Game mechanics of the npc dialogue

[Elemental_wanamingo]

One of the reasons I don't generally play characters who have lots of skillpoints in speech skills and stats is because to me it almost feels like I am circumventing part of the game simply by choosing a text option that is basically just a skill/stat check. And when I choose that option I basically get what I wanted without doing really anything. I just click a one special line of dialogue and avoid 10 minutes of combat.

In comparison when I play combat oriented character I need to manually play through the combat so there is more gameplay there. And more importantly that means I have to make decisions whether I can win that battle, do I have enough resources for it or do I need more time to prepare for it. Or maybe I just need to gtfo and come back later with bigger guns. I do get the idea that some people play these kinds of rpgs for some other reason than combat. Or to avoid combat. But to me it seems kinda worthless. I mean you pretty much get the same dialogue options with a character than is 1 step below the skill or stat check. That char just doesn't get the special option.

Same thing with skills like hacking. Just walk around the map and find a speshul computer in some corner where I can right click and choose hack and a speshul door opens which allows me to bypass 10 minutes of combat. It is a bit like having a gun that instakills everybody just because your stat is higher than the statcheck.

So why that is? I mean why is the speech based character most of the time just a skill/stat check? I'd like to see a game that offers speech and combat as options to have more gameplay with the speech. Instead of just choosing the special text option that let's you through if your X parameter > Y... maybe have some kind of game mechanic that requires similar amount of gameplay as the battle option?

Obviously the next question is how to do it? Would not like it to be some kind of stupid minigame. Adding more minimissions (do this for me and I'll let you go) would not really work either because then it is no longer a speech driven dialogue but a mission that anybody can do. Also I dunno if having a stat or skill check for alternative missions for speech characters is the way to go either... Maybe one way to avoid this is to have the player manually type in the dialogue... Although that sounds super slow. But at least then there would be more gameplay in the dialogue in trying to figure out the magical words that give you the result you want.

Although it would still require skill or statcheck but I'm not really against skill or stat checks. I just don't like when one whole style of play is basically a skill or stat check in dialogue.

Maybe there is a game I don't know about which does it somehow?

Anyways. Since I'm a newfag I think the best thing I could do is to start a new thread and mention arcanum>fallout2 and then ask what do you think? Do you agree that speech driven characters in games like fallout1/2/3/4/5/6/7/arcanum/shadowrun/all rpgs suffer from how the speech oriented gameplay option is most of the time just a skill or stat check in the dialogue and there is most of the time no gameplay in choosing that special option in the dialogue. In shadowruns for example it is just one specially highlighted option in the dialogue options.

 

[Bester]

Typical dumb fighter irl.

 

[Erebus]

I fully agree that having the PC's Diplomacy skill (or Bluff skill, or Charisma, etc.) be the only factor that decides whether or not you can bypass a danger by talking is rather boring.

In order to turn a dialogue into a challenge just as exciting as combat, I think you have to offer dialogue options that require good thinking from the player.

Let's say your PC is trying to persuade an important NPC to do something risky that would greatly benefit your quest. The dialogue options offer three different tactics : appeal to the NPC's sense of honor, appeal to his greed by promising him a large reward, appeal to his hatred for a common enemy. Clues are given (in the dialogue itself or by other NPCs) about the personality of the NPC you're trying to convince ; if you (the player, not the PC) are perceptive and clever enough, you can figure out which dialogue option is going to convince him. Social skills could still play a role (for instance by giving you a second chance if you didn't pick the right dialogue option the first time), but shouldn't completely erase the challenge simply because they're high enough.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

There are a few approaches I've seen. The "higher persuade skills give higher percentage of success" is probably the worst because it's begging for you to savescum past them. Player stats giving extra dialogue options is a good approach, although if it turns into a dialogue I Win button then that's also bad. Ideally, your options would be broader depending on stats, but you need to use common sense or knowledge you've obtained somehow to choose which ones are best and the glowing blue or yellow icon shouldn't automatically mean it's the best option at any given point. Persuade having ranks and just a simple pass/fail isn't very good, although when you layer several different persuade stats (e.g. charm vs intimidate vs seduction or whatever like in Vampire) it can be done well. In general you don't want one key to open every lock.

In terms of dialogue "battles" that you mention as an idea, the only one I've ever seen is in DXHR, which has dialogue boss battles at various points in the game. The core idea is solid enough, you get a little character personality summary in a window to read, which you use to figure out which of 3 options to use depending on what they are saying or doing. Additionally, you have a little gizmo that tells you whether they fit into a generalized "alpha" "beta" or "omega" personality type, and you occasionally get the option to do a sort of super persuade uppercut which works if you've read them properly.

