Vapourware The problem with Speech (and your ideas for solutions)

[KeighnMcDeath]

Lordy. It is like reading Thomas Covenant novels; be sure to have your dictionary and thesaurus handy.

Irascible comes from the Latin root ira, which means "anger" or "rage," the same root that gives us the word ire, "anger." The -sc in the middle of irascible, means "becoming," so irascible doesn't just mean you're angry — it's got action built into it.

banality​

noun​

ba·nal·i·ty bə-ˈna-lə-tē bā-
also ba-

plural banalities
Synonyms of banality
1
: something that lacks originality, freshness, or novelty : something banal : COMMONPLACE

2
: the quality or state of lacking new or interesting qualities :



Let's Play Arcanum | Page 2

My irascibanality is unmatched! : [Smiling] Yes. You truly are without wits, Lukan. [IMG] : Thank you so much. I can almost forgive your churlinity ..


Well, I can’t find this offhand, so it seems made up but I don’t have my old book library with me atm.

 

[antimeridian]

Someone mentioned Deus EX: HR. Iirc, that was a primitive dialogue system where you could trial and error different approaches, while getting hints of what arguments certain characters were susceptible to. If you were more right than wrong, you would basically win the conversation. That's something like what I'm talking about, but there's no reason you couldn't have a more involved approach with stats and percentages. I may do that in another post, as this already turned into a wall of text which no one will read.

Been a minute since I played it, but I believe HR also has some randomness to the lines you'd get in the conversations that used the full system (there were less than a dozen in the whole game, it wasn't used in most conversations just key story moments). The NPC lines in these conversations wouldn't necessarily be the same every run, or they would come in a different order, so you'd have to actually listen and choose the appropriate responses each time. The minigame was optional, you only played if you chose to unlock the social enhancer aug which theoretically made the conversations easier, but you could pass the conversations regardless by paying attention to the NPC and responding approriately. I never took the social aug and I think I only failed one conversation. It was a neat experiment but also kind of a dead end due to massive amount of work involved.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I liked Alpha Protocol's implementation of it. Most of the time there are three options, which affect people in varying ways, and the odd fourth option which is akin to a high speech option. The fourth only pops up whenever you do enough of the right choices earlier or get enough data in a level, IIRC, never linked to a skill check. It does suffer from some gamey-ness and guess the developer's intentions, but for the most part it felt like a well-thought out system. Of course, most games do not have the depth of writing that Alpha Protocol has to pull it off.

 

[Harthwain]

Some ideas for solutions:
- Make Speech a into a minigame with its own mechanics.

Not into a minigame. Into its own mechanic. You could turn "speech" into Reputation. Imagine "trading" your Reputation. You can ask or do favours based on how much Reputation you have or owe to someone. Of course, going into deep negative for too long would mean your reputation with a particular person or faction goes down... Assuming they even allow you to go into negative. The possibilities are endless and they are very free-form, which is important when it comes to gameplay.

- Make it so that Speech simply gives the player access to a new dialogue tree where the right options must be selected to convince an NPC.

It would be better to allow the player to have access to more options based on what kind of information (or items, if they are related) the player has or is aware of (you don't need items themselves. The "concept" of item can be good enough. This of it as another way of conveying information).

- Integrate speech skills entirely into gameplay (think Daggerfall, where speech skills are rolled when near monsters to see if you pacify them). Interesting, but how would it work beyond just pacifying enemies in a way that feels very gamey and abstracted?

Allowing you to interact with NPCs in various ways is the obvious way such skill should work. The real issue is how to determine whether it works or not (in terms of interactions and their results). I guess some kind of checks are in order (unless you are going for a heavily hand-crafted game, but in that case there is little to discuss).

- Have it so that the Speech solutions may not be the optimal ones, forcing the player to compromise or acquiesce. This is cool in theory, but in practice, what's the point? It just means that investing in Speech will turn you into a loser who never wins.

That's why players should diversify, in my opinion. Speech as an option is a good idea. When that fails, you can try something else. Otherwise you go into one-trick-pony category, where you invest into a single skill (or two), because otherwise you are not good enough to pass whatever checks there are and progress.

- Divide Speech into lots of different skills (Intimidate, Persuade, Deception, etc.) This is a shit idea because it just means that, since players can't read the developers' minds, they won't know what to invest in ahead of time. Either every quest makes equal use of all these skills, in which case there's no point even having more than one Speech skill, or quests just randomly use one of these options out of nowhere, leaving people who invested in the others completely fucked. Bad idea.

You can roll all these "different skills" (intimidate, persuade, deception) into a single skill (speech). This allows you to be diverse in use of it. Just make it so that the use of speech changes depending on context (there is a difference from intimidating someone by blackmailing him with a certain information and selling that very information to his rival for money or favour). By having flexible skills players will be encouraged to use them. This also prevents skills from being dead/useless/niche/traps.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

every cRPG is a combat RPG

 

[thesecret1]

Everyone agrees: Speech and Diplomacy skills suck. They haven't evolved in about 25 years, and all too often they're an auto-win button. Click the [Speech] option, win the quest. In addition to this, they often actively restrict players from accessing content - if you persuade an NPC, your "reward" is usually to skip ahead in a quest or just have it end right there, meaning you've just missed out on part of the fucking game.

