I was listening to good old Pete' Molleneux talk about power in games, and how it adds to the experience. And I thought, how can I add a better feeling of power to the game? And it hit me. In the vanilla game, you can walk into a bar, pull out a gun, point it at someone's face, and they won't bat an eye. I'm thinking of making a simple script that would use a target NPC's stats like aggression, confidence, etc, to instill a reaction in them when they are about to be shot and aware of this. The script could also take into account if the NPC has a weapon. This way, when you aim at someone, and they can see you, and are close enough to realize they're about to be shot, they'll either flee, draw their weapon and aim it at you, or draw their weapon and shoot you. Basically fleeing would be for NPCs who don't have guns, as long as their confidence is less than max, drawing without firing would be for responsible/unaggressive NPCs, and shooting you would be for the ones with either low responsibility or high aggression or both. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions before I try this?

EDIT: I just wanted to mention that I play a heavily modded game where guns are a lot more powerful and ammo as well as weapons are much more rare, so this would fit better in a game like that than in vanilla, but it would still work for both.

Sounds like a cool idea. I think it shouldn't happen instantly, but instead NPCs give you like 3 warnings with a delay in between. So someone about to flee says "hey I dont want trouble", "please, stop waving that gun at me", "ok I'm out of here". Same goes for aggressive types, and probably some in between that say something like "look, you don't want to find out what happens if you keep pointing that thing at me".

I like the idea exactly as you described it, but it might be hard to do well.

One thing to think about is that the player sometimes takes out his weapon just, well, because it's a mouse click to do so, and its easy to click your mouse.

I've noticed a dialogue classification called "ironsights" or something similar, but I'm not sure the game's configured to use it atm? Maybe it pertains to this thing.

Agreed, sounds very cool... and yeah it's the PLAYER IN IRON SITES. All those special ones are in the Genericadvlt quest.

Hey guys good news, the script I'm working on works at least somewhat. I haven't tested it much, but so far a few NPCs have run away from me, and only when I had my weapon drawn and was pointing it near them and if they could see me. Made me feel pretty awesome to be honest. haha