Speech skills

[pmp10]

This being obsidian I'm sure there will be some sort of speech skill equivalent used for quest resolutions, so I'd like to make a simple appeal:

Please don't reduce it to picking weirdly marked dialogue lines and a skill check.

In case you need more elaboration the point is made far better below:

The implementation of forms of persuasion has gone from being great hallmark of Fallout series to a joke of a skill-check barred instant-win single dialogue lines in your recent games.
You are a better developer than that.

Thank you, that is all.

[Wormerine]

I watched today morning. Good video.

In the comments I mentioned my surprise that he didn't mention PoEs and Disco Elysium - PoE2 Relationship system is somewhat similar to what he suggest when mentioning number driven CK2 system, and oh boy it didn't work well. 

On the other hand, Disco Elysium has stuff that should be shamelessly copied - they way it allows previous interactions to modify difficulty of skill checks is quite brilliant. I know Josh liked it, I hope whoever is working on Avowed liked it as well. 

I think he sometimes mixes player reputation systems with skill checks - not that having those two interact isn't a great thing to have. 

Edited August 3, 2020 by Wormerine

[Madscientist]

This is a very good video.

So the best solution is to give every named NPC an own personality with an own opinion about you. But this is very hard because there are tons of NPC and for tons of your actions the devs have to decide for which NPC is it relevant and which way, for example does he like you more or less or does he fear you.

So the most practical way is to:

a) split up speech into several independent skills such as persuation, intimidation and deception

b) use many different skills in dialogue, not just classic speech skills. Many skills should be used both outside and inside of dialogue.

c) the knowledge based approach sounds great ( you need to learn something first to bring it up in dialogue)

 

Disco Elysium is a great game but it will be hard to use it in a more classic RPG. It has no real combat and treats every interaction with anything like a dialogue. Failure is often as interesting as succes and every skill is used often, some active, some passive and most of them both ways.

EXP should be given for advancing a quest, not for skill usage. In Pathfinder ( I think in some of the new fallouts too) you get more exp for winning more difficult skill checks. As a result players chose the answer with the most difficult skill check because it gives most exp, not the answer that makes most sense for their char.

One of my favourite games is the original Deus Ex. You get exp only for finishing quests and exploring the environment, not for using skills and the game gives you several possible solutions for most stuff. This allows the player to play however they want without feeling bad about it. Later Deus Ex for example give exp for hacking which means you hack everything, even if you know the password or there is no one who could trigger the alarm any more.

[Wormerine]

32 minutes ago, Madscientist said:

So the most practical way is to:

a) split up speech into several independent skills such as persuation, intimidation and deception

b) use many different skills in dialogue, not just classic speech skills. Many skills should be used both outside and inside of dialogue.

c) the knowledge based approach sounds great ( you need to learn something first to bring it up in dialogue)

But Disco does all of those, and does them elegantly and efficently. The problem with giving character their own personality is that we would most likely run into Deadfire problem - things will work unnaturally. CK2 works well, because it has no written dialogues, nor hand crafter characters. DE takes that idea and impliments it well in an RPG with a lot of text and handcrafted characters.

Adding modifiers to skill checks based on 1) things we know 2) previous interactions with the character is a simple, transparent and intuitive system that designers should be able to take a great advantage of. What ManyTrueNerd talks about at the end (with Crusade Kings2) is mixing reputations systems with a skill check to bring other actions into it. DE system is great because it's very specific, very effective and according to DE dev easy to implement, without a need for devs to create handcrafted reactivity for each interactions. It's also not "global" as reputation system in PoEs, which makes it feel more natural. I think it could work with flat number check as well - final speech check in Fallout New: Vegas could infact be only possible with high speech skill and some extra positive modifiers (but both positive and negative modifiers being able to be aquired throughout the game). Alternatively, max speech could be really difficult to aquire (require a very dedicated investment), but on a flipside one could boost chances by other actions.

I think PoEs did speech checks quite well, but with that system it could be even better. 

Josh talked about it in:

I agree with you on XP via objectives. Slogging my way through Pathfinder, and the way game encourages to munchkin through the game, instead of roleplaying. 

