Game mechanics of the npc dialogue

[Elemental_wanamingo]

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.

I don't think the user necessarily needs to type in the keywords. Instead you could make the keywords sort of collectables. For example if you speak with certain npc and he mentions radscorpions you can then use that keyword when talking with other npcs. There are lots of things you can then do with that information as a game dev.

Also the other thing to understand is that a keyword system can coexist with the typical rpg dialogue system. In fact it is probably better to not allow the player type in anything because that kinda allows the player to skip massive amounts of gameplay and break missions for example. Main issue for this kind of system I think is to make sure the keywords are properly cataloged. Otherwise you end up with long list of keywords and no recollection whether any of them even means anything in this town compared to the other town where most of those keywords were collected.

 

[Black Angel]

So combat = gameplay?

But still most of the time the two clear options you have is to either smooth talk through a situation or fight through it.

But isn't that's what makes an RPG? Every character has strengths and weaknesses? What about non-combat oriented characters? Should they try to fight too as to not 'circumvent part of the game'? But yeah, when the choices are narrowed down to smooth talk or fight, it gets boring after a while. Like some had mentioned, Fallout 1 did it right especially with the Master where you ought to gain the knowledge of Super Mutants autopsy. The speech option with the Khans doesn't necessarily means you won against them because if you let them live to the end they would fuck up Shady Sands before finally get wiped out by Super Mutants (though the dialogue for that sounds weird).

And as mentioned by Neanderthal, Dead Money also punish you for using that Barter check with Dean Domino, really give him a believable personality. From what little session I've had with Wasteland 2, supposedly there would be some characters that would get pissed off at you for using Smart Ass check (and I assume it happens even if you succeed). I don't know, though.

 

[Elemental_wanamingo]

So combat = gameplay?

But still most of the time the two clear options you have is to either smooth talk through a situation or fight through it.

But isn't that's what makes an RPG? Every character has strengths and weaknesses? What about non-combat oriented characters? Should they try to fight too as to not 'circumvent part of the game'? But yeah, when the choices are narrowed down to smooth talk or fight, it gets boring after a while. Like some had mentioned, Fallout 1 did it right especially with the Master where you ought to gain the knowledge of Super Mutants autopsy. The speech option with the Khans doesn't necessarily means you won against them because if you let them live to the end they would fuck up Shady Sands before finally get wiped out by Super Mutants (though the dialogue for that sounds weird).

I'm just trying to make the point that the battle option gives more gameplay if you choose to go that way than the speech option which is usually just a skill check in the dialogue.

For example a road is blocked by bandits. You can either try to speak your way through, fight your way through or do a side mission.

With speech you just talk to the bandit, choose some dialogue options and the game skillchecks your character. If your skill x is above z they just let you through. That's it. Done. Playing with average smart character you can try speech and fail, then try doing the sidemission and win or fail in it, then come back and get through or choose to battle. Simply from content perspective there is a lot more to do with a non-speech character. For me as a player if I play speech character it feels like I just missed some content. There is a lot less gameplay in the speech option. Of course I can play with speech character and choose to do the sidemissions instead but then what's the point of the speech skill?

Imagine playing doom and having typical rpg speech option. With high enough speech skill you could just skip all combat. It would be pretty shitty (rpg) shooter. (It would be and rpg shooter right guys, right?! :D)... Surely one would want more depth put into the speech style gameplay to make it different but as fulfilling as the combat? I don't think the speech option in rpgs offers as much depth as the combat. And the combat most of the time is not that good.

I just want that the speech option had more gameplay in it. I don't know how to do it though

 

[SniperHF]

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.

It's obviously substantially more laborious to implement, but like with the Fallout principle of multiple ways to accomplish every quest; the principle for dialog checks should be "Different content not bypassing content".

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.

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.

Before they dumbed down the system by cutting the dialog stats to just Charisma, D:OS had a system where you could attempt to pass the same check with 3 different speech skills. Situationally the various options would have an advantage or disadvantage to passing the check. It was kind of like an abbreviated dialog battle.