What the situation is telling you is that the skill is shit and shouldn't be present in the game. It's mega cringe in dialogue – you virtually never "convince" a person of something in two sentences. You'd need a whole lot more time to bullshit someone. It doesn't come off as natural and just leads to cringe (see Eden in FO3 for an example). Just don't have a speech skill. If you feel like you need a check for dialogue, check the other skills and attributes.

 

[Just Locus]

every cRPG is a combat RPG

New Signature

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I wonder how many god damn minigames you can shove up an CRPGs arse?

 

[Modron]

every cRPG is a combat RPG

Except for Titan Outpost.

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

Are players that hate “story faggotry” just people who hate to read or is it the writing is so bad or has no real effect in decisions made in the game?

I would consider myself a shameless storyfag but even with that being said there are games, even really good ones, that I just can't play because I can't be bothered to care about the story. Obviously I can't speak for the guy you're responding to but that's just my 2 cents.

I have zero interest in any of the D&D settings and consider them non-sense generic fantasy which is why I've never been able to make it past the first area in Planescape, even though I know it's objectively one of the best CRPGs ever made.

I think the best compromise in this regard is something like System Shock 2, where there is a deeper story and lore behind everything if you pay attention to the audio logs and environmental storytelling, but if you don't care about that you can just ignore all of it and play it like a more straightforward horror FPS game.

 

[Hagashager]

1: make sure diplomacy use rewards the player with at least the same XP as the violent option. 90% of the problem is right there.

2: Diplomacy can't be used to override higher level quest objectives. You can use it to bypass stuff like a keycard or ID check, but it can't be used to convince the final boss to kill himself.

3: to pull off convincing the final boss to himself you have to use PC knowledge or faction clout.

Optional, highly controversial suggestion: speech is exclusively used for shitty romance mechanics. Wanna nail Shadowheart? Crank diplomacy, otherwise don't bother.

 

[agris]

I’ve read absolutely zero posts other than the OP. I think the OP gets it wrong in all proposed examples of how to implement a “better” speech skill. I also may have slept with OP’s mother, but that’s for another discussion.

The answer is simple: certain cRPG discussions should be considered Important, such that the player has multiple lines of discussion and argumentation to navigate through. More complex and nuanced lines of argumentation that may ultimately be persuasive should be gated behind a speech skill, and if relevant other player skills (warfare, science, animal husbandry).

Critically, there needs to be wrong/bad/suboptimal lines of argumentation supported by the speech skill as well. These should be fully fleshed out and parallel in depth to the “winning” line(s) of argumentation, so while involving speech checks that ultimately do not provide the best possible outcome they do further illuminate some detail of the issue at hand. This is the reward for having a developed speech skill yet being too dumb to use it correctly: lore and immersion.

This addresses the “press speech to win” problem that I assume you monkeys discussed to death in the preceding 5 pages. You need to provide the player enough rope to hang themselves with, so that actually *reading and thinking about the dialogue options in the context of the situation and character the player is talking to* is the key to selecting persuasive dialogue options with the speech skill supporting it.

In practice, the skill should be infrequently used, but impactful. Wasteland 2’s 3x ass system is the antithesis of a good speech skill system, and while I don’t think Iron Tower’s Colony Ship nailed in with their 3x speech skills, they implemented them in dialogue awfully close to the ideal I laid out above.

 

[mondblut]

Are players that hate “story faggotry” just people who hate to read

We hate to be constrained and railroaded. Story and player agency are mutually exclusive.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ah! The ole railroad like certain pnp modules I know. Yeah, I can see that. I definitely know that a majority of jrpgs are going to be a railroad esp if I can’t create my own party or character. I suppose there are a fair amount of western games that do this as well. Games with only one possible result to “WIN” the game could loosely be considered this as well (story or no story). You’re not likely to truly get a game with as much free agency as real life or just your imagination daydreaming.

Even pure combat faggotry can be an utter railroad.

 

[Harthwain]

every cRPG is a combat RPG

Except for Titan Outpost.

It is not an RPG then, obviously.

 

[mondblut]

Even pure combat faggotry can be an utter railroad.

Of course. These tend to be the worst. But a story-heavy game will never give player a proper agency, so I'd rather waste months of my life on some purposeless sandbox than 3 hours of my day on passively consuming someone else's narrative while occasionally doing some stupid chores to unlock the next story beat. I'd sooner read a book or watch a movie, no chores involved and easier to skip the boring parts.

The Daggerfall manual said it all: "You are the protagonist, the hero of the game — the story is what you decide to make it."

 

[oscar]

Scrap speech skills and have such checks covered by charisma and intelligence (sometimes a check requiring one, sometimes both). Someone with a high charisma stat should be inherently likeable and persuasive (plus whatever other bonuses charisma gives in-game such as a larger party and better prices).