You fly a bit blind if you don't have a particular aug ("Social intelligence enhancer"), but when you do have it things become too easy, and additionally it is a one-and-done augment, there's no additional ranks in the skill once you unlock it. It is good because it encourages you to pay attention to both what your aug is telling you and also how the other person is behaving - you pick up one one of their behaiviours and go "oh, he's trying to deflect the conversation, I need to refocus him". But it's bad in that as I said above, it's one of those "one size fits all" kind of things. Less egregious because it does require some player interactivity, it's not just a "do you have aug yes/no", but still needs more fleshing out and to be split over a couple of upgrades.

 

[Black Angel]

So combat = gameplay?

I thought skills checks, even that in the dialogues, are part of gameplay mechanics in an RPG? But what do I know, I'm a newfag in cRPG fanbase.

So why that is? I mean why is the speech based character most of the time just a skill/stat check? I'd like to see a game that offers speech and combat as options to have more gameplay with the speech. Instead of just choosing the special text option that let's you through if your X parameter > Y... maybe have some kind of game mechanic that requires similar amount of gameplay as the battle option?

Maybe what you're looking for can be found in here.

 

[Neanderthal]

^What Erebus said, as demonstrated in Alpha Protocol but wi a bit more depth, an hopefully more than three options which could be given by stats.

Say you've got a bluff old general who hates gobshites: Spend too much time gabbing and he fucks you off, you've failed. Sum up quickly, answer smartly and accept no shit and he'll like cut o your gib. Admires plain talking and getting to fucking point.

Then you could have some fucker like Gann in MotB who likes word games, smart anwers, quick wits, and you'll need your most insightful or charismatic responses to attract him.

Thought dialogue wi Ravel in her maze in Torment were a good high point, you weren't sure of yourself, wrong answer could lead to trouble and losing out on bonuses or information.

Also bring other shit into it: Inventory, past experiences, who you know in common, rumours and hints, who you've killed or spared, all o these should be used for important dialogues.

 

[Telengard]

Binary social skill results are dumb, but they're also about the only thing normally available. As I may have mentioned before (heh heh), having lots of variability in combat options is possible because the output of combat - no matter how many options are dumped upon it - is always a single, computer-calculated number. While having convo options, in contrast, results in a series of explicitly written developer text results. And RPGs are already at 5-10 novels worth of text as it is, which is about the limit of human endeavor.

Yeah, sure, you could just increase the size of the writing team, but rpg writing teams are already so large that their stories already lack a sense of overall style and quality. It takes a rare individual as lead to conceive of a 10-novel plot with a whole bunch of variability in the story, and then take all that and be able to guide a team to the same type of style and production throughout. Add even more people to the team, as well as sub-managers and such as the team grows, and watch the whole thing turn to shit.

But if you want to see what social skills as gameplay looks like, just go play the Sims. 'Cause that's what that game is built around, so you'll see exactly what would result with a full social model implemented in an RPG.

 

[epeli]

So OP doesn't like binary skillchecks and would like to see more in-depth mechanics for everything? Who doesn't, but realistically speaking... there's a limit to what can be done.

Implementing anything more than a simple succeed/fail condition for dialog branches is a lot of work when there is a game's worth of hand-written dialog and scripting involved. One thing devs could do to alleviate this is to plan their game around insane amounts of dialog branching and a large number of dialog skills. Check out Age of Decadence, it's a perfect example. If not the perfect example.

If you want to keep hand-written dialog and simple binary outcomes, yet have more involved gameplay than a static pass/fail skillchecks, there are a couple of approaches. Either there is a minigame of some sort or your dialog skills affect a random chance to pass the binary checks. The latter is often awful and just leads to savescumming, whereas the minigame approach probably could be developed. After all, it could be said that even combat is one extremely well developed and integrated "minigame" with binary outcome, win/lose. The problem is, someone would have to come up with a good dialog minigame. I don't expect that to happen on a genre this old after seeing so many bad attempts.

Then there are the oldskool keyword-based dialogs and some attempts to modernize them. Not a personal favorite. Keyword based dialog systems will suck until we have rudimentary AIs running them. As they are now, they are the most cumbersome way (for the player) of doing hand-written dialog.

A more unconventional approach would be ditching hand-written NPC dialog and abstracting NPC interaction as a whole to something that's a better fit for complex mechanics. Not an option for typical character/dialog driven RPGs, but could work for in some exceptional cases.

 

[Erebus]

And RPGs are already at 5-10 novels worth of text as it is, which is about the limit of human endeavor.