I thought the system had some potential in that it included some aspects of discerning which check would work better on which NPC by the player, use of stats from the player, and finally it wasn't strictly pass/fail so it still allowed some variability. Wasn't to be alas, what's left is just a vestige that gives you a lame + bonus on a mini game

and mention arcanum

Maybe we should ask you about Arcanum instead

 

[Elemental_wanamingo]

Maybe replace all the npcs with chatbots who are configured to respond to certain keywords?

 

[adrix89]

So combat = gameplay?

Thea: The Awakening has all challenges resolved with card battles based on completely different attributes depending on the type of the challenge. You also have the option of combat but in that game a character can die for reals.
Failure in the non-combat challenge usually gives a penalty and puts you straight into combat. So you can have some moments when you have some shit stats for the challenges and if you play ironman there are some real risks.
Also the non-combat options aren't necessarily better options but at least you keep your little life.

I also have been playing The Guild 2 and even if its simplistic and kinda like the Sims every point is an increase in your ability to manipulate the political situation. With a bit more depth and in a game like Crusader Kings it could well work as a game mechanic.

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).

You know what would be great? Pillars of Eternity dialog attributes. Where every attribute can be used as a check and you play Rock Paper Scissors with what choices are the best for the situation. Even if the attributes make no sense whatsoever.


Jokes aside for more procedural dialog/storytelling what is the key is player intention and context. If you can find what the player wants and as long as the options are available you can present them as options. Especially if it has a win and lose state you can build a challenge around it like convincing an NPC to let you through in a location.
The other thing is context, if a player is a bounty hunter and has a mission to hunt a bandit then you can assume the player would want things related to that.
Also know that you can fully control an NPC intention so you can pester the player. The options and outcomes are also set, he can ignore you but it can have consequences.
But ultimately it all boils down to a set of verbs with some window dressing, which is fine, that's what dialog is anyway.

For a combinatorial explosion like in combat you can have Character Traits, Moods and Patience where the player has to have the right responses that align to that character as well as do some preparation beforehand seeking necessary information and items for that challenge.

 

[Carrion]

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.

I believe Daggerfall had the 3 different tones option.

Yeah. An even more elaborate tone system can be seen in... Football Manager (Aggressive, Assertive, Passionate, Calm, Reluctant, Cautious). The speech system is entirely stat-driven, taking into account a whole bunch of factors from personality (also determined by a number of stats) to international reputation, and also allowing for various levels of success and failure (like crushing the confidence of some youngster by being overly critical or aggressive towards him, and then somewhat redeeming the situation with a few calm, encouraging words, or pissing off a star player so badly that he becomes completely alienated and won't even talk to you anymore). Of course, you end up with a dialogue system that is very to-the-point and where functionality is valued above everything else (very much like Daggerfall), but dialogue is also a seamless part of the actual gameplay, and being good at it is all about being able to properly read the characters you're talking to and acting in a way that makes the most sense in the context. Of course, the goals you're pursuing in Football Manager are usually very different from your average RPG (you're usually not giving motivational speeches to your entire party before a battle, after all), but it still often comes down to persuading or intimidating someone into acting in a way that benefits you.

Arcanum was mentioned in the OP, but maybe it should also be mentioned that it actually goes a bit deeper than just choosing the "I win" option in dialogue. Having a high Persuasion skill occasionally gives you an additional dialogue option, but instead of just ending the dialogue right then and there that option might just open up a new branch where you still need to figure out the right things to say in order to even get a good outcome. There is also a reaction/disposition system that is affected by the looks of your character among other things, but unfortunately they didn't do all that much with it.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I actually think that the mass open world genre could do much more interesting things with the 'speech skill victory', but they never do. Instead of making the speech victory just a skill-check, make it a reward for a particular lore-chasing playstyle, by giving you the option only if you've gathered enough obscure bits of lore throughout the game, requiring not only that you keep your eye open during the main quest, but also a fair bit of off-the-beaten-path exploring, where such exploring is under-rewarded in terms of items compared to the rest of the game - i.e. exploring for the sake of finding out the finer details of what is going on. Combine some elements with science or other skills, so that, for one of the lore-pieces, a science-speech character might be able to get it directly, whereas a non-scientist might have to get that info from someone else, with greater hassle. Stealth-speech characters might be able to sneak their way in, Indiana Jones style, to find lore in places that are tough (not impossible, but very tough) for a character who isn't pure combat (i.e. has sacrificed combat for speech/science/etc) to fight their way in (works if stealth is 1 skill, while combat requires multiple skills).

