Social skills always fall short of combat skills.

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It's very simple.

When you improve a combat skill, your performance in combat marginally and gradually gets better. You know that you will do better in combat and you will eventually see that you do better in combat.

In a social skill, the outcome is binary. The skill may work perfectly or may not work at all. A dialogue may require a Persuade skill of 25. If you improve your Persuade skill from 20 to 21, there is no marginal improvement. If you improve your Persuade from 24 to 25, then there is improvement. Unless you have metagamed, you have no idea about the outcome of improving the skill.

The player always feels she makes a meaningful decision when choosing to put her points between sword or axe skill, but she always feels like she is making a coin toss gamble when adding another point to her speech skill.

To put it more simply:

And what's the point of stating this obviousity?

Looks like someone played AoD recently.

It's not like that in every game, though. I have no name right now, but i'm pretty sure I played several games where dialog skills choices had a percentile of success.

Fallout 3

Oh, yeah, right...
Thanks I guess

BTW, surf solar, how is your VTMB choose your adventure progressing? You know, you could possibly throw in a tb combat simulator there, like Final fantasy tactics or ToEE or something.

Would be kinda cool, if scenarios were written for it and the scripting flexible enough. Though doing a good combat engine is like doing 95% of the game parts of a game already, so maybe lonewolf style combat is better.
Maybe you could reuse the AoD combat engine? It's almost the same design

I wonder if someone would do a AoD walk-through like that.

Maybe this is true in some games, but this is far from something inherent to dialog skills. It is possible to make a game where you have different skills to be used, different ways to use these skills and different consequences for trying to persuade someone using different methods.

For example, you might have three skills, seduction, persuasion and Intimidate. Furthermore, you may have multiple ways to use these in dialog. If you are trying to seduce someone, you might use your obvious physical attributes only, or try to pass yourself as an intelectual, or try to paint your personality as fun, but dangerous. These would work differently for different npcs, but this isn't, again, a simple binary case of works/doesn't work. The point of seduction is to get an NPC to open himself up to you, but how you sell yourself to him will also determine how he opens himself. The third option, it would probably be easier to manipulate him into doing something stupid, whereas the first one could get him to talk about something he would rather keep a secret. Of course, different skills would create very different relationships with NPCs. Persuasion can make someone do things the other two wouldn't, but it requires finding what the other person would want in exchange and possibly doing that. Threatening someone may seem like getting something for nothing, but burns bridges the player may later regret.

Now, even this still wouldn't really be enough to compare conversation and dialog. While this makes conversation "multidimensional", the results are still success and failure. To make things less binary, you need to account for different degrees of success and outcomes. Seducing someone so he falls head over heels for you will create a different dynamic than if you slowly, but steadily, build up his trust. In fact, the second option might be better in some situations! Really successful threats could make an NPC "lose his shit" and never go after the retribution he would otherwise. Of course, he might become less useful as well. If you have such a system in place, and the correct consequences for it, it becomes easy to make dialog less binary.

inescapable problem resulting from no granular, on the fly cascading turn to turn outcomes and freeform decision approach compared to combat

will never be fully remedied until an engine is made that honors creative personal strategy with social skills as much as combat skills in a way that satisfies story-oriented roleplayers i.e. fucking never in our lifetimes

But does that game exist? If it were that easy, wouldn't one of the hundreds of RPG developers of the past 33 years have done so already?

Is there really a threshold in weapon skills in RPGs before which the player always dies in battle and after which the player always wins the battle? We all know that in this genre of random chance, nothing is completely likely or completely impossible.

I mean, in Fallout, with a 30% Heavy Weapons skill, you could still just barely manage to defeat a Nightkin with a flamethrower. Or even with 25% or 20%. It is merely a matter of it being more or less likely.

sgc_meltdown

Well, there is Storytron and a few other ventures that try exactly that (though how 'strategic' the resulting game is would be up to the author). I mean, they can't really honor creative dialog use, except by allowing you to creatively add up your actions to get a result, but that is true of combat systems in computer games as well. It is also probably too much to expect a game with a really developed social aspect to do anything else well, but I think we could still see a lot of improvement in that area in normal RPGs with much better "dialog systems", as long as there is any will in the industry to swing that way.

Wyrmlord

I have seen no game that tries this as a generic approach, though I am pretty sure some games at least have tried to do something like this in specific instances. Doing this generically could be really hard and expensive, but it is not limited by our "technology". That is, it is something feasible to do with computers. Whether we will see such a game or not would really depend on whether people decide to explore this area or not. Right now, making games more interactive isn't big in the agenda of most companies.

Improvement has always been possible but given that balanced and rich combat is a complex enough goal and all in all sufficient for excellent overall gameplay as well as leading to supplementary influencing mechanics(inventory, stealth etc also see: Nethack, pretty much) I do not see equal design weight being placed in social encounters anytime soon

no pressure from players or profit

you really need to take out dialog from cosmetic/story flag toggling choices only and make it a bonafide global interaction choice with as much allowance for player input and creativity in actions as well as from the npcs themselves

say like your uncontrolled npc follower or party member being taunted and then he used a burst on a mook when he was told to single shot snipe the boss character, when has that ever happened

right now as players the first thing you take note of is maybe does my talky guy have enough charisma to trigger the good plot flags, okay now let's spend a whole lot more time prepping my squad for combat, if dialog comes up we'll just choose the good ones when they happen

you know things will be better when you factor social skills as much as combat ones for overall survival
i.e. expand on jagged alliance 2 personality types at the very least

even more glorious would be a way where you could say demonstrate overwhelming skill and force by grazing every single opponent's ear and then having your leader character negotiate a surrender with very strong modifiers for certain personality types, then have the fanatical ones gun down the ones who gave up

nonscripted synergistic use and emergent outcomes

Seems like Morrowind tried something like this with Speech or Persuade or something. Was very dull and didn't lead to any interesting results as I recall.

