Vapourware The problem with Speech (and your ideas for solutions)

[Zombra]

Lemming42 have you played Griftlands? I have not but I'm intrigued by its use of cards to resolve negotiation conflicts. Might be worth checking out.

I see a lot of people here saying "Get rid of speech skills altogether, just make the players use real-world reasoning to decide what to say" .... yet no one has a problem with RPGs abstracting swordfighting?

I don't get why people are so hard on skill-check mini-games. Without that, the check becomes a binary pass:fail where the player has little to no agency in the challenge.

Exactly. If combat skills were pass/fail
1. Surrender.
2. Kill them with your sword (Sword 80%)
grognards would scream bloody murder. Yet for some reason they're terrified of dealing with actual systems to model other kinds of conflicts.

Abstraction of social skills is a very cool idea. I want to see RPGs abstract all kinds of different skills. Having killing things be the only complicated systems in RPGs is fucking ridiculous.

Lemming42 Your card (mini)game idea has a lot of merit, I think. Puts me in mind of the "Duel of Wits" system for the excellent TTRPG Burning Wheel, which has a bunch of "social maneuvers" that match against each other. The same way physical combat can have Parry, Thrust, Bash, Dodge etc., BW has Point, Avoid, Obfuscate, Dismiss, and so forth for social conflicts. Maybe card game isn't the perfect way to frame it for all games but it's a start for thinking about it. Probably would make more sense to model the exact system on other existing systems in a particular game, e.g. a phase-based blobber would use a phase-based social system too, with "will points" instead of hit points or whatever.

 

[Lemming42]

@Lemming42 have you played Griftlands? I have not but I'm intrigued by its use of cards to resolve negotiation conflicts. Might be worth checking out.

Thanks, never seen this before but checking it out now and it looks extremely cool.

Exactly. If combat skills were pass/fail
1. Surrender.
2. Kill them with your sword (Sword 80%)
grognards would scream bloody murder. Yet for some reason they're terrified of dealing with actual systems to model other kinds of conflicts.

Abstraction of social skills is a very cool idea. I want to see RPGs abstract all kinds of different skills. Having killing things be the only complicated systems in RPGs is fucking ridiculous.

Exactly, that's the heart of it - it seems bizarre to me that so many games give you two options - combat and speech - that are equivalent in terms of their effectiveness in resolving quests, but only one results in actual gameplay. It's even more jarring in games where the speech option is presented as the moral one with the better story outcome; the optimal way to play the game in that case is to avoid gameplay, which is bananas.

Maybe card game isn't the perfect way to frame it for all games but it's a start for thinking about it. Probably would make more sense to model the exact system on other existing systems in a particular game, e.g. a phase-based blobber would use a phase-based social system too, with "will points" instead of hit points or whatever.

Card games/deck building are appealing because they seem like an easy way to reward skillpoint allocation - the player could add a new card to their deck with each skillpoint invested, so negotiation becomes tangibly easier with each point (and it avoids the New Vegas type nonsense where you fail a set speech check because you have 68 speech but need 70 or whatever). You could also reward the player with cards for doing certain things like completing quests or reading relevant in-game books or whatever else would logically help in a future negotiation.

I think the key would be that it'd have to feel mechanically distinct from combat as much as possible (so ideally, no turn-based "debate" battles where the player shoots their Logic gun at the enemy to reduce their Intolerance bar), so that the difference between speech and combat doesn't feel entirely cosmetic.

 

[Gargaune]

The problem is that the speech option is often the most boring and quick one. You validate your character build, but you also typically end up with the least satisfying, least engaging option.

A good example is rescuing Tandi in Fallout:
- you can kill everyone in the base (a long combat encounter)
- you can fight Garl one-on-one
- you can barter for Tandi
- you can pass a speech check

The combat ones involve actual gameplay, and the Barter solution at least involves some kind of thought behind it since you have to firstly get the resources to pay for Tandi's release, and then decide what you're willing to offer for her. But the speech option involves clicking an obviously-telegraphed dialogue option. In this case, it's not even the most narratively satisfying option, since it's some dumb one-line shit which Garl immediately folds to. The other builds get to actually do something, make some kind of meaningful choices, and experience tangible game mechanics. The speech build is reduced to just clicking "win".

