How would you guys feel about using a skill system like this:
Thievery- X points
Pickpocking - Y Points
Lockpicking - Z Points
You can put points or train thievery which general helps all the sills in the subsection or you can specialize specifically in just lockpicking.
I can see that working if you're using points to buy skills rather than training them by use, but there's the problem of where you get the points. Just killing enemies to gain experience and levels doesn't really work because that would leave stealth-based characters forever stranded to the bottom of the experience ladder. For a train-by-use system, I think it'd be better to just have similar skills give bonuses to each other. Both require finger dexterity, so being an expert pickpocket also helps when opening locks? I'm not familiar enough with either to tell whether that makes sense.
How about making training the skill also slowly train the associated attribute, so that becoming an expert pickpocket would also make you more dexterous, thus helping with locks?
That actually sounds pretty easy to do in and of itself, though of course agreeing on how to do all the supernatural shit (and actually implementing it) would add a lot more work, unless it was only trivially different from the mundane stuff, in which case there wouldn't be much point to it...
A setting slider in the game options would be just super if it's feasible. Yeah, I guess most of the hard work would go into implementing the vampires in the first place, and making the game not use them if the option isn't set would be easy.
I'm on the side of location based damage, and a more complex inventory layout. Thus, placing things in pockets, pouches, packs, but also an idea of straps/belts, like you'd get with some guns, or on packs, and needing one's hands free to use an item (perhaps a coordination check to accomplish simple tasks with your hands full?), perhaps even allowing for multiple items to be carried at once (think a bundle of something, or a precarious stack held between one's arms and one's chest), along with a fuzzier encumbrance system than "59.9 weight units and you're perfectly fine to run a marathon across the city! 60 weight units and you can't budge an inch, or have trouble walking across the room (lol STALKER),".
A really complex inventory layout could both help with immersion (I have this knife in my right jacket pocket and I can take it out
this quickly), and hurt it. (What do you mean, "no free grasp"? Just pick up the fucking knife!) The inventory should be easy to manage so that it doesn't ACTUALLY become an annoying puzzle you must wrestle with every time you pick something up. Try playing a game of DF Adventure Mode without a backpack. It's terrible. There should be plenty of ways to carry items (like bags, backpacks, tool belts, pockets, holsters etc.) and the item size and volume restrictions should be fairly lenient. And maybe letting you carry an unrealistic amount of things in your hands, so that if you just want to grab a shitton of stuff and haul it to the other side of the room without worrying of things like stealth and acrobatics penalties, you can do that easily. Giving a lot of really small movement penalties for carrying everything might be good. Having any amount of weight on you starts slowing your running speed, but you can still walk normally with a heavy load. And if you're carrying something weird where it's visible, people should get suspicious.
Speaking of taking knives out quickly, what're we planning to do with time? It might be cool to have things like western-style gunfights where the winner is the guy who draws faster. Would it be worthwhile to separate the actions of drawing, aiming and firing a weapon, so that spraying a magazine of bullets vaguely to the right direction would take next to no time, and pointing the bloody thing at the target would be the involving part?
skills
Would "explosives" be, like, operating explosives or making them? It could be split to "electronics" for knowing how detonators are put together and how you defuse them, and "chemistry" for mixing together your own bombs. Chemistry could also be used for making and identifying poisons and drugs and such. Also, some kind of medicine skill, for basic first aid and generally treating yourself when injured.
(Oh no another wall of text I'm sorry I'm just excited about this)