Edited August 4, 2020 by Wormerine

[Madscientist]

Disco Elysium is great, but you have to change tons of things if you make a more normal RPG. In this game every interaction in the game is done in the same dialogue and skill system. I would call Disco Elysium a "skill based adventure game" (character skill, not player skill) and not a classic RPG. In most normal RPGs anything that is not dialogue should be done as gameplay if possible, like combat, sneaking, jumping and so on. Those scripted events should only be a workaround if you cannot do something with the normal game mechanics, though I admit that they can be interesting.

 

I agree with Josh and you that the System of New Vegas combined with the tag system from Disco Elysium ( as Josh called it, meaning that former actions modify or enable later skill checks)is good, especially if you use many different skills in dialogue, not just speech.

I also agree with Josh and the other video, that at least in dialogues I prefer skill checks as threshold instead of a dice roll. In many games I have save scummed to get the right result. If you miss in combat you can attack again. If you fail to pick a lock you can try again. But if you fail a dialogue choice you cannot.

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Madscientist said:

One of my favourite games is the original Deus Ex. You get exp only for finishing quests and exploring the environment, not for using skills and the game gives you several possible solutions for most stuff.

the problem is that the player-reward loop is pretty important. i remember in the early poe backer beta it was extremely annoying that you didn't get any XP at all from fighting monsters, which made everything feel like an utter waste of time (on top of most loot being uninteresting). the compromise approach of using bestiary to give you experience for a little bit was a good one, imo.

there's a similar compromise with traps in deadfire - there's some "max" amount of xp you can get from traps and lockpicking in a given area and after a while you max out. so player who invest in these skills sufficiently are trained up a bit with rewards, but players who bypass it don't miss out on that much.

 

in all the newer fallouts, the experience you get from passing speech checks is pretty minor, so it will never be a huge amount of xp, but rewards players who make the extra effort to do something that is by definition not normal (since you need to pass a skill check). however this works much better in new vegas than in save-scum fallout 3/4, and in new vegas reading a magazine and taking a drug just so you can get over a threshold makes getting that tiny drip of xp all the better and more appropriate since it seems like actual player effort went into it.

Edited August 4, 2020 by thelee

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, Madscientist said:

Disco Elysium is great, but you have to change tons of things if you make a more normal RPG. In this game every interaction in the game is done in the same dialogue and skill system. I would call Disco Elysium a "skill based adventure game" (character skill, not player skill) and not a classic RPG. In most normal RPGs anything that is not dialogue should be done as gameplay if possible, like combat, sneaking, jumping and so on.

I don't quite understand your argument, as the video OP mentioned, focuses purely on the speech checks. DE uses "speech checks" like mechanics for everything, but that doesn't mean that a game with more gameplay systems, couldn't learn something when implimenting its skill checks (and skill checks only, as DE, as you say don't have many other systems). I have only discussed DE in context of how it did conversations (and so did Josh - both examples he showed were speech checks). 

Though to be precise, what we really talk is reputation system influencing our chances to succeed in speech checks - and that can be tied to other branches of gameplay - killing someone, stealing from someone, even a global reputation system - they all could be used as triggers: -1 handed stone tablet to Huana, -1 killed X, +2 completed quest forZ, +1 you expressed support for faction Y, +1 have reputation of honest. 

I think biggest problem with reputation system in PoEs is that it tracks all kind of choices - both public and private. It's also a bit too easy to max it out I think. What if public reputation would only be tracked for big global choices, and smaller ones could be manually responded to via DE like system in smaller communities. 

EDIT. Yes, I am a threshhold guy as well. I think one needs a very specific structure to support Dice Rolls (or make failing entertaining like in DE). Kingmaker is one big savescum fest and so was wasteland 2. But again, my interest in the system which allows previous choices to influence skill checks, not how skill checks themselves are done. Aka, F:NV end problem is not that there is a flat 100 speech check, but that it would be far more satisfying if extra steps were needed. While those can be manually scripted (aka. Fallout1) Disco uses a simple abstracted system through which it achieves just that.

