So, one of my players made a Suk Doctor, main understand, sub disciple, as a character, while the rest of the party is more battle oriented. Besides healing the other players, how can I give him more “action”?
One thing that I was thinking was to give him a new poison or biochemical weapon to which he has to create an antidote, but making something like that ever so often can be a bit jarring and boring…
Also, the limitation that Suk doctors have to exclusively work for payment makes it a bit hard to make something in the lines of “this city has been plagued by an illness and needs at least its fighters healed to protected the city against invading forces”.
Assuming all your players work for/are loyal to a House, then the mattter of payment is already handled by the House itself, and your Suk can (within the restrictions of his conditioning) can be ordered by the Head of the House just as your other players can. And, anyway, healing the House’s citizens and not just the leadership could well fit into the scope of his employment.
In other situations, if there isn’t a Mentat in the party, your Suk would be the next best thing with all the rigorous training and mental discipline they undergo. So while the Imperial Conditioning would prevent him from doing some of the things a Mentat would, there’s still plenty of intelligence work he could still do.
Also, with the reputation that the Suk enjoy, he could gain access to enemy facilities and personnel that none of your other players could, and he could hear things that would be very valuable. It would be a fun role playing challenge for your Suk to try and communicate to the rest of the party the secrets he learned while tending to an enemy House’s leader, without breaking his conditioning or violating his oaths.
There’s one Mentat in the party, but he “specialized” on bureaucracy, so the doctor is usually the one that knows science and stuff like that.
That part of infiltrating the enemies’ bases is really interesting, but supposing that they still have the oath that prevents them to disclosing patient’s medical status, this would be near impossible imo
That’s what makes it such a fun (or frustrating) challenge!
Or, the other way for your Suk to approach that situation is that he would have to do what the FBI calls “parallel construction” - if they discover a crime through inadmissible evidence, they have to work around that and come up with alternate and legitimate evidence (that has no connection to the unusable evidence they already have) so they can take action.
I don’t have as much combat in my party but the Suk doctor has been quite active in making friends and doing a chuck of the investigation work.
Merely as a doctor she can get people to trust her and if she reveals her Suk conditioning then she has that extra level of authority as everyone knows the skills and restrictions that she has.
As for the battle aspect there is nothing stopping them using psychological tactics (careful use of Communicate or Understand can be as powerful as Battle here) and non-lethal weapons (stunners, Bolas, etc) against enemies. They just have to make sure they are not harmed once they are subdued. Something that may put them at odds with less restricted party members.
But the inter Party conflict over philosophy can make for fun RP. As long as your group can separate player from character that is.