on the topics of medbay and death

[PKPenguin321]

Bottom post of the previous page:

lets be honest current medbay is garbage, if you cant deal with this fact stay out of here

I think it matches the pace of the game pretty well

On this note, if we somehow find a code solution to make our rounds last longer (as oranges proposed to do in the other thread) without losing the fast-paced style of action ingame, I probably wouldn't be opposed to a slower medical system to go with that. Doing things out of order would make medbay a massive unfun slog, hence why it's a hard no from me at the moment.

[somerandomguy]

>timegate
TECHWEBS

[oranges]

- Remove the unliked and barely stomached code that incentivizes the players to feel and act a certain way, or else they get penalized. It may just be my personality type, but whew. Do I hate feeling limited or constrained.

The playerbase you're working with won't do any of that otherwise

[iamgoofball]

- Remove the unliked and barely stomached code that incentivizes the players to feel and act a certain way, or else they get penalized. It may just be my personality type, but whew. Do I hate feeling limited or constrained.

The playerbase you're working with won't do any of that otherwise

if anything we should expand it more and make it more punishing

[oranges]

lets be honest current medbay is garbage, if you cant deal with this fact stay out of here

I think it matches the pace of the game pretty well

On this note, if we somehow find a code solution to make our rounds last longer (as oranges proposed to do in the other thread) without losing the fast-paced style of action ingame, I probably wouldn't be opposed to a slower medical system to go with that. Doing things out of order would make medbay a massive unfun slog, hence why it's a hard no from me at the moment.

Changes like these are part of that, and for fucks sake pk we have to do one thing or the other we can't just do nothing and point at each side and go, they should move first.

[somerandomguy]

make revival and reconstruction easier, the shuttle will be called later because it's not needed

[Shadowflame909]

- Remove the unliked and barely stomached code that incentivizes the players to feel and act a certain way, or else they get penalized. It may just be my personality type, but whew. Do I hate feeling limited or constrained.

The playerbase you're working with won't do any of that otherwise

if anything we should expand it more and make it more punishing

Please no goof



The most important thing is that someone took the time to read the post

[MisterPerson]

Simply refuting someone's point doesn't enhance the conversation. I know you've already said you dislike that kind of incentivization, but you could at least address Goof's claim that said coercion is necessary.

[Mickyan]

I think it matches the pace of the game pretty well

I think if implemented properly (a big if) the proposed changes can still match the fast pace of the game while making encounters more interesting and meaningful. Making injuries less instantly deadly and more of a long term issue means your trips to medbay may take a bit longer but they're going to be a lot less frequent

In other words you can have a fast paced experience that isn't dominated by the guy with the biggest stick and a backpack full of magical healing pills

I'm reminded of project zomboid which is the kind of game where winning a fight doesn't mean you're going to survive the aftermath, and it makes everything a lot more tense and engaging.

[Shadowflame909]

Simply refuting someone's point doesn't enhance the conversation. I know you've already said you dislike that kind of incentivization, but you could at least address Goof's claim that said coercion is necessary.

Alright. The incentivization is disliked because its purely negative. You do this or you get penalized. The people making this change aren't going to like it. The people who were used to doing it don't care for it. The design is flawed, is what I'm saying. Slight positive reinforcement would give us a better effect. The current mechanic is just barely stomachable. if it were to be made harsher like original moodlets. You'd just strike the same nerve, and revive the active aggression we had. Compared to the passive aggression we have now. Remember how pissed off people were that they were suffering a space drugs like effect because the janitor missed cleaning one tile, and a light was broken? This kind of negative reinforcement to get people to do things, doesn't need Revival. It needs to be tore down and replaced.

