Comes the Forensics Evaluation!
This suggestion is mostly a curiosity/little detail to give some fun storytelling to the game... However it probably could have some use for rangers/investigators, scouts (when they find dead animals or bodies), trackers, people to understand what might be roaming their lands, etc...
The basic concepts are:
- When you inspect a corpse, you get some information from it.
- The more "fresh" the corpse is, the "easier" it is to get precise information. Someone killed an hour ago will be much easier to investigate than a skeleton that has been there for weeks.
- Forensics evaluation could be based on a INT*PER score.
To determine the information retrieved, every corpse should have a "base" difficulty based on its age (difficulty increases over time) and cause of death ("natural" deaths could have a base difficulty of 0 (drowning, starvation...), animal kills could be on the middle ground and player kills should be the most challenging)
If your INT*PER score beats the base difficulty, you get the cause of death:
"This hearthling was killed by another hearthling" for example.
Additional info is "added" the better your INT*PER score is. So, let's say you have at least 120% of the required score, you get the precise cause of death:
"This hearthling was killed by another hearthling with a bladed weapon"
More score could bring more info like: approximately how long ago, a more specific determination of the weapon and even its quality, possibly things like the specific skill (i.e. cleave or chop or whatever) and "evidence of struggle" - which would actually be a comparison between the murdered and the murderer's stats. If the murderer is far stronger, it could say something like "he was killed with brute force" while if the stats are similar it could say "the victim seemed to have put up a fight" and things like this. A "master" forensic evaluation could look like this:
"This hearthling was killed by another hearthling with an arrow (quality 80-100) about 2 weeks ago. There are signs of struggle."
Alone these would make up for good stories but with more "fresh" bodies and scents combined, they can make tracking and ranging even more exciting, since you could slowly gather pieces and figure out the enemies you'll face, for example.
And, of course, any creature body could be inspected so you could track people by trails of dead animals, &tc, &tc...
Anyway, just an idea for the future
