Interview RPG Codex Community Q&A: Project Eternity with Josh Sawyer

[Excidium]

Like I said - the ability to write conversations without having to artificially stuff them full of checks to balance the otherwise overpowered Diplomacy skill.

Sounds one-dimensional to me: every attribute or skill affecting combat is a "right" design choice, but affecting conversations is a "wrong" one. Where's consistency in that?

This is a big topic, but luckily somebody has already explained it better than I could: http://sinisterdesign.net/toaster-r...finished-evolution-of-rpg-character-creation/

Combat is generally an RPG’s most highly emergent system. Combat is built upon a number of actors operating according to simple rules, which then produces unexpected and complex situations. There are dozens of different factors in play at any given time in battle: a single scenario involves dozens of player decisions, and is unlikely to play out exactly the same way twice. This emergent quality makes combat a tempting choice to form the backbone of a cRPG, since it offers a much higher ratio of entertaining possibilities relative to development time spent than a more static system (such as, say, dialog trees) would. Thus, combat ends up accounting for a huge chunk of playtime, which in turn makes combat-related skills the most consistently valuable skills in the game.

Further, because combat skills impact an emergent system, their use offers a wide variety of possible effects. Gunplay, for instance, can deal direct damage; it can injure particular parts of an opponent’s (or player character’s) body; it can detonate explosives; it can break parts of the scenery; and so on. It offers variety and flexibility because the system it impacts responds organically to its use. This, in turn, makes these skills carry more water in terms of offering satisfying, unpredictable results across multiple playthroughs.

By contrast, skills that are useful only in scripted systems do not possess these benefits. A skill check or variable check in a scripted event will always produce one of two (or, in a best-case scenario, one of a few) pre-generated results. Because each result has to be hand-crafted rather than arising emergently, such skills are much less efficient at generating interesting variations throughout the game, and tend to feature less heavily in wRPGs than those skills which directly impact the game’s emergent systems.

The solution is to not make things so horribly scripted but it's not like I'm expecting CRPGs to ever move forward

 

[Lancehead]

Like I said - the ability to write conversations without having to artificially stuff them full of checks to balance the otherwise overpowered Diplomacy skill.

Sounds one-dimensional to me: every attribute or skill affecting combat is a "right" design choice, but affecting conversations is a "wrong" one. Where's consistency in that?

It may be consistent with the content variation (combat vs. dialogue).

 

[Hormalakh]

This is a big topic, but luckily somebody has already explained it better than I could: http://sinisterdesign.net/toaster-r...finished-evolution-of-rpg-character-creation/

which is where i think king of dragon pass did kind of an interesting thing: they made "dialogues" sort of emergent gameplay (or at least it felt that way). you could get the exact same options and they would work sometiems and not work other times. this is why i think a mish-mash of combat and non-combat attributes would be nice. i could be wrong about KoDP mechanics though. Anyone know how that worked?

 

[Shadenuat]

Infinitron, while I understand that you can't win this battle between useful and semi-useful skills without creating a new set of instruments for your game (like a whole dialogue system which can be used to actually "win the game"), I would prefer designers would still try. My reasoning is, I would prefer a game where playing a scientist/doctor with GREAT meta knowledge would be possible to a game where playing one would not be possible at all. The more levers player has to manipulate the game (including character generation screen), the more interesting results he'd get.

It may be consistent with the content variation (combat vs. dialogue).

Yeah, okay, P:E is not Fallout, it's H&S dungeon crawler. But even in dungeon crawlers, conversation skills can be used to add flavor and fun. If they're implementing a system with two skill pools, adding your basic persuade/intimidate/bluff should't be that a big deal.

 

[Infinitron]

which is where i think king of dragon pass did kind of an interesting thing: they made "dialogues" sort of emergent gameplay (or at least it felt that way). you could get the exact same options and they would work sometiems and not work other times. this is why i think a mish-mash of combat and non-combat attributes would be nice. i could be wrong about KoDP mechanics though. Anyone know how that worked?

