Game mechanics of the npc dialogue

[Lhynn]

No, this, which is an actual game, not a concept.

Thats a CYOA tho.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

For all its faut, Deus Ex HR persuasion game also mirrors Alpha Protocol system where you need to suit your argument based on the NPC personality. Off course you could "pass skillcheck" by using the Charm Aug (Cassey I think?), but I think both AP and DXHR are a step in a better direction than most other RPGs.

 

[Lurker King]

The solution is to create a CRPG with no combat. That will force innovation in the dialogue system and general depth of world reactivity and C&C.

No, this, which is an actual game, not a concept.

Thats a CYOA tho.

shihonage, read Lhynn's comment. This why developers don't drop combat and invest on dialogues. If the game has too much dialogue and C&C is perceived as a CYOA, not a cRPG.

 

[Lhynn]

shihonage, read Lhynn's comment. This why developers don't drop combat and invest on dialogues. If the game has too much dialogue and C&C is perceived as a CYOA, not a cRPG.

Thats nonsense, you can have gameplay without having combat. Sometimes Always Monster is a good example of an RPG with no combat.

 

[Coma White]

This is a really great thread. OP raises a very valid criticism. I think looking at this from the perspective of tabletop might be beneficial:

When you're running a session, depending on your style, you tend to have a couple set pieces/encounters in the chamber. How your players reach those encounters is up to them, and how you present or alter them is up to you. In my experience, players who tend to be very diplomatic tend to want to get clever. They enjoy testing your NPCs or bypassing work you've done. This is a great opportunity to get some reactivity going -- you know, the fundamental point of real role playing. Don't let the players bypass an encounter, but change it in some way to reflect their more diplomatic approach. These can be small changes from some monsters betraying others to huge changes -- like a combat encounter becoming a social one.

When your players get clever, you have to bargain with them through your own NPCs. Because this is what diplomatic players ACTUALLY want in my experience -- even if they don't really know it themselves. They want to negotiate. They want to bargain. They want to make deals. They want to feel like your NPCs are real people they can trust, betray, trick, and learn from.

CRPGs have a hard time of this, which is why I think speech and diplomatic skills in games often just boil down to tunneling shortcuts through gameplay. It's really hard to craft organically dynamic encounters because once you've written an encounter, you've written it. No matter how many outcomes or permutations you craft. Once it's out there, it's out there. Players choose social skills because they want to play characters who are social -- not because they want to cheat encounters. It's very difficult for CRPGs to address this.

 

[shihonage]

I didn't say that removing combat from existing dialogue concepts is a swell idea. The whole point is to make NPC interaction deeper than before. Dialogue can have actual mechanics. Imagine what would've happened it the industry invested a fraction of research it invested into optimizing the algorithms of drawing jungles, into improving NPC interaction.

I know that expert systems, a concept which existed since 1960s and can be found in every "20 questions" toy, cannot be directly applied to expected dialogue structure, but there has to be a way to shape it into being useful. It offers the advantage of NPC potentially keeping the subject conversation on-topic based on your previous answers, without having to pre-define a branching tree.

Another idea I had, is to use micro-achievements in the game as dialogue qualifiers. Not stat checks, but actions which speak of your character's qualities. By making it obvious to the player why he got the "rejection response" from an attempted line, you can actually make him do them as a kind of quests which would allow him to "breach" the dialogue option into succeeding.

The game itself could be built around a distinct non-combat personality. In real world, non-combat personalities can't bulk up or learn martial arts in an hour, and generally they know to stay away from violence. So you could be an engineer who helps protect the settlement by planting mines of building turrets, atmospheric processors, a growing power grid, mining and defensive infrastructure. Or a doctor. Or a doctor-engineer.

Yes, there's the question of "but what's going to introduce excitement", i.e. hurt you, make your activity dangerous. Perhaps you're terraforming the planet, so you have to deal with a hostile environment. Perhaps you CAN get attacked by hostile creatures, but you deal with them by making sure your personal forcefield doesn't run out of charge. Yeah that sounds kinda lame, but the point is, it is a general direction which can be made less lame, and more interesting, and not a CYOA, if only sufficient thought and exploration was put into it.

