Hello all. I decided that my thoughts on phones last week didn’t really count as a DD, so we are still on #2.This week I’m going to talk about a new set of features we’ve made for the upcoming but as of yet unannounced DLC: Symptoms, diseases, and doctors. Firstly, doctors, or more accurately, Court Physicians. Court Physician is a new minor title which you can give out to a well-learned person which makes them responsible for diagnosing and treating illnesses in your court. Now, symptoms! No longer will you simply become “Ill” through an event, instead you will receive one of a variety of symptoms and over time you could become sicker, either you will gain more symptoms or they will evolve into a full blown disease, or perhaps you simply just had a cough and it will pass in time. When you first get a symptom if you have a Court Physician they will first attempt to diagnose what the cause is, and then administer a treatment - if their diagnosis was correct it’s more likely the treatment will be successful. Here we can see the unfortunate Doge Orso becoming unwell:


The full list of symptoms is: Cough, Fever, Diarrhea, Vomiting, Headache, Chest Pain, Rash, Cramps, Abdominal pain, Fatigue, Malaise. Depending on a number of factors your symptoms may well manifest into a disease. We’ve added some more diseases too: Flu, Dysentery, Gout, Food Poisoning (not a disease exactly), Rabies, and Cancer.
As we can see, Cassio was right, Orso did have Food Poisoning! I skipped over a few more symptoms appearing, and here they are removed and replaced with the Food Poisoning trait. At this point your Court Physician will call on you again to offer further treatment. This part is a bit more involved, and depending on the skill and traits of your Court Physician they can offer you up to 4 choices of treatment method: Experimental, Mystic, Proven, or Cautious:

• Experimental treatments tend to involve radical methods and/or surgery and very much depend on the skill of your Court Physician. Results will likely be very good or very bad depending on how it goes.
• Mystical treatments are offered by Court Physicians with the Mystic trait and often involves an appeal to a higher power. Because of the capricious nature of spirits, or possibly due to the mind-altering substances used to contact them, Mystical treatments may result in strange outcomes, and can even result in a change of personality in the patient. The power of faith is strong though, and when Mystical treatment goes well it can go very well indeed.
• Proven treatments represent the tried and true methods which are well-known to work (at least for a given value of “work”). They rarely go too badly wrong, but equally they do not have a huge effect when they go right.
• Cautious treatments are very safe, but often do little more than make you more comfortable. They will almost always be successful, but have a fairly minor effect.