I agree that an "emergent" dialogue system isn't an impossibility, but it would almost certainly result in a style of dialogue that would be highly unusual for a traditional IE-like RPG. People do love those scripted dialogue trees, limited though they are.

 

[Logic_error]

It is really hard to believe that people played IE games for the combat. The real reason why people like Baldur's gate saga is the characters and the story and the occasional mage battle.

 

[Excidium]

I played IE games because it's D&D

Brand power!!

 

[Shadenuat]

People do love those scripted dialogue trees, limited though they are.

We're playing an RPG for the story only once ('kay, unless it's Planescape which is still fun even after I've read through dialogue trees 7 times). It does't matter if there are only four choices in dialogue and two game endings. Dialogue trees doing their job just fine, I believe.

 

[evdk]

I played IE games because it's D&D

Brand power!!

I played IE games because all the other people did.

Peer pressure!!

 

[Hormalakh]

I played IE games because it's D&D

Brand power!!

I played IE games because all the other people did.

Peer pressure!!

I played IE games because my friend gave me the original Baldur's Gate 2 CD and I was addicted and couldn't stop playing because of the story. I played the others because I thought it was BG2 continued.

Dumb luck!!

 

[tuluse]

However, from what I understand, your skill picks in PE would not lead you into new dialogue branches you would not find without them. So sure, you won't get insta-win text quests to resolve situation, but you will also have the same conversation every time you play no matter what character you play; even if sometimes your INT will give you a hint or some more info.

I don't think that's true actually.

Yeah, okay, P:E is not Fallout, it's H&S dungeon crawler. But even in dungeon crawlers, conversation skills can be used to add flavor and fun. If they're implementing a system with two skill pools, adding your basic persuade/intimidate/bluff should't be that a big deal.

There not avoiding social skills because they're hard to do, Sawyer doesn't like them.

 

[Hormalakh]

you know, the more i think about it, the more i want them to do King of Dragon Pass type "adventures" in the game. The best time for them to occur would be during traveling between different maps in the outside world. How freaking awesome would that be? You have the story come up and then your party decides what to do: then you have C&C later on (maybe the next time you're out on the road).

cool huh?

 

[Liston]

MCA on dialogue in PE (link to the interview):

We also want to explore the idea of speech as a tool, not as a key. That may sound odd – we don’t want speech skills used as insta-wins when the option comes up, which doesn’t allow for much player contribution in the interaction beyond pressing the highlighted button. We experimented with this slightly in Fallout: New Vegas and the DLCs, although what we’d like to explore is more along the lines of what we did in Alpha Protocol: if you know enough about a target or subject, there may be different ways and approaches you want to use to create a desired result, which may involve pissing the listener off, flattering them, or intimidating them, for example, but none of these technically “win” the scenario, they either provide a broader context or more information on the target’s attitudes and motivations but it all depends on which way a player wants to push them.

A better example of a dialogue tool is the “Empathy” skill from Fallout 1 and 2. It was a perk that color-coded your responses to indicate whether the response would create a favorable, neutral, or hostile reaction. That didn’t mean that that option would lead to a good or bad result, however, and you had to decide what to do based on the clues the Empathy perk gave you (for example, you may not want to get in good with the leaders of Vault City in F2 because you feel slimy and dirty doing so, even if you’re being unfailingly polite – or you may want to make a mob boss angry and hostile so he has a heart attack right then and there).

I also remember that MCA (or maybe somebody else from Obsidian) said that speech skill will open new dialogue trees that will give you more information about the situation thus enabling you to choose the right option instead of just leting you "win" conversation. But I can't find that anywhere so maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

 

[Excidium]

Yeah, okay, P:E is not Fallout, it's H&S dungeon crawler. But even in dungeon crawlers, conversation skills can be used to add flavor and fun. If they're implementing a system with two skill pools, adding your basic persuade/intimidate/bluff should't be that a big deal.

There not avoiding social skills because they're hard to do, Sawyer doesn't like them.

I share his dislike of it, the way it's done in CRPGs is incredibly dull.

