Search in a lot of RPGs is pretty standard: You have one or more characters in some environment with a skill called search which, if it succeeds based on some test, reveals something not otherwise obvious (a hidden door, treasure, a trap, etc.).

In a lot of games its pretty generic pass or fail. In some you can spam it at no cost. I've been thinking about making search resource based (maybe you need special particles to "scan" an environment), in order to give it an opportunity cost, with a kind of "getting warmer / colder" dynamic.

Are there better implementations out there that you've heard of?

I think it needs to be "fixed efficiency" which means no randomness and no resources. Otherwise the load/save routine will be repeated by the player over and over again. Unless, you can disable/restrict the load/save somehow (which usually is ugly).

I would assume that Search would be a stat that you could augment with special glasses, contacts, and/or magic. It would be a skill you train like any other skill.

Why not allow searching, but once an area is searched don't allow any further PRODUCTIVE search of that area by the same searcher until skillup (including buffs from items, etc.)?

Just a thought!

I remember the old might and magic games had a search spell that depending on your magic level marked treasure, and lootable corpses on the mini map and at higher levels highlighted hidden doors and switches in red on the screen. Or the more recent batman arkham games where things were highlighted when in detective mode.

What about if the player has a tricorder, sonic screw driver, cell phone, omni gadget whatever you want to call it. The player can install and activate different modules that have different effects. Passive modules decrease available energy while switched on while active modules temporarily use energy while in use.

So if it has 100 energy and I switch on the life form scanner which uses 20 energy then I can see nearby lifeforms. If I switch on the weapons detector which uses 50 energy it highlights weapons on npcs and tells me what they are armed with. Both of those on reduces my available energy to 30 which means I can only run the hacking module for 30 seconds at a time.

Another option for more a survival type game would be to give the player the option to use probes to boost treasure drops from certain searchable areas. For instance a junk pile might normally give level 1 drops, but you can use a probe to boost that to level 3 drops. In this way search is used to boost the quality of what you find from certain containers.