82 réponses à ce sujet

[tmp7704]

Foolsfolly wrote...

Why would you pick a side and lose someone else's loyalty when you can press a button that gives you both loyalties with no consquences?

Story-making/roleplaying. Depending on what character you choose to play and/or what story you have on mind for them, picking options which net you disapproval or even lead to negative outcome can be perfectly reasonable choice.

And for some people it can be as simple as 'i hate companion X and the last thing i want is their loyalty".

[ipgd]

ishmaeltheforsaken wrote...

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.

You would never be restricted in what your character is allowed to say, only how well it would work.

You cannot completely control the outcome of any adversarial encounter. The only time you want to fail a dialogue check is if you want your character to fail the dialogue check. Okay. Me too! The only time I want to die in combat is if I want my character to die in combat! But I still risk dying every time I enter combat. I should risk not being that convincing any time I try to be convincing.

I don't want my character to be some Hitler-esque demigod of mind-control who doesn't even have to try. That's not fun.

If I want my character to be a stupid Mary Sue with unexplained founts of both charisma and menace, I should be able to.

I do not want there to be any kind of number element behind my dialogue interactions. I do not want any sort of element that makes me consider anything other than what I want my character to say. If I have to choose charm instead of intimidate because I don't have enough arbitrary points to intimidate, even if I think my character would use the intimidate option and also be competent at it, I am displeased, especially when there is no actual difference in the spoken lines and the pass/fail is determined by a game variable. I am not okay with failing a dialogue check because I have a deficit of points, because when I have to think about the points I am no longer actually roleplaying my character but metagaming a Personality Build to achieve my desired outcomes at the detriment of actual characterization.

I'm actually surprised that people see not being able to persuade an
NPC because of poor decisions/bad rolls within the conversation as
being worse than not being able to persuade an NPC because you didn't
pick the top option often enough throughout the entire game. One
requires you to reload a conversation to get the outcome you want, the
other requires you to pretty much start the game over.

I hate both of them.

ishmaeltheforsaken wrote...

Except, sometimes, you get really crappy dice rolls. That happens in combat, too. That's not frustrating, it's what makes it fun.

That's what makes me seething mad and incredibly unhappy, personally. There is seriously very little else that makes me more furious than RNG failures, but 5 years of playing MMOs is probably responsible for that. The feeling of losing hours worth of time and money solely because the dice were in a bad mood is ****ing awful and likely the source of at least 70% of the anger I have ever experienced in my life, and I have a lot of anger.

I only want to fail when my strategy is bad or my playing is bad or my gear is bad or my build is bad or my group composition is bad. If all of those are perfect, there is absolutely no reason I should not succeed every time. If I want more of a challenge at that point, I'll play something else that is harder or that I haven't already mastered yet.

RNG is a garbage, garbage, garbage kind of artificial difficulty and I want to see less of it even in standard combat gameplay, and I would pretty much **** myself if it were standardized for inclusion in roleplaying elements like dialogue interactions.

[tmp7704]

ipgd wrote...

I do not want there to be any kind of number element behind my dialogue interactions.

What about access to dialogue options based on character's skills/attributes like intelligence and/or others, though? I'm thinking of how Fallout games do it (along with few others, including PS:T) and that kind of limitation feels quite sensible. At least, doesn't irk me personally...

Modifié par tmp7704, 05 octobre 2011 - 05:54 .

[ipgd]

tmp7704 wrote...

ipgd wrote...

I do not want there to be any kind of number element behind my dialogue interactions.

What about access to dialogue options based on character's skills/attributes like intelligence and/or others, though? I'm thinking of how Fallout games do it (along with few others, including PS:T) and that kind of limitation feels quite sensible. At least, doesn't irk me personally...

It's lower on the list of things that make me want to die inside, but I still don't particularly like it. I want to be able to choose between every single dialogue option written without precondition (obviously barring options available as direct consequence of plot decisions, etc.).

[MichaelFinnegan]

ishmaeltheforsaken wrote...

Good post.

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.

How about some dynamism to the personality of the NPCs? As the NPC develops a liking/disliking for the PC (based on previous successes at persuade, or via gifts, and so on), the ability of the PC to persuade that NPC increases/decreases.

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.

This sounds good, actually.

Also there could be the concept of not everyone being able to be persuaded or intimidated simply based on the PCs ability to do so, no matter how high the persuade/intimidate score. One'd need to carefully evaluate the NPC to understand what conversation choices need to be made to succeed in bringing about a desired outcome.

