82 réponses à ce sujet

[mesmerizedish]

A persuasion challenge should be a conversations consisting of several (exact number could depend on complexity of the encounter) "talk points" (not sure what the dev term is; basically, any opportunity the player has to select a line of dialogue).

Each "talk point" is a roll for either Diplomacy, Bluff, or Intimidate. The DC for each is pre-determined based on such considerations as the personality of the NPC and the actual content of the persuade choice.

The final outcome of the challenge depends on how many successes the PC scored during the conversation

The PC gets a bonus based on her "dominant tone." An aggressive PC gets a bonus to Intimidate, for example. Perhaps the PC gets a larger bonus distributed among the three based on how often she uses each tone; this allows for a PC who's often diplomatic, but can get mean if she has to, and offers a smaller bonus to her based on that.

There should be a "general" talent tree open to all classes that includes what used to be skills. It could include talents like "Compulsive Liar," which could grant the full bonus to Bluff regardless of "dominant tone," for example.




Simplistic example: Julia Hawke has a +10 bonus to Diplomacy and no bonus to Bluff or Intimidate.




Merrill: The mirror is driving me mad! I must talk to the spirit again!


       /(Diplomacy): We'll find some way that doesn't involve a demon, I promise. (DC 15)
      /
Julia---(Bluff): The demon's gone, Merrill. I killed it while you were sleeping. (DC 25)
      \\
       \\(Intimidate): Forget about the demon, or I'll shatter the mirror right now! (DC 15)




Julia uses Diplomacy and rolls a 9, for a total of 19. Success! Merrill agrees to hold off on finding the demon... for now.




A full speech challenge would consist of several such persuasion checks. Perhaps the player would choose an argument she thinks the NPC would be receptive to, and then chooses how to persuade him; she selects each argument from the wheel in turn until she's done trying to persuade him. The successes are totaled and he is persuaded or not.

Keep in mind that I'm totally pulling the DCs out of thin air, and the d20 roll is just out of habit: it could be a percent chance or anything. What's important is that there's a random element to it: my aggressive personality makes it easier for me to be intimidating, but there's still a chance at failure. You can fail a combat challenge because of bad dice. Why shouldn't you be able to fail a speech challenge?

Discuss.

[tmp7704]

This seems similar to how DAO (the landsmeet and dark ritual discussions) and the latest Deus Ex did the 'converation duels' with one key difference -- in these games there's no explicit 'modes' for conversation, but rather number of lines to choose from, each with assigned value based on the opponent's personality. The conversation is thus won if at the end of it the player manages to collect enough "talk points" to pass required threshold.

I find that approach more flexible so i'd rather see it than this structure, as it allows to also cover situations which don't easily translate into diplomacy/intimidate/bluff model... like actually debating viewpoints -- even such simplistic example like "killing is wrong" "killing is right" "i don't know" "i don't care" could easily break the suggested model.

[ipgd]

Adding a random element to dialogue would just exponentially increase the amount of time I spend compulsively reloading.

Honestly, I don't really like any kind of stat or numbers element being tied to dialogue. I both am a massive powergamer and actually enjoy roleplaying, but when a game is structured in such a way that my desire to do either of those things fundamentally conflict with the other I get massively buttpained. Make dialogue a numbers game (hello paragon/renegade) and I am invariably going to metagame it and stop actually roleplaying, which I perceive as Less Fun but cannot stop myself from doing anyway. The absolute only thing that I want to influence my dialogue choices is what I think my character would say, and the only time I want to fail a dialogue check is if I want my character to fail the dialogue check.

[Xewaka]

I like how Deus Ex: Human Revolution did it. There, cinematic dialogue actually makes sense, because you have to try and read the other party body language to see what effect your arguments are having. And the full effect of each line is slightly randomized, to ensure that you actually pay attention to what lines you choose and the reaction of the NPC.
Of course, since the arguing is rather involved, it also has the benefit of offering the full line, so that the player knows exactly what argument his character is making.

[Morroian]

I'd like to see BW implement a Deus Ex HR type system as well.

