New Skill: Eavesdrop

[Darvor]

Suggestion for a new skill

Eavesdrop

Allows a player to hear conversations, or parts of conversations in nearby rooms. At higher levels you can hear farther and with better accuracy. Perhaps even through closed doors. Could be made a covert skill maybe, not general use, I'm mixed on that. Also, could have a detection check if someone else comes in, they could see you are trying to eavesdrop, higher skilled, can hide it. So its not a passive skill, but a command driven active one. Just a thought

-Dane (Darvor, Jochen)

[Qharos]

There are a couple concerns about an eavesdrop ability. The first being any measure of protection. Likely, anything done via psay or whisper would be completely undetectable.

The second being how the eavesdropper would be noticed. Forcing an action, while doable, removes any chances of not being detected. A command to check a person's state seems excessive, and a chance to detect upon look could be easily abused by repeating the look command. Possibly a stat check to see if an onlooker notices, compared against the skill of the eavesdropper. This would remove the random chance, though.

Level of skill would certainly determine the usefulness of an eavesdrop. At lower ranks, you'd likely only hear very garbled speech, and (whichever method is used) be fairly detectable. At higher ranks, it would be harder to notice, and the speech overheard would be much clearer.

Maxed out, I wouldn't think a skill like this would hear 100% of each set of speeches, nor understand 100% of the words.

What are thoughts on how the eavesdropper would be detected?

[Sofia]

A couple suggestions for detection:

-Force an action, but don't have it break hiding, so if a person wishes to hide the fact that they are eavesdropping, they can hide and then use the eavesdrop command.

-Provide an additional covert argument. Ex: eavesdrop <direction> [covert]. If you use the covert argument successfully (skill check with random factor when you try to do it!), no messaging goes out and no one sees you're doing it. If you don't, there would be the usual messaging. However, using covert would also make it more difficult: when listening covertly, you would hear less at the same rank than when not.

<3 Sofi

[Darvor]

All of this sounds good to me. I'ld make it a public skill. It can be used in partnership with hide in order to keep it hidden from others. If used outside of hide, everyone in the room can see you are doing it, with a tag line like when you have a weapon drawn or something. If in hide, the eavesdrop command does check on the skill plus hide skill minus room factors like number of people, light, whatever it is you nutty Imms use . With sucess the person remains hidden and eavesdrop, maybe with slightly reduced effectiveness. Even at the grandmaster uber-powerful skill of 81, a player may not hear every single sylable and letter, but it should be pretty dang close. At adept level, They should barely be able to pick out words here and there, and if lucky, they'll be able to piece things together.

[Onasaki]

I agree with this, though, I don't think it should be a skill. It should be a sort of continuously-active skill sorta thing. I saw it in I think 2 other MUDs, prior to this one. Depending on how far you are away from a room you could hear certain things. Or if you're close enough you could hear a whisper, or something.

It'd work alot like listen checks vs Whisper. Though, to really work that in correctly. We'd need to supply automatic support for the map code. I see alot of people standing in the same place 100% of the time and I've heard whispers completely before. To make this work, we'd have to introduce code to actually automaticly move you about the room "map" when you sit at a bar, or a table. Rather then it keeping you in the same place.

Maybe have it echo to you, "You must get closer!" for certain things like that. Though, back on topic. It should work like whisper. Where-as if you're close enough to a door, or a room you can hear bits and pieces of a conversation. It's the exact same thing, but less of a skill and more of an automatic thing.

[Sofia]

I think without actually trying to do this via a command, this would be annoying to get these messages. Especially for people who step away from the main room to discuss in more quiet. It would also be self-defeating. If people could always hear you from the next room, it's always a bad idea to stay anywhere close to accessible. Whereas if it's a skill, people can shrug off the risk due to a limited number of people who are any good at it. Then only the people who want to be extra cautious move further off.