Investigating Deaths

[MadAtlas]

    I remembered hearing somewhere that if you kill NPCs when they are implemented, you would suffer negative social buffs when socializing with others. But as I heard about this, something didn't make sense, how would these people know what you did if they didn't see you perpetrate the murders? Would they have a sort of telepathic sense that you personally were killing?

 

    This is where my idea would come in. At the moment, there is only one type of corpse, and whether the body was human or zombie seems to be indistinguishable. However, I would think a survivor could easily tell if the person was a zombie or not. So my proposition would be to make a different variant of a corpse, still called a corpse but with a different graphic and a special twist to it. This variant would carry information regarding things such as method of death. If the person who was killed was killed with an ax and left out, a passing NPC could see this person and tell by the wounds sustained he/she was killed by an ax, this NPC would then be extra wary and carry distrust toward any new strangers who carried axes in combat.

 

    This mechanic could also be used by the player to investigate any bodies and tell if there were murderers to look out for, these tags could also give random information upon inspection such as the person's name or occupation, maybe even a trait or two. The option to investigate could crop up like the info tag on plants and maybe if the player met NPCs, the information could be brought up to them in conversation to learn of any affiliation.

[PhantomWarlock]

This sounds so cool, but I doubt it would get implemented. I think it would be the greatest to be a post-apocalyptic detective, and finding how murders went down. I like the idea of certain injuries being shown, and their occupation. But this ability should be even better if your a cop. Maybe if your not a cop, you don't notice if a body was a zed or not. Or, only cops can read the persons information. But this seems like it would be a mod, if anything. I'd love to see the mechanics added though, mod or not.

[MadAtlas]

It doesn't seem too hard to implement. There would be fewer survivor corpses than zombie corpses, and maybe the window that would pop up would share a similar layout to the player health window. I like the idea of police having a perk with this.

[TheLastCandleBurns]

Do you really think that while you search the corpse you pay your attention to the wounds it has and think how this human died, was it zombie or not?  OK buddy, you have very strong nerves to look at the corpse and think about that but not about how to hold in your vomit

[Footmuffin]

As far as I know, killing other survivors won't carry any indirect social consequences like you seem to describe. NPC survivor's won't magically know you killed any other people, they'll only know when/if that somehow gets revealed to or shared with them by someone else who knows about it.

But back on topic, that seems like a really good idea! Maybe RMB on corpse of dubious humanity > Examine/Info and then a fun little pop-uppy screen like the ones currently used for examining the condition of plants that displays fun data about whether the subject died while human, what sorts of injuries they had before/during death,and whether anything's super nasty with their body like a broken leg, gunshot wound, or a split skull! That last thing probably would come after the medical overhaul.

[migulao]

I love that! you find someone killed by an axe, you see another survivor, he was the murderer, but you don't know it and he doesn't have the axe equipped, you bring the topic up (maybe something like: ''be carefull'' just to be in context), and whenj you turn around, he might or might not kill you depending on his personality, so you wouldn't tell anyone else, if this was implemented, it would be a great combo with the personality mechanic that NPCs are going to have.

[d0v3r]

Please someone, somewhere make this happen, not only with npcs, think about the online potential it could have on pvp servers!

 

-great idea OP

[Konrad Knox]

Project Gorgon does this fairly extensively. The more you level up your Forensics skill, the more info you gain upon Examine Corpse.
You get hilarious stuff like:

Cause of demise:

Slashed to pieces by John G.
or
Mauled by a feral animal.
or
Arrowed down by unknown person.
or
Starvation.
or
Punched to death by a furious troll.

 

 

 

Good fun to investigate corpses.