[Zjarcal]

tmp7704 wrote...

This seems similar to how DAO (the landsmeet and dark ritual discussions) and the latest Deus Ex did the 'converation duels' with one key difference -- in these games there's no explicit 'modes' for conversation, but rather number of lines to choose from, each with assigned value based on the opponent's personality. The conversation is thus won if at the end of it the player manages to collect enough "talk points" to pass required threshold.

I like the examples of the Landsmeet and the DR Alistair/Loghain conversation. You could also throw in the conversation with Alistair to convince him to marry Anora.

What I like about those situations is that, not only do they flow much more naturally, with the NPCs reacting properly as the conversation goes on, but they are also not based on a skill (although some lines did benefit from a high persuade skill), it's more about the arguments you make, which I feel is much more natural than saying one thing and having the decision of whether that one thing is convincing or not to be based on a number.

Granted, not every situation that deals with persuasion or intimidation needs to involve a long conversation, but it should be implemented more often for the sake of making those "convincing arguments" more convincing.

[hoorayforicecream]

Add elements of randomness to a gameplay system and the players who care about the system will do all that they can to eliminate the randomness from the events.

[Zjarcal]

ipgd wrote...

Adding a random element to dialogue would just exponentially increase the amount of time I spend compulsively reloading.

Honestly, I don't really like any kind of stat or numbers element being tied to dialogue. I both am a massive powergamer and actually enjoy roleplaying, but when a game is structured in such a way that my desire to do either of those things fundamentally conflict with the other I get massively buttpained. Make dialogue a numbers game (hello paragon/renegade) and I am invariably going to metagame it and stop actually roleplaying, which I perceive as Less Fun but cannot stop myself from doing anyway. The absolute only thing that I want to influence my dialogue choices is what I think my character would say, and the only time I want to fail a dialogue check is if I want my character to fail the dialogue check.

Also, this.

I completely agree. I hate to base things on numbers. I like to have all the options available and whether or not I pick the "succesful" one will be based on how I'm roleplaying my character. I have lost the Landsmeet on purpose on occassion, knowing full well which lines would've made me win it, but if they weren't appropriate for my character, I simply won't choose them.

The Paragon/Renegade system also created many situations where I could see the line greyed out and think to myself "THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT MY CHARACTER WOULD SAY, LET ME CHOOSE IT!!!", but nooooo, it had to be greyed out because of insufficient points. That's just lame.

Let the player roleplay as they see fit. If others want to metagame and choose lines that are OOC for the sake of "winning" then so be it, but I can perfectly choose not to do that.

[Xewaka]

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Add elements of randomness to a gameplay system and the players who care about the system will do all that they can to eliminate the randomness from the events.

The fun comes in choosing which event do you want to raise your chances at. Do you want to play a silver tongued casanova? A hulking mountain man? A dapper swashbuckler?
What you call "eleminate randomness from events" I call "character building". And it is a very enjoyable part of the process. There is nothing quite as beautiful as a well thought character sheet, where you can see all those little numbers and notes warp into a full persona.
Then again, I'm used to play PnP RPG.

[Wulfram]

I don't really like buying out of combat stuff with the same resource as combat stuff, and it seems like you're being punished for having a character who isn't one note. Just because my character is gentle or jocular with their friends, doesn't mean they can't be scary with people who get in their way.

This is only tangentially related to your post, but I also find the association of snarkyness with lying in DA2 annoying.

[esper]

If it involves a (hidden or visible) dice roll to suceed it is an element of randomness I would never want to see again as it has nothing to do with roleplaying (At least not what I enjoy with roleplay). I really hated constantly reloading in NWN2

But then again I like the personality system, it makes me think that this Hawke is good at this and that kind of speech.

[Cutlass Jack]

Xewaka wrote...

I like how Deus Ex: Human Revolution did it. There, cinematic dialogue actually makes sense, because you have to try and read the other party body language to see what effect your arguments are having. And the full effect of each line is slightly randomized, to ensure that you actually pay attention to what lines you choose and the reaction of the NPC.
Of course, since the arguing is rather involved, it also has the benefit of offering the full line, so that the player knows exactly what argument his character is making.

