Non-combat skills

[Bendu]

I would really love to see Obsidian to refine some non-combat/social skill with this game. It's so disappointing that a lot of recent modern RPGs are only focusing on combat abilities. But playing a warrior/mage with a philosopher/historian/explorer/scientist background would be cool if they would affect the game world in some or another way. Oh and it is time to make the speech skill/tree/perk not a winning buttom.

[WorstUsernameEver]

It's their intention at least:

Buck: Let's talk mechanics. While the game is certainly far from completion, what are your goals for the character creation and advancement system? Will progression be a standard affair with attributes and skills/perks/feats, or will you be treading into unknown territory? Finally, will there be a major focus on the non-combat abilities that are often overlooked in modern RPGs?

 

Feargus: Yes, yes and yes

[Oerwinde]

One of the things that makes PnP better than CRPGs in a lot of ways. One of my favorite characters was a half-elf priest of Gond that I played back in 2E rules. The extra proficiencies made him fantastic. Dude could cook, play music, speak like 9 languages, and build pretty much anything. All skills that are pretty much useless in a CRPG but were awesome in PnP.

[Flouride]

And for love of something, NO visible skill checks in conversations ala FO3 and FNV. I love it when you can use your skills, perks and attributes in conversation to get what you want, but if it's obvious you need have +1 INT or +15 healing to win, it ruins the "immersion".

[WorstUsernameEver]

Sawyer is in favor of transparency when it comes to check, iirc, so we'll most likely get something like skill/attributes tags, at the very least. Then again, who knows, maybe he's changed his mind!

[Humanoid]

Well in my ideal world, the result of such a check wouldn't be binary anyway. Coupled with a personal preference of removing RNG from any of these checks and I'd be supportive of a system where there are degrees of both failure and success, and the performing character should provide at least an estimation of how confident they are and their guess of the likely outcome. You could with good skill, silently pick a lock, with moderate skill you might open it noisily, and with barely-sufficient skill you might get through but damage the lock permanently.

[ShadowScythe]

Non-combat skills sounds promising. I hope it goes as far as Fallout/Arcanum level quest design where you could actually take alternate approaches to every quest or even finish the game without killing anyone.

 

There's something really satisfying about a well developed set of non-combat approaches like stealth or diplomacy that allow for alternate approaches rather than just brute forcing your way through everything.

 

Regarding whether skill checks should show up, I don't mind if it just says [persuade] or [bluff] etc but what I wouldn't want is something like what FNV did where it had [speech 30/50] which makes it way too obvious.

 

On the other hand doing the other thing that FNV did where it had separate lines for 'failed' dialogue checks would be a great way to make it transparent without revealing too much, and the dialogue itself tends to be hilarious.. I absolutely loved that bit where you can fail a barter check with Mr House with a line like "You'd better pay more or your....chip out of luck".

Edited September 15, 2012 by ShadowScythe

[fkldnhlsdngsfnhlsndlg]

I think the big problem with non-combat skills comes down to the inherent difficulties in supporting multiple play-styles. Some people just want to make the most efficient death machine party, some like to role-play, some like a mix of abilities for any situation... however, creating scenarios that appeal to all types and give them all meaningful gameplay is exceptionally difficult when you can't really change things on the fly like a real DM can.

 

Unfortunately, combat is also one of the easiest things to reliably systematize when it comes to RPG gameplay, because the rules of that aspect of gameplay are all so well defined, while so much more about non-combat is left up to the DM's interpretation. What's more, it's hard to avoid uncanny valley-type problems with non-combat options that are systematized because we expect a certain degree of realism and reactivity in other human beings (or even just living creatures in general) that is very hard to capture using rulesets. It's doable, certainly, but nobody has ever really tried in the context of an RPG... and when in doubt, developers tend to play it safe and stick with what they know works. Picking locks = easy. Deceiving enemies = not so easy.

 

That said, a good portion of this really just comes down to laziness. There's an inherent, implicit understanding among developers and players that RPGs are combat-focused games, and as a result non-combat options tend to be exceptions rather than rules. When non-combat options do exist, they are almost inevitably simple persuasion checks rather than interesting multi-stage decisions. It is possible to do much, much more if developers decide to invest time and resources into design, writing and so forth rather than visuals and cinematics.

 

Really, the best we can hope for is that Obsidian will keep in mind the value of being able to play a game with multiple non-combat options, and will consider them in gameplay as much as the combat stuff. The fact is that Infinity Engine and D&D-style gameplay are already heavily geared towards combat, so I doubt it will be entirely optional, but even shooting for, say, 3 different options to every significant quest would be excellent. I'd certainly be willing to put up with less gameplay overall if it made for a better game, period, and more replayability (the original Fallout is basically the ultimate example of this, in my mind).

Edited September 16, 2012 by sea