Edited August 4, 2020 by Wormerine

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Wormerine said:

Though to be precise, what we really talk is reputation system influencing our chances to succeed in speech checks - and that can be tied to other branches of gameplay - killing someone, stealing from someone, even a global reputation system - they all could be used as triggers: -1 handed stone tablet to Huana, -1 killed X, +2 completed quest forZ, +1 you expressed support for faction Y, +1 have reputation of honest. 

I think biggest problem with reputation system in PoEs is that it tracks all kind of choices - both public and private. It's also a bit too easy to max it out I think. What if public reputation would only be tracked for big global choices, and smaller ones could be manually responded to via DE like system in smaller communities. 

yeah, i missed je sawyer's reputation stream earlier so i just watched it now, and hearing him talk about the general approach to disco elysium got me excited about the possibilities, precisely for what you are talking about. i imagined a hypothetical world where you were trying to convince the bardattos and valeras to negotiate in deadfire, and you'd hover over the threshold indicator and see you getting like +1 because of diplomacy skill, -1 for resolving a quest badly, -1 because you're a goody two-shoes Benevolent and valeras hate that, +1 for keeping the duelists alive earlier, etc.

i think an indirect benefit to a system like that is that designers and writers can focus their attention a lot more on specific mechanical checks and how things feed into that and really get the balancing right, versus a more abstracted system. so you get greater reactivity out of a few important impactful checks, rather than a diffuse, easy to max out system that sometimes seems a bit arbitrary or low-impact.

Edited August 4, 2020 by thelee

[Madscientist]

So it looks like we agree that a system like Fallout NV combined with the system of Disco Elysium would be good.

As Josh said: The Disco Elysium system greatly increases reactivity ( The player feels that his actions have some influence) without the need to create many new outcomes or choice options for a dialogue. It takes some extra efford ( There are only a few things that influence one quest, but there are many quests) but it is much less efford than PoE2, where you have to check every line for several arbitrary tags and you check the reputation of everyone vs everyone else even when it has no effect.

I also agree with him that you should track good and bad reputation separately. It feels wrong when you are considered neutral after first helping 20 people and then murdering those 20 people in their sleep.

[Madscientist]

20 hours ago, thelee said:

the problem is that the player-reward loop is pretty important. i remember in the early poe backer beta it was extremely annoying that you didn't get any XP at all from fighting monsters, which made everything feel like an utter waste of time (on top of most loot being uninteresting). the compromise approach of using bestiary to give you experience for a little bit was a good one, imo.

Are players really so impatient that they stop playing when they do not get a mechanical reward (exp, money, item, skill, . . .) every minute?

Im am perfectly fine with getting a reward only when you do some relevant progress in a quest. Rewards need to be earned, not given for free. Whats next? You get exp for selecting your char, clicking on the ground or eating an apple? Personally I dislike the idea of getting exp for skill usage. Using a skill is just a tool to get a result, it is not a goal in itself. For example in Deus Ex you got a fixed amount of exp for entering a room. It does not matter how you enter it ( bribe the guard, kill the guard for the key, hack the computer, pick the lock, crawl through ducts, blow up the door). So yes, I prefer a result based reward ( you get rewarded for achieving a desired goal) over an action based reward ( you get rewarded because you do something).

On the other hand I hate grinding, which means to do the same stuff over and over again. For example repeatedly killing similar enemies to gain a level or repeatedly craft items to improve a skill.

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Madscientist said:

Are players really so impatient that they stop playing when they do not get a mechanical reward (exp, money, item, skill, . . .) every minute?

it's not about impatience, it's the fact that if the player does something extra there should be some sort of reward, or else the game effectively disincentivizes the player from doing it.

what is the point of clearing an entire level of enemies if you get nothing out of it? in some genres, the action itself is the reward, but in RPGs they tend to be stepping stones to something else - character development, narrative development, loot, etc. Given different choices, some choices clearly become suboptimal. For example, in PoE1, there are many ways to handle Raedric's fort, but the violent options are heavily disincentivized because of how brutally difficult they are and how minimal reward you get for identical outcomes to e.g. stealth, disguise, etc.