 

[bddevil]

OK, this is a great discussion. I do want to address the OP briefly first

While I agree- binary checks are very meh- one thing about RPGs is that many people play them for role-playing, not combat.
And if you are a speech master/charisma overloader/diplomat/grifter/etc, your tongue is your weapon. You slay foes with it, you plea.. er, charm women with it. You persuade people to take your way. It's ok to circumvent combat by using your tongue. That's what role-playing IS. But - and here we get to the important part - it shouldn't be a 'one button check/select right dialogue/win'.

So ideally (and I know, resources are a problem) what the dialogue-based gameplay would do:

1. Present lore. Many RPGs do this, but many do not. If you're a speech master, game needs to dump (optional) lore on you, new dialogue options, information, etc. To a diplomat, dialogues should matter hundred times more than for a warrior. People should have much more to say and conversations should be longer just because you're a master of speech.

2. Present INDIRECT ways and HINTS as to circumvent a problem, not solve the problem by just having a check. This is something RPGs can learn from adventure games. Hypothetical problem: you need to steal valuable item X from museum/mansion/whatever. Your choices are stealth/guns/speech. If you choose speech, don't just have janitor steal it and give it to you if you pass the check. No, if you're a master of speech, the janitor should, after some convincing/persuading/flattering dialogue, blurt out that there's this thing in this [secret?] room that disables most of security around item X. You still may run into guards, but your problem is much easier than before because an extra layer of security is gone, and that's great because your stealth/guns arent that good. And, you found a real, alternative way to solve a problem, explore (this thing that disables security otherwise you wont know what to do with) all after extracting information from the janitor due to your speech mastery.

3. Don't show successful/unsuccessful checks or that a choice is by default a 'speech choice'. Yes, this will lead to some save scumming, but people who roleplay will be much more engaged. Also, don't have strictly positive options. Have some of these options fail once in a while. Have some of these options don't have effect. Every grifter fails once in a while. Have these options have delayed, not immediate impact. Have NPCs agree with your persuasion externally only to think internally you're too pushy/sly and then fuck you over in the end. People do that in real life. Have real consequences of you being a women charmer, in that men who lust for these women, would hate your guts.

Yes, I know, this is a bit naive/unrealistic, but imagine such a game. A lot of people who love adventure games (like me, for example) a lot of time play RPGs as speech masters/diplomats because we enjoy dialogue and witty/charismatic characters. I would pay a ton for such games to be made where you aren't winning simply by gaining stats and clicking it when it's available in dialogue.

 

[gaussgunner]

And RPGs are already at 5-10 novels worth of text as it is, which is about the limit of human endeavor.

So if you want dialogue to be really interesting, you'll have to turn it into a combinatorial system. Conceptually that's easy because language is itself a combinatorial system, but...

Yeah. A full dialogue tree for every outcome is effectively CYOA, a dead end. AI is another dead end. It'll never be convincing enough for intelligent RPGers: social interaction and natural language aren't nice and logical like grid-based combat AI. I don't think it'll be good enough in 1000 years. And if you reduce social interaction to a logical model, as Telengard said, you get The Sims: no strategy, no plot, no meaning.

I'm using a simpler combinatorial approach. Instead of one big CYOA storyline, every NPC has a set of storylines representing their goals. They only follow a storyline when the game state conditions are met, so everything should make sense.

I also wanted to avoid meaningless choices, skill checks, and dialogue trees altogether. So, NPCs always choose the topic of conversation: basically, the storyline with the highest probability of success (for the NPC), based on current game state and dubious algorithms. Usually they're just feeding you bits of information, so as not to interrupt the flow of gameplay. When you're offered a choice, you know there will be consequences. But that's rare. Talk is cheap. Busting heads and delivering the goods is what really matters. And when you do it, you're not just checking off a quest objective, you're changing the game state which drives all storylines, with potentially unintended consequences.