Making Shrouds More Powerful

You chase down a hooded punk, and you end up wrongly accusing some big tough guy instead.

Proposal

If someone attacks/aims/grabs a shrouded person, perhaps the game should roll a random number to determine whether their target is the intended Player Character or not. If the roll result is not the intended Player Character, then a dynamically generated NPC is summoned and the attacker's attack is then redirected towards that summoned NPC.

This summoned NPC could be as weak as an immy, or as strong as Seven Ecks. This way, attacking shrouded people is a very risky and perhaps even a non-rewarding thing to do if the summoned npc is itemless.

And perhaps for every room in the game, there could be a population value to determine how many shrouded people there could IC-ly be, and use that to determine how likely it is for an NPC to be rolled as the result. In the case of topside, the value for shrouded people should be zero since there shouldn't be shrouded people in topside in the first place. And thus, attacking a shrouded person topside will always hit the Player Character.

And let's not use skills or stats to determine the roll. Let's just make it so that it's always 80% or more likely that your attack against a shrouded person will spawn an NPC rather than actually successfully targetting the intended Player Character.

After the summoned NPC is out of combat long enough, it will disappear.

This way, we can sort of let the game help enforce the philosophy that we really don't know who the shrouded person is.

The way the philosophy of disguises is enforced is that staff checks for a justification when they review your notes and if it sucks, they tell you so. This doesn't need some D&D 2e style mechanic attached to it.

"Yo, chum! You got any extra shrouds?"

"Nah, but we go outside and we'll get you one once the others scurry out like rats."

I'm joking, but also not joking.

They might get targeted for murder over their disguises, but the chance that you could be attacking a beefy PC instead would discourage that.

I also love Vera's idea of high disguise skill enabling changing what size or even gender you're disguised as. This would lend some actual use to the disguise skill, or getting it to higher milestones. Maybe you could even select from a pre-canned fake voice when you put one on at high disguise levels.

Also, the oops-factor of I'm now fighting an entire gang of chummers because I mistook Jake Hologram for Chaim is a motherfucker.

Also, can we please add a script function for -most- NPC's of "What's your name?". There's a lot of casual meta around NPC names and the disguised NPC's combined with that script could make for some more interesting interactions and NPC aliases.

Love this idea.