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

[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.

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.

The problem with what we have is that there's often involved dialogue options and only a few of them have speech checks involved, often being the obvious right solution.
I'm switching the order around. The speech skill check is what gets you to even start trying to convince someone of something, and from that point forward, there's the involved dialogue options where you try to achieve just that. They are all options that already take into account your high speech skill.
If you wanted to divide it into different stuff like intimidation, sweet talking, bartering, etc, the process would still be the same. The gate is at the start, then you have to pick the right options to intimidate, barter or sweet talk someone.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Joke? Like… an RPG, a Visual Novel, a Puzzler and an Adventure Quest walk into a bar……

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Disco already solved this problem.

 

[gabe1010]

It depends quite a bit on what the appeal of the specific game is. BG3 is a cinematic, licensed DnD experience, so including dice rolls in conversation checks, and having a huge quantity of content in terms of dialogue, voice-overs and sequencer cinematics is basically required, regardless of whether it is the ideal speech implementation. More open-ended sandboxy type RPGs don't need, and pretty much could not produce the mass of content for, that kind of speech implementation (BG3 had like 400+ employees working on it full-time at peak, took many years to make, and included many years in early access, and even for that is pretty constrained/on-rails compared to a sandbox fully open world, and is also still quite buggy).

I lean more towards favoring the semi-sandboxy open world game you get from Morrowind or Daggerfall, where the story is what you make it, instead of the BG3 cinematic approach (and Morrowind was made by ~30 people 20 years ago). As I read over this thread, I kept thinking that the Morrowind way was the least bad of all those mentioned so far, especially if we're talking about a standard combat RPG, and not some kind of slice of life roleplay.

Morrowind already had individual disposition, a personality ability score, a speech skill, racial modifiers, faction modifiers, and reputation.

AFAIK Morrowind didn't utilize its well-realized disposition system and its various modifiers to its best potential. Hence, I wish that another game could've learned from MW and taken its already great base and expanded it.

It's a logical and intuitive system, Someone's willingness to give up information almost always depends on how much they like/dislike you and that's what the disposition system is meant to represent. if you have a high personality stat, People are naturally going to like you more due to the innate traits that make you more likable as a person - as much as I can excuse Fallout and similar games' use of the speech mechanic, I don't like how sometimes a character who might utterly despise you will still give up valuable info based purely on a single line of dialogue...

The above makes the most sense to me. Say individual NPCs have an out of 100 disposition towards you that defaults to 40 for the sake of the argument. You then have numeric alterations like:

-Base Charisma attribute bonus/detriment to all NPC dispositions (or whatever system the game uses, maybe charisma/speech is a trait that can be none/major/minor)
-Same Race bonus / Rival Race detriment
-Same Faction bonus / Rival Faction detriment
-Same Religion bonus / Rival Religion detriment
-bespoke bonuses for specific quests or favors done in game
-dialogue options to increase bonuses based off information you learn in-game (or decrease disposition if you are rude/aggressive/taunting)
-bribery to smooth things over (but it's a risk as it decreases the disposition of NPCs who can't be bribed, or who wanted more money than you offered)
-maybe charm spells (just not broken like in Morrowind)
-perks that balance bonuses/detriments to disposition based on class, profession, wealth, whatever of the NPC in question (like bonus to women but detriment to men or vice versa, or bonus to disposition from the poor but detriment to the wealthy, etc...).

And perhaps a few more things, and all this disposition boost really does is open up more dialogue options as it goes up. Maybe below 10 they won't talk to you. From 10-24 they give curt/rude answers. From 25-49 they provide basic personal and world information like directions and shop locations. From 50-74 they share rumors and secrets, and will participate in most quest specific dialogue. From 75-89 maybe they offer specific bits of help, or are required to be in that range for more advanced quest dialogue. And >= 90 is for the rare times you need someone to straight auto-win the quest for you, or agree to appoint you head of a guild, or follow you as a companion, or share info about hidden treasures, secret doors and such, or some other kind of very high disposition thing. It would also affect merchant prices. I think it would probably be a nice simplification if options always fell in these discrete ranges, and the player knows with decent certainty what kind of disposition they need from who for what (ie 0-10 is just "hates you" and 90-100 is "loves you" and everything in-between labelled, and you just know they need to "like" you for whatever).

