Why don't most RPGs understand that people lie?

[DalekFlay]

Been jumping around playing various RPGs lately and it reminds me of a pet peeve: in the vast majority of RPGs, every dialogue answer you give is treated as genuine. Some games even have a little "(lie)" thing on certain options, as if you're always telling the truth otherwise. It's very rare a game treats what you say as a non-binding action when it comes to quest outcomes.

In real life, it's extremely common to go along with what someone's saying to make things easier, yet in RPGs if I say "yeah sure I love your faction it's great" it's often treated as 100% genuine. In some of the worst examples, if you tell a quest giver you'll do X instead of Y, the game might not even let you do Y afterward. The absolute worst is when a dialog decision in town A makes everyone in town B a hundred miles away know that you chose the opposite of what they wanted. The dialog screen is often treated as the decision, not your actual gameplay actions, which can be restricted because of something you said but didn't mean.

There are exceptions to this. I remember playing an NCR spy in New Vegas and telling other factions what they wanted to hear while working behind their backs. That was a wonderful experience. I wish more RPGs allowed for that kind of thing, but sadly I feel like the common experience is exactly the opposite.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Because heroes don't lie, stop playing as the villain.

 

[Ol' Willy]

In real life, it's extremely common to go along with what someone's saying to make things easier, yet in RPGs if I say "yeah sure I love your faction it's great" it's often treated as 100% genuine. In some of the worst examples, if you tell a quest giver you'll do X instead of Y, the game might not even let you do Y afterward. The absolute worst is when a dialog decision in town A makes everyone in town B a hundred miles away know that you chose the opposite of what they wanted. The dialog screen is often treated as the decision, not your actual gameplay actions, which can be restricted because of something you said but didn't mean.

Shit games, man. In good games your words rarely bind you to a particular action and you can always do as you please.

A masterpiece, known as Age of Decadence, even has "Word of Honor" count, where each time you give you word and then break it, it's noted. Some people don't want to deal with the liars and traitors.

 

[Joseph Stalin]

You forgot the two most important titles - Pathologic 2, and The Void. In the latter, Sister Death, your tutorial, LIES ABOUT GAME MECHANICS.

 

[CappenVarra]

why do you lie?

 

[Ol' Willy]

Pathologic 2, and The Void

Ahh, good taste right here, man.

 

[Raghar]

You reminded me of Planet Alcatraz.

 

[Darkzone]

Because heroes don't lie, stop playing as the villain.

It is correct that Heroes dont' lie. But do you know why?
If not, than you should look into the Plato's and Aristotle's explanation of a Hero. Or you could just watch the youtuber "The fourth Age". But there is something that even "The fourth Age" didn't told in all his videos and that is what the virtue means and how it is connected to telling the truth or simply "The Truth". Therefore i will do it in short for you or any interested reader:
Virtue is derived from "Vir" which means "Man" and the Romans encoded this in the deity of Virtue (Manliness) and the mother of manliness ( acting manly under the borders made by 4 cardinal virtues ) is the deity Veritas ( Truth ). So in other words The Truth is the root of Manliness and herebei of the cardinal (Platonic) Virtues (Prudence (wisdom, knowledge), Fortitude (courage, inner strength), Temperance (restraint, self-control) and Justice ). And now you know also why Merlin answers with "Truthfulness" to Arthur in Excalibur (1981) upon the question "Which is the most important Virtue"

 

[Serious_Business]

Torment's writing is often noted as great because it allows the PC to lie. Point of fact, I'm not even sure if it was possible to do so before. Writing dialog trees certainly is an art form, one that is not mastered so easily. Certainly it should allow for some kind of "player expression", although it will always be limited in its mechanical possibilities. This is something I should talk about elsewhere, but I came to think that narrative in rpgs is greatly helped when you have predefined characters, like the Nameless One or Geralt - creating your own character will always force you to adapt to choices in a dialog tree, as if your intention is never clearly reflected in the choices. This includes lying, of course. When the character is pre-made, then the choices are always the choices of that character - and not your character. I think creating "your character" is pointless is a narrative game, most of the time ; you're always going to be playing the character the devs want you to play in the end. Creating characters make sense in tactical games or blobbers, as a strategic phase of the game (creating "builds"), but in terms of writing you get a disconnect. The disconnect between your intentions and the choices are pretty much the same as the ones between "truth" and intention. If anything, it would be great to play a premade character that was a pathological liar. You'd get confused in your own intentions, or something like that. Lying probably doesn't happen a lot in games because the devs are railroading you, of course.

Because heroes don't lie, stop playing as the villain.