True enough (for recent games), but it's not uncommon for said text to include a lot of useless shit. The romances in Bioware games are a good example. They were fairly basic in Baldur's Gate 2, but they still required a lot of writing ; in more recent games, they look like extensive dating simulators. Yet they're completely unnecessary and seldom benefit the plot at all.

Even outside of romances, some discussions with companions/NPCs are much more elaborate than they really need to be. It's okay to develop the personality of a significant character, but you don't need to have him tell the PC at great length about his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his first love, the dog he used to have, etc.

Cutting down on unnecessary interaction would leave the writers more time to make plot-relevant discussions actually interesting.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I think best dialogue system is better based on the player's skill to read and analyze someone's personality.

Like instead of skillchecks, you have am array of responses in order to persuade someone.

Good example of this is alpha protocol and deus ex: HR. There are still in-game skill that affect dialogue outcome, but parts of it are affected by player ability to choose the right tone of the response, whether to lick their ass, aggressive, use flattery, threats, or trying to make a deal.

Like, powerful people with big ego, you have to stroke their ego, if your opponent is pragmatic, calculatinv person, you should make a deal and show them how they benefits from this, weak minded and cowardly people, you have to threaten them or ensure their safety, etc, etc

 

[undecaf]

I do agree that win button dialog checks are pretty boring, but they do also have their place in certain kinds of situations.

One way to make dialog more mechanically (and expressively) interesting could be to allow the player to adjust the tone in which any given line is said by the PC. Like, for example, having a tick box in the dialog UI that presents the options "Soft", "Indifferent", "Aggressive" and letting the player evaluate which one would best suit the situation based on the NPC's demeanor (where there are skill checks, the choice might either hurt or improve the chances), and the NPC's reaction and willingness to cooperate/discuss further/give further info would be based on how the tone might affect his disposition towards the PC. For example, an aggressive sounding demand might require an even more aggressive tone on top for a muscle giant brute to comply as he might respect that kind of tone more (or alternatively, if you've happened to build a small framed character with little intimidative capabilities, you might try to be sly and use the indifferent tone to drive the discussion to your direction, lest you be laughed off), whreas some other type of character might require a softer tone for the same line lest he gets too scared; and even some mundane lines that aren't about getting anything, but simple discussion, might also get some new kind of flare when the player needs to think about how the PC speaks. Or some shit like that.

 

[felipepepe]

What really makes dialog mechanics boring is how most modern games use it as a clear "better option" - if you have enough Diplomacy, just pick the colored glowing option and you'll get the best possible outcome. For example, this is pure bullshit:

Not only it's a very simple check, but the writing is garbage and has no context. I honestly thought this was false or made for laughs, but no - choose the "SPEECH" choice and you win.

Fallout 1 did this a lot better not only by having more elaborate dialog, but also by having secondary items & information like the Brotherhood of Steel scientist that could be persuaded to talk about her autopsy... and having the autopsy data would make convincing the Master easier.

IMHO the perfect approach would be that - I wouldn't even have diplomatic skills, just make the player collect relevant information & objects needed to persuade others - almost like an adventure game. Combat should be the short & dirty route, not the other way around.

 

[Neanderthal]

Think it were interesting in Dead Money to see a positive skill check punish you wi Dean Domino, think that were MCAs commentary on winning everything through tapping "I win" button.

 

[Elemental_wanamingo]

I really like the idea where the speech skill doesn't just let the player through but instead the speech skills would give you extra information along the way that you can use in the dialogue. Maybe even have the game offer conflicting pieces of info and force the player to choose which way he wants to go.

Similarly I like the idea of npcs having maybe 3 skill factors you need to take into consideration when talking to them. Call those factors something like talkativeness, offensiveness and narcissism. Npcs that have high talkativeness will talk with you until the end of time while npcs with low talkativeness have very little time or interest to chat with you. Offensiveness is a that trait requires you to win the argument by volume. What you say matter doesn't really matter as long as you say it more loudly and more intimidatingly than the other guy. But on the other hand npcs with low offensiveness don't like insults and will react negatively if you try to intimidate. Narcissim is of course flattery. High narcissism npcs want their ass licked, low narcissism npcs will rip out your brown tongue. Or maybe not those 3 options but something along those lines.

Then have speech skills that make those stats visible during convo so you can game them with choosing different options. But like all other dialogue options these would add to the workload of the dialogue writers. You'd still have skill and stat checks but you still to play it smart to win. Not just choose the specially marked I wins buttons. Having this kind of system would definitely make me interested in playing a speech character.

So combat = gameplay?