If it was just a better balanced, more sensible, slightly evolved form of Morrowind, and used well by quest writers, it would be more than good enough for most combat/exploration/questing based RPGs. I think it fits well with the wiki-type dialogue as well, so you don't have to click through the same dialogue tree repeatedly as often. You come to an NPC to get info or advance a quest, and it's nice to just immediately select what you want, or see what's new, instead of going through tedious dialogue sequences over and over, especially many hours into the game.

As for going much further than that for speech options in an RPG, you could go all the way down the path of different types of speech, and many non-combat options with minigames and other complex mechanics for non-combat builds, but that then strikes me as bordering on a different genre of game. If you can be a dedicated diplomat, or run a store, or be a travelling merchant, or just a pillar of the community around town, then you're talking about the mechanics of The Sims, The Guild, Potion Craft, Recettear, a bunch of social/romance games, etc...basically a different genre to an RPG (although with "RPG elements" oftentimes). A given game needs to pick a focus, even an open world game, and including a full suite of both combat and non-combat play/lifestyles in an RPG is gonna be like making 2+ games at once. Who is the audience for that game? And who would make two games and sell it for the price of one?

 

[Lemming42]

As for going much further than that for speech options in an RPG, you could go all the way down the path of different types of speech, and many non-combat options with minigames and other complex mechanics for non-combat builds, but that then strikes me as bordering on a different genre of game. If you can be a dedicated diplomat, or run a store, or be a travelling merchant, or just a pillar of the community around town, then you're talking about the mechanics of The Sims, The Guild, Potion Craft, Recettear, a bunch of social/romance games, etc...basically a different genre to an RPG (although with "RPG elements" oftentimes). A given game needs to pick a focus, even an open world game, and including a full suite of both combat and non-combat play/lifestyles in an RPG is gonna be like making 2+ games at once. Who is the audience for that game? And who would make two games and sell it for the price of one?

The problem is that in recent years the cRPG genre seems to be simultaneously obsessed with ever-increasing amounts of dialogue, C&C, NPC interaction, and story, but devs are still unable to come up with a non half-assed way to implement those things. The general template devs use today is the one Fallout set out back in 1997, which is just absurd - over a quarter of a century of failure to innovate.

Obviously the issue is that TTRPG combat is very easy to replicate in a videogame because it's simple, predictable and rules-based, while everything else in a TTRPG is complex, imaginative and spontaneous, and thus extraordinarily difficult to replicate. A lot of older cRPGs were correct to eschew anything other than combat and dungeon exploration entirely (or offer it in a very abstracted and brief form, like the NPC encounters in Eye of the Beholder). This worked well; the games consisted almost entirely of actual gameplay and anything else was just a bonus that endearingly made the game feel a fraction more like a tabletop campaign. Modern cRPGs that have taken the same combat-first approach have been similarly successful, making sure that there's no half-implemented or shoddy mechanics dominating half the game (like, say, New Vegas' awful [Skill Check] quest solutions).

In other words: if a whole game consists of combat, and that's done well, then you've got a good game. If a game however, as many do nowadays, consists of lengthy dialogue, C&C, NPC interactions, non-combat quest solutions, and long periods without combat, and the game doesn't offer any real mechanics for anything other than combat, then you've got a visual novel/walking simulator where the player only spends a small percentage of their time actually playing a game. This is bad IMO; ideally all aspects of a game should be of equal depth and quality, as far as possible.

To take the Morrowind example, the problem is still that the player gains 100 Disposition with an NPC by just clicking "Admire" over and over. It'd be unacceptable for combat to consist entirely of the player opening a menu and clicking "Sword" repeatedly until a meter filled up, with no other mechanics involved. I think the same should be true of dialogue, especially in games where it's given equal or greater focus than combat, or can be used to the same effect as combat (eg solving quests). Otherwise, you've offered two paths through the game - one that involves actually playing the game (combat) and one that essentially involves clicking "win" (speech), and the two routes are treated as equal.

