Safe house features

Depending on whether or not your safe house can be attacked:

Outside Monitors
Monitors for hidden or placed camera's around the area, both outside or ajacent to the entrance. These sorts of things help give you a heads-up on any uninvited guests, giving you time to escape your Safe House before they reach you.

Booby Traps
These can range from laser triggered warning systems, to nerve gas, flashbangs, or explosive mines. These could be equiped with triggered arming systems to help surprise potential intruders (and keep common civilians from accidentally setting them off).

Dedicated Utilities
Satelite Communications and a spare Generator suite separate from the buildings tele-communications and power grid. This is in case any potential attacker cuts the power or telephone lines to cut you off or disable any defensive measures you have installed.

All-Clear Call
This is a small safety measure designed to indicate whether a Safe House has been compromised or not. The player calls his Safe House from anywhere in the city and connects to an automated answering machine rigged to a door trigger/laser. If his safe house has been compromised (the doors been opened for example) the message on the machine will change to reflect this.


On a more generic note:

Medical Suite
A small operating room built into one of the bedrooms of your Safe House. This is in case whomever maybe trying to kill you (police, CIA, mafia, etc) maybe watching any nearby hospitals for you. This can be made even more useful if you have a trusted doctor/friend/teammate you can call/bribe to make a house call to patch you up if your injuries are too severe to do it yourself.

practice area.

Have ranged weapons and a combat system that uses player input to determine hits rather than just target and dice roll? Let the player learn to aim in peace.


Workshop, let the player either customize just the looks of their items with a built in feature, or actually change values on the stats of their items.

If you have a large world, let the player buy several houses.

If you can buy several houses, maybe allow NPC factions to raid you if you are getting too powerful and are impacting their efforts. Rather than a purely safe place to run to, they become something you can manage. Throw in being able to hire guards and run little fortified areas, and you could have a cool little side line to your normal RPG.

All of these ideas are very clever. Here are a couple less useful but somewhat fun features:

Recreational area
Some of your most recent off-duty lackeys and soldiers can lounge around, relax, and have fun here. They can watch movies, play video games, play drinking games, pool, cards, or whatever. Any time you need to use or hire one of these guys, you only need to look in this one place to track them down. Plus they would automatically help defend your safe house if it was attacked.

Laser Tag and combat games or "Danger room" (similar to Talroth's practice area)
You can load up all of your current party members and off-duty lackeys with non-lethal weapons and play combat games. The games could increase normal combat skills by a certain fraction of real combat. There could be several types of games with varying rules. It may be a way for skilled NPC characters to spread skills to non-skilled NPCs.

I always like to see a way to review information or plot you've experienced earlier in the game. Whether a bookshelf to store documents you've found, a TV to rewatch cutscenes, or a computer to review enemy data, some way to view backstory pulls me deeper into the game.

a pet of some kind

maybe if you have a snapshot element in the game you can take snapshots from your game and put them in photo frames

Mini games are often quite good

Teleportation module. Teleports you back to home when you're about to get pwned by a bad guy.

Personal computer. To access mail, the internet and what ever else you need to access on a computer.

Radio/ CD Player: ... for music