Sleuth Home - Message Boards - Newbie Questions

Nov-7-2005 03:44

Is the number of questions you can ask before a suspect or people in town clams up again purely random?

Nov-8-2005 07:10

Yes, that is the help bar. What indepth information do you require more?

Nov-8-2005 09:20

I think the thing here is that you are going to have to do your own research on the "X factor" as you play. I am not sure anyone else has tracked it in the detail you are asking for, and if they have, they might not want to share it. We tend to tell everyone almost everything about the game, maybe sometimes making it less fun because we do so, out of a desire to be helpful. In this case, I think the best way for you to get the indepth information you desire is through playing. Even if you invest in a skill or gear and later wish you'd made a different choice, it's not the end of the world. The last thing I'll add is that if you don't have stress detection, you might want it, as it lets you know when people are going to clam up.

Nov-8-2005 10:27

Granted, there are people who prefer the inner mechanisms of games to remain hidden to them. However that's not the case with me.

The less I know about how a game's gears moves the less interested I am in it [in time]

I'd love to take this game apart before my interest wanes, but the only way to do that right now is by performing something highly illegal. There are no game guides with formulas, no character simulators to test things out on. A significant amount of the important numbers are hidden, even with the Judge of Character skill.

So my only recourse is to rely on experienced players and whatever observations they've garnered on their own or passed down from even older players. After all, I've seen people list down the exact numerical effects of some skills.

The purpose of my question was to see if I should start mapping my character's secondary focus in terms of gear, if it should be on Smarts or Toughness.

At face value, Smarts seemed to have the upper hand as Toughness apparently only did one thing and Charm pretty much filled that role. Having more accurate PE would save more questions than having another option when unclamming PE Townspeople. So what if Interrogation worked, it'll only get me probably give me a totally random number of questions on evidence that might not even belong to the killer.

But this extra tidbit of the Charm/Toughness bonuses lent weight to considering Toughness as my secondary focus, now that I have an idea, albeit rough, that Charm and Toughness actually help in getting more questions, better PE might actually be not as an investment at the better chance at getting extra shots at WE [and PE as well] and an equally better chance at getting a good number of these "extra shots"

Of course a reply to this would be that instead of asking the help of people who could provide me the information, I do my own tests, but I doubt I'll turn up enough information before I lose interest in pursuing the matter any further.

Nov-8-2005 10:46

*that Charm and Toughness actually help in getting more questions,*

that Charm and Toughness also help in increasing the number of questions you get from their respective conversation skills.

Nov-8-2005 11:07

Take smarts as your secondary tool.

Obviously once you have more skill points you can then choose a second persuasion type. Then once you can judge character, you can use whichever method is more likely to bring success.

Theres too much randomness in the gsmr to give anything other than rough guidelines, it seems to me that the models simplistic - theres not all that much to take to pieces. If I were you I'd get an awful lot more excited about the rules behind autocad or something.

Nov-8-2005 11:16

Excited isn't exactly the term for it, it's just how I normally play PC/console games. Or anything with RPG elements in it.

Nov-8-2005 17:16

I'll think you'll find that using smarts as your secondary skill will benefit you the most, for the exact reasons you mentioned above. I don't have numbers to crunch, but I do use charm/smart/tough skills, and find that the smart is more helpful than the tough on a consistant basis. With my charm skills, the tough skills are a convience more than anything. (Of course I could reconstruct my outfit and lean toward the tough skills and make charm skills the convience easily enough as well.)

Nov-9-2005 01:56

Sleuth has some elment of luck build in. So even if you had the exact numbers it wont always help you.
I have judge of charcter skill (since ive strated) so I can see the numbers. But even with that some ppl will clam on me when the chance is 90+ and others will talk around the 70+. So luck is very important.

Nov-9-2005 02:11

Of course, I dare say that almost every game in existence has luck or random chance factored into it one way or another.

It's not the issue of getting the perfect results [although that's the what I'm aiming for] but optimizing with that goal in mind.