The only real thought that ever goes into most skill checks is whether or not you want to chance the roll (unless the game has removed even that element, eg New Vegas). Which is a fun risk to take, but then we're back to devs not coming up with any fail states beyond combat.

I'd say that's the trick, you gotta put points into the ability and chance the roll, it's a strategic investment with a dose of hazard. (Personally, I prefer rolls over thresholds in general.) Incidentally, I went through that Tandi sequence earlier this year and I was very thankful for the speech option... because I'd tried the fight first and had the Load menu slapped in my face in short order (first time playing).

So I'd say I didn't feel like I missed out on content because I didn't do the fights or expended money/valuables to complete the objective, but that the points I'd spent at chargen paid dividends in that instance and got me out of a tricky or expensive situation. Now if the writing sucks (and yes, I remember the line, it does), you could say the content branches are qualitatively uneven, but the immediate solution would be to write betterer.

 

[processdaemon]

I am fine with having high speech being an instawin button in terms of persuading people, but I think it should be augmented by the information you find to lead to different kinds of 'winning'.

Like let's say you're having a public conflict with the representative of a faction, if you just have high persuasion you can talk him out of a fight but without digging around you might alienate an opposing faction because someone in his retinue is secretly a member and doesn't like what you said. If you have high persuasion *and* you nosed around enough you have the option to phrase the things you say to subtly indicate to the spy that you're amenable to being talked to by them (you can also have non-persuasion options with the information alone, like calling out the spy to force him to flee or fight with you to make the fight easier). The high persuasion alone would still have value as it opens an alternate solution to the fight regardless but you're rewarded for engaging with the game world if you care about the story.

 

[Zombra]

Card games/deck building are appealing because they seem like an easy way to reward skillpoint allocation - the player could add a new card to their deck with each skillpoint invested, so negotiation becomes tangibly easier with each point (and it avoids the New Vegas type nonsense where you fail a set speech check because you have 68 speech but need 70 or whatever). You could also reward the player with cards for doing certain things like completing quests or reading relevant in-game books or whatever else would logically help in a future negotiation.

I love this. Specific card rewards for specific events. If a guy hit you with a cutting insult, you could learn the Insult card and adapt that style to your deck. Though depending on the game I wouldn't want to take away too much from allocating skill points. Maybe you could make a skill roll to learn an enemy card after it's used on you, otherwise you don't retain the knowledge.

I think the key would be that it'd have to feel mechanically distinct from combat as much as possible (so ideally, no turn-based "debate" battles where the player shoots their Logic gun at the enemy to reduce their Intolerance bar), so that the difference between speech and combat doesn't feel entirely cosmetic.

Good point. In my post above I advocated for making the mechanics all conflict mechanics similar, but I'm going to 180 now and agree with you that they should be substantially different for different approaches. That's actually one reason I didn't grab Griftlands yet; it looks good but I don't see a superficial difference between playing a Shoot Gun card and a Sly Retort card which makes it a little less jazzy.

Another game that comes to mind is Renowned Explorers. It's not really useful here but it's worth noting that the "combat" there has three branches: physical, snarky, and friendly. Your character "attacks" could be based on force, insults, or charm, with different animations of course but they all worked the same in gameplay terms, with sort of a rock paper scissors resolution format. You could have one character running around making friends and another character running around shooting people. It's nice to see games at least attempting to incorporate new conflict resolution flavors. Good game btw.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Just remove it alltogether. No Speech/Diplomacy/Persuasion skills, no Charisma, etc

Have dialogues depend on the following factors:
*Knowledge that the PC has uncovered throughout the game
*the disposition of the NPC towards the PC
*if applicable, Faction allegiance
*if applicable, quests or other things the PC has accomplished (you could call this reputation)

But using this system would require a lot more effort than just adding a Speech skill, so here we are.