Then at the end, your use of the speech skill for victory is more of a 'I've spent a lot of time walking the darkest corners of this world...and I've seen things....' payoff, than a way of by-passing content.

Harder to do for the non-ending speech skiilchecks, but you could do it on a smaller scale here and there...which would in turn prep the player's expectations for what they'll need if they're going to use it in the end-game.

 

[Siobhan]

I don't think the user necessarily needs to type in the keywords. Instead you could make the keywords sort of collectables. For example if you speak with certain npc and he mentions radscorpions you can then use that keyword when talking with other npcs. There are lots of things you can then do with that information as a game dev.

But that's a keyword system in name only. It's a dialogue tree where certain dialogue options are automatically unlocked based on world exploration instead of skill checks. Plenty of games have that, even Deus Ex with its very simple dialogue system.

It's true that dialogue trees do not tend to give you 20 options for every NPC like keyword systems often do. They go for depth instead of width, but that's not an intrinsic limitation, just a convention. What separates keywords from dialogue trees mechanically is that all currently available options are laid out for the player, there is no agency on the player's side. Combined with the tendency to make the best choice very obvious (indicating what skill is checked, blue highlighting of special options, etc), it's essentially a turn-based QTE.

In fact it is probably better to not allow the player type in anything because that kinda allows the player to skip massive amounts of gameplay and break missions for example.

So? We're talking single player games here, why shouldn't I be allowed to break missions and skip content just because I don't want to redo a silly fetch quest or don't care for that great cinematic set piece the designers have poured their soul into? Let's once more look at Deus Ex: according to your logic, it is horribly broken because the player can just randomly try codes on keypads (or figure them out through their own wits) instead of building up a list of unlocked keycodes through exploration.

Main issue for this kind of system I think is to make sure the keywords are properly cataloged. Otherwise you end up with long list of keywords and no recollection whether any of them even means anything in this town compared to the other town where most of those keywords were collected.

So you want to remove even that little bit of player agency that keywords provide? Then we just have diametrically opposed views of what games are about: You'll never get an interesting dialogue system by reducing the player's participation to clicking on one of a carefully curated number of choices, just like you cannot have interesting exploration if all the player has to do is follow a quest compass.

 

[Siobhan]

Instead of making the speech victory just a skill-check, make it a reward for a particular lore-chasing playstyle, by giving you the option only if you've gathered enough obscure bits of lore throughout the game,

I agree, but it's very important what exactly is meant by collecting lore. If it boils down to unlocking dialogue options, a la "if player has right-clicked book X, spoken to Y, and is a member of guild Z, unlock dialogue option 4", this is still too limited, and nobody would consider it good design for any gameplay element other than dialogue, which somehow gets a free pass most of the time.

Here's an example from Shadowrun Hong Kong. I could have also gone with Albion, MM6, Wizardry 8, RoA2, Ultima Underworld, or Deus Ex, but this is one case I remember particularly well: you want to access some computer but need the password. Looking around the office, you see a particular painting, and if you know the name of the artist, you can deduce that this might be the password and give it a try. This is not perfect because, if I remember correctly, the only way for the player to know the artist is to be well-versed in the art history of our world, rather than the specific lore of Shadowrun. But it still beats the unlocking scenario: in that case clicking on the painting would add one more option to a list of passwords you can try, at which point it is obvious that this is the right answer. It takes no intelligence from the player, just diligence in clicking everything that can be clicked. It's the dialogue equivalent of running heads-on into every wall in a dungeon to check for secret doors.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I believe Daggerfall had the 3 different tones option.