I don't think it's necessary to recreate The Sims though, only to find some kind of way to apply a set of satisfying mechanics to NPC interaction. Fallout took the first step and did so brilliantly, but nobody seems to have really taken the second step in the intervening 26 years, which is insane especially when you consider that developers seem increasingly interested in those very aspects. Your suggestions for evolving on the MW system are a good start; I think the solution lies in a degree of abstraction and letting speech be determined by mechanics rather than by hand-written dialogue options.

 

[Harthwain]

The general template devs use today is the one Fallout set out back in 1997, which is just absurd - over a quarter of a century of failure to innovate.

I would point to NEO Scavenger as a game that supports exploration (and crafting) through gameplay in very RPG-esque manner.

Streets of Rogue is also interesting, because it allows for some degree of creativity when it comes to finding solution to a quest (and interacting with a larger system on each floor, albeit that system is fairly simple, truth to be told. Still, that is a very good starting point for creating something unique, in my opinion).

Unforetold: Witchstone (formerly Project Witchsone) is a game I am eyeing from this perspective as well.

These are all examples of games that do not rely on heavily hand-crafted content when it comes to their core gameplay loop, while also being more than just "RPGs = combat".

 

[deama]

Actually, with the rise of AI, you could implement a straight up skill system.
Assuming the game has a AI npcs setup and you talk to them by typing it out.
What if the idea is that, e.g. if you're speaking to a lord in the castle and you type in "gimmy quest", the AI will write out an appropriate dialogue that your in-game character might have said, like if you're speech skill is crap it would say "gibby me quest lordy lord", and you'd basically be killed for insulting the lord. But if you're speech skill is high enough, the AI would turn it into a masterfully crafted sentence.

 

[gabe1010]

To take the Morrowind example, the problem is still that the player gains 100 Disposition with an NPC by just clicking "Admire" over and over. It'd be unacceptable for combat to consist entirely of the player opening a menu and clicking "Sword" repeatedly until a meter filled up, with no other mechanics involved. I think the same should be true of dialogue, especially in games where it's given equal or greater focus than combat, or can be used to the same effect as combat (eg solving quests). Otherwise, you've offered two paths through the game - one that involves actually playing the game (combat) and one that essentially involves clicking "win" (speech), and the two routes are treated as equal.

I don't think it's necessary to recreate The Sims though, only to find some kind of way to apply a set of satisfying mechanics to NPC interaction. Fallout took the first step and did so brilliantly, but nobody seems to have really taken the second step in the intervening 26 years, which is insane especially when you consider that developers seem increasingly interested in those very aspects. Your suggestions for evolving on the MW system are a good start; I think the solution lies in a degree of abstraction and letting speech be determined by mechanics rather than by hand-written dialogue options.

I agree that Morrowind's implementation often falls short, but it's more the base disposition system I like as a starting point. Admire should be an option, among those I listed, that would in a better implementation a) only be available (or at all effective at least) when used by certain builds, b) would have a pretty low cap of repeated effectiveness (spamming admire makes no sense in real life, and like bribing it should have a negative effect if taken too far), and c) only be effective against certain types of characters vulnerable to charm (and have the opposite effect on characters that dislike flattery, also like bribing). I think that would be adequate for most disposition type stuff in an otherwise quest/combat/exploration game like Morrowind, but with at least one eye towards some semblance of balance (unlike Morrowind). It would provide a few extra options for roleplay, and support some worldbuilding (like how in Morrowind Dunmer like bribes as a systematic cultural thing), and that's enough for that sort of RPG. The lockpicking minigames of TES 4 and 5 are tedious and boring, and the designers knew it so they included easily accessible skeleton keys, and they even harm roleplay as contrasted with Morrowind where the character does the lockpicking, not the player. I feel that speech minigames would just be that problem on an even larger scale.