 

[Infinitron]

you know, the more i think about it, the more i want them to do King of Dragon Pass type "adventures" in the game. The best time for them to occur would be during traveling between different maps in the outside world. How freaking awesome would that be? You have the story come up and then your party decides what to do: then you have C&C later on (maybe the next time you're out on the road).

cool huh?

They're kind of doing that, bro. Only the inspiration is Darklands, not KoDP.

 

[Shadenuat]

I also remember that MCA (or maybe somebody else from Obsidian) said that speech skill will open new dialogue trees that will give you more information

That's what I remember too, but apparently things change?
Infinitron?

 

[Infinitron]

I also remember that MCA (or maybe somebody else from Obsidian) said that speech skill will open new dialogue trees that will give you more information

That's what I remember too, but apparently things change?
Infinitron?

Uh, I guess? Don't know much about the specifics of how PE's dialogue will be structured.

Anyway, Something Awful is butthurt about the Codex as usual (they don't appreciate Zed's sense of humor): http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506352&pagenumber=453#post417614539

Classes in A/D&D are much more character-defining than ability scores. Ability scores typically just reinforce what the class does or work against it -- in the latter case, producing a character that does the class' job poorly. This is less horrible in 3E/3.5 than it is in 2nd Edition, but it's still far from ideal. Choosing a non-standard array of ability scores for a given class should not, IMO, be an implicit difficulty modifier.

 

[Logic_error]

Darklands. Famous for dialogue choices.

 

[Shadenuat]

Sawyer is sorta right there, but then again, there are only a handful builds for a wizard with maxed charisma one could probably create before it completely stops to make sense, and it's a bit of a "everyone is a winner!" approach which I am not used to, and don't like.
Then I remember what happens when you dump Beauty in Arcanum, running from every grumpy villager or slaying whole city because your half-orc is just so damn ugly of a monster, and I understand that simulationist approach to stats can work too if you just make some effort and implement it to do something in the game.
Still, more builds is good. If he'd finally make DEX based fighters work without some banal stuff like "with this perk DEX does everything what STR supposed to now!", that would already be neat.

 

[Zed]

Infinitron I don't think I can read SA because I don't have an account but I don't care either. I recall them having a general dislike for the Codex and I don't exactly value their opinion.
edit: oh I could read it. Someone actually had a good point with the readability. I changed it a bit.

 

[Hormalakh]

i need to freaking play darklands...

 

[Infinitron]

i need to freaking play darklands...

I just read your post on the Obsidian Forums, and to clarify, I don't think PE will have anything "emergent". They're going to be using text-based CYOA mini-adventures in the style of Darklands in some places, but those adventures will (I assume) be as static as any other dialogue tree.

 

[Hormalakh]

i need to freaking play darklands...

I just read your post on the Obsidian Forums, and to clarify, I don't think PE will have anything "emergent". They're going to be using text-based CYOA mini-adventures in the style of Darklands in some places, but those adventures will (I assume) be as static as any other dialogue tree.

i really liked the KoDP events. they never played the same way twice. it was so frustrating not being able to meta-game those. and then i realized that's what good RPGs should be.

also, fuck SA

 

[Ignatius Reilly]

The more I think about this direction, the more I like it. This might not be the best example, but after putting a lot of time into those Spiderweb Software games (which are all kinds of fun), and after developing a handful of characters I've become disillusioned with a system that is so centered around stat points. Stat point selection begins to feel automated based on the class you chose, to the point you wonder why they've even included stats the first place -- other than the obvious reason of measuring character progress and becoming the biggest bad ass in all the land (which is always important).

Interesting choices in character building (as far as those games go) are things like dual wielding versus defensive perks or improving elemental spells vs summoning spells. Things that really affect how your character performs and get me excited about, and make me feel like I'm actually building a character.

Ideally, perks would tie into your attributes to where if you want certain perks you need a set number of points in a stat, which could possibly open up some interesting possibilities based on what stat combinations you're emphasizing.

 

[Delterius]

What? How? Push this button to increase damage, for each and every class. Where's the strategical variety?

You really can't think of any scenarios where more damage is useless?