Watch an adjacent room
But be vulnerable to being snuck up on.

There are certain items that allow a player to 'look' into another room. It would be nice if you could instead 'watch' the other room, with the tradeoff that you don't see anything in the room you aren't watching (namely the one you're in). The game is already able to distinguish speech from actions within a pose, so that same system should be able to make hearing what's going on require additional items to accomplish.

As it stands, it can be rather spammy to watch in a specific direction while keeping an eye out, and allowing the lookout to watch that room as if they were in it could likely promote people using lookouts on jobs.

I thought that regardless of commands how the 'thingies' worked had to do with other thingies. Since I remember them mimicking this effect to some degree.

Villa,

I'm not 100% certain as to what you are referring to, but I believe you are referring to a hideable static item that requires installation in the location to be watched and is difficult to permanently deal with as a trade off.

If I got that right, there is both overlap between this item and my suggestion, but also there are unique aspects to both that retain their individual utility. In my case study, the 'watcher' is left blind in their occupied space while watching the adjacent space, and thus trades mobility for vulnerability. In your case the tradeoff is opposite, in which safety is gained at the expense of mobility.

There are useable portable items that allow you to 'look' at adjacent rooms, not 'watch' them. Giving the watching capability to those items is the scope of this thread.

Apparently tags ate the content of my last post:

"Would 'look direction' be disabled in this case..."

This already exists unless I'm missing something.