About 95% of the time the special speech option is used only for avoiding combat. In 4% you get a little extra mission reward money and in the 1% then maybe opens a sidemission. I never said combat=gameplay. Combat is gameplay but gameplay is a lot more than just combat. But still most of the time the two clear options you have is to either smooth talk through a situation or fight through it.

And RPGs are already at 5-10 novels worth of text as it is, which is about the limit of human endeavor.

True enough (for recent games), but it's not uncommon for said text to include a lot of useless shit. The romances in Bioware games are a good example. They were fairly basic in Baldur's Gate 2, but they still required a lot of writing ; in more recent games, they look like extensive dating simulators. Yet they're completely unnecessary and seldom benefit the plot at all.

Even outside of romances, some discussions with companions/NPCs are much more elaborate than they really need to be. It's okay to develop the personality of a significant character, but you don't need to have him tell the PC at great length about his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his first love, the dog he used to have, etc.

Cutting down on unnecessary interaction would leave the writers more time to make plot-relevant discussions actually interesting.

I think the reason why some devs like to add tons of text is for world building and character building. That is obviously a double edged sword as not a lot of people like reading pages of character biography that doesn't lead anywhere. But maybe some do. It is definitely an issue for players who play completionist playstyle but don't like reading useless dialogue. You want to open all sidemissions and find all secrets but don't really care about what kind of relationship bork had with his dog in his childhood.. But you read it anyways becuase bork might have a sidemission hidden there in the dialogue.

 

[Ashenai]

One way to make dialog more mechanically (and expressively) interesting could be to allow the player to adjust the tone in which any given line is said by the PC. Like, for example, having a tick box in the dialog UI that presents the options "Soft", "Indifferent", "Aggressive" and letting the player evaluate which one would best suit the situation based on the NPC's demeanor (where there are skill checks, the choice might either hurt or improve the chances), and the NPC's reaction and willingness to cooperate/discuss further/give further info would be based on how the tone might affect his disposition towards the PC.

I swear I've played a game with almost exactly this system, except instead of on the dialog UI, you had to set your character's attitude on the character himself (and could do it at any time). I distinctly remember forgetting to reset my attitude after an aggressive conversation/interrogation, and accidentally yelling at the next hapless friendly NPC.

can't remember anything else about the game, though (I played it a long time ago), and I can't find it. Any chance someone knows the game I'm talking about? edit: I remember! It was an interactive fiction (text adventure) game called Varicella. The system is described more here.

Also, this post proposes quite a few interesting ideas. It's worth reading, I think.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Vanguard had a fun for a while diplomacy (card game) game. Not suited for a normal RPG though.

 

[Siobhan]

One major obstacle is that dialogue in modern RPGs is not abstracted enough. Since all lines have to be written by hand, you are limited to traversing a finite graph, and one of very limited complexity to boot (as Telengard pointed out). A good combat system exploits combinatorial explosion to create many different scenarios from just a few primitives. So if you want dialogue to be really interesting, you'll have to turn it into a combinatorial system. Conceptually that's easy because language is itself a combinatorial system, but it's also a damn hard system for computers, and one where they're at a natural disadvantage compared to humans. So don't expect anything revolutionary any time soon.

At this point, the simplest fix would be to revert back to keywords instead of dialogue trees. That way you can at least reward players who do their research and use their knowledge of the gameworld to ask NPCs about keywords that are not in the default list of options.

 

[Space Insect]

I swear I've played a game with almost exactly this system, except instead of on the dialog UI, you had to set your character's attitude on the character himself (and could do it at any time). I distinctly remember forgetting to reset my attitude after an aggressive conversation/interrogation, and accidentally yelling at the next hapless friendly NPC.

can't remember anything else about the game, though (I played it a long time ago), and I can't find it. Any chance someone knows the game I'm talking about? edit: I remember! It was an interactive fiction (text adventure) game called Varicella. The system is described more here.

Also, this post proposes quite a few interesting ideas. It's worth reading, I think.

I believe Daggerfall had the 3 different tones option.

I personally wish that instead of dialogue skills like persuasion and such, the skills would be focused on "reading" people. A higher perception could give extra text about the mannerisms of the person that could be used to extrapolate which dialogue option would be best. Other skills could also give you more descriptive text to identify how to talk to them.

 

[Wayward Son]

At this point, the simplest fix would be to revert back to keywords instead of dialogue trees. That way you can at least reward players who do their research and use their knowledge of the gameworld to ask NPCs about keywords that are not in the default list of options.

