[UseSkill XY] In Dialog lines - yes/no ?

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@MMXI

Exactly!

Of course that would be some insane work for the developer, but it's his fault he decided to develop an RPG instead of bejeweled clones.

Was this thread made to promote What Remains?

Because it's working.

you ask for too much from poor rpg developers who are struggling to grow their audience

this aren't big fps games where you have fifty million dollars to innovate with and getting the action right is already hard enough this is an indie genre with just a fraction of the market share

Dragon Age origins had 56,000 lines of spoken text already

game designers have enough writing to do without being harrassed by unrealistic expectations from players like you who have no idea how much work goes into a modern rpg experience

well if you like reading for some reason might I remind you that SW TOR has 800,000 lines of dialog which is 60 novels worth of roleplaying

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=331362

Yeah, that's my philosophy. I try to make even monumental failure fun. If someone isn't punished too severly over an ATTEMPT then they will probably run with it, if it's in character. I would rather punish someone for a deliberate stupid choice, not for failing a roll attached to a smart choice.

I remember a Rifts PnP session where, deep in enemy territory, we just began shooting cows. Quality fun, shooting cows. But they we were set upon by a massive enemy force who had detected our ...um explosions.

It was hard to begrudge the failure... it was a lot of fun.


Still, fucking cows...


edit - Also, I put a lot of stupid choices mixed into the dialogue lines for low Wisdom. And damn, do I make them tempting to click on. I slip a couple in for those with moderate Wisdom and remove them (usually) entirely for Wise PCs. But at no stage is it ever written beside the line [LOW WISDOM] or whatever retarded shit modern designers like to do.

This reply doesn't exist. It is a fallacy. A fraud. A fake. A product of your diseased mind.

Aye. Much easier to view one's stats in the port -- and figure out how to be a truly awesome character.

A shame He hasn't expanded the game like he wanted to back in 2005. Truly, the lack of homosexuality and tentacle sex makes DarkUnderlord weep.

I was thinking of a range, determined on a scale of X - 11, where X is greater than zero and no greater than 10. Essentially Fallout's luck skill applied to conversations, in addition to a skill check.

Would hate to take a jinxed character then . . . I imagine this would be too much of a pain to write for, though -- taking into account varying degrees of success or failure, and catastrophic failures, epic successes despite odds . . .

I could fap to that if it wasn't Bioware writing in the Star Wars universe. They're going to run out of clichés.

800,000 lines? Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment have around 1,000,000 words if I remember correctly. 800,000 lines is most likely over 10,000,000 words! That's insane. Is it all spoken?!

if there's no VO it means they're indie developers in an indie genre

that means long development times like grimoire or having to compromise dialog depth due to reduced developmental budget and lost sales from lack of VO and graphics like spiderweb software

http://n4g.com/news/363150/sw-tor-fully ... ocumentary

brace yourselves for the first fully voiced mmo in gaming history

This.

I also don't like some of the Fallout 1/2 dialogs where it was obvious from how the line was written whether you would succeed or not. It should blend skill levels better.

I hope you are aiming high like crafting an rpg experience so demonstrably stellar that it convinces skyway or mastermind to create threads praising the professional caliber of your product and also have their favorite quote from your game in their sigs

I prefer die rolls rather than hard skill requirements. Hard skill requirements only work if you have fewer skill levels (i.e. apprentice, journeyman, expert, master etc.), as the numbers can get overly finicky if you're allocating skill points point-by-point, and you run into the issue where there's little incentive to raise a skill by anything less than intervals of 5 or 10. Die rolls make more sense in simulating the randomness of real life and still leave a small margin for error unless the player really is maxed out in something.

The reason I say this is because if you're going to go the route of having only a few skill levels, I think not telling the player what the requirement is actually works well, especially if the skill requirement is in proportion to the task presented; i.e. repairing a radio should only require basic mechanical skills, compared to repairing a power generator; unless you're dealing with foreign technology, magic, etc. there shouldn't be a need to expose that too obviously. When you have a system where it's possible to literally be 1 point short, though, it becomes more necessary to expose the number side of things.

