New Skill - Analyze Death

[Yummri]

Feel free to come up with a different name for this guys. Because I wasn't sure. But!

There should be a skill for trained doctors/hunters/assassins who would know a lot about anatomy enough to heal, skin or place a killing arrow and saycritical strike a human body etc.
That allows them to see how something died.

The varying skill levels could arrange from just noticing what type of damage killed from stabbing to chopping at low levels to much more detailed descriptions as you gain a mastery of telling the signs of death.

This could be a great way to rp around finding bodies, solving crimes or simply telling a little more about rival assassins in your area or other hunters.

Even before medical science was as advanced as it is today. There were some people who could tell what killed others or animals and even guess when or how long the body had been there based on rate of decay and weather conditions etc. I think this would make an interesting skill and a great new addition to improve rp around this otherwise uninteresting discovery of bodies. Let finding a body be more than what loot it had and leaving/disposing of it.

[ShaLeah]

I remember ideaing this 12 yrs ago for the physician subguild as autopsy lol.

[catchall]

I too had this idea when I started playing.  I feel like it's almost a rite of passage when you start playing a permdeath RPI.  You realize, hey, permdeath means murder investigations can make sense.  So then you want an autopsy skill.  It would be awesome, but if you go beyond the killing blow, it does imply a new code system to track damage.  We don't see a whole lot of new code systems come in these days.

No disputing it, though, it would definitely be cool.

[ShaLeah]

Right. A simple "The body has been slashed/pierced/chopped/clubbed/burned/stoned/clawed/punched to death. It bears the distinct markings of a <insert critter here> attack" would make it so much more interesting!

[BuNutzCola]

Though not foolproof, when I have played characters in which this sort of thing would be actually necessary and my pc had the relevant background, I have found the wish command to almost always give some sort of insight, if it was apparent.

[Voular]

And murders ho leave pc or npc corpses to be found generally use the arrange command to leave clues about what transpired. And if you do not then you should!

[Yummri]

I just think it would actually allow for the tracking down of criminals or rivals and give players more reason to interact and rp. I think it would be based on killing blow or at least wounds inflicted on areas of the body.

Most of the bodies I've come across are just left there with no sign and no hope of locating the culprit. Which really doesn't make a lot of sense. But yeah I think it shouldn't be to much information.

Location o killing blow, other major wounds, the type of damage done...then as you get better maybe you can pin down the weight or size of the weapon. and so on.

Enough to give clues, but not so much you can ever say exactly what did it. So other work still has to be done. It would be nice to see something like this.

[Riev]

What if you were "bad" at the autopsy skill?

Code Select Expand


autopsy corpse
The body looks like it was bludgeoned to death, with many cracked ribs.

autopsy corpse
The body looks like it was slashed, and then dismembered.

autopsy corpse
The body looks to have been shot by a cannonball.

autopsy corpse
What corpse?


[Ktavialt]

If you "wish all hey I'm trying to figure out what killed this guy whose corpse I'm in front of" the immortals have in the past modified the ldesc of the body to give a decent hint.

[RogueGunslinger]

If you "wish all hey I'm trying to figure out what killed this guy whose corpse I'm in front of" the immortals have in the past modified the ldesc of the body to give a decent hint.

I've never had your luck.


I think this is a great idea.

[Yummri]

If your bad at the skill, you'd either  get a "You can't be sure exactly" message

Or a partial truth, you think it could of been a slashing weapon that caused the fatal blow, but it could be a chopping weapon too....

Things like that

[Wish]

This idea is awesome.

cast 'mon un please please please' morgenes

[Barsook]

I dig this.

[Orin]

Or perhaps during the death sequence, depending on the weapon skill used, a tdesc would be attached to the body.

"It appears the body has been bludgeoned quite heavily"

"Several stab wounds weep a dark red blood"

"Lacerations are seen all over this body, some slashed in quite deep"

I don't like the idea of a skill that would be exclusive to certain guild/subguilds.  Anyone who has lived in the world of Zalanthas would know what certain wounds look like imo.