It's like someone with a high strength score also needing a separate heavy lifting skill to roll a boulder aside. Weird redundancy.

Or even sillier that you can make a character with very low charisma who is also an excellent persuader. Is someone with 6/10 charisma and 80% in speech better at persuading people than someone with 9/10 charisma and 55% in speech? It's a unnecessary double up.

In general I think it's tidier to have most non-combat skill checks simply fall under base stats. In a sci-fi setting it should be a fairly safe bet that a high intelligence character will have a good grasp of science. In all settings a high dexterity character will be good at moving, balancing and leaping without needing to also put points into mobility or acrobatics or whatever.

 

[NecroLord]

Scrap speech skills and have such checks covered by charisma and intelligence (sometimes a check requiring one, sometimes both). Someone with a high charisma stat should be inherently likeable and persuasive (plus whatever other bonuses charisma gives in-game such as a larger party and better prices).

It's like someone with a high strength score also needing a separate heavy lifting skill to roll a boulder aside. Weird redundancy.

Or even sillier that you can make a character with very low charisma who is also an excellent persuader. Is someone with 6/10 charisma and 80% in speech better at persuading people than someone with 9/10 charisma and 55% in speech? It's a unnecessary double up.

In general I think it's tidier to have most non-combat skill checks simply fall under base stats. In a sci-fi setting it should be a fairly safe bet that a high intelligence character will have a good grasp of science. In all settings a high dexterity character will be good at moving, balancing and leaping without needing to also put points into mobility or acrobatics or whatever.

Only the party Paladin should handle the talking.
The axe swinging Barbarian should just stick to decapitating orcs.

 

[TheShadyLurker]

Here is an idea for a relatively simple solution.
You have an involved branched dialogue system where you need to select the correct answers to convince people, but you can only access those branches to begin with if your speech skill is high enough. The dialogue option that starts that discussion off to begin with has a speech skill gate. This means that you require the high skill to even get access to that, depending on how difficult it would be, but you then need to pick the right options, based on what you think would make sense based on the character and situation.
In terms of guessing what the developers want, as was already said in this thread, that's already how RPGs work in general. If you feel like you roleplayed your character adequately in the conversation and it simply didn't match up with what he wanted to hear, or you think like you gave it your best shot but it failed, then you just live with whatever consequences happen from the failed dialogue check, which should be a way to do finish the quest in a different manner. If you think it was a stupid way it ended or want to try out different options and maybe find a balance between something that still fits your character but has a better outcome, then just quickload, who cares? You load the game when your party gets wiped, don't you?
As for complaining that you need to invest in dialogue skills and then can still lose, so it feels worthless, I disagree. You invest in combat skills but you still need to, as a player, make the correct decisions to win the combat encounters. Why should dialogue be any different?
Minigames or involved dialogue systems can work as abstracted versions of speech in certain RPGs, especially roguelikes and more simplistic games, but real simulated dialogue is indispensable for games that try inserting you directly in a story and roleplay a character reacting appropriately to it.

 

[Modron]

It is not an RPG then, obviously.

Go play it.

 

[Harthwain]

It is not an RPG then, obviously.

Go play it.

For context.

 

[Modron]

That context does little to say "I have played it."

 

[Harthwain]

That context does little to say "I have played it."

Obviously, because that was not the point of the joke I was making.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Here is an idea for a relatively simple solution.
You have an involved branched dialogue system where you need to select the correct answers to convince people, but you can only access those branches to begin with if your speech skill is high enough. The dialogue option that starts that discussion off to begin with has a speech skill gate. This means that you require the high skill to even get access to that, depending on how difficult it would be, but you then need to pick the right options, based on what you think would make sense based on the character and situation.

That's what we already have. I'd like to have a dialogue system where a particularly charismatic character can convince people of obviously wrong things.

Think of cult leaders who convince people to give working people all their money; of men who marry rich women and live lives of luxury; of politicians who lie, corrupt and break promises and still get re-elected; of women who charm their way out of jail, etc. That's what I'd like to see.

The reverse would be a loathsome character who wouldn't be believed even when telling the truth, who would get arrested by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc.

 

[Just Locus]

You have an involved branched dialogue system where you need to select the correct answers to convince people, but you can only access those branches to begin with if your speech skill is high enough. The dialogue option that starts that discussion off to begin with has a speech skill gate. This means that you require the high skill to even get access to that, depending on how difficult it would be, but you then need to pick the right options, based on what you think would make sense based on the character and situation.

This is a very good suggestion however another thing I would add to this is making the "style" of the dialogue correspond to your intelligence stat too, think of the inverse of what Fallout 1 did with its intelligence, where if your INT is low enough, your character will sound like a drooling moron, I'd make it so the higher your INT stat is, the more "sophisticated" your speech pattern is, where you'll sound more formal and professional, an average INT stat will make your character speak casually and with whatever else Speech offers, and a low INT stat will make it so your character sounds like a lost caveman ala Fallout 1.