Charisma has existed since the foundation of RPGs with original Dungeons & Dragons, and one of its functions has always been to affect reactions by others. If a dialogue system already includes disposition, then it would be a simple matter for charisma to affect this disposition, just as would faction allegiance, reputation, and more specific factors such as knowledge uncovered by the player. Thus, charisma would substitute, to a limited extent, for these other factors, making it easier for a charismatic player-character to achieve better reactions with others but not automatically resulting in the success of charismatic PCs or the failure of non-charismatic PCs. Similarly, a system relying on skills rather than attributes would have a speech skill that modifies reactions, again substituting for those other factors but not obviating them.

Morrowind already had individual disposition, a personality ability score, a speech skill, racial modifiers, faction modifiers, and reputation.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Just get rid of it and test all the different things the game keeps track of:

This is good but the one issue I can see is that, in a game like Fallout, investing in speech means sacrificing other, combat-oriented skills. This is great because it means you can end up playing as a squishy diplomat who is screwed as soon as combat starts, since you invested everything in non-combat skills and literally cannot fight. Without that skillpoint compromise, that experience of playing as a character for whom combat is essentially a death sentence could be lost. You mention lore skills which I suppose could work in the place of an all-purpose "Speech" skill, but that ends up rubbing against some of the problems posed by the "intimidate/deception/persuade" model.

In all mainline Fallouts you can pump your speech skill without sacrificing much of your combat potential. In 1 and 2 you can tag 3 skills, and you don't really need more than 2 weapon types, one early game and one late-game. I think you can Finnish 1,2 and New Vegas with just small guns without ever feeling vastly underpowered.

Lore skills replacing speech alone would probably be just as bad as splitting speech into different skills, players would just either have to guess which one is the skill that unlocks the most content, or invest into all 3 of them. They should be used in combination with different checks I've mentioned. So that every playthrough every character gets a different bit of special content. Buff characters gain additional info by intimidation, clerics win theological arguments, wizards impress ancient liches by knowing about times when they were still mortal etc. The problem with implementing speech is that it's pretty much useless outside of dialogue, so the developers compensate by making it really useful during dialogues, which makes if often a semi-mandatory investment.

 

[antimeridian]

Exactly. If combat skills were pass/fail
1. Surrender.
2. Kill them with your sword (Sword 80%)
grognards would scream bloody murder. Yet for some reason they're terrified of dealing with actual systems to model other kinds of conflicts.

Or it's just the fact that in decades of RPG development, there haven't been any attempted solutions to the speech conundrum that even come close to feeling satisfying. It's a dead end and the smart solution is to rethink the concept entirely, into something that better complements core RPG mechanics.
Hell it would be better to just have conversation mechanics be a reskin of the game's normal combat, at least you won't end up with a compromised game-within-a-game tacked on instead.
All the card games and other ideas being discussed here are just minigames at the end of the day. Put as much effort into them as you want, but at the end of the day folks will still be sick of them well before the end of the game and they'll feel about as superfluous as the Kangmaker kingdom management.

and it avoids the New Vegas type nonsense where you fail a set speech check because you have 68 speech but need 70 or whatever

There's a much easier solution, it's called a dice roll. Hey wait a sec, maybe what we have now is already the best possible speech implementation - goddammit!

In all mainline Fallouts you can pump your speech skill without sacrificing much of your combat potential.

This is true of a majority of games tbh. Nobody actually plays a helpless diplomat type except for hardcore LARPers who are metagaming, because most games rarely demand the player sacrifice much combat potential in exchange for maxing out social skills.

I rarely pump social skills at all in games anymore, especially in anything more modern where spending all my time in dialogue is more of a deterrent than a bonus.

