean, the house search came up in the first period and you don't want it to be case-solving but I do feel in this particular case we played it didn't bring much information. Maybe you wanted it to be distracting, if so then I said nothing

I'm not sure if it's a good idea though, I'm looking at this from my own perspective and maybe it's not necessary.

I think including some red herrings (lead paint, when the diagnosis is not actually lead poisoning for example) would be a better and more House way to do this.

[Shadow Dancer]

Well I left more than one clue. Granted, the house was the largest clue, but the "cheapness" was also a huge clue. Someone who would be willing to save a buck by buying only cheap deli meats and McDonald's would also be the person to use cheap tools and would have a shortcut to their health. Mixing that with the symptoms, lead poisoning shouldn't have been such a large leap. I'm pretty sure the house wasn't a factor to TTH when he diagnosed and set the patient on the correct treatment.

And you're right. I don't want the answer to be so easy that the doctor would walk in and find a can of paint, test for lead and there you go. A cooldown period does seem nice. The thing is that the specified search is kind of how I already have it. Titus, on the second try, said that she wanted to go back and search specifically for the paint chips.

But I do like, "Oh you're using an action period to search the house? OK. This is what you find." And the second search could lead to, "You took samples of the tap water, the mold on the bread and liquid underneath the sink, etc."

But on the other hand, if brain surgery lasts one action and if you can do an MRI and get the results within one action, why does the house search have to be longer?"

One turn to go the House and take samples, oner turn to go to the lab and analyse them...

[Shadow Dancer]

Short list of ideas and criticisms that I came up with. It needs to be much more clear about what is and is not being done with investigations, like the house for instance. It needs to be very clear what the rules are on certain things like that, or with certain things and how that will affect gameplay, like the confidentiality thing. It's a house flavor, so some people might expect that to be okay, what others think the medical side of it makes it not OK, and it can cause some confusion. Also, I'm against the D20 thing. It would work for something like a tabletop house game, but not for a for Mafia game, random this is probably bad here. Also, last question, how does this actively tie into a game of Mafia? Is the mafia attempting to get the patient killed? Because unless they are, I don't really see how this mixes with Mafia all that well. Diagnosing the patient becomes much more important to everybody that catching scum is, and if there is no opposing goals to the alignments, there's no real way to figure out who is scum. I think there has to be some kind of conflicting goals between the mafia and the town.

Maybe give scum the ability to sabotage tests to give false results and thus mislead people into false diagnoses and treatments.

[Shadow Dancer]

Oh maybe not hated but clinic duty and not be able to do anything on the patient during the next period.

Yes, we definitely need some clinic duty mechanic! Maybe have them diagnose clinic patients in a PT if they screwed up some way.

[Shadow Dancer]

I definitely would adore House as a flavour for a Mafia Game, and even more the mechanic. And leaving it relatively open with regards what players can do makes it so much more House, so I guess you should keep that as well. I think what you should put some more thought into is how this could be better integrated with an actual Mafia Game, so that it still remains mafia but at the same time players have a clear incentive to do both old-fashioned scum hunting and diagnosing (that's also very House, by the way. He's always bored if he hasn't some prank going on on the side...)