[Yummri]

I originally thought that. And on that I was thinking more that everyone would have some basic knowledge of it. But if you ever wanted to be a master of it you'd need to be of a guild or subguild that would allow a higher skill in it.

[Molten Heart]

Maybe dead bodies could include clues as to how they died, like wounds, other markings, etc (that everyone could see).  Maybe some dead bodies would lack any outward clues and would require someone with skills to learn more, if possible.

[slvrmoontiger]

I honestly don't even see why this work be important. Most of the times no one cares how a commoner died... This would probably just be for nobles and templars.

[Narf]

There's two types of bodies in the world.

Headless and headed.

If you can't learn all you need to know from that, then infer harder.

[KankWhisperer]

This is a great idea. Usually the body is just there. Usually you get no addiditonal information from wishing up. The only thing I would add is time since death, or decomposition affecting it.

>Autopsy body

>It is far too decomposed to tell.

[James de Monet]

I honestly don't even see why this work be important. Most of the times no one cares how a commoner died... This would probably just be for nobles and templars.

Not strictly true.  This would also be very useful for wilderness characters.

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Somewhere in the Wilds [NESW]
The body of an insect-like scrab lies here.

>autopsy scrab
The body has been pierced to death. It bears the distinct markings of a tarantula attack

You think:
    "Oh shit."

>run
>e

-vs-

Code Select Expand

>autopsy scrab
The body has been slashed to death. It bears the distinct markings of a humanoid attack

You think:
    "Heh, check out this newb."

>draw skinning boots
>skin scrab

-vs-

Code Select Expand

>autopsy scrab
The body has been burned to death. It bears the distinct markings of a magickal attack

You think:
    "OH SHIT!"

>flee self

And in situations such as these, I probably wouldn't bother the Imms with a wish, myself, but it could still be very useful to know.

[slvrmoontiger]

I don't  know how you'd autopsy something and then skin it. Technically an autopsy already does remove things.

[James de Monet]

True, but I don't think Zalanthans are performing that type of procedure.  They are just looking at the corpse and going "Whelp, those are some big, parallel slashes.  Probably claw marks.  Big enough to be a gwoshi."

It doesn't really matter what you call it, autopsy, inspect, analyze, ass -v.  Some of these already have associations that would have to be expanded.  Autopsy doesn't (but it might leave the question of whether the skill will consume the corpse, as you point out).

[perfecto]

also wouldn't help much if I used a severed scrab claw to beat you to death.. would look like a scrab did it!

(ponders the thought)

[Lizzie]

What if...

The bandage skill, combined with the skinning skill, would produce an "autopsy echo" when you skin something? Since an autopsy basically is just a medical version of skinning something anyway.

So the higher the two skills, the more likely you are to discover the cause of death. If you don't have bandage, but do have skinning, you'd see something generic - like - "The body has been battered" (indicating a fall, or being pushed, or being dropped from the sky, or in a fist fight, or possibly blugeoned) or "The body has many open wounds" (indicating some kind of physical altercation, or possibly ripped to death by fleeing through the thornlands to avoid a bahamet attack). Or "the body appears physically intact" (indicating he died from poison, even if he might have a single wound where the arrow hit, it wasn't the arrow that killed him and the arrow wound isn't significant anyway)

If the skill is high enough, they might see that the types of "battered" wounds look more like some kind of altercation, rather than a fall or drop from a height. If there are many open wounds, you might notice they are slash-marks, or axe-wounds, or wounds from something sharp and pointy, or the skin appears to be gored (indicating either claw marks of antler marks - something not caused by battle with a humanoid). If the body is intact, therefore likely poisoned, then maybe it'd give off a hint of a smell of the particular poison that killed them.

[evilcabbage]

Not all poisons have a smell.

[Synthesis]

The overarching problem with this is that it isn't going to work unless you add code to track -every- source of damage that a PC took prior to their death.