 

[Butter]

Nobody wants to hear it, but the problem is Fallout-style conversations where you're shown the exact words your character is going to say. This style of dialogue is anathema to a skill-based systemic approach, and requires the writers to include (usually very obvious) "winning" dialogue lines. Topic-based dialogue with a text parser is vastly superior and means you can THREATEN and check the character's Intimidation skill, or BRIBE and check the character's gold + reputation. Add to this the option to drag and drop items into the dialogue window to show them to the NPC. The player has to realize that the autopsy report is critical to convincing the Master and show it to him unprompted by the bright green text. This is the stuff Incline is made of.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

in my ruleset any action facing direct, active resistance is a "versus" roll, with 4 obvious possible outcomes ww, ll, wl, lw. sometimes even your best arguments won't work, sometimes you think you just said something dumb but it actually hit the mark. if the discussion is complex or the demands are tight, a fair master writes down (but hides) how many victories in a row the character/party needs.
when it's a matter of words, you either tie it to roleplaying or you keep it straight and simple. only fallout kept the best of both worlds, but for that to work it needs a smart planification AND a smart player. good luck with that.

Hell it would be better to just have conversation mechanics be a reskin of the game's normal combat

some "romance of the three kingdoms" game did it already.

 

[antimeridian]

Nobody wants to hear it, but the problem is Fallout-style conversations where you're shown the exact words your character is going to say. This style of dialogue is anathema to a skill-based systemic approach, and requires the writers to include (usually very obvious) "winning" dialogue lines. Topic-based dialogue with a text parser is vastly superior and means you can THREATEN and check the character's Intimidation skill, or BRIBE and check the character's gold + reputation. Add to this the option to drag and drop items into the dialogue window to show them to the NPC. The player has to realize that the autopsy report is critical to convincing the Master and show it to him unprompted by the bright green text. This is the stuff Incline is made of.

Great stuff, too bad it can't be made "cinematic" so we'll never see it again.

 

[Zombra]

game-within-a-game
just minigames

That's exactly what all RPG combat is now, yet somehow it's okay and correct for people to love that?

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

I think at minimum they ought to take a page from LA Noire and have you analyze the target character (not facial features though) and make a best guess on whether they'd respond to Persuade, bluff or intimidate based on their personalities. Higher skill will increase the likelihood of success as usual but also decrease the chance of failure for picking a skill the target is less responsive to. Just don't over-telegraph the characters to be too empathetic, dumb or cowardly so as to destroy the difficulty of deducing what they'd respond best to, rather grant hints to the player who takes the time to explore the dialogue fully about what the NPC might ultimately want or be convinced by. The trick is making the hints via dialogue not feel gamey and obvious which requires competent writers that have mastered the offhand remark, which should be placed randomly somewhere in the middle of NPC monologues, not as the punchy final word. Attentiveness should be rewarded and the skill checks should be more difficult as well. Options should only be available if the dialogue is fully explored. Increase the likelihood of making the check with the more that you know about the character.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I said this in other threads: you have to "gamify" dialogue.

RPG dialogue is roughly at the same development stage now (after decades) as combat was in the earliest days of RPGs. You had some combat stats, and the game just compared your combat stats against enemy combat stats and auto-resolved combat. This was pretty boring, so very quickly combat was gamified, by creating a lot of skills/spells/abilities, and letting the player use them actively against enemies, who also use their skills/abilities.

But dialogue isn't exactly like combat, so you can't gamify it the same exact way. Combat is about positioning, timing, using cover, reacting to enemy abilities, etc. Dialogue gamification should be about active parts that are naturally part of dialogue in RL. Figuring stuff out, applying your knowledge, making logical arguments to convince others, etc.

So for example, you know that the NPC is lying not because you have speech skill 10, or because his dialogue option is in red, but because you read some in-game book about the the shit he is talking about, and you realize he is bullshitting you. And if you want to convince another NPC to do what you want/need, you might have to do research on him in-game, figure out what he likes/hates, what he is interested in, afraid of, and then use that knowledge to convince him.

On the downside, obviously something like this would be fairly complex to implement, and right now, most RPG developers struggle to create games WITH shitty simpleton dialogue, so yeah...

 

[deuxhero]

There have been tabletop RPGs that tie some combat ability to "speech" skills: Intimidate to demoralize, bluff to feint/taunt, (etc.). I think it would help speech skills in games a lot, meaning they aren't just locked to dialog, and give more options in combat. For a general "speech" it could be as simple as a "dispel morale effects" that gets more effective the higher it is, or do what JA2 did and tie it into general leadership/officer material.

