flightlessavian
commented
11 months ago Excellent idea. I'd broaden it, including within the limit, various species of animal. Cats, dogs, spiders, imps, skeletons, what have you. You could finally make Dathil Leaf into a proper cat cafe, or get the touch of authenticity for your arcane laboratory!
Those Red Wizard towers and Tribune mansions can get awfully empty and lonely, and surely even a relatively well-off mid-sized dwelling for a merchant or a priest of Kossuth would have some sort of service work.
The suggestion is basically to add the ability to purchase stationary NPCs for housing. I'm thinking live-in servants, NPC members of the family, and such. Children models, different race models, the works. They don't really necessarily need to do anything, it'd just populate the domiciles. Might even be able to set them to wander between two points or in a small area, and customize their names and outfits. If you want to add an actually useful component, you could also add in personal guards for more money (with the more expensive guards being more hardcore in a fight, kind of like how you can buy higher level locks currently). Anything from lictors and bodyguards to house-gladiators.
Note that I'm not talking about giving vendor access to non-merchants, just (cheaper) stationary or moving NPCs with customizable names, customizable appearances, and maybe even a customizable greeting text for when other people talk with them.
This is inspired by the fact that romans apparently used the number of servants (slaves, really) they had in their houses to show off their wealth, since it was considered gauche to show it off with mere items. So the really rich romans would have one slave open the door, another welcome in the guests, and a third show them to the living room and stuff like that. We might not want to go quite that far, but it could be nice to have like, the opportunity to buy maybe 2 NPCs for a small house, 4 NPCs for a medium house, 10 NPCs for a big house, and 20 NPCs for a tower or mansion or something like that (just spitballing here).