If you instituted a simple "register the killing blow and add a code flag matching it," it could be very easily circumvented by the mercy system.

E.g., you could backstab someone into the negative HP range, then pull out a hatchet for the killing blow, and the simple-register system is going to read "This dude was killed by an axe-wound to the neck."

[Orin]

"This dude was killed by an axe-wound to the neck."

I actually laughed and caught my coworkers attention at this.  Best analyze echo ever.

[Fujikoma]

I like the idea. Maybe have backstab or ranged weapons register regardless of whether they did the killing blow. Not sure it would be a good idea to have it set up so that you had to skin the corpse to find out, although being able to cut up a body and transport it piece by piece somewhere it is unlikely to be found would be pretty neat.

[James de Monet]

The axe thing would be OOC abuse, IMHO, and it would still tell you that this guy didn't die of poison, starvation, or overdose, which would give different connotations about his death and your reaction.

[Narf]

The axe thing would be OOC abuse, IMHO, and it would still tell you that this guy didn't die of poison, starvation, or overdose, which would give different connotations about his death and your reaction.

I'd tend to agree that you could just put a rule under the help file that says 'switching weapons after most of the damage has been done for purposes of messing with analyze death is not allowed' rather than trying to code it in.

[Cutthroat]

But Synthesis's example can just happen on its own without attempting to force it. For example: Guy gets filled with arrows, runs into a gortok. Autopsy skill tells us "This guy died of a gortok claw to the face" despite all the arrows sticking out of him. Or a less contrived example, if a person was attacked by multiple people with different weapons, that should ideally be pretty obvious to discern. Figuring out the exact wound that killed someone is difficult when there are dozens of wounds of different kinds in the game.

If an idea like this is implemented, the system needs to record every wound. Which would be good if it is possible.

[James de Monet]

True, but I would much rather have a system that detailed only the killing blow than no system at all.

(And such a system would probably be significantly easier to code than tracking all damage done to any living thing ever)

[Orin]

You could get around this by adding flags for the following: last hit weapon type, percent majority damage, percent minority damage, did player die from poison, arrow count.

Suddenly it's the dude who was stabbed to death, but has a broken, bludgeoned arm, a small amount of lacerations, and three arrows sticking out of his back.

To be quite honest I think that would be the most I would expect out of a MUD's code given the limitations, and would take some time to code properly.

[Jherlen]

Agreed that we'd need to record more than just the killing blow. Consider this possibly unlikely but plausible scenario:

Amos meets Talia at the bar in Tuluk. Talia buys Amos a couple drinks and gives him the sexy eyes. Amos leaves the bar with Talia and they go to her apartment. Suddenly it turms out Talia is actually a soul sucking abomination!!! Talia blasts Amos in the face with a giant fireball. Amos, on the edge of death, lunges at Talia, who kills him with a breadknife. Talia then uses her magick powers to escape. A little later, the ever hard-working soldiers of the Legion find Amos' remains in Talia's apartment. "How did this man die?", Corporal Malik asks. His partner, who examines the corpse, says, "Looks like he was stabbed to death."*

Killing blow could be misleading, and in cases where the cause of death is relevant to a plot, I'd rather trust in staff to provide the info over just a "what was the killing blow" sort of implementation. That said, if we had code to track all sources of damage and give a bigger picture, that would be REALLY cool.

* I tried, I really tried, to think of a CSI: Miami joke here, but it evaded me.

[Quirk]

You could get around this by adding flags for the following: last hit weapon type, percent majority damage, percent minority damage, did player die from poison, arrow count.

Yeah, this would be a serious undertaking. I can claim to be pretty well qualified to speak on this as I was the coder who presided over rolling out and tweaking Traithe's wound code on Harshlands just after he left to found SoI.