So tell me what the difference between randomized combat outcomes and randomized diplomacy outcomes would be.

Also plenty of RPGs are entirely or almost entirely deterministic. Fallout has silly combat.

You made a small mistake. You consider combat the whole encounter while dialogue a single choice. It would be better if you compared a whole combat encounter with a whole dialogue encounter or a single attack roll with a single social skill roll. Suddenly, you can have different outcomes in both.

Also, as Helly said, there are games that use % even on social skills.

There were persuade, intimidate, bribe and something, but they were all just for increasing an NPC's disposition towards you. A succesful intimidate rised the NPC's disposition a lot, but decreased it after the dialogue, and a succesful persuasion rised the disposition permanently. Easiest way regardless of your speechcraft skill was of course just giving them a few dozen (or a few hundred with difficult targets) septims, and they were your best friends 4ever.

yeah, you missed taunt, which was the most broken thing ever for metagaming

it made targets attack you and allowed you to kill and loot them with no interference

at least in new vegas if you liked an unique gun held by a named NCR character you had to do shit like shooting it out of his hands then hurriedly picking it up and then holstering your weapon in the hope that they would turn neutral again

All of this is true. Problem is that building outright systems for dialogue will often deprive NPCs of uniqueness (unless you want unique lines for every possible situation and outcome), and it can get in the way of "proper" storytelling and the cinematic focus most games go for. Remember Oblivion and its persuasion wheel mini-game? Good intentions, horrible execution, and when you put that into a game where the focus is anything other than dialogue, chances are you will end up with shit.

In other words, not only is it hard to do and anyone who went about it would probably have to cut corners elsewhere, but it's contrary to our current expectations of what an RPG should be about (engaging stories, characters, universes, cinematic presentation, etc.) or at least what the mainstream expects these days. There are actually plenty of indie games out there that have more involved and systems-driven dialogue, but the problem is that they also tend to be experiments and not full-fledged games really worth playing for any more than academic reasons... and nobody actually making games that people want to buy actually gives a shit.

tl;dr

Any single check, binary outcome mechanics is utter shit.

Problem with making really complex social interaction game mechanics is, that you'd really have to cut out on explicitly written dialogue.

You could certainly have a game/minigame where you've got several meters you watch, for different mental things like how entertained, afraid, horny, alert, etc the guy who you're talking to is, on top of having defined personality stats that don't change (and you'd have similar stats about your PC too). Then you pick stuff like [friendly greeting]/[imposing greeting]/[strictly professional greeting], or [small talk about mudcrabs]/[compliment her looks]/[get straight to the point]. Opponents mood is affected and then responds something back for similar effect. Meters go up and down until you reach whatever you were trying to reach, to make her give some info, get her relaxed and then steal her purse, convince her to buy something from you, whatever.
Shouldn't be too difficult to make it into a passable game with enough care, same which can be said for combat.
It's just the more generic and less scripted (and therefore more reusable) the system gets, you increasingly lose the simple charm that reading and picking dialogue lines was.
But the element that might make it properly interesting would be the possibility to "lose" conversations. Maybe your PC will get seduced against your intent, or made a promise that's very unconvenient to keep. Just don't go into out-of-depth conversations man!

Then implement stuff like food and drugs, to make it more diverse and also to feature resource management. So if you smoke a joint with someone their behaviour changes (some people will oblige right away, someone you might have to first convince it's a good idea), or if you take some alcohol beforehand it'll switch your own mood a bit, which affects how people perceive you.

Johannes sea

While it can be a lot of work, having a "dialog engine" doesn't mean you have to make your communication system generic, like in Captain Blood or something like that. It is also possible to specify the different interactions with other characters, one by one, possibly even removing some of them for some cases, but still having a whole lot of work.

For example, you might take Fallout's dialog system and add the various interaction options according to the current situation. For example, if the NPC is in a bar an you just get there, you could have dialog options having to do with the current situation, like buying them a drink, or asking them how was their day (not that good of an idea if you don't know them that well). I also think it would be more interesting to convey feedback to the player through dialog rather than bars or other abstract means.

This approach, as itis less generic, may mean that NPCs will have overall less ways of interacting with. But on the other hand, the ways you do interact with them will be customized for that dialog, allowing for a more traditional style of game.

It's like no RPG uses dice for checks and/or have different levels of success or failure...

Josh Sawyer talked about this in Do (Say) The Right Thing and how modern RPGs have only changed the aesthetics of dialogue trees while keeping everything else, including the structural flaws, the same. Their future will try be a bit more like Alpha Protocol with cosmetic and win/loss scenarios falling by the wayside. I'm sure they'll die before that happens though.

DX:HR "dialog battles" - a step in the right direction?