Long story short: I had an abstract idea recently to roll and pair dice together to perform various actions. But I quickly realized that I did not really need to do this as a detailed system of classic skill rolls could actually do the job.
Now the real problem is how to deal with the various threat on the board most specifically the mobile threat (Guards), because I could possibly easily design an obstacle course where you do various skill roll during your path, but when you add people to the map, it is very complicated to keep track of alertness, guard status, AI script, etc.
So I thought that it's the opposing forces that needs to be abstracted, not the player. So my idea is that each area of the board can have at most 2 types of cubes (Guards and innocents). I could look similar to something like that (last year's prototype):
http://bgd.lariennalibrary.com/uploads/Mainsite/GameIdea/GameIdea2010050...
Now when you enter a square(area) you flip a number of cards equal to the number of guards and innocent people. Now you must take your actions in this square according to those people currently present. You could kill them, trick them, sneak on them, etc. Then when you are done and move to another square, the enemy characters do their last resolution, like finding dead bodies, and then the cards are discarded. A new set of card is drawn for the new square. So when the actions in a square is over, the game forgets what happened in that square, and then move to the next square. If something bad happened during that encounter, alert levels could raise, new guards could spawn or move on the board, etc.
So it follows the philosophy of detail the game on demand instead of detailing the whole board. It somewhat makes more sense because the area is likely to get crowded by much more than a few guards like seen in many video games.
The alert level is more like a global alert level that effects everyone.
Keeping track of individual awareness is actually what I want to avoid because it make the game fiddly and annoying to manage.
One solution could be to use a low scale detailed map, where you'll have at most 6 or 8 enemies in order to keep track of everything. They could even have a character sheet of their own. Reminds me of invisible inc. Then again, not very convenient because it would now require a more sophisticated AI.
Else while looking at my game collection, I was thinking about dungeon quest where certain tiles has some special effects and when you enter an area, and when you draw a card as an encounter.
I could use a similar system where every time you enter a new area, you have an encounter card. The type of area (Houses, garden, etc) could determine which kind of card is drawn. The card could contain a list of chararacters, obstacle, or a difficulty to use certain skills. Or even a mini map containing where the people are positioned on the tile.
I gave some thoughts to the map design, and to make terrain interesting to navigate, I thought of maybe allowing player not only to move between space, but also move in corners and move between corners using walls, rivers, etc. It could look like an octogon + square tile floor.
Right now, I think I should be focusing more on making an obstacle course without any people and see if that can make a fun game. Then I could see how people could influence the core rules.