 

[Sabotin]

It's less of a problem with speech skill and more of an issue with writing, right? I guess it's easier to just have it skip chunks of quests than making a bunch of extra lines for one skill many won't even see.

Instead of directly solving problems, have it point out to players a way to advance forward or provide extra information. The bouncer won't let you meet the boss, but may mention who can or where/when the boss is reachable by other means. Talking to a trader he may offer an extra item for sale after a conversation where you discover you share the same interest in hats.

The player could also be more verbose or diplomatic when talking, mention certain things or withhold others in orther to get a slightly more favorable outcome.

Maybe have it mitigate quest failures to encourage no reloading and better RP, etc...

In general I'd rather see it used more as something that enhances the experience. No need for complicating gameplay or having tacked on mechanics.

I'm mostly bothered when the skill being abstract, while the dialogue choices aren't. I much rather see it used as a treshold to unlock extra dialogue where the character is actually convincing rather than "gimme extra 100 gold [speech]" with a basic yes/no outcome. What, is the difference that you ask in a sexy accent?

 

[Reinhardt]

the main problem with speech is that there is too many of it.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Remove it all together storyfaggots should be crucified anyway

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

Remove speech checks or persuasion altogether and add in an NPC diposition system like in Morrowind. Your typical RPG speech solutions are now locked behind having a high disposition with a character. You can raise disposition in plenty of ways - having a high charisma helps, but if you need to raise someone's disposition towards you decently high you'll still need to do other things to raise it like being a part of that characters faction, having already done quests or tasks for them, bribing them off with money, etc. Meaning they have to, you know, actually like and know you in order to be persuaded into things.

Also, maybe other stats outside of charisma can affect NPC disposition towards the player. Let's say you meet a tribe of savage barbarians that don't care much for charisma, but will like and respect you more if you have a high strength and constitution.

This way instead of it being a free win button like in fallout, it requires you to actually interact with the world and do content in the game in order to persuade or convince people to help you.

 

[Flint]

The problem with speech skill is that it's usually just a skill-point tax you need to pay to see more content in the game. Usually some of the best content in the game as speech checks whenever available often leave to optimal solution no matter the situation. More named characters survive, you get better loot, you get to hear more backstory, etc. Take Lonesome Road. You can either kill Ulysses and leave or convince him to step down and have a nice chat with him.

Lonesome Road is a bad example, because it's not a skill tax in this case. You can convince Ulysses to step down without any skill checks if you want. There are two other dialogue branches that rely on you exploring the world (finding all of his audio messages and getting all of the ED-E logs).

 

[Grauken]

Everyone agrees: Speech and Diplomacy skills suck.

No, obviously not. It only seems like a problem for a certain subset of players, most people are happy with it

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Yeah bro totally cool shit. Carefully design a combat encounter that can be made easier or avoided by sufficiently stealthy characters here comes storyfaggot, dildo in the ass, homosexual lust in his eyes and he clicks on dialogue options saying "we're not so different you and I" to progress through the area.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Amazing storyfaggot gameplay.

 

[thesheeep]

This is a shit idea because it just means that, since players can't read the developers' minds, they won't know what to invest in ahead of time.

This is always an issue, though, not just for speech skills.
Invested all your points in throwing weapons? Tough shit, developers didn't see fit to more than a handful of those into the game.

I'm fine with any solution that does not result in fucking minigames.
There are no good minigames, only minigames that are slightly less mind boggingly annoying and can thus be tolerated for longer.
Minigames are the bane of every other game that has them.

 

[behold_a_man]

What if a game would actually become more non-linear (and sometimes perhaps harder - but with better abilities to roleplay) the higher the speech skill you have?
For example, let's say there are a bunch of anarcho-statists holding a keycard to the long-forgotten ruins of somewhere else. With high enough speech, you can convince them that you adhere to their philosophy and obtain the keycard, bypassing a fight - but later in the game, if you align with stateful libertarians, they will come with reinforcements and try to whack you.
The problem with this approach I see, is that it would make sense in a small world where encountering the same character many times is expected, not necessarily in a larger setting.
In such system speech could be all about having additional options and perhaps avoiding tougher problems until later in the game.