The speech challenges in DE:HR were interesting but not something I'd want to see in a Bioware game. It made it less about playing and developing a personality and more about saying what your 'opponent' most wanted to hear. The actual content of the lines was irrelevant.

That works fine for someone like Jensen who had no real personality of his own to develop. But not good for an RPG where the fun is creating and developing your protaganist.

[hoorayforicecream]

Xewaka wrote...

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Add elements of randomness to a gameplay system and the players who care about the system will do all that they can to eliminate the randomness from the events.

The fun comes in choosing which event do you want to raise your chances at. Do you want to play a silver tongued casanova? A hulking mountain man? A dapper swashbuckler?
What you call "eleminate randomness from events" I call "character building". And it is a very enjoyable part of the process. There is nothing quite as beautiful as a well thought character sheet, where you can see all those little numbers and notes warp into a full persona.
Then again, I'm used to play PnP RPG.

Not everyone finds this fun. Quite a few would view the inability to progress along a certain line due to a random element as failure, and would just reload unti lthey succeed. Plenty of players want to take the "optimal" path, and already do so with their conversations trying to maximize their approval with the followers based on their conversational decisions. Adding a random element to this would just make them reload repeatedly until they got their choice, and that's the sort of behavior that the devs have stated they wished to avoid.

[Xewaka]

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Not everyone finds this fun. Quite a few would view the inability to progress along a certain line due to a random element as failure, and would just reload unti lthey succeed. Plenty of players want to take the "optimal" path, and already do so with their conversations trying to maximize their approval with the followers based on their conversational decisions. Adding a random element to this would just make them reload repeatedly until they got their choice, and that's the sort of behavior that the devs have stated they wished to avoid.

Following that line of thought, characters should be invincible in combat.
If you want to remove chance (despite you not complaining about critical hits, miss chances, or glancing blows), use a system like New Vegas (enough skill? Pass. Not enough? Fail). That's better than the "ultra charismatic, everyone loves me because I'm awesome and unable to fail" concept Bioware's going for.
Besides, if they intended to avoid compulsive reloading, they failed, as with their current system the player must reload at least three times per dialogue choice hub just to know that his character will say what he wants him to say.

[Dave of Canada]

Cutlass Jack wrote...

That works fine for someone like Jensen who had no real personality of his own to develop. But not good for an RPG where the fun is creating and developing your protaganist.

They could make the lines tied to your personality, it might be somewhat humorous to see an Aggressive protagonist trying to suck up. Though I somewhat agree with your point, I'd just like to see persuasion that's untied to a skill / roll and actually involves persuasion.

Modifié par Dave of Canada, 04 octobre 2011 - 09:28 .

[hoorayforicecream]

Xewaka wrote...

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Not everyone finds this fun. Quite a few would view the inability to progress along a certain line due to a random element as failure, and would just reload unti lthey succeed. Plenty of players want to take the "optimal" path, and already do so with their conversations trying to maximize their approval with the followers based on their conversational decisions. Adding a random element to this would just make them reload repeatedly until they got their choice, and that's the sort of behavior that the devs have stated they wished to avoid.

Following that line of thought, characters should be invincible in combat.
If you want to remove chance (despite you not complaining about critical hits, miss chances, or glancing blows), use a system like New Vegas (enough skill? Pass. Not enough? Fail). That's better than the "ultra charismatic, everyone loves me because I'm awesome and unable to fail" concept Bioware's going for.
Besides, if they intended to avoid compulsive reloading, they failed, as with their current system the player must reload at least three times per dialogue choice hub just to know that his character will say what he wants him to say.

Didn't Jennifer Hepler say that there should be a combat skip button? Regardless, your examples are not analogous.

The only way they would be analogous is if you got differing rewards (exp, money, items) each time you completed combat successfully. The more varied the rewards, the more people would complain.

[tmp7704]

Cutlass Jack wrote...

