Nonmagical detection?

[kingvictory2003]

I've found playing pure fighters that I often resort to peeking around a corner, then stepping back and waiting a good number of turns to see if a nasty enemy or a mob comes around. This gets tedious as light radius is quite limiting, and the speed with which a character can get killed is pretty, well, quick.

I was thinking along the lines of a "Hunting" category of talents, where a specific species, such as Undead or Animals or Humanoids could be sensed, have bonus damage applied to them, and even have a sort-of telepathy based on superb detection of minutiae (ala Bene Gesserit mastery of subtle observation).

Here's an example:

Talent: Hunting-Undead

a) Sense Undead
-You have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to successfully sense undead in a radius of 10. The radius increases with your Cunning stat.

b) Hurt Undead
-Your damage vs. undead is increased by 5/10/15/20/25%.

c) Stalk Undead
-You can constantly track undead in a radius of 3/4/5/6/7 based on your superior ability to detect subtle sounds, scents, and supernatural auras. (radius 7 too powerful? but investing points into a species-specific telepathy could be a big deal) -Could make it drain stamina slowly?

d) Holy Wooden Stake
-Through your intimate study of Undead, you have learned to create a potent tool of undead annihilation. You can swing your stake with a stamina cost of 25 for a 150%/175%/200%/225%/250% weapon damage attack with a 5/10/15/20/25% chance of instantly killing the undead monster. Uniques cannot be instantly killed in this manner, except for Vampires.


This is of course very, very preliminary. I was thinking similar categories could be made for dragons, demons, humanoids, animals, and constructs (including golems, elementals, or if they're gonna make it into ToME, vortices). As to balance, that's something I haven't spent the energy to really think through, but such can be tweaked easily (I assume).