In Daggerfall, although the 3 speech options were called tones they really reflected social status: the etiquette skill affected your attempts at speaking in a more polite, high-class manner and the streetwise skill affected your attempts at speaking in a plainspoken, lower-class manner (the "normal" tone lacked an associated skill). These options had no relation to either emotions or different methods of persuasion, merely depending on these two skills and the social status of the recipient. In practice, the etiquette and streetwise skills were virtually useless and the "polite" and "blunt" tones nearly superfluous, as you could easily obtain information using the "normal" tone.

 

[Ashenai]

So? We're talking single player games here, why shouldn't I be allowed to break missions and skip content just because I don't want to redo a silly fetch quest or don't care for that great cinematic set piece the designers have poured their soul into? Let's once more look at Deus Ex: according to your logic, it is horribly broken because the player can just randomly try codes on keypads (or figure them out through their own wits) instead of building up a list of unlocked keycodes through exploration.

So you want to remove even that little bit of player agency that keywords provide? Then we just have diametrically opposed views of what games are about: You'll never get an interesting dialogue system by reducing the player's participation to clicking on one of a carefully curated number of choices, just like you cannot have interesting exploration if all the player has to do is follow a quest compass.

Well put. Breaking a single-player game is only bad if doing so ruins the experience for the player (for example, it corrupts their save files or makes it impossible to progress.) The type of breaking you were talking about is actually all upside: players who don't want to bypass parts of the game like that will not look for or find ways to break it, while players who are interested in "outsmarting" the game can do that.

It's not the game designer's job to enforce that a player experience a game in the intended way. The best games make it clear how you're "supposed" to play them, and will then give players versatile and creative tools that can be used to forge their own path instead, if they want to.

In Divinity: Original Sin, you can reverse-pickpocket an NPC to give them one of the two teleport pyramids, then use the other one to teleport to them when they're somewhere else entirely. This trick lets you bypass significant parts of the game, and I'm pretty sure the designers didn't think of it (since it goes wonky when the NPC is on another map entirely). But this unexpected tactic is just a consequence of giving players versatile tools. And it's awesome.

One of the worst trends of modern games is narcissistic game designers who refuse to let go of their "vision" and let the player have fun on their own terms. If you don't want real interactivity, make a movie or write a book for fuck's sake. If you're making a game, you should be thrilled when the player finds ways to move off the paths you foresaw and intended.

 

[Elemental_wanamingo]

But that's a keyword system in name only. It's a dialogue tree where certain dialogue options are automatically unlocked based on world exploration instead of skill checks. Plenty of games have that, even Deus Ex with its very simple dialogue system.

I really meant to say just that adding some kind of keyword system into the current dialogue would imho already make it little better. Not really solve the issue but imho it could definitely add depth to the way speech based character is played.

So? We're talking single player games here, why shouldn't I be allowed to break missions and skip content just because I don't want to redo a silly fetch quest or don't care for that great cinematic set piece the designers have poured their soul into? Let's once more look at Deus Ex: according to your logic, it is horribly broken because the player can just randomly try codes on keypads (or figure them out through their own wits) instead of building up a list of unlocked keycodes through exploration.

I don't really care about people playing single player games in any way they want. Honestly I don't really care at all how other people play the game. Not one iota. It just makes game design harder when you need to account for people who make crazy jumps just because they might know a keycode or whatever that opens an endgame storyline for example which the player has no tools and in worst case can get completely stuck. It can also limit game options if the developer wants to make sure such possibility doesn't exit. Honestly I don't care if such option exits. Personally I'd be happier to not accidentally stumble upon one of those if it would mean some part of the game content was completelety skipped and not experienced then. But at the same time if such option exists to skip some stupid grindy annoying shit then sure, I'd take it. It would not bother me one bit to use cheatcodes to bypass annoying shit unfun gameplay and I couldn't care less if someone won the game 9000 times sperging some numbers into keypads and memorizing hundreds of keywords just to be amazing at rpgs.