The speech challenges in DE:HR were interesting but not something I'd want to see in a Bioware game. It made it less about playing and developing a personality and more about saying what your 'opponent' most wanted to hear. The actual content of the lines was irrelevant.

I think it was more of a case you had to say stuff which appealed to the person if you wanted to get them on your side. You could certainly instead stick consequently to the personality that you'd imagined for your character. It simply had a consequence that some of the NPC people would actually disagree with you.

There was decent amount of leeway left in it, too. E.g. while talking a character out of suicide i could indeed "tell them what they wanted most to hear", but the situation also worked out in my favour if i called him a coward for considering that -- it wasn't what that NPC 'wanted to hear' but because i made solid enough argument overall with the earlier lines, he did admit what i said was actually right.

[Morroian]

Cutlass Jack wrote...

The speech challenges in DE:HR were interesting but not something I'd want to see in a Bioware game. It made it less about playing and developing a personality and more about saying what your 'opponent' most wanted to hear. The actual content of the lines was irrelevant.

That works fine for someone like Jensen who had no real personality of his own to develop. But not good for an RPG where the fun is creating and developing your protaganist.

Maybe adapt it to incorporate the personality elements.

[Xewaka]

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Didn't Jennifer Hepler say that there should be a combat skip button? Regardless, your examples are not analogous.
The only way they would be analogous is if you got differing rewards (exp, money, items) each time you completed combat successfully. The more varied the rewards, the more people would complain.

If I were to have it my way, combat rewards would be completely removed, replaced by objective rewards. You know, the way most modern PnP RPGs do it.
Also, I wonder. What do you refer exactly with my examples not being analogous?

Modifié par Xewaka, 04 octobre 2011 - 09:41 .

[Herr Uhl]

Cutlass Jack wrote...

Xewaka wrote...

I like how Deus Ex: Human Revolution did it. There, cinematic dialogue actually makes sense, because you have to try and read the other party body language to see what effect your arguments are having. And the full effect of each line is slightly randomized, to ensure that you actually pay attention to what lines you choose and the reaction of the NPC.
Of course, since the arguing is rather involved, it also has the benefit of offering the full line, so that the player knows exactly what argument his character is making.

The speech challenges in DE:HR were interesting but not something I'd want to see in a Bioware game. It made it less about playing and developing a personality and more about saying what your 'opponent' most wanted to hear. The actual content of the lines was irrelevant.

That works fine for someone like Jensen who had no real personality of his own to develop. But not good for an RPG where the fun is creating and developing your protaganist.

I think that something similar to the DE:HR would work though. If you find a terrified person and try to get some info or if you need to BS your way past a guard, the optimal ways would be different. If you're being consequent with your choises, then you're roleplaying someone that is just that. Seeing as I talk in completely different ways and have completely different demeanour depending on context, I don't see how that would be non-roleplay.

I thought the system of contextual persuasions would be introduced more in DA2 than it was. For example, some people may answer to authoritive speak or want more humor, just like companions do. Having more NPC's acting like that would be refreshing, now it mainly seemed like you had to win the lottery and have a dominant personality that corresponded with the check you needed.

Edit: I mean this as in a set conversation tree. Not in the mini-gamey way it was done in DE.

Modifié par Herr Uhl, 04 octobre 2011 - 09:43 .

[hoorayforicecream]

Xewaka wrote...

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Didn't Jennifer Hepler say that there should be a combat skip button? Regardless, your examples are not analogous.
The only way they would be analogous is if you got differing rewards (exp, money, items) each time you completed combat successfully. The more varied the rewards, the more people would complain.

If I were to have it my way, combat rewards would be completely removed, replaced by objective rewards. You know, the way most modern PnP RPGs do it.
Also, I wonder. What do you refer exactly with my examples not being analogous?

You said "Following that line of thought, characters should be invincible in combat." That isn't analogous, because combat has only two outcomes: Either you reload from your last save, or you win and move on. You don't get a grade on how well you did in combat, or experience points based on how well you did, or better drops because you fought better. It's only win or lose. 

