In addition to communication within a player class, I’ve also been thinking about playing with the current darkness mechanic to allow for different perception for different classes.
We’ve added an “eyes” item that currently allows viewing the description of any item in a “look” mode that is functionally similar to the “fire” mode of arrows, I had also considered adding a “nose” item that animals have that would use the trace functionality that is currently exposed as “There are some names scrawled on the wall, past visitors…”. But having eyes begs some connection to the darkness of rooms– each room has three possible states of darkness, dark dim and light, which is connected to whether a character is carrying a candle (dim) or has fixed a candle to the room (light).
What if the eye item made a character sensitive to the light levels in the room (allowing them to get items and see door names etc) whereas a nose allowed a character to see items and navigate depending on how dirty the room is? Rooms have three qualities, light, cleanliness, and sacredness, which each have three states, so they could function the same way. A ghost might have a sense item that depended on sacredness. This could also be inverted, say a plant has a root item that allows it to “see” only when the room is dirty. This adds a lot of interesting mechanical variation to the classes, and because it’s all item based, if we allow taking sense items after a character died, you could stock up on different ways to “see”.