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.

I'd rather prefer it to happen fully via conversations/interactions with NPCs. It's just a personal choice.

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?

Well, the situations aren't the same. For instance, why would you need to really have a random element to decide persuade/intimidate, other than the fact that it is also there for combat? In combat, as I develop my skills, my chance to miss goes down. That sounds logical. But, for converations, are you suggesting you'd like to include something like a "mood" to the NPCs, which can vary (randomly or based on experiences the NPCs might have had, which the PC isn't aware of) and decide how he/she perceives your attempts to smooth-talk or intimidate him/her? Also, I suppose, a very "ideal" system is in place in the games, one where the characters have perfect memory of each and every thing you did (the unchanging underlying numbers ensure this). So randomness might actually help in making it more real. But I'm not sure what your intentions behind this were, other than what you said.

Also how would introducing such realism (if I can call it that) into games really help? Everything, I mean the set of all "talk points," is bounded (not infinite). So ultimately one'd get to know all the permutations and combinations associated with it. By doing this, would it help in enhancing replay value?

Looking at some poster comments below (I read only a few initial ones), I suppose the element of randomness could be made an option, thus giving each gamer what he/she wants. I also like the suggestion of some to be able to read body language of NPCs to see how they react to conversation choices; although if one'd add the element of subtelty to this (when some NPCs might not wish to show how they feel), it'd also make it more interesting.

And, finally, would it help to have "gameplay difficulty" applied to conversations, where the chance (or bonus) to  persuade or intimidate (statically) either goes either up or down. This would be apart from the difficulty currently applied to combat alone (I think). That way, those who purely want to roleplay could set this to "easy" and get what they want.

[Foolsfolly]

Well due to the regularity in which The Witcher 2 comes up in these boards I've played and beaten the thing.

I have opinions on many things with the game but I will stay on topic and say this.

I liked how their persuasion system worked. I liked that it grew independent of my leveling up (so no points pumped into it, the way to get better at it is simply to persuade more often). And I liked how it was used. There wasn't ever a time where there was a "Persuasion is the Best Case" scenario. They were there for information purposes, mostly, and a few times to avoid a fight.

They were smartly used.

Also last page I said this:

And I'd love to see things go worse if you go combat instead. Like you're hired out or otherwise tasked to kill some minor lording. You go to their base and fight your way in and in the process alert the guards which causes the lordling to escape while you're battling. The mission is failed but you don't reload and try again. Instead an optional quest is triggered where this Lordling is now using this attack to muster support. And you've got to deal with that mess you created somehow.

The Witcher 2 got really close to doing that. Early in the game you're tasked with taking out some lording. You have options when you meet him. I decided to duel him mano-y-mano and struck him down. With their lord dead at my feet his men threw down their weapons and I won. Then later I see the affect killing him has on his mother in prison, and then in Chapter 2 there's an off-hand reference by a main character on how things would have been better if that lordling was still alive.

I haven't done a second playthrough yet, so I have no idea if his being alive does make things better for that particular Act Two (since there's two Act Twos based on your choices)... but I like how that made me feel like I'd inadvertently shot myself in the foot when I thought I put down an enemy.

[SkittlesKat96]

Deus Ex Human Revolutions persuasion system is good and immersive and realistic and all but it has some big downsides.

A majority of people are too tempted to go back a save if they fail it which makes it somewhat pointless. Don't bother arguing 'Not everyone does that.' If you put in a feature in a game but not a whole lot of people use it does that mean you should still put it into the sequel unchanged from the original?

Also the director of DXHR said that he wanted to add bigger rewards for the persuasion system in DXHR but he decided not to because of the fact that people would be too tempted to go back a save.

Whereas in DA:O, KOTOR and Fallout 3 you could do things like convince Alistair to marry Queen Anora anyway and become king despite you letting Loghain live and become a Grey Warden, or you could convince that woman in KOTOR to join your party more easily if you had the first persuasion feat and so on. If you didn't have the persuasion skill then you simply just couldn't do anything about it and/or you don't even know the option exists.

Maybe they'll make an Rpg similar to M&B where you get the realistic option at the start that constantly autosaves after certain things happen (like you get taken captive and have items and soldiers taken away from you and etc.) but I think a game developer tried that on the PC once and they said that people just started to turn off their PC and load the game again instead.