So you want to remove even that little bit of player agency that keywords provide? Then we just have diametrically opposed views of what games are about: You'll never get an interesting dialogue system by reducing the player's participation to clicking on one of a carefully curated number of choices, just like you cannot have interesting exploration if all the player has to do is follow a quest compass.

It seems you want a completely new and great way of doing dialogue now. I'd be even happy with small improvements for now. I'd rather have have two shitty ways of doing dialogue instead of one shitty way. My standards are low because I feel the usual standards are even lower. The options in shadowruns for example are very limited in many ways but if keywords that you could collect like those retarded pokemons could even slightly improve the game then sure. I'd take it. Is that the way to create a great dialogue system? Fuck nope.

But in the end I'd like to have a great system. One with player skill and with myriad of deeply and meaningfully written dialogue options (or however the system works) and lots of freedom to do crazy shit and ways to game the system and ways to make it worthwhile and challenging in a good way to play through the whole game like that and make it good enough that it is fulfilling and independant enough that it would be good enough even on its own. If the best way to do it is to not have dialogue options then I'm all for it. Make it now. But since the revolution is not going to happen now I feel suggesting smaller easier things to improve the current system is a way forward.

The only reason I really want the keywords for example to be cataloged is that if I take a week break from the game for example I'm not completely forgotten everything about the keywords which I could only arrange in my head. It is an rpg all right but you are the character. It is not supposed to be memorycheck9000 for rpg autists. For the exact same reason quest journals are a good thing so is catalogue of keywords. Because nobody can't fucking remember all of it. As far as the catalogue goes simply knowing in which city or from whom I heard that keyword is enough. I'm not suggesting quest compass. I'd never want to have the game tell me what to do in an exploration rpg.

I'd love a speech system where I'll never be forced to choose and click one of a carefully curated number of choices. I'd love to not be presented with readymade choises but instead be encouraged to create my own. It would be great if I was playing some rpg and when I wanted to talk to a character it would skype me to some real person who is playing the character and have a real discussion with him about the things I was going to want to talk about. Hell, have people be born and be trained in the ways of brotherhood of steel and BE that fucking character just so I can have a true 20s dialogue with one when I find one inside the game. Fuck sakes, put one into a box with batteries and fedex it to me so we can do the dialogue face to face with the correct clothing and scenery.

You say I want some kind of clear optioned clicking mobilegame when I exactly don't want that. The thing I don't like about the speech style of play in rpgs is exactly the way it is just choosing from few lines of dialogue which is just skillchecks and Iwin buttons.

 

[Siobhan]

It seems you want a completely new and great way of doing dialogue now.

Quite the opposite, just like it seems you want the opposite of how I read your post. I have a long wall of text below about my thoughts on dialogue systems.

tl;dr Dialogue trees suck, keywords are the only viable option unless you go all the way and create an actual RPG chatbot, which would be completely wasted on 99% of all RPGs.

Siobhan's Wall of Text
=================
Keyword-based systems are the only viable fix at this point. The holy grail of realistic dialogue supported by NLP and AI is decades away and would represent such a game changer that it's worthy of its own genre (think Facade on steroids), rather than being reduced to a mini-game in RPGs. But anything that isn't keywords and falls short of this holy grail isn't viable for anything but highly specialized RPGs:

Suppose we take a hint from detective games and have a dialogue system where questions/replies must be unlocked by combining hints. Essentially, your journal turns into a large inventory and there is a crafting system in place to produce the dialogue entries. You could even require skill checks for crafting recipes to make sure that only very intelligent and well-spoken characters can use certain powerful dialogue entries. Sounds good, right?

No, that's no good at all. You now have all the gameplay problems of point-n-click adventures and crafting systems. You finally have a combinatorial system (which I identified as a desirable trait in an earlier post) but it's a completely unprincipled system. Crafting systems aren't mechanically predictable, out of the millions of combinations the only viable ones are those that the designers implemented. There is no emergent gameplay in this system, it's just a way of obscuring a hard-coded list of answers --- but that's what player-supplied keywords already do, they obscure the list of possible answers.