It is correct that Heroes dont' lie. But do you know why?
If not, than you should look into the Plato's and Aristotle's explanation of a Hero. Or you could just watch the youtuber "The fourth Age". But there is something that even "The fourth Age" didn't told in all his videos and that is what the virtue means and how it is connected to telling the truth or simply "The Truth". Therefore i will do it in short for you or any interested reader:
Virtue is derived from "Vir" which means "Man" and the Romans encoded this in the deity of Virtue (Manliness) and the mother of manliness ( acting manly under the borders made by 4 cardinal virtues ) is the deity Veritas ( Truth ). So in other words The Truth is the root of Manliness and herebei of the cardinal (Platonic) Virtues (Prudence (wisdom, knowledge), Fortitude (courage, inner strength), Temperance (restraint, self-control) and Justice ). And now you know also why Merlin answers with "Truthfulness" to Arthur in Excalibur (1981) upon the question "Which is the most important Virtue"

I remember once this 19 years old kid telling me he was going to teach me about virtue ; I was eager to learn, although I'm sure it at something to do with his anxiety-ridden sexuality - which is precisely what I was eager to learn about. I was ready to make him a Hero, if only by beating his lunch money out of him (I don't actually do gay sex, but I'm sure if I was more virtuous that I would ; as it stands I am a decadent being, attracted only by the weakness in nature : the female)

 

[Darkzone]

Because heroes don't lie, stop playing as the villain.

It is correct that Heroes dont' lie. But do you know why?
If not, than you should look into the Plato's and Aristotle's explanation of a Hero. Or you could just watch the youtuber "The fourth Age". But there is something that even "The fourth Age" didn't told in all his videos and that is what the virtue means and how it is connected to telling the truth or simply "The Truth". Therefore i will do it in short for you or any interested reader:
Virtue is derived from "Vir" which means "Man" and the Romans encoded this in the deity of Virtue (Manliness) and the mother of manliness ( acting manly under the borders made by 4 cardinal virtues ) is the deity Veritas ( Truth ). So in other words The Truth is the root of Manliness and herebei of the cardinal (Platonic) Virtues (Prudence (wisdom, knowledge), Fortitude (courage, inner strength), Temperance (restraint, self-control) and Justice ). And now you know also why Merlin answers with "Truthfulness" to Arthur in Excalibur (1981) upon the question "Which is the most important Virtue"

I remember once this 19 years old kid telling me he was going to teach me about virtue ; I was eager to learn, although I'm sure it at something to do with his anxiety-ridden sexuality - which is precisely what I was eager to learn about. I was ready to make him a Hero, if only by beating his lunch money out of him (I don't actually do gay sex, but I'm sure if I was more virtuous that I would ; as it stands I am a decadent being, attracted only by the weakness in nature : the female)

Degenerates gonna do what Degenerates always do and it's going to be degenerate.

 

[Agame]

Because vidya gaem writing is trash.

 

[Gerrard]

Because real world NPCs are too dumb to comprehend the concept that a game might lie to you.
See the Witcher 3 Blood and Wine DLC and the psychopath sister of the princess. People were defending her, not even for a moment considering that everything bad that happened to her might have been just lies, like how she lied to Detlaff.

 

[Ol' Willy]

If we are talking NPCs lying to you, you don't have to go farther than Dark Sun: SL. People there always lie to you and try to get you killed. In the very beginning, Templar lies to you that he needs your servises, gives you "four healing guavas" and leads to to the ambush.

And magnificent Miltiades from AoD, of course.

 

[Dodo1610]

It's a scripting thing not writing: If you add the ability to lie you have just created another path for a quest and given the player another option to change the outcome which in RPGs means more scripting writing, voice acting, animation... all of which cost time and effort. And why should a dev bother; most players claim a game is nonlinear if it gives them 2 option even if they lead to the exact same outcome.

 

[DalekFlay]

It's a scripting thing not writing: If you add the ability to lie you have just created another path for a quest and given the player to change the outcome which in RPGs means more scripting writing, voice acting, animation... all of which cost time and effort. And why should a dev bother; most players claim a game is nonlinear if it gives them 2 option even if they lead to the exact same outcome.

I agree their attitude is "why bother," but considering New Vegas was made in record time I think the "too complicated" excuse can easily be labeled bullshit.

 

[Tigranes]

As dodo boy says, adding truth/lie intention to speech just massively increases the amount of possibilities you have to keep track of. It's much easier to treat every statement as an 'honest' data point.

New Vegas was "too complicated", it was an extraordinary 'get this shit going' hackjob of a scripting nightmare with many many bugs pulled together by the only company with a track record of complicated faction systems and other C&C scripting.

You might argue that that should be the baseline competency of RPG developers, and I'd agree with you, but it's not.

 

[Shitty Kitty]

1. Lying to the player can have... mixed results. Some players might appreciate the fact that an RPG just attempted to accurately implement a real part of some human interactions (deceit). Others might go "wtf you tricked me" and rage about it.
2. Lying has many components, not all of them verbal. You might spot some lies via verbal cues (and thus be able to say "yeah this dude's probably lying, everyone on high alert") or advance knowledge of the truth, but a great many lies are things you pick up on via things like body language. I don't think I've yet seen a game that bothered to model things like "tells", and to be fair it might be damn difficult to do since there are a lot of potential tells that someone may not be speaking the truth, or may be glossing over parts of the truth, or what have you. Some games will halfass this as best as they can with things like Insight, Sense Motive, or Perception checks or equivalent, and as inelegant a solution as this is it might have been the best that could be done for one reason or another.

TL;DR Deceit can be a VERY complex thing and abstracting it without making it feel really dumb and cheap is probably not easy.