[actioninja]

It's almost entirely a psychological effect though. I've read a lot into this actually because it's a serious problem in game design. Functionally identical mechanics tend to be received differently if they are presented to the player differently.
A really good example is health loss on death in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2 that's restored by an item versus "bonus health" given by item that's then lost on death I'm ds3. They're both the same mechanic: you spend an item to get max health that's then lost on death.
If we could figure out some way to reframe negative mood as the default or neutral and then provide "bonuses" for actions you want the player to be doing, people would like that you get bonuses for actions and would start going out of their way to get "bonuses"
Game design is as much psychological manipulation as it is actually making a fun game. Players always try their hardest to not have fun.

[Shadowflame909]

As long as it doesn't feel like your holding a gun to my virtual head and forcing me to do a task. I'm all for it

[PKPenguin321]

lets be honest current medbay is garbage, if you cant deal with this fact stay out of here

I think it matches the pace of the game pretty well

On this note, if we somehow find a code solution to make our rounds last longer (as oranges proposed to do in the other thread) without losing the fast-paced style of action ingame, I probably wouldn't be opposed to a slower medical system to go with that. Doing things out of order would make medbay a massive unfun slog, hence why it's a hard no from me at the moment.

Changes like these are part of that, and for fucks sake pk we have to do one thing or the other we can't just do nothing and point at each side and go, they should move first.

I suppose we do need to start somewhere, but starting with medbay means rounds where you'll have 5 minutes of action and 30 minutes of downtime in medbay where you can't do anything because you're injured. It doesn't really add to the player experience at all, with the exception being if you're the doctor (and you happen to enjoy having a stressful backlog of people to work on).

[iamgoofball]

As long as it doesn't feel like your holding a gun to my virtual head and forcing me to do a task. I'm all for it

this is the kind of mindset that is incompatible with game design

[Shadowflame909]

Goofball Actionninja literally just listed an example of where what I want works. Go home your goofy!

[somerandomguy]

As long as it doesn't feel like your holding a gun to my virtual head and forcing me to do a task. I'm all for it

this is the kind of mindset that is incompatible with game design

Are you going to say how or not

[DemonFiren]

As long as it doesn't feel like your holding a gun to my virtual head and forcing me to do a task. I'm all for it

this is the kind of mindset that is incompatible with game design

Are you going to say how or not

Of course he isn't, silly. He's the one designing the game, you're not.

[datorangebottle]

Point: Death should be a meaningful experience
etc etc etc

Agree with basically everything said here. Cloning is basically a necrotic limb of genetics; plenty of geneticists just flat-out ignore it or ask the AI/CMO to emergency access it.

Point: Our current medical system and damage system is somewhat lacking still

Sure. I don't like that you just slam a guy in a tube for a few seconds and shove him out of medbay. We have all these other medical supplies that generally go untouched in a given round because you can sleeper someone and let them go. Like, who's used bandages recently?

How do people feel about introducing some requirement for actual surgery? (broken bones and internal organ damage)?

(and quite a bit after that)

Holy fuck no. This change would be more inclined, much like the infamous Miasma change, with a heavy RP server, not a medium RP server. Also, doing anything with arms and legs will make it so that people just get augmented whenever they have a problem with a specific limb, like a broken bone.

Emergency Traumas should cause pain to build up, once pain builds up past a point, you lose conciousness for a short period, and then the pain counter is reset and builds up again.
This is just so you can't run around with emergency trauma's on you without seeking medical attention for them, and should be manageable for short periods (10-15 minutes) with pain pills, so you can book a time to hit surgery.

This sounds horrible. You might as well suggest that we blink and breathe manually, and that we have to use the toilet every fifteen minutes. These are the kinds of changes that drive most of the players away from the server, good or bad. We don't need medbay to act like an actual IRL hospital. Is the Chief Engineer gonna get murdered not for his hardsuit or magboots, but because the murderer needs better dental to get treated for his broken arm?

Memes aside, god that sounds absolutely obnoxious. Security beat the shit out of me, so an arm and a leg broke and now I can't get to medbay between the broken leg and the unconsciousness.