If you want speech to be another way of playing the game altogether, and not just an augmentation of largely combat (or at least stealth) builds that takes place in dialogue windows, then yeah you'd need minigames et al, but now you're losing focus. It is perhaps insane that so little progress has been made on this front relative to combat in the past quarter century, but maybe it's just not the sort of thing that's as readily gamified, and those genres in which it is well gamified (The Sims, Romance games, etc...) tend to be either niche or have a big but non-traditional gaming audience like The Sims (ie the average The Sims player I suspect does not play Call of Duty or Morrowind). IE, it brings us back to the question of who would such a game be for? Or, to put it another way, there has been progress made on this front, but just in splitting into multiple other genres, ie you don't find it that much in games calling themselves RPGs.

The obsession with ever more dialogue, C&C, NPC interaction and story is simply a result of video games, gamer culture, and RPGs spilling out more into the mainstream, and what the mainstream wants is movies that you click through with a little bit of CYOA branching. Basically, Baldur's Gate 3 is a long animated movie shot through all the way through multiple branching plots and then stuck together with a CYOA option set, and between cutscenes you can play turn based battles (that I am finding every more tedious to get through, and I just got to Act 3). It won every award just about, but imo the "roleplay" aspect of it can't hold a candle to a game made 20 years ago.

Many people dream of AI being the solution to this (and many other problems), and there are some promising leads in that regard, but I'll remain wary until I see it implemented really well. Ultimately though, the AI would just be filling in flavor text and matching player inputs to existing possible options. It wouldn't really be an open ended conversation that could also map to a limited number of gameplay options.

 

[Daemongar]

I always thought of speech as an OP mechanic indicating too much with one skill.

If one had a 100 speech (on a 1-100 scale) and with your 100 could converse with kings, how could you possibly converse with some low tier beggar or parasite of society? Find anyone with a high speech. What, some talk show host can coax the safe combination out of some old bag at a bakery? I'd see Speech as a scale at what level you can communicate in society, not all encompassing. The higher you go, the less you are able to communicate or contact those who are too far off on the scale. Genius orators can't calm mentally handicapped people - compassionate old ladies who finished 8th grade can reach them better than any scientist or scholar.

So, I'd see speech as some manner of scale where one can be most effective with someone of the same speech score. That is, you have a speech of 50, you may be most effective with folks with speech between 25 and 75. A player may raise a score to 100 and communicate with judges and kings, but lose that "common touch" and be unable to sway regular slobs. Raising Speech too high would lock someone out of side quests, while having it too low would get the shittiest rewards for completing a quest to a king.

 

[Funposter]

re: Morrowind implementation, Tamriel Rebuilt's sway, barter and debate checks take good advantage of the framework that Morrowind provides with proper depth and an actual use for Speechcraft in a game where normally you just bribe everyone until they're at 100 disposition. It comes up in a lot of TR content and makes it WAY more useful to create a proper Speechcraft focused character. In an ideal world, you would still have Etiquette and Streetwise, and then these would also take into account social classes that are flagged for each character.

 

[Lemming42]

Coincidentally, Tim uploaded this today.

Summary: he agrees that clicking [Speech] to win is dumb, but he doesn't like minigames either. He thinks the solution is needing something tangible to back up a speech check (like the holotape evidence of mutant sterility in Fo1), and he thinks the game should telegraph when you'll need this so you know what you're looking for. He says getting evidence to back up a skill check could involve:
- finding some physical records in the game world (like the holotape), which itself should form a quest in which the player can bribe/sneak/etc to acquire the evidence
- talk to other people and piece together your upcoming speech check from things that they tell you. He thinks this can be supported with a Persuade/Intimidate/Lie system like in TOW, which creates a "pure speech solution"
- create the evidence yourself (by "running experiments with your science skill" and other such things), and present it to the bad guy.
He thinks that these solutions should take as much time and be as involved as the equivalent combat or stealth paths, and should be just as fun.

He's also put up a video about pacifist playthroughs which I'm about to watch, might have some other relevant stuff.

(btw Tim if you're reading this, I love you)

 

[HarveyBirdman]

I have pretty much a whole game in my head. It incorporates the dopest speech skills. It would be the best game ever.

But I can't code so it will never be made. Still not giving you my intellectual property for free.