Percent majority damage sounds much easier to track than it is. Consider a case where someone takes 50 damage from source A, 30 damage from source B, heals 20 points of damage, takes 40 damage from source C and dies. What's the autopsy going to look like? Depends how the healing was split - is it even, is it oldest first? What if the healing is an ongoing thing? You rapidly approach a point where it makes no sense not to implement it as a wounds code, because you're doing nearly all of the work for it, and because a wounds code leads to a lot more RP than autopsy code. A wounds code would be a big thing to retrofit though, because many very different things can do damage on Arm and all of them need catered for with a damage type.

But once you add new things to track for each player savefile (you don't want the damage information to disappear when they log out after all), and a mechanism to transfer these to the corpse object... well, certainly, it's all doable, but if we consider a sensible and useful suggestion like this:
http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,46418.0.html
well, we're talking about two orders of magnitude more work, in my estimation.

So - what if we just look at the last wound taken? We're still doing quite a lot of work. There are many things that could inflict that last wound, and all of them need touched by this code. And we're still open to Amos and Malik talking until Amos is actually starving, then Malik beating Amos down to negative HP and leaving him for dead, and the starvation doing the last few points of damage.

It's a nice idea, but the payoff looks far too slight for the effort if we compare it to many other suggestions.

[Brytta Léofa]

Let hitpoint loss be caused by attaching an Affect to the character whenever he's effectively hit or otherwise damaged, and healing happen by decaying these affects over time.

Code Select Expand

Amos.damage[] =
 [0] a nasty black eye (-2 hp)
 [1] a sucking chest wound (-85 hp)
 [2] some big, nasty wounds and scratches (-32 hp)
 [3] deeply charred and blackened skin all over his body (-258 hp)
(The muscular, tall man is quite dead.)

I don't doubt it'd be a demon to implement.

[evilcabbage]

1 and 2 are like 117 hp on their own, I doubt most people could survive that kind of damage.

And yes, it would be a bit of a demon to implement, if I have even half an idea of how difficult it was to code SoI's damage system. That's something that would GREATLY affect the game, possibly in a negative way, given what we know about most peoples lifestyle in this MUD.

[Brytta Léofa]

That's something that would GREATLY affect the game, possibly in a negative way, given what we know about most peoples lifestyle in this MUD.

It doesn't have to be done in a way that changes gameplay: make all the damages the same values as today, and have HP regeneration just apply to wound affects across the board; the only difference is that you can identify what all the wounds are.

(And you could have better auto-ldescs: "looks very ill," say, for poison, or "is battered and bruised" for sparring encounters.)

But a huge investment, sigh.

[Desertman]

I remember being in Luir's once and I'm in the Kuraci Fist, and we find some poor sap's body.

I recall seeing someone holding different kinds of daggers up to their wounds trying to "figure out how they died" and seeing what blades "fit the wound".

Someone sends:
"What is this CSI?"

Laughs were had.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

There is an extremely easy way to do this. Its hodgepodge, but it would work. Aside from some very minor code.

Write up wound objects that decay at various rates. Give these objects to PCs as they are wounded. These would be checked by weapon type and amount of damage. Instead of saying he carries these, say he bears these.

They would be flagged as noremove and 0 weight.

They would be on a corpse as well until they decayed, at which point you can just say the body is too decomposed to know what killed him.

[Fujikoma]

There is an extremely easy way to do this. Its hodgepodge, but it would work. Aside from some very minor code.

Write up wound objects that decay at various rates. Give these objects to PCs as they are wounded. These would be checked by weapon type and amount of damage. Instead of saying he carries these, say he bears these.

They would be flagged as noremove and 0 weight.

They would be on a corpse as well until they decayed, at which point you can just say the body is too decomposed to know what killed him.

Would have to make them no-remove, however.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

1. In corpse becomes on corpse. This is doable with a simple check for the object type, and, if corpses have no code flag but container, then create a new object type for corpses so the code can check appropriately.

On the corpse of the tall, muscular man:
a sandcloth shirt
a pair of grey pants
a pair of worn boots
a nasty head gash
a horiffic many-toothed bite mark on the chest

2.Expanding on what you see when they are alive ...