You could also just up the lethality of common station equipment and items. People are going to be more hesitant to murderbone if every encounter has an element of risk even when you are significantly overpowering them.
Or conditionally remove some of the more lethal tools from the standard traitor uplink. Like make conspicuous weapons only show up if you have a hijack or die a glorious death objective.

This is a post I greatly agree with. Specifically that last sentence. Murderbone should be disincentivized, especially if death is made more punishing.

In sum: I honestly don't think drastically changing medbay is the place we should be. Nerfing/removing cloning itself, yes. Cloning should require some sort of interaction aside from stuffing them in a tube, and/or some form of resource. Sleepers should pretty much only be a place to store someone and automatically inject them with stabilizing meds periodically until they can be treated, though it should be possible to ghost / succumb inside them, with a loud and obvious beeping / sprite change when it happens. Cryo is fine. It's slow enough and provides some nonlethal autism for chemistry. If anything is done about it, make the chems deplete a little faster so that they actually need to be replaced within 30 minutes of use.

A lot of the proposed changes would lead to me just suiciding / succumbing and taking a spawner the second I go anywhere near crit.

Edit: Remove Neurine so that brain surgery is actually a required thing.

[iamgoofball]

"medical that takes actual effort is ONLY FOR HEAVY RP!!!"

no

[datorangebottle]

If a game is more annoying than fun, less people will play it.

[Lumbermancer]

People are going to be more hesitant to murderbone if every encounter has an element of risk even when you are significantly overpowering them.

No, they won't. Do you people still not realize that murderboner absolutely doesn't care if it dies? That's why murderboner happens, because they don't care about the round, their objectives and such.

[datorangebottle]

People are going to be more hesitant to murderbone if every encounter has an element of risk even when you are significantly overpowering them.

No, they won't. Do you people still not realize that murderboner absolutely doesn't care if it dies? That's why murderboner happens, because they don't care about the round, their objectives and such.

Then the murderboner will die faster based on luck instead of murdering 90% of the crew, because more people are able to adequately defend themselves.

...


Thinking about it, this might just be kinda shitting on antags a bit.

[oranges]

Hell yeah

[actioninja]

Making antags require more skill and thought without actually nerfing them directly would only be a good thing. Antags in general are pretty ludicrously overpowered, and it's largely because the average stationgoer has no adequate way to defend themselves unless they go full powergame doomsday prepper.

[Dr_bee]

Thinking about it, this might just be kinda shitting on antags a bit.

Good. Antag powercreep is real. It would be nice for the antag to actually fear the crew instead of the other way around.

Criminals actually afraid of security officers, Imagine.

[somerandomguy]

More stealth items, less kill items

[lmwevil]

we need someone with the balls since we don't have goof, to give us baymed wholesale, then we can just edit it in future PRs

[ATHATH]

I agree with pretty much everything Shadowflame909 has said here.

I'd also like to bring up the point that nobody likes sitting still in Medbay for 15-30 minutes while they wait for an incompetent doctor to try (and fail) to heal their broken leg that they got because they were caught in the light devastation range of an explosion, and a lot of these Medbay change ideas seem like they want to make that hypothetical scenario a reality. The cryotube already feels like that to use, and everybody hates it.

Why are you so hell-bent on antagonizing the playerbase by always using negative reinforcement and refusing to use positive reinforcement? Do you just enjoy drinking their tears?

It's almost entirely a psychological effect though. I've read a lot into this actually because it's a serious problem in game design. Functionally identical mechanics tend to be received differently if they are presented to the player differently.
A really good example is health loss on death in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2 that's restored by an item versus "bonus health" given by item that's then lost on death I'm ds3. They're both the same mechanic: you spend an item to get max health that's then lost on death.
If we could figure out some way to reframe negative mood as the default or neutral and then provide "bonuses" for actions you want the player to be doing, people would like that you get bonuses for actions and would start going out of their way to get "bonuses"
Game design is as much psychological manipulation as it is actually making a fun game. Players always try their hardest to not have fun.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

As long as it doesn't feel like your holding a gun to my virtual head and forcing me to do a task. I'm all for it

this is the kind of mindset that is incompatible with game design

I now despise goofball with the very essence of my being for believing that actually caring about how your changes look/feel to your players is "incompatible with game design".