I'm also not opposed to a perk or some such (empathy, maybe?) that allows you to view skill requirements in dialogue. I don't know if it's something that should be obvious to the player at first, especially if you're taking the route where the player can't see precise enemy HP values etc. in combat as well. Being able to judge what it will take to convince someone of something is a bit different than actually managing to do it, after all. Spending a perk/skill point/etc. on such an ability is a good risk:reward balance, at least on first-time playthroughs or without the use of a guide, so long as of course that knowledge can't be exploited for a disproportionately large reward. You could play with this by, say, doing an initial die roll on initiating a skill check based on some other stat, with higher ranks in one's empathy/awareness/whatever increasing the chances of seeing the numbers involved.

Regarding the "you get nothing, or a huge reward" thing, I'd say that's bad design. It's always good to reward the player for their accomplishments, whether that's with some money, a neat item, a new quest to continue forward in, information on the main plot, some sort of novelty/gag/whatever, etc. Skill checks in dialogue should provide greater reward, absolutely, but depriving a player of a reward due to a single failed die roll or not having a skill high enough is overly punitive. There should never really be ideal outcomes, anyway, only different ones, with the "quality" differing from player to player based on what he or she may be invested in when it comes to narrative.

To answer the thread question:

No. It's silly.

Name.
Job.
Bye.

Doesn't need any skill checks, yet the best dialogue ever seen in the role playing genre was done in such a system.

That being said *actions* performed through a dialogue like user interface should have skill checks. Like in darklands you were always given choices of what to do like how to get into the castle of a hostile lord and most of those had a skill check of some kind.

So if the question were should *actions* have a skill check and should the player be told what skills are being checked, my answer would still be "no".

It accomplishes very little. Gives a struggling player a hint, but at the cost of reminding a good player that he's playing a spread sheet.

Care to give an example?

That, plus an option for turning even that off, for the most hardcore guys amongst players.
Showing skill level IMHO breaks immersion.

An example of the dialogue accomplished, or an example of a game using that system. Surely not the latter?

The former.

It serves its purpose very well and is perfect for dungeon crawlers, but I don't think I've ever seen a good conversation using keywords.

A typical conversation with a typical NPC in Ultima VII: The Black Gate. Notice the quality

The humor in the dialogue is that Sherry does exist, she is currently working in the nursery in Lord British's castle, and in Ultima VI she could be one of the Avatar's companions. Hubert's hair raising adventure is Sherry's favorite book, and Lord British used to ( or still does ) read it to her. Shamino is one of your companions in this particular conversation tree. In another, where Shamino is not your companion she would say:

"Dost thou know my beau? He is probably drowning his sorrows at the Blue Boar. The lazy knave! I will not let him go about adventuring. It is time for him to settle down. Thou canst tell him I said so!"

After this conversation you can ask Shamino about "settle down". So the conversations are far from a linear affair.

The beauty of it is Amber doesn't care about you, and she's not there to help you on your quest or give you a quest or sell you items or get into a "romance" with you or anything like that. She even says "To blazes with the Avatar!". Basically you can find out her Name, her Job and then say Bye. But you actually engage in a *conversation* with her, and it is quite amusing and interesting. To relate this to the discussion at hand, in *conversations* with people you don't have stat checks. I don't need so and so amount of charisma to want to know your thoughts about your favorite pizza, I don't need so and so intelligence to want to learn about your mother.

It's interesting that you would say a keyword system is best for dungeon crawlers because Ultima VII is the opposite of a dungeon crawler if an opposite could ever exist. If anything it's in dungeon crawlers where conversations are usually more interesting if the conversant is just an attribute reader. i.e. you come across a group of monsters and can use your charisma score to pacify them or intelligence to trick them to leave.

I wasn't talking about the quality of the writing, but about the dialogue structure.

But you need some charisma if you want to convince a person to tell you a secret. And you'd need enough intelligence to comprehend highly technical information if you were talking to a scientist.

I like keyword systems in dungeon crawlers because it makes puzzles and exploration more involved, if you don't know what to say you don't get the information you need.

I prefer how it was done in Fallout. I find all the [Ability] and [Skill] stuff jarring.

That's interesting.

On the one hand you think whether a certain conversation path should be accessible should depend on character attributes, but on the other hand you think that knowledge of possible conversation paths should depend on player skill.

Why do you think like this? I am not berating you for doing so but I am curios.