So your crafting system hasn't gained you anything over keywords except more programming work and tedious clicky-clicky combination hunting for the player. In addition, once the answers have been crafted, dialogue is once again on rails, just use what you crafted at the designated points, it'll almost always be better than the default options. For otherwise the crafting system would serve no purpose.

Now you might say: okay, I'll treat the crafted answers more like items. So the NPC says something, and then the player opens their inventory to use one of their crafted replies. That's all nice and dandy, but now you have a crafting system and an inventory system, and the two combine to give you a very rudimentary combat system. One that is probably much worse than the actual combat system in your RPG. So if dialogue is just a simplistic version of your combat system, why should anybody pick a brains-character over a brawns-character?

Alright, alright, then we'll just add more complexity to the dialogue system and that fixes it, no? No! Now you have two combat systems of comparable complexity in your game, which means that all you have successfully achieved is assimilate dialogue to combat. You've sawyerized dialogue. Best case scenario: you have a dialogue-version of Shadowrun's matrix, but without the integration of meat space and cyber space combat, which is its only selling point.

That's why keywords is the sweet spot for RPGs that aren't completely dialogue focused. Anything less is too basic to be engaging and reduces the player to a passive role, anything more is in direct competition with the other RPG systems and will end up looking bad or pointless in comparison. If you want an interesting dialogue system for a general-purpose RPG, it must:

- use keywords

- allow players to enter custom keywords

- rely on exploration to give the player ideas for useful keywords

- make exploration especially viable for characters with non-combat skills; for instance, a scholar with high history and archeology skills should learn more from visiting an ancient ruin than a barbarian

- optional: provide keyword modifiers (blunt, polite, flirtatious, etc.); even more optional: lots of points in skills like etiquette and street-wise automatically pick a modifier for you

- optional: make the outcome of (possibly modified) keywords non-deterministic so that they can be affected by skill checks (e.g. how much information the NPC supplies)

- optional: use skill checks to add more or fewer entries to the list of suggested keywords

- optional: use skill checks to determine how likely the keyword parser is to accept partial matches

 

[Elemental_wanamingo]

Agree on most stuff although some pointers.

I mean I like everything you said and agree with it but still the main issue for me is that none of those options you listed don't add much gameplay directly into the dialogue. They do add gameplay outside the dialogue for speech based characters but it almost feels like such system would work better if it was without any skillchecks for speech skills at all. Barbarian may not know anything about ruins or not learn much when visiting ruins but a barbarian could use the same game mechanic to learn some combat moves from his opponents or learn a about how and why those hostile npcs were patrolling in that area. An engineer could learn different ways to make power (diesel, coal, gasoline, batteries, nuclear, tears of peasants). Could this work better with new type of character that focuses on knowledge skills? Geography for politics and devices for engineers and ruins for archeologics as sources of exploration.

I do kinda like my own idea about the dialogue having maybe 3 different energy bars. Every option you say can increase or decrease one of the bars and once one of the bars goes to 0 the discussion ends. Different dialogue options consume that energy but also open new keywords for example. Kinda like mana or action points for dialogue. Characters with high speech consume less energy and/or receive bigger energy buffs. Or start with more energy. Hell you could even have skills, spells and telepathy which alter those energies during dialogue gameplay. With that kind of system even short dialogue with relatively small amount of options can provide interesting gameplay because... well ...it is a resource managing minigame with dialogue. Then instead of direct skillchecks you can have partial skillchecks which means you can try but you may or may not succeed because the low speech skill does hurt your ability to do it but doesn't prevent you from trying. This could even allow different kinds of speech based builds.

It does sound kinda complex but rpgs do spend a lot of time working out the mechanics of the combat to make it fun to play. Adding and changing feature and skill lines and playstyles to make it work. Same should be done with the dialogue gameplay which isn't really gameplay usually but just a " turn-based QTE" like you said.

 

[M0RBUS]

The Age of Decadence.