Like, if you're so hellbent on making Medbay/playing as a doctor more interactive, just make sleepers only able to synthesize epinephrine (and morphine if you emag them or something). Bam, now doctors will be more protective of their medkits and medical chems (because they actually need to use them to heal people), and healing someone will be a bit more interactive than "dump them in a sleeper and click every button except for the bad ones (and don't accidentally make 30u+ of tricord)". There, was that so hard?

I also believe that cloning is an essential part of the SS13 experience- being able to be cloned makes a lot of deaths that'd normally feel "bullshit" tolerable (take a look at Paranoia for a more extreme example of this). The cloning damage, brain damage, time that you have to spend not in the round while being cloned, and genetic damage from being cloned by an unupgraded cloner is more than enough of a punishment for dying.

Here's a fun little experiment/challenge for you to try, oranges (or anyone else who thinks that removing cloning is a good idea): The next time you die and get cloned, don't reenter your body (or just commit suicide when you come out of the cloning pod) and instead just sit on your thumbs as an observer for the rest of the round (you can take a ghost role if you want to, I guess, but you're not allowed to use your admin powers). Do that every time you die and get cloned for a week, and come back and tell us how that made you feel. Oh, and also, while you're doing this challenge, you're only allowed to use burn and brute packs on yourself while you're naked on a surgery table with someone else (who isn't SSD) next to you (don't worry, you don't have to simulate the minute or so that it'd take to do the surgery).

[iamgoofball]

Like, if you're so hellbent on making Medbay/playing as a doctor more interactive, just make sleepers only able to synthesize epinephrine (and morphine if you emag them or something).

I did this along with sleepers actually full-halting all Life() ticks so that it was a literal "stabilize the guy while we figure out the cure" thing to give it an actual difference from Cryo one of the last times I refactored med. Players threw a hissy fit.

Bam, now doctors will be more protective of their medkits and medical chems (because they actually need to use them to heal people)

I expected this to occur too, but "medical storage is freely accessible" is so goddamn engrained in the server culture that myself and other MD players got yelled at by admins when we killed people who were stealing critical medical supplies from medbay during the testmerged nerfs to cloners and cryo and sleepers

this is also not helped by the fact that despite Box putting medical storage way in the back for obvious reasons, a shitton of current maps have med storage right next to the entrance for "easy access", making it piss easy to waltz in and steal med supplies without getting caught

I also believe that cloning is an essential part of the SS13 experience- being able to be cloned makes a lot of deaths that'd normally feel "bullshit" tolerable

this is correct and what cloning is there for, except the problem is it's gone from "make death not as fucking ass to deal with" to "makes death literally not matter period", which throws a wrench into discouraging people from doing stuff because at the end of the day, we can't have everything be Positive Reinforcement because then there's no tension, some form of negative reinforcement is needed, and the best way is "you might die" since we have no other good ways and players react terribly to any other attempted methods(economy, hygiene, mood, etc.).

Here's a fun little experiment/challenge for you to try, oranges (or anyone else who thinks that removing cloning is a good idea): The next time you die and get cloned, don't reenter your body (or just commit suicide when you come out of the cloning pod) and instead just sit on your thumbs as an observer for the rest of the round (you can take a ghost role if you want to, I guess, but you're not allowed to use your admin powers).

Ghost Roles are supposed to replace cloning. I don't see why you're writing them off as "well I GUESS you could use it" when they're literally supposed to be "the way back into the round". Yes, it's hard to get back into the station after spawning as a lizard or a beach bum or whatever. That's because it's not supposed to be easy. Otherwise, death is back to being meaningless.