This man is tall, and muscular. He has green eyes and red hair.
The tall, muscular man is in poor condition.
<on torso>               a sandcloth shirt
<on legs>                a pair of grey pants
<on feet>                a pair of worn boots
He bears:
A nasty head gash
a horrific many-toothed bite mark on the chest
He is carrying:
a large bag

[James de Monet]

That would be really cool, especially if you could target emotes at your own

Code Select Expand

>em fingers ~massive.black.contusion, wincing

Wouldn't it show up in your inventory, though? And mess with the number of things you could carry?

[i love toilets]

Make corpses last longer, and you have my vote.

[Desertman]

1. In corpse becomes on corpse. This is doable with a simple check for the object type, and, if corpses have no code flag but container, then create a new object type for corpses so the code can check appropriately.

On the corpse of the tall, muscular man:
a sandcloth shirt
a pair of grey pants
a pair of worn boots
a nasty head gash
a horiffic many-toothed bite mark on the chest

2.Expanding on what you see when they are alive ...

This man is tall, and muscular. He has green eyes and red hair.
The tall, muscular man is in poor condition.
<on torso>               a sandcloth shirt
<on legs>                a pair of grey pants
<on feet>                a pair of worn boots
He bears:
A nasty head gash
a horrific many-toothed bite mark on the chest
He is carrying:
a large bag

Venomz is here having another great idea.

I would like to take your idea and apply the same sort of concept to food so that it could decay over time given the proper tag. Cooking food/drying food/salting food/preserving food in some way with the "cook" skill would reduce the rate at which it decayed. This would also make all of that salt everyone is digging in the south IC'ly useful and valuable. It would also make hunters in Houses a lot more valuable. It would also makes the cooking skill, cooks, and food in general more valuable.

It would also just be more realistic than everyone having apartments with fifty pieces of raw meat that are five IC years old that are still edible.

A meaty steak.
A fresh meaty steak.
A stale meaty steak.
A aged meaty steak.
A decaying meaty steak.
A rotting meaty steak.
Nothing.

Once something reached the "stale" stage you could still eat it without risking food poisoning, but you could no longer cook it/cure it/dry it to preserve it further.

Eating anything older than "stale" would result in a chance to be poisoned.

(Probably needs its own thread.)

[evilcabbage]

1. In corpse becomes on corpse. This is doable with a simple check for the object type, and, if corpses have no code flag but container, then create a new object type for corpses so the code can check appropriately.

On the corpse of the tall, muscular man:
a sandcloth shirt
a pair of grey pants
a pair of worn boots
a nasty head gash
a horiffic many-toothed bite mark on the chest

2.Expanding on what you see when they are alive ...

This man is tall, and muscular. He has green eyes and red hair.
The tall, muscular man is in poor condition.
<on torso>               a sandcloth shirt
<on legs>                a pair of grey pants
<on feet>                a pair of worn boots
He bears:
A nasty head gash
a horrific many-toothed bite mark on the chest
He is carrying:
a large bag

Venomz is here having another great idea.

I would like to take your idea and apply the same sort of concept to food so that it could decay over time given the proper tag. Cooking food/drying food/salting food/preserving food in some way with the "cook" skill would reduce the rate at which it decayed. This would also make all of that salt everyone is digging in the south IC'ly useful and valuable. It would also make hunters in Houses a lot more valuable. It would also makes the cooking skill, cooks, and food in general more valuable.

It would also just be more realistic than everyone having apartments with fifty pieces of raw meat that are five IC years old that are still edible.

A meaty steak.
A fresh meaty steak.
A stale meaty steak.
A aged meaty steak.
A decaying meaty steak.
A rotting meaty steak.
Nothing.

Once something reached the "stale" stage you could still eat it without risking food poisoning, but you could no longer cook it/cure it/dry it to preserve it further.

Eating anything older than "stale" would result in a chance to be poisoned.

(Probably needs its own thread.)

Make your own thread for this so I can voice my support and stop being a Dr. No.