One feature Toady is talking about (which is not this suggestion) is delaying the reporting of deaths in order to facilitate murder mysteries. I find this problematic, as it will make DF's UI "betray" the player. The fact that a dwarf is dead can't be hidden from a single-stepping player. Failing to pause and zoom at the moment of the death just punishes players for un-pausing.
I have another idea for implementing murder mysteries that does not reward obsessive-up-to-eleven play. This is to provide Privacy to dwarves.
A room can be private space if:
- it is a bedroom
- it is assigned to a dwarf
- it has only a single door
- the player allows the designation
A normal dwarf will never enter another dwarf's private space -- it will be removed from pathing. To path into his own private space, a dwarf would path to the door and then use special-case code to navigate his own room.
When a dwarf enters his private space, he would become invisible to the player. Instead, a placeholder symbol would appear in the center of the room, flashing "P" for private. Normally, the real dwarf will also be in the same room, but a hostile disguised as a friendly dwarf may sneak out of it. The real dwarf would be invisible like a thief or snatcher.
He won't stick out on a player "head count" because the player will see the placeholder. The player will know that the "P" means that dwarf has no alibi, but there can be many innocent "P" dwarves at a given moment.
The safest approach for a dwarven murderer is to choose a victim who is also in private (sleeping or on break) -- then the death will not be noticed for a while. The "P" placeholder for the victim will long outlast the actual dwarf. Deaths of working dwarves will be noted immediately, since an attentive player would see the stopped progress.
One parameter the player could tune is the time threshold before a special privacy-ignoring job is generated to check on a dwarf who hasn't been seen. Each "false-alarm" check would cause unhappy thoughts, so a player wouldn't want to set it too frequent.
Turning off privacy would avoid the murder mysteries, but dwarves with no privacy will be unhappy. They'd rather have a private bed in a closet, than an open furnished 3x3.
Players may decide to deliberately give new migrants unprivate bedrooms for awhile, in an effort to "quarantine" out any hidden vampires. The migrants would "earn" a private room after they've gone longer than a vampire could last without feeding. Actual vampires would either die or be caught feeding in the open. Clever vampires might fake going berserk over lack of privacy, in an effort to beg out of quarantine so they can start hunting.