[Eaglendia]

I did this along with sleepers actually full-halting all Life() ticks so that it was a literal "stabilize the guy while we figure out the cure" thing to give it an actual difference from Cryo one of the last times I refactored med. Players threw a hissy fit.

this was actually good and I was surprised to see it reverted when I got back recently

[Shadowflame909]

I did this along with sleepers actually full-halting all Life() ticks so that it was a literal "stabilize the guy while we figure out the cure" thing to give it an actual difference from Cryo one of the last times I refactored med. Players threw a hissy fit.

this was actually good and I was surprised to see it reverted when I got back recently

It was because it required chemistry to do a lot more work then they could handle/then they would want to do.


The average bagil/sybil highpop round ended up with the medbay storage broken into and raided, with medical doctors having even less to do than before.


It just ultimately backfired, and would require a rework of chemistry before it tries to make the sleepers more involved with them.


like tbh saltpetre drains so much it's unreal that they need 200 units of that for a 100 potency plant

[iamgoofball]

like tbh saltpetre drains so much it's unreal that they need 200 units of that for a 100 potency plant

im pretty sure I removed energy requirements on chem dispensers in the same PR

[oranges]

there is no code solution other than actually making changes bit by bit and I've already committed to doing that

[ATHATH]

Like, if you're so hellbent on making Medbay/playing as a doctor more interactive, just make sleepers only able to synthesize epinephrine (and morphine if you emag them or something).

I did this along with sleepers actually full-halting all Life() ticks so that it was a literal "stabilize the guy while we figure out the cure" thing to give it an actual difference from Cryo one of the last times I refactored med. Players threw a hissy fit.

Because players would rather have NEITHER cloning nor sleepers nerfed/removed. If given an ultimatum ("Either sleepers get nerfed or cloning gets removed"), I'm confident that most of them would choose a sleeper nerf over the removal of cloning any day of the week.

this is correct and what cloning is there for, except the problem is it's gone from "make death not as fucking ass to deal with" to "makes death literally not matter period", which throws a wrench into discouraging people from doing stuff because at the end of the day, we can't have everything be Positive Reinforcement because then there's no tension, some form of negative reinforcement is needed, and the best way is "you might die" since we have no other good ways and players react terribly to any other attempted methods(economy, hygiene, mood, etc.).

You tell me that "death literally does not matter period" after waiting ten minutes to actually play the game again after your corpse is found (a few minutes being cloned/waiting in a queue to be cloned, a minute or so putting your gear back on, a few more minutes waiting in cryo, and then another minute or two breaking into Chemistry to make neurine). And that's assuming that someone actually remembers to use suit sensors to find your body/finds your corpse in the first place, that somebody then goes through the effort of tracking down your body and bringing it back to Medbay instead of leaving it to rot in a hallway, that nobody just leaves your corpse in the scanner, and that Medbay isn't bombed/power sinked before you can get cloned.

[Stillplant]

A question if I may: How long should a visit to medbay take? For example, you are dragged into medbay in crit after being caught in an explosion. Assuming the doctor is competent, and you are the only patient, how long until you will be discharged?

[cedarbridge]

Something that occurs to me is that with the experimental surgeries, there's one that allows for reconstructing and resurrecting a dead patient. I haven't had the opportunity to test this one or compare it to the defibs we have currently, but I kinda like the idea of being able to take a dead body and 6 Million Dollar Man them back to life with cyborg parts and donated/grown organs. It sounds infinitely more gratifying than the current "stuff them in the box and see if there's a working brain to come back with" system. Maybe just give all player bodies bracelets to mark if they're DNR so medical doesn't waste effort and parts on reviving somebody who plans to stay dead.