 

with regards to speech skills, a lot of speech checks in deadfire don't do much. They add some extra lore, but there's only so much impactful reactivity. The same was true for Fallout: New Vegas as well, to a lesser degree. But even the speech skills that had no impact were still worth trying to beat because of that tiny drip of experience.

 

and let's be real here - we're talking games. reward loops are a critical element of the game. i'm not the only one (from having talked to people about this) who felt that Fallout 3 lost a little bit of something once you hit level 20 and no longer got the fun little cash register noise every time you killed an enemy or did something.

 

edit: there's obviously a balance here. i also don't like it when certain things are rewarded so above and beyond the "normal" that they basically become the new normal, like how hugely a fully stealthy infiltration can get rewarded in open-world action games like far cry.

Edited August 5, 2020 by thelee

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

For example, in PoE1, there are many ways to handle Raedric's fort, but the violent options are heavily disincentivized because of how brutally difficult they are and how minimal reward you get for identical outcomes to e.g. stealth, disguise, etc. 

Don't think that this is a good example. The reward isn't minimal at all. If you clear the whole castle (like I use to do 90% of times) your reward will be the immense amount of loot (especially lots and lots of armors like plate which is pretty rare before that point). Once you sell all the loot you can suddenly afford to buy very good items quite early in the game.

[thelee]

4 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Don't think that this is a good example. The reward isn't minimal at all. If you clear the whole castle (like I use to do 90% of times) your reward will be the immense amount of loot (especially lots and lots of armors like plate which is pretty rare before that point). Once you sell all the loot you can suddenly afford to buy very good items quite early in the game.

ok, better example - benweth in deadfire. if you take the violent path you get some pretty rough (at least at the recommended level) fights and the loot is still pretty standard fare/minimal. out of all my runs, i did it twice. now i just always rig the piano to blow up.

[Wormerine]

13 minutes ago, thelee said:

ok, better example - benweth in deadfire. if you take the violent path you get some pretty rough (at least at the recommended level) fights and the loot is still pretty standard fare/minimal. out of all my runs, i did it twice. now i just always rig the piano to blow up.

What do you mean by violent path? Lure him away with the stolen ship and then kill him? Sneak all the way to the top to kill him? Kill everyone to kill him? 

Roleplaying game should encourage roleplaying. Unless your predefined role is to kill things that move, I don't see giving XP for kills to be particularly a good idea. While, game might not reward you for killing everyone in Raedric's hold or Fort Deadlight, it... well also doesn't encourage it. If killing everyone would give more XP, why wouldn't you want to kill eveyone? And if the game would be balanced that you would get more xp for being stealthy, and less for being violent, it encourages being stealthy and then killing everyone. Bad, bad, bad. That's more or less a problem modern Deus Exes have - why use a code you have, if hacking gives you stuff and XP? Why Ghost, if you can ghost and knock everyone out and get far more XP? Rather then picking a route that is fit for your characters you are encouraged to do everything, because that's what you get rewarded for.

In Deus Ex1 it's not because doing things (be it shooting, hacking or lockpicking) cost resources. There for you are encourage to do as much as you can, and explore as much as you can with the most efficient tools at your disposal - good design.

Not to say, that there isn't a potential values, in rewarding more certain choice - aka. get more gold for being greedy. But messing with XP can be problematic. PoEs have XP balance problem to start with, varying how much XP can one get per quest would only amplify the problem. Mostly removing XP for kills is one of those things I 100% am behind in PoE. 

And you say, that you feel discouraged from slaughtering everyone, because rigging the piano is the easiest to do and brings the same effect. Yes, that's an issue. And that's why Disco Elysium system comes to rescue again, because your choice on how you dealt with this quest could influence future checks in positive and negative ways, possibly closing and opening different door later down the line on subsequent playthroughs, without a need for developers to do manual reactivity. Bang!

[thelee]

47 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

Roleplaying game should encourage roleplaying. Unless your predefined role is to kill things that move, I don't see giving XP for kills to be particularly a good idea.

if you fully read my post, you would see that what i'm talking about are minor, capped rewards.

