Cluedo Casualty

The game of Cluedo involves six protagonists, nine rooms and six murder weapons. This means there are two gross-three dozen character-weapon-room permutations, which makes for a potentially interestingly varied game.

Casualty is a semi-unintentionally comedic medical drama which, at its best, involves random patients of the week being maimed in entertaining ways before admission to an A&E department in Bristol, whoops, er, Holby.

Now imagine combining the two. Create a TV medical soap as follows. There are six characters and nine settings, and six possible ways in which medical emergencies can be incurred, all of which are survivable but involve a high degree of peril. Each of these are chosen carefully so they can occur in each of the nine settings to each of the six characters. Each medical emergency has interesting consequences.

In each episode, a pseudorandom number generator allocates each character to one of the settings and one of the medical emergencies. This enables considerable investment in the sets and simulations of the nature of the incidents concerned as they can be endlessly reused. As each mishap has consequences, interest can be maintained by increasing disability per patient, but in interestingly varied ways according to the order in which they are injured. Only six actors need to be employed to play the patients. Since the same sets are constantly re-used, a stock of footage can be built up to reduce time and money spent in producing the thing. Then there are actors playing the medical staff.

Most of the script can easily be written by a computer program which generates relevant text strings which would occur in each circumstance. A casually-employed part time writer can be sent the script each week to clean it up, remove discrepancies and write bits which the program fails to anticipate.

The result is a varied medical serial where initially healthy patients get increasingly and entertainingly injured as the season grinds on, until at some point they are all dead and have to be replaced. However, it would make sense to wait until _all_ of them are dead so as to start afresh every few months. The problems they encounter are varied and the consequences change according to the medical history of each patient, so there is a sort of butterfly effect in each subplot.