More ways to ask people for information

[indigo bridge]

Currently we can only ask people for:

• their name
• their fingerprints
• "do you know this person?"

Some other questions I'd like to be able to ask people:

• where do you live?
• where do you work?
• does anyone else live with you?
• what's your phone number?

Although they shouldn't necessarily be willing to tell me those things. Also we should be able to bribe them for this information like we can with other questions.

Additional questions that might be interesting, although they might be more difficult to implement in a good/balanced/fun way

• Where were you at $time? (where $time is the datetime range for when the murder victim died; this would only be available if i've currently selected a murder case)
• What are your hobbies? (This would be a way to identify people when we get hints like "likes creative writing"; currently the only way to discover this is to ask neighbors or roommates)
• Are you suffering from any medical conditions? (like the above, to identify people when we get hints like "suffers from high blood pressure")

Additionally: I'm aware that there are other ways to identify if people have medical conditions. I suppose it's technically possible to identify their interests as well, but this is a lot less straightforward. Technically I can find a chemistry set at someone's house to identify that they're the person with "interests: chemistry", but it's kind of hard to know what's random world clutter and what's supposed to be useful.

Also, while I would think that most people should refuse to answer if you ask them if they have medical conditions (although a lot of players would probably think this was funny & enjoy being able to ask), people should be willing to talk about their hobbies and interests. It's weird that somebody is a huge chess fan, but won't talk about this to me and only his neighbor will tell me.

[heavy ginkgo]

just to add to this, I feel like the dialog menu is extremely cluttered, and adding more options like these (which is probably inevitable) would make it worse - the dialog menu needs to be cleaned up for repetitive questions that you're asking a lot of people to avoid a lot of painful scrolling

[dusty solar]

to resolve the issue of cluttering of the dialogue panel is to just section parts into subsections within the dialogue. An example could be you can ask if you may ask a personal question, which will give you the options to go back or ask about their medical history, workplace, relationship status and such

[unreal night]

You could potentially have a new piece of equipment like a "Notepad". Where you use it to interact with an npc for investigative/interrogative dialog.
And that note, after the dialog finishes, would become a piece of evidents to pin

[pearl sonnet]

I'd like to see some reaction from the victim's partner if they have one.

Player: "I'm investigating the murder of your spouse. Can I ask you some questions?"
NPC: "Like I'd tell you."

I mean, it'd still be possible for the NPC to not be helpful anyway, but I think most of the time the surviving spouse would be pretty forthcoming about whatever you ask about the deceased.