[Dr_bee]

Something that occurs to me is that with the experimental surgeries, there's one that allows for reconstructing and resurrecting a dead patient. I haven't had the opportunity to test this one or compare it to the defibs we have currently, but I kinda like the idea of being able to take a dead body and 6 Million Dollar Man them back to life with cyborg parts and donated/grown organs. It sounds infinitely more gratifying than the current "stuff them in the box and see if there's a working brain to come back with" system. Maybe just give all player bodies bracelets to mark if they're DNR so medical doesn't waste effort and parts on reviving somebody who plans to stay dead.

I have been asking for this forever. It would give augmentaton surgery and basic robot organs a reason to exist outside of powergaming for the low, low price of making the resurrection surgery standard. Synthflesh or augment the parts that are over the defib window, then do the resurrection surgery, boom, active way of bringing people back into the round.

[Remuluson2]

Actually.....

I thought about one thing nobody seems to think about. Where is all that meat coming from?!

I remember when I was looking through the chef wiki page I was astonished that you can grind bodies of cloned people for meat and when they die again you repeat the process.

What if you had to restock the cloning pod with synthflesh or something like that to restock it?

It would make cloning a bit more interesting and give a genetics a reason to get out of their room.

tl;dr Make cloners need meat to make people.

[legoscape]

Can we not turn /tg/ station into citadel...We don't need a more complex system of medical. I personally like putting a band aid on my bullet holes and being fine to continue fighting.

[cedarbridge]

Can we not turn /tg/ station into citadel...We don't need a more complex system of medical. I personally like putting a band aid on my bullet holes and being fine to continue fighting.

You say that as though medical hasn't evolved to be less turbo-heal slap-patch already. This isn't Baymed's Wild Ride and simplifying it that way isn't doing the thread discussion any justice.

[Super Aggro Crag]

what if you could make new people out of spare parts

frankensteins

[Shaps-cloud]

Hi all,

Like I said in an old thread back a while ago, I think adding more surgery to the game would be fun, but I also think that surgery right now is not very fun to do.

Surgery requires like 5-6 different tools which basically restricts it to happening wherever the tools are (medbay surgery, holodeck, maybe robotics if they're free), since if you're missing one of the core tools, you're shit out of luck for the entire surgery. Sure, there are analogues you can use, but lots of them are hyper specific and weird (you may have 2 different sets of usable ghetto tools for different steps that use the same medical tool), or even rarer/less likely to be on hand than the real thing (wrapping paper is basically a decorative item, and I have never just had a chainsaw or fireaxe sitting around when I need to do surgery but not a circular saw), which means you're probably not going to be able to assemble a ghetto surgery kit in an emergency. To boot, since there's only one set of tools in medbay, there's a hard bottleneck on how many people can be treated at once no matter how many doctors are standing around doing nothing (and it's usually far more time consuming to print out a spare copy of each surgical tool than it's worth, I've never seen people bother). Honestly, the fact that there's a full on-demand surgery room in the holodeck with unstealable tools in the first place is a sign that medbay and robotics isn't reliable enough to handle the surgeries our medical system already has.

I propose adding more minor field surgeries, and then giving doctors mobile surgicals boxes with smaller (and perhaps less efficient and robust) surgical tools that can all fit together in a box in your bag (which I guess you can put them all in a medbelt already, but I like the idea of being able to vend full surgery kits). Field surgeries would still be inconvenient since you wouldn't have an operating table on hand, but people would still be able to seek out doctors and get surgical treatment even if surgery got bombed or there's already several patients waiting for the SINGLE SET of surgical tools they have

This would let you add things like broken bones which could be triaged with brute packs and splints, but would require surgery to return to 100% health, without gating that treatment behind the horrid mess that surgery is right now.

[cedarbridge]

Hi all,

Like I said in an old thread back a while ago, I think adding more surgery to the game would be fun, but I also think that surgery right now is not very fun to do.