 

[shihonage]

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

 

[Siobhan]

I agree. Too many RPGs try to be a jack of all trades rather than specializing. The one exception is blobbers/dungeon crawlers, which tend to focus on fast combat, a detailed character system, and complex level design while cutting out everything that interferes with that (story, dialogue, factions, narrative C&C, elaborate quests, ...). And they're much better designed than your average RPG for that very reason (in b4 awor).

Edit: I'd also say that the Shadowrun games profited from a very minimalist approach. They're definitely RPG-lites, but cutting out inventory management, enemy loot and party management made for an interesting change of pace.

 

[adrix89]

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

That's too boring. Instead have a real RPG with permadeath and no save scumming. That way you raise the stakes and try desperately not to devolve things in combat. Also permanent wounds for a little spice to drive up the point.

 

[shihonage]

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

That's too boring. Instead have a real RPG with permadeath and no save scumming. That way you raise the stakes and try desperately not to devolve things in combat. Also permanent wounds for a little spice to drive up the point.

So, the solution to improving the NPC dialogue is permadeath and permanent wounds. Brilliant.

 

[adrix89]

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

That's too boring. Instead have a real RPG with permadeath and no save scumming. That way you raise the stakes and try desperately not to devolve things in combat. Also permanent wounds for a little spice to drive up the point.

So, the solution to improving the NPC dialogue is permadeath and permanent wounds. Brilliant.

It is. Check Thea: The Awakening. Given the high risk of combat any other option becomes much more favorable. And the failure of the dialog can lead to combat so you have the extra incentive to do well. That means if you have things like preparation the player may well invest in that.

In fact going the extra mile of insanity you can have dialog in combat. With things like morale,fear, intimidation and ways to negotiate a surrender. Battles don't have to be done to the death. If the battle is an attrition it might be worth for both parties to simply part ways.
NPC personalities can be a factor so a pragmatic person might accept if things aren't going well, you would have to chose your responses to suit them based on how they act in combat.
This also changes the nature of combat. Instead of the goal of kill everything you have the goal of achieving the right situation and gathering information about the enemy and then letting dialog do the rest.
In fact the initial dialog before combat could be immensely useful in gather information about the enemy that you can use later.

 

[shihonage]

This post doesn't really validate your previous post, you're just finally trying to be on topic. Good, I guess.

 

[Lurker King]

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.

The reason why most dialogue systems are simplistic is that there is no incentives to implement them as a complex feature, since most cRPG players only care about combat and think that they can have gameplay only in combat. In this sense, dialogues will never be sophisticated enough to be considered proper gameplay because you can’t kill things with it. Which is unfair because is like saying that apples are bad because they not oranges. The game that took this more seriously than any other was Age of Decadence and the consequence was that it was heavily criticized for “interfering” and “restricting” gameplay with skill checks. That tells you all you need to know about what players really think is the role of dialogues in cRPGs. The less and fluffier, the better. In fact, since combat is the parameter of active gameplay, the implementation of a deeper and engrossing system would only make things worse.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine an ideal world in which most cRPG players are not combatfags that hate writing and support developers that want to implement a more detailed and active dialogue system. I think that one interesting feature of a deeper system is considering NPC’s temperament or present activities, for instance, if you are trying to convince a guy who is angry or is talking with someone else, this should make you job harder. Another idea is providing different variants of the speech skills, which would be useful in different circumstances, in the same way that different attacks can be useful in different circumstances. Of course, you can also consider that clothes and a bunch of other stuff would affect the skill checks, just like in real life. The more realistic the situations, the better. I want a game in which gossip is a speech skill and in which you can have believable dialogues with three or more interlocutors, etc. I made a more detailed post about this subject months ago, but I don't know where it is.

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

But this will only ensure that another developer will lose his job. How about telling the combatfags to go fuck themselves and leave it at that?

 

[Black Angel]

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

So basically this. Though, if I'm not mistaken, the combat will take place through the dialogue.

 

[Lurker King]

No, this, which is an actual game, not a concept.