One thing I remember not liking about many old party CRPGs was having to juggle party lead just to open up options in a conversation. If I have Merlin standing next to me, I don't want to find out that he could have solved the entire problem if I'd just let him be the party lead for the conversation. You're party of the group because of your expertise, that should be contributed in non-combat situations as well without me having to pass you the talking stick.

One thing I remember not liking about many old party CRPGs was having to juggle party lead just to open up options in a conversation. If I have Merlin standing next to me, I don't want to find out that he could have solved the entire problem if I'd just let him be the party lead for the conversation. You're party of the group because of your expertise, that should be contributed in non-combat situations as well without me having to pass you the talking stick.

 

That would be one way to solve it. But it clashes with the feature Obsidian wants to put in of low charisma and low int dialog options. If you always took the highest stat of the group in talking you would never see those dialog options.

 

But if they really implement separate skill points for fighting and social/stealth/crafting skills (like they said in the beginning), you could make sure that your PC has the social skills you want for him.

Really though, throwing accusations of realism around like its a bad thing that automatically ruins gameplay seems like a weak argument to me, and wasn't it those who were opposed to controlling other characters in dialogue the ones citing realism to begin with?

 

Sorry for two replies to the same post, but I just stumbled on an interesting blog post by Nathanial Chapman of Obsidian on this site from two years ago. He talks about the worth of realism in game design:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/5/entry-139-realism-vs-what-designers-care-about-verisimilitude-and-the-responsibility-of-expectations/