 

[Agame]

A similar example is AI, look at Paradox games, forums always have X number of people screaming for better AI. Paradox released numbers awhile ago on which difficulty level people play on. It was overwhelmingly the easiest difficulty. If Paradox invested huge amounts of time into a top tier AI the sales of their games would probably be WORSE as you would have all the casuals and normies crying about it being to difficult.

So we get 'good enough'.

The best you can hope for a truly devious narrative experience with misinformation and subterfuge of that level is a game like Pathologic that is entirely constructed around its narrative experience.

 

[Bony Hands]

It's a matter of convenience for the player. If you want to give the player character the ability to lie you have to make it clear what's a lie, what's a "maybe" and what's a truth. So then the player can choose what suits them. In a genre where your choices often dictate the story, you want your players to have some idea on how they're influencing the plot, which is why most games take the simple way out and have "Yes" and "No" answers.

 

[DalekFlay]

It's a matter of convenience for the player. If you want to give the player character the ability to lie you have to make it clear what's a lie, what's a "maybe" and what's a truth. So then the player can choose what suits them. In a genre where your choices often dictate the story, you want your players to have some idea on how they're influencing the plot, which is why most games take the simple way out and have "Yes" and "No" answers.

I guess my argument would be that only actions should cement decisions, unless the dialogue causes a direct action ("hit the button and launch the nuke!"). If Sally and Billy both want to hire me to kill the other, and I tell Sally that I'll kill Billy for her, I shouldn't be locked into killing Billy until I actually do it.

 

[Danikas]

New Vegas was "too complicated", it was an extraordinary 'get this shit going' hackjob of a scripting nightmare with many many bugs pulled together by the only company with a track record of complicated faction systems and other C&C scripting.

https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Vizima_Confidential

What about this quest from glitcher 1?

 

[Shitty Kitty]

In regards to players lying to NPCs: it's a matter of the game's AI not being able to read intent past whatever you tell it, and whatever flag (if any) is set to a particular dialogue option. Computers and computer programs are not people. You could tell an NPC "sure, I'll help retrieve your dog from the well!" and then proceed to throw a fireball down the well to flashfry the dog, or whatever. Congrats, you lied to the NPC. What did it achieve? The possible responses are limited to whatever branches the writers and programmers thought to include. You might have an NPC just kind of stop dead in its routine, waiting for a rescued dog that never happens, because the programmer didn't attach an appropriate trigger to the death of the dog. Your achievement would be whatever the programmer laid out in advance as a reward/consequence for a given set of actions, and it might be that nobody on the game team anticipated what you were going to do.

Basically, there are many ways to lie, deceive, prevaricate, betray... and there are likely far fewer roads that lead to truth.

 

[Ol' Willy]

You might have an NPC just kind of stop dead in its routine, waiting for a rescued dog that never happens,

That's a bad example. The possible outcomes here are:
1 - dog is alive, but lost
2 - dog is alive and found
3 - dog is dead
4 - dog is killed by the player

First one give no consequences, keep looking. Second one completes the quest. Third one fails the quest. Fourth one fails the quest and provoke some response from the NPC, to the point of aggroing him.

 

[Bony Hands]

It's a matter of convenience for the player. If you want to give the player character the ability to lie you have to make it clear what's a lie, what's a "maybe" and what's a truth. So then the player can choose what suits them. In a genre where your choices often dictate the story, you want your players to have some idea on how they're influencing the plot, which is why most games take the simple way out and have "Yes" and "No" answers.

I guess my argument would be that only actions should cement decisions, unless the dialogue causes a direct action ("hit the button and launch the nuke!"). If Sally and Billy both want to hire me to kill the other, and I tell Sally that I'll kill Billy for her, I shouldn't be locked into killing Billy until I actually do it.

I agree with you that this would be the best way to do things, but it has to be done in a way that players understand their options. Take the quest to stop Gizmo from Fallout 1. By the time you take the quest, you know taking his assassination request either means you murder Killian or report to Killian with evidence Gizmo put a hit out on him. The idea to trick Gizmo has already been brought up, so the player can choose to take the offer without fear.

 

[Shitty Kitty]

You might have an NPC just kind of stop dead in its routine, waiting for a rescued dog that never happens,

That's a bad example. The possible outcomes here are:
1 - dog is alive, but lost
2 - dog is alive and found
3 - dog is dead
4 - dog is killed by the player

First one give no consequences, keep looking. Second one completes the quest. Third one fails the quest. Fourth one fails the quest and provoke some response from the NPC, to the point of aggroing him.

Could probably have come up with a better example, yeah, but the root problem is "what responses do the writers/programmers have mapped out for dialogue branches?" I've seen a few (sometimes VERY bad) games where a trigger isn't set correctly and certain dialogue branches are dead ends, loops, etc. Lying, just like in real life, is a very complex thing. A lot of liars in real life have trouble keeping track of their own bullshit. There's also the matter of the writers/programmers just reducing (Lie) options to fairly obvious "heel" behavior, perhaps predicated on a notion that if you're going around lying to people you're playing a heel-ish character.