Roleplaying games should encourage meaningful choices when roleplaying. Lacking proper reward loops isn't equity in choices, it actively makes certain choices punished because players have to put in more effort than other players for the same net reward; you are in effect punishing certain players for their preferences by a logic that is frequently obscured to them at the outset. Sometimes this lack of equity is meaningful within the narrative itself - like being good means turning down rewards so that "goodness is its own reward." Stuff like that. But I think typically the bigger risk is improper or insufficient reward loops.

 

47 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

That's more or less a problem modern Deus Exes have - why use a code you have, if hacking gives you stuff and XP? Why Ghost, if you can ghost and knock everyone out and get far more XP

this is literally a line of argument i also make. (though here i reference far cry's use of generous rewards for being completely stealthy versus going in unseen to basically punish players who don't want to play a stealth game)

 

47 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

PoEs have XP balance problem to start with, varying how much XP can one get per quest would only amplify the problem. Mostly removing XP for kills is one of those things I 100% am behind in PoE. 

i'm not actually sure what XP balance problem you're referencing? Again, I'm not talking about varying how much XP we get from quest rewards. That would be design suicide in my book, because then there obviously is a "correct" way to resolve each quest. My examples are the minor, capped "bestiary" rewards from kiling enemies, and the minor, capped "locks & traps" experience from picking locks and disarming traps, and--relevantly for this thread--the extremely minor incidental experience for passing a speech check in F:NV (in the 10s of experience, when quest completions can be on the order of thousands). in the long run these things don't matter at all for character advancement due to the sheer difference in magnitude, but in short bursts they are an acknowledgment that the player did something special, and in the minor instances where they make you level up a hair faster than someone else can feel very satisfying.

 

edit: deadfire adds a lot more special one-off bestiary rewards for many bosses and boss-type enemies. i'm more dubious on that, but it's also still part of a reward loop.

Edited August 5, 2020 by thelee

[Madscientist]

Players do things that give rewards. Good games give rewards for doing things that make sense in the game world. Role playing means that there are several options and those lead to different results with different rewards or punishments according to what makes sense in the game world. In a good game there is no conflict between game mechanics and role playing. The original Deus Ex is the best example I have for this. Disco Elysium is also a very good example because the game reacts to almost everything you do.

It is bad when games have game mechanics that reward a playstyle that makes little sense in the game world. We already mentioned the new Deus Ex (exp and money for hacking, exp for killing enemies with different exp for different ways to kill them.) Well, I still enjoyed the new Deus Ex and there are much worse examples where the best way to become more powerful is to play in a totally unintuitive way. I think Final Fantasy II had one of the worst levelling systems ever. I am sure you know lots of bad examples too.

I also think that Readrics castle in PoE1 is a bad example. Killing everyone gives lots of money while not having any influence on the quest outcome. In the end it matters only if you kill Readric or not. Yes, I think Benweth is a better example. I always used the non violent route. The dialogue with Mirke and the piano scene are really funny.

[ComradeYellow]

On 8/3/2020 at 4:22 PM, Wormerine said:

On the other hand, Disco Elysium has stuff that should be shamelessly copied - they way it allows previous interactions to modify difficulty of skill checks is quite brilliant. I know Josh liked it, I hope whoever is working on Avowed liked it as well. 

Yeah there's definitely some good theses to be had from DE and I hope Obsidian takes note on some of them.

[wih]

I'm starting to think that completing quests should not give exp points. Quests should be interesting enough for the player to want to complete them for their own sake. The game developer shouldn't be trying to bribe us to make us complete these quests.

Edited August 6, 2020 by wih

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, wih said:

I'm starting to think that completing quests should not give exp points. Quests should be interesting enough for the player to want to complete them for their own sake. The game developer shouldn't be trying to bribe us to make us complete these quests.

So no XP what so ever?

[ComradeYellow]

2 hours ago, wih said:

I'm starting to think that completing quests should not give exp points. Quests should be interesting enough for the player to want to complete them for their own sake. The game developer shouldn't be trying to bribe us to make us complete these quests.