Surgery requires like 5-6 different tools which basically restricts it to happening wherever the tools are (medbay surgery, holodeck, maybe robotics if they're free), since if you're missing one of the core tools, you're shit out of luck for the entire surgery. Sure, there are analogues you can use, but lots of them are hyper specific and weird (you may have 2 different sets of usable ghetto tools for different steps that use the same medical tool), or even rarer/less likely to be on hand than the real thing (wrapping paper is basically a decorative item, and I have never just had a chainsaw or fireaxe sitting around when I need to do surgery but not a circular saw), which means you're probably not going to be able to assemble a ghetto surgery kit in an emergency. To boot, since there's only one set of tools in medbay, there's a hard bottleneck on how many people can be treated at once no matter how many doctors are standing around doing nothing (and it's usually far more time consuming to print out a spare copy of each surgical tool than it's worth, I've never seen people bother). Honestly, the fact that there's a full on-demand surgery room in the holodeck with unstealable tools in the first place is a sign that medbay and robotics isn't reliable enough to handle the surgeries our medical system already has.

I propose adding more minor field surgeries, and then giving doctors mobile surgicals boxes with smaller (and perhaps less efficient and robust) surgical tools that can all fit together in a box in your bag (which I guess you can put them all in a medbelt already, but I like the idea of being able to vend full surgery kits). Field surgeries would still be inconvenient since you wouldn't have an operating table on hand, but people would still be able to seek out doctors and get surgical treatment even if surgery got bombed or there's already several patients waiting for the SINGLE SET of surgical tools they have

This would let you add things like broken bones which could be triaged with brute packs and splints, but would require surgery to return to 100% health, without gating that treatment behind the horrid mess that surgery is right now.

Suture kits, leg splints (rod and bandage/torn jumpsuit) etc would be neat

[iamgoofball]

wrapping paper was only ever useful when it bypassed w_class limits tbqh

[cedarbridge]

wrapping paper was only ever useful when it bypassed w_class limits tbqh

Would be more useful if people used the tagging system.

[Dr_bee]

wrapping paper was only ever useful when it bypassed w_class limits tbqh

Would be more useful if people used the tagging system.

Ive actually used it to, you know, give gifts to people as well.

[Shadowflame909]

wrapping paper was only ever useful when it bypassed w_class limits tbqh

Would be more useful if people used the tagging system.

we need a guide for it, no idea how the tagging system works

[Shaps-cloud]

I regret using wrapping paper as an example now

[lutrin]

Idea: first of all, make surgery menu based. Not "press a button, wait a bit, now his heart's out" menu based, but you open the surgery menu for a body part, and you get options like "make incision", "cut through bone", "clamp/cauterize bleeders", "remove [organ]" etc. The main advantage of this would be that you don't need to have the wiki page open/memorized in order to do any surgery, making the process streamlined and futureproofing a bit if surgery needs to be more relevant.
The second advantage would be that, since actions are explicitly chosen and not determined by tool use, you can use the same tool for multiple tasks, or even no tool at all (bare hands). For instance, say all you've got is a circular saw and a welding torch. You need to replace a guy's brain. it might go something like:

• "make an incision (circular saw)" [at a big penalty]
  "Retract skin (hands)" [at a penalty]
  "cut through bones (circular saw)" [at no penalty]
  "deal with bleeders (welding tool)" [at a big penalty]
  "make an incision (circular saw)" [at a big penalty]
  "remove brain (hands)" [at a penalty]
  "insert brain (hands)" [at no penalty]
  "seal wound (welder)" [at a big penalty]

This way, ghetto and semi-ghetto surgery is easier to carry out (but not necessarily any safer) since you can try and "make do" with just a few tools.

Also now you won't accidentally stab patients when you get a step out of order

[Stillplant]

Another use of wrapping paper: conceal a weapon. Wrap up a stunprod, and it looks like a box, making it far less noticable.

[cedarbridge]

The main advantage of this would be that you don't need to have the wiki page open/memorized in order to do any surgery

Surgical computers exist for a reason.