Dialogue isn't like this. You cannot "lose" a dialogue in the game. Even if you fail at a particular coercion check (as in DAO), you still progress. Depending on your choices and the randomization element of the roll, you don't end the game, you simply don't get access to certain elements (rewards) of the game. There is a sliding scale of outcomes based on dialogue. There is no such sliding scale of results in combat, there is only a binary outcome (win or reload). 

Making the player invincible would be like removing all choices from dialogue and just having it be static for the entirety of the game.

[Quething]

Xewaka wrote...

Following that line of thought, characters should be invincible in combat.
If you want to remove chance (despite you not complaining about critical hits, miss chances, or glancing blows), use a system like New Vegas (enough skill? Pass. Not enough? Fail). That's better than the "ultra charismatic, everyone loves me because I'm awesome and unable to fail" concept Bioware's going for.

I also say this isn't the same. A glancing blow in combat is a random response to a single attack. Any given combat has hundreds of attacks. Being successful in combat is a matter of building your character and honing your strategies to minimize the effect of that random element: boost your attack score, increase your damage so fewer hits need to connect to make the same difference, learn to prioritize targets, etc etc. And do notice that in DA2, talents always hit. Clearly a conscious design choice in response to player annoyance with DA:O, and how obnoxious it is when an expensive, high-cooldown talent whiffs. Players don't like when their important abilites fail to the RNG god.

The element of randomness could be added to dialog, but it would require a corresponding increase in the complexity of the dialog system; it would need to be the same as a whiff in combat, basically, such that you could fail a line and yet still win the dialog taken as a whole, provided you had taken the right skills and were able to intelligently respond to the challenge. You'd need to have clear, understandable NPC feedback, branching dialogs that rewarded consistency and player responsiveness to feedback, the ability to learn the particular strengths and weaknesses of different opponents... You would even probably want to tie it to the difficulty setting, such that a less-than-optimal dialog choice would be more effective on Casual than on Nightmare. It would be very cool if done right, but extremely dev-intensive, and probably a hard sell with the newer action-focused half of the dramatically split fanbase.

Besides, if they intended to avoid compulsive reloading, they failed, as with their current system the player must reload at least three times per dialogue choice hub just to know that his character will say what he wants him to say.

Too bloody right. <_< Though it would certainly help a whole hell of a lot if the icons actually matched the tone; I'd reload a lot less if "direct" actually always meant "direct" and not "direct and/or jack@ss even though we have a whole different icon for jack@ass that we should have used instead."

Modifié par Quething, 04 octobre 2011 - 10:04 .

[Collider]

No chance whatsoever, please.
People are just going to reload. Like me.

[Xewaka]

hoorayforicecream wrote...
You said "Following that line of thought, characters should be invincible in combat." That isn't analogous, because combat has only two outcomes: Either you reload from your last save, or you win and move on. You don't get a grade on how well you did in combat, or experience points based on how well you did, or better drops because you fought better. It's only win or lose.

Deus Ex Human Revolution does this. Depending on the way the enemy was dealt with, the XP granted can vary from 10 to 50.

Dialogue isn't like this. You cannot "lose" a dialogue in the game. Even if you fail at a particular coercion check (as in DAO), you still progress. Depending on your choices and the randomization element of the roll, you don't end the game, you simply don't get access to certain elements (rewards) of the game. There is a sliding scale of outcomes based on dialogue. There is no such sliding scale of results in combat, there is only a binary outcome (win or reload).

Again, you could "lose" dialogue in DE:HR if you didn't convince the other party to fork over your position. This forced you to look for alternate parts.

hoorayforicecream wrote...
Making the player invincible would be like removing all choices from dialogue and just having it be static for the entirety of the game.

That is, effectively, what we have now, regarding dialogue. The plot always moves forward regardless of the player actions, rather than because of it.

[mesmerizedish]

Collider wrote...

No chance whatsoever, please.
People are just going to reload. Like me.

You reload combat when you lose. Why shouldn't you reload when you don't pass a dialogue challenge?