Obsidian usually does a good job at balancing xp and material rewards depending on how you completed the quest.  I always liked that because that in itself makes the quest interesting as you can complete them in different ways.

[ZyroMane]

On 8/5/2020 at 11:34 AM, thelee said:

what is the point of clearing an entire level of enemies if you get nothing out of it? in some genres, the action itself is the reward, but in RPGs they tend to be stepping stones to something else

 

On 8/5/2020 at 2:39 PM, thelee said:

if you take the violent path you get some pretty rough (at least at the recommended level) fights and the loot is still pretty standard fare/minimal.

 

If combat is tactical, there is fun, if you get harder combat in the future for combat, but that thing Sawyer always talks about, then you can make the combat easier for those who want less of a challenge (or just not force combat, but then one usually ends up with Torment rather than Disco) and more tactical fun for those who play rpgs for the combat systems. ... In theory. But then we have Augury of Chaos as a counter example, or rather pushing the envelope too darn far.

And I say this as one who tried clearing maps the multiple times I tried to play Pillars, and would do so even without bestiary xp. (In fact, in a map based rpg, xp for clearing maps of monsters could work out fine. But hey, then what are quests? heh)

[wih]

13 hours ago, Wormerine said:

So no XP what so ever?

No, there should be a way for your character to become smarter and stronger. This is both interesting and true to life.

In life we get XP for learning new things and overcoming tough obstacles, not for doing favors to other people repeatedly.

But it is a tough design problem and I don't know the right solution yet, unfortunately.

[ovelteen]

I have never been happy with the way skill checks were done in F;NV. I hate not being able to influence an outcome just because my special score wasn't high enough for the challenge. from my perspective all or nothing requirements are not good. 

I would like to see a system where even the absolutely abysmal character can expect to succeed at least one time out of a hundred tries. 

Whether we receive experience points for slaughtering stuff, or for completing quests and missions doesn't really matter to me. What I would like is for my character to feel he is at least capable of success and knows that at some point he can get better at them is way more important than how he gets there.

I would also like the ability to choose which of my character's skills and abilities get nerfed and which ones I can increase at the outset, and along the way.

[Madscientist]

3 hours ago, ovelteen said:

I have never been happy with the way skill checks were done in F;NV. I hate not being able to influence an outcome just because my special score wasn't high enough for the challenge. from my perspective all or nothing requirements are not good. 

I would like to see a system where even the absolutely abysmal character can expect to succeed at least one time out of a hundred tries. 

Whether we receive experience points for slaughtering stuff, or for completing quests and missions doesn't really matter to me. What I would like is for my character to feel he is at least capable of success and knows that at some point he can get better at them is way more important than how he gets there.

I would also like the ability to choose which of my character's skills and abilities get nerfed and which ones I can increase at the outset, and along the way.

Sorry, but I disagree

Since we already have some videos here, this is my favourite Choice an consequence

Look at the part "failure is a consequence" and "things that should fail in the real world should also fail in the game".

If you try to disarm a bomb and your disarm skill is low you will blow yourself up. If you have low int and cha and you try to convince a scientist that the universe is cube shapes you will fail. As he says in the video: Many games encourage players to chose the good but unrealistic option, and this is bad. Very difficult actions should be locked behind very difficult skill checks. It is also OK if there are some options that always fail, because some things just don´t work.

A good example may be Age of Decadence. You can talk your way through the game or you can fight your way through the game, but you will most likely die if you try something your char is not skilled with. For example somebody tells you he can guide you through the city. If you accept he will lead you to his bandit friends and they will attack you no matter what what speech skills you have and you will die if you are not a very good fighter. Lesson: Do not trust strangers.

[thelee]

On 8/6/2020 at 11:04 PM, ovelteen said:

I would like to see a system where even the absolutely abysmal character can expect to succeed at least one time out of a hundred tries. 

this is not even a thing in many table top systems, and they tend to be full of dice rolls and chance. notably, at least in 3.5e/pathfinder, skill checks by default cannot critically fail or critically succeed. because tying your shoelaces is not something someone fails miserably at 1/20 times, and trying to recall an obscure piece of arcane lore is not something a random peasant can do 1/20 times.