Suggestion:20070504 Who's Packing / "Size Up" Skill

	Closed
	This suggestion has finished voting and has been moved to Peer Reviewed.

20070504 Who's Packing / "Size Up" Skill

Seb_Wiers VeM 01:57, 4 May 2007 (BST)

Suggestion type

Skill

Suggestion scope

Survivors

Suggestion description

Its a bit unrealistic that you have no way to "see" what is in another character's inventory. If a survivor or zombie in your location is hauling around 3 generators, you'd likely notice if you cared to look! And while this may seem like useless information, consider what you'd do if you were a bounty hunter in a location with two known PKers, and had the AP to kill only one of them. Wouldn't it be worth checking to see what weapons they had? Heck, if a "PKer" has no weapons, maybe they are trying to reform, and you can let them live for now.

Anyhow, to the mechanics.

On every character's setting page, there would be a list of all the character's inventory items that have an encumbrance of less than 10%. Next to each would be two radio button options- "concealed" and "displayed". By default, all these items would be "concealed". Items with an encumbrance of 10% or more are always considered "revealed" for reasons that will become clear later, and because they are simply to bulky to conceal.

Alternately, there could be two new drop menues on the main game play page, similar to the "drop item" menu. One would be to "reveal item" and the other to "conceal item". These two methods are functionally identical, and so which you prefer should not affect voting.

Characters with the "Size Up" skill would have an action button with a drop menu of targets. Valid targets would include all survivors and contacts present in the location (be they alive, corpse, or zombie) but would not include "a zombie" or any inanimate objects.

Using "size up" on a valid target would cost 1 AP and would reveal (as a reported result of the action) a list of inventory items you noticed the target was carrying. The target would also get a report to the effect that you were "sizing them up", just as if you had attacked or scanned them.

Now for the heavy lifting- the maths bit.

The chance that an inventory item would be noticed / reported to the person using the "Size Up" skill is as follows:

• For "displayed" items, it is always 100%; all "displayed" items are always seen (not entirely realistic, but it may help reduce server load by limiting RNG calls, and acts as a potential communications tool)
• For "concealed" items, the chance depends on the size of the item and the total bulk of the items the person is trying to conceal. The total encumbrance of items being "concealed" is added up, and half of this total is added to the encumbrance of the item being concealed, squared (4% for a syringe, clip, or shotgun shell, 16% for a pistol or DNA scanner, 36% for a shotgun or ax); this final total (with an obvious 100% max) is the chance that the item in question is noticed. For example, if you were concealing a total of 30% encumbrance, each shotgun you tried to conceal would have a 51% chance of being noticed. If you were instead concealing a total of 60% encumbrance (which would mean most of your inventory was concealed), that would go up to 66%.

  As there is no point in ever trying to conceal any item with an encumbrance of 10% or more, it's not allowed, to stop you from accidentally making other things easier to see

Voting Section

Voting Rules

Votes must be numbered, signed, and timestamped. # justification ~~~~ Votes that do not conform to the above may be struck by any user.

The only valid voting sections are Keep, Kill, Spam and Dupe. If you wish to abstain from voting, do not vote.

Keep Votes

1. Keep author's vote --Seb_Wiers VeM 02:25, 4 May 2007 (BST)
2. Keep had my doubts about this, but the uncertain chance of something being revealed gets a keep from me. You can't hide things totally, and the more you've got, the more likely it is to be visible. Well done with the improvement of the idea -- boxy ^{T L ZS Nuts2U DA} 02:32, 4 May 2007 (BST)
3. Keep -- Cool, it sounds like it has sound game mechanics... --Lord Evans 06:07, 4 May 2007 (BST)
4. i like it --Duke Garland^LCD 07:29, 4 May 2007 (BST)
5. Keep I like the changes you made, thanks. --Rasi 07:40, 4 May 2007 (EST)
6. No regrets here. Move along. --•▬ ▬••▬ • •••• •▬ ▬•▬• ▬•▬ ^{#nerftemplatedsigs} 13:49, 4 May 2007 (BST)
7. Keep Good. Well thought out. Don't think i'll ever use it, but I can see why others would.--Seventythree 14:12, 4 May 2007 (BST)
8. Keep - Eh, why not? --_Ducis ^Dux_Sloth^Talk 15:32, 4 May 2007 (BST)
9. keep - Sounds good to me... - BzAli 13:08, 5 May 2007 (BST)
10. Keep - Yeah, I'll give this a 'yay'. - The Hierophant. 15:18, 05 May 2007.

Kill Votes

1. Kill -This has only benefits for bounty hunters and PK-ers. People carrying generators would get constantly get pre-emptively killed by GK/PK-ers. It would introduce a lot more annoyance for more people for a bit more convience for a limited group--Vista 07:30, 4 May 2007 (BST)

   As I see it, it has massive benefits for revive technicians and healers - which are actually the main groups I had in mind when I wrote it. Scan a zombie. Add it to your contact list. Size it up. If you think the zombie has equipment they are holding that would be useful to the survivor cause, revive them. If they are holding nothing but shotguns, do NOT revive them, as they are probably a PKer or death cultist. Same deal when deciding who to heal.

   As for pre-emptive GK's, how many APs is a GKer gonna spend sizing a crowd up looking for people holding generators? Its a much more useful skill when determining who not to kill, than for determining who to kill. Hell, you want a PKer friendly skill, look no further than "diagnoses". --Seb_Wiers VeM 13:37, 4 May 2007 (BST)

   You may be right on the trencies (no way currently to know, really) - and in that case, I'd rather not revive them. Let them rot with the zombies and the PKers, and let somebody who wants them around revive them. --Seb_Wiers VeM 17:40, 4 May 2007 (BST)

   I find it easy to see wether they're zombie or a revivee. I also think you're underestimating the amount of threnchcoaters loaded with nothing but guns vs. actual PK-ers or deathcultists.--Vista 17:27, 4 May 2007 (BST)

   Kill --Sonofagun18 18:30, 5 May 2007 (BST) Unjustified vote struck; please unstrike when a reason is submitted. --^T 01:01, 6 May 2007 (BST)

2. Kill - Seems a bit too much like x-ray vision to me. --^T 01:01, 6 May 2007 (BST)

   Mind elaborating? I see no connection to the commonly accepted meaning of x-ray vision as it regards suggestions. If it doesn't really affect the voting, it might be better to expand on the discussion page. Either way, I'm just curious. --Seb_Wiers VeM 01:40, 6 May 2007 (BST)

3. Kill - A skill whose only purpose is to feed paranoia between survivors with no other real use but to identify the obvious ("he has generatos and fuel and 'conceals' syringes! he's a reviver!"). No. --Matthew Fahrenheit ^YRC☺T☺+1 10:12, 14 May 2007 (BST)

   Currently there is no way to "identify the obvious", so its actually far from obvious, isn't it? --Seb_Wiers VeM 12:48, 14 May 2007 (BST)

4. Kill - I don't see the point, the games based upon the unknown. You don't know what the other persons intentions are, and thats the risk that you run when reviving. - Jedaz^{ΣT MC ΞD CT SR: 09:42, 15 May 2007 (GMT)}