I feel like you could combine both approaches when doing this. The way that FO games used to have the Ask Question(?) feature in dialogue. It could lead to some interesting things, like inputting a certain keyword leading into a dialogue tree, to reward those players that ask and find out all sorts of information, and appeal to the audience that likes dialogue trees.

 

[Athelas]

There shouldn't be a dedicated 'speech' skill to begin with. In a dialogue where you intimidate someone, it would make more sense for your strength stat and/or weapon skill to be checked, and more importantly, it would make playing a 'speech' character more interesting and less straightforward compared to the no-brainer choice of simply investing in the speech/persuasion skill.

Bringing item use into the mix more often would also help make dialogue more interesting (like planting a bug on Gizmo in Fallout 1 to record his confession).

 

[Elemental_wanamingo]

In hindsight it might have been better idea to make this topic about the non-combat gameplay of the rpgs. Because the issue (most game mechanics are just nothing more than skillchecks for I win button, except combat) I'm complaining about is not really just the speech but the way most rpgs seem to handle gameplay outside of combat. If you have something like an engineering or hacking skill for example most of the time you just right click something and the game does a skillcheck and that alone defines whether you can or can not do what you want to do. At most you have something like lockpicking made into a minigame.

As far as I know shadowrun is only modern game that has taken some game mechanic that used to be just a skillcheck (hacking) and make it into its own part of the game with its own gameplay. It is still combat though and I think not a lot of codexers like it. I don't like it either really. It is a bit grindy and repetitive and has more issues I don't want to get into but still I prefer having that instead of having a decker who just walks to a computer, right clicks and the game then does a skillcheck and a door opens or whatever.

 

[Siobhan]

I feel like you could combine both approaches when doing this. The way that FO games used to have the Ask Question(?) feature in dialogue.

But isn't the whole point of dialogue trees to create the illusion of a real conversation, including realistic input from the player? A keyword system undermines this. So either you make the keyword system a gimmick, in which case it is frustrating for players because they will try tons of options with few good results. Or you make it a viable and central mechanic, in which case realistic dialogue is clearly not a priority, so why have dialogue trees at all? Combining keywords with dialogue trees is like adding cinematic takedowns to turn-based combat, what's the point?

 

[Space Insect]

But isn't the whole point of dialogue trees to create the illusion of a real conversation, including realistic input from the player? A keyword system undermines this. So either you make the keyword system a gimmick, in which case it is frustrating for players because they will try tons of options with few good results. Or you make it a viable and central mechanic, in which case realistic dialogue is clearly not a priority, so why have dialogue trees at all? Combining keywords with dialogue trees is like adding cinematic takedowns to turn-based combat, what's the point?

If the keyword system was implemented well, it could come of as the character asking a question and the NPC either knowing and telling the answer, knowing but refusing to answer, not knowing, or purposefully lying. If the keyword system took the certain NPC's character into the mix, it could come off as realistic rather than the walking encyclopedias of Morrowind.

 

[Siobhan]

In order for a keyword system to be worthwhile, you have to allow users to enter arbitrary keywords. Unless your game has a damn good NLP engine that would make 99% of all current language technology obsolete, you'll only have canned replies for the majority of those keywords. That's a-ok if you treat dialogue as a mechanic, but if the goal is immersion --- which I think is why players like dialogue trees --- it's hard to be heavily invested in that NPC's tragic backstory if just 2 minutes earlier they utterly failed 20 times in a row to reply like a human being to simple keyword queries.

But I only brought up keywords as a quick fix that already exists, the actual problem with dialogue is much larger. From a gameplay perspective, dialogue is just navigation through a graph, a graph that happens to be embellished with tons of text. Dialogue trees (misnomer, they're not trees, not even DAGs) have three major shortcomings:

- the graphs are finite and small,
- for any given vertex, the player knows all outgoing edges
- there are no principled restrictions on the shape of the graphs, and so the user cannot learn from previous dialogues how future ones might play out

This is very different from your average combat engine, where the number of possible encounters is usually large enough to be considered infinite, players are often unaware of the full range of possible moves, and experienced players can estimate the consequences of any given move or even sequences of moves. Switching from dialogue trees to keywords only fixes one of these points: the player's awareness of all available choices at any given point. Graph size can be marginally improved because you only need writers for the NPCs, not the player character, but you're still stuck with rather small graphs because there are no combinatorics to exploit. And there is still no mechanical predictability.

 

[Viata]

We need an auto-save system after dialogue(that auto-saves all your used saves slots) so you are not given a second chance to choose the right dialogue. Then we can have better skillcheck dialogues. Otherwise, it'll be the same old savescum system and having emotion based skillcheck or whatever will just be a minigame of "try-load-try-load-try-done".