The Miscellaneous Ideas And Noteworthy Things Thread

[Lephys]

We had a similar thread, but it seems to have sort of died off. So, instead of necro-ing a thread, I figured I'd just whip up a new one.

 

This is for all those little ideas you get for things that could apply to P:E. Basically, not really super-in-depth discussion about how to design systems, or do things from the ground up, or whether or not to put in crafting, etc. Just various "I just happened to think of this" things.

 

For instance, what I just thought of, whilst playing a game in which I ran into an "Investigate this area, and look for any clues to what happened/this person's whereabouts" situation, was this:

 

How about having Perception (or perception-related skills/stats, abilites, etc.) affect your detection of clues in such a situation? The common thing I've seen is a big, blatant blood splotch on the terrain every 15 feet. And yet, people are all "Hmm... it's a mystery the details of what happened here. Who knows where this person might've been dragged off to?". So, what if your perceptive capabilities (your character's/party's, whatever) determined whether or not you find blood and/or other clues very close together, or very far apart?

 

What I mean is, maybe you see blood, so you know to look generally in this direction. But then, there's not anything so blatant for another... I dunno.... 50ft? So, with good Perception, your character might notice broken branches/little bits of clothing, etc. You know... tracking-type clues. so, you'd say "Yep, they were here" about every 10 feet, because of your exceptional perception checks. But if you had crappy perception, you wouldn't be able to find any clues until the next big blatant one. Which, being decently far off, would have you actually searching around more before finding the exact trail something/someone took.

 

This could work for blood, or really anything that would leave clues behind. And, obviously, some situations aren't going to be much of a mystery, and some situations are going to have easier-to-find clues than others.

 

But, if there's any kind of Survival/Tracking-type skill at all in the game, or anything that could even partially cover that, I think it would be pretty great. Especially if there are going to be "Hey, I wonder what happened to this guy who went out into the woods" scenarios. Something a little more nuanced, instead of just "obviously there's a huge blood splotch on the ground every 10 feet... You can literally see like the next two, on the screen, within your sight range. No player would EVER not-know which way to go at ANY point in this entire 'search'."

 

Please share your own miscellaneous ideas, as you think of them, and feel free to weigh in on individual ones. Although, if the discussion of a given idea gets pretty extensive, it'll probably be best to make a separate thread just for that idea/topic.

[JFSOCC]

But why not necro my thread

It's not like I'm invested or anything

[Azmodan]

Like your idea, Lephys. I can see it working as a "trail of breadcrumbs" at a predictable distance, where all clues start invisible. Depending on party's maximum perception only every nth breadcrumb can be revealed (still needs to pass the roll).

I liked how they did this in Witcher II, where you can either try to follow a trail of blood (hard when blood is lost in the underbrush), or you drink a potion, and go into a "predator" mode, where everything is black and white, except for blood and living beings (which are orange and golden). Theoretically - a ranger should be able to "cheat" past a puzzle of this type.

[neo6874]

Having parts where "hey, this random skill I got was actually USEFUL" is always nice -- a lotta times in cRPGs your options are pretty much limited to "use rogue -> find trap -> disable trap -> continue on".

 

I can't recall *ever* having a point where "oh hey, good thing I kept that ranger in the party for their tracking skill!"

Edited December 13, 2013 by neo6874

[Lephys]

But why not necro my thread

It's not like I'm invested or anything

 

I'm sorry. I was very torn, for what it's worth. I figured it was best to avoid 17 comments of "OMG, this thread hasn't been posted in in like a month! Even though it's still perfectly relevant!"

 

And yeah, the trend has been to sort of make such stuff (if it's even the game in a manner that affects several different scenarios) rather binary. "Oh, you've got someone with lots of tracking? YOU FIND THE THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR! Oh, you didn't have someone with tracking? You can't even just grid search the entire area and find it. It's now impossible to find. Your party doesn't even know how to search an area, much less track something."

 

It's great when things have layers. When perception allows you to see the extremely-faded symbol that was embroidered onto a corpse's bloody clothing, and knowledge skills allow you to be aware that the particular pose of the corpse means something in particular, or maybe where someone of this order would have a secret pocket sewn into their robe/clothing to keep some valuable ring/artifact/money/item-of-non-monetary-value-but-strategic-lore-value, etc.

 

But, yeah, that in particular always irked me. Not that there was a scenario at all that had the player simply visually track something, but that that was all you ever ran into. Especially when there were like... wrong ways to go and stuff, but the bload-soaked trail was blatantly the right way. I wasn't aware a human body had THAT much blood in it. "Guys, this blood trail is 3 feet wide, and we've gone like 300 yards already... it's still a solid drag-trail of blood! WHAT DIED?!"