As some of you might already know, this idea has been suggested already. I found at least two threads about the same thing but none of them went into much detail. I personally came up with all I'll type here thanks to a comment by
Marko while we were chatting.
General concept
Basically the idea is to add a new item to the game, Paper, that has some of the characteristics found in the already existing
Holodisk. A player can use Paper to write down a short message, then leave the note on the ground, in a container, etc.
How would the Paper item work?Writing down a note: exactly the same way we put messages into Holotapes - use Science on the Paper, a window pops up and you can type your message and select a title for it.
Reading a note: a player is able to read the note written on the paper by "
examinating" it. The message will be displayed in the item's description area of the Inventory window. This exactly how the player could read the
Note from Francis found in Broken Hills, in Fallout 2. The fact that the note appears in the item's description will make it necessary for the text to be really short (also a
maximum number of characters should be added).
By the way, the note
should not automatically add the name of the character that wrote the message, which should be anonymous instead (that is, unless the one who writes wants to include thier name in the message itself) because this way we would have more possibilities (for RP purposes, for example).
What about rewriting? I personally think rewriting a Paper
should not be possible, that the work needed for that is not worth it, because the item could work perfectly without this option. If a person wants a note destroyed, it can be simply thrown into the fire thanks to the last update.
Obtaining PaperPaper should imho not be too difficult to come by, but at the same time there should be some sort of limitation. I thought about the following ways of getting paper, which doesn't mean that I think only one of them should be implemented. I don't think it would hurt to have all these options:
1. Buying Paper from NPCs, via dialogue and with a fixed price in caps, just like Holotapes are bought. The price should be lower than that of Holotapes and there should be a cooldown on it, just like with Holotapes.
Maybe the cooldown for buying Paper should vary from town to town: so towns that are rather "rural" (Klamath, The Den, Modoc, Redding, Gecko, Junktown) would sell Paper at a lower rate than bigger cities (Vault City, Shady Sands, Necropolis, The Hub, Adytum, San Francisco, New Reno), because the latter are build on much larger Pre-War settlements and/or would make use of a larger amount of paper (State bureaucracy, Caravan/Brahmin business, etc). If implementing different cooldowns is complicated, maybe a difference in prices should do (cheaper in bigger cities, more expensive in smaller towns).
2. Spawning randomly in some traders' inventory, just like it happens with Holotapes, which can be bought at a lower price this way. The same could happen with Paper.
3. Crafting it, maybe with any of the already existing book items, and 1 piece of Chemical Components, to erase their text. Would make books useful for something.
Why should Paper be implemented?To make it possible to leave notes for our friends in bases, shared tents, etc,
in an immersive way that would make players communicate with each other at least a little bit more through the very game and not via IRC or voice-comm. These messages
would not add to the character's Archives, so it would be very confortable to read them without worrying about "spamming" our Pip-Boys.
As it was mentioned before, there was already a note item in Fallout 2 that worked this way (using item description to read), so this would be totally faithful to the original games. Also, the fact that the message appears in the Inventory window forces the text to be really short - this is one of the details that makes Paper different from Holotape, which would still have an advantage.
Being able to leave notes on paper would open
new possibilities for player-driven events (because it helps, as said, with in-game communication between players)
and even for Role Play (because of its immersive nature).
[EDITED] Pen & Paper ideaIn general i'd support this idea. It's one of those little "tweaks" that are'nt really necessary but do add some more immersion into the game. Btw, what about pens? You can write/rewrite holodiscs just by plugging them into your PipBoy...makes sense. But paper?! Wouldn't you need some sort of pen/ink for it?
I am not sure it'd be a good thing to need a pen. Let's think about Cigarettes, you need a lighter for them, but Cigs are a drug used by pvp builds and which can be crafted easily, quickly and in good amounts, so the lighter is a limit to it. Paper however should be a tool to leave a message and it should be easy to use, otherwise forum PMs would be even better than this ingame idea.
Yes, i agree, that i should be easy to use, without the need of extra tools. Maybe the item itself could be called "pen & paper" then, instead of just "a piece of paper" (or "a leaf of paper" 
).
