RPG Design: Charisma, the Dump Stat
Some dice & paper gaming and further (but unrelated) work on Frayed Knights has made me go back to one of my favorite topics - dealing with conversations in an RPG (computer or tabletop). Or more particularly, the player's role versus the character's role (and... uh, rolls) during dialog.

The old way of handling things was to... not. The player handled the conversations, and the character handled the combat rolls. Charisma was (and remains) a popular dump stat. Titus the Ugly might have a charisma of 5 and be unable to speak above a mumble, but when the non-combat heat was on he could negotiate with eloquence, passion, clear logic, and only the most polite hint of threat - because his player could do that in the comfort of the gaming room, or because that conversation option was available to him in the computer games' menu.

The Ultima series eventually just dumped those sorts of stats altogether to keep the conversation tree free of barriers.

Making Social Skills (Barely) Relevant
The new trend (if you can call it that) seems to be driven by Bioware, and that is simply to provide some dialog trees with options that can only be successfully exercised by successful social skill rolls. Bethesda tried to do something different by adding a social mini-game in Oblivion (evolved from a simpler menu-based system in Morrowind) which sometimes opened new conversation options (though in practice, it rarely useful for me beyond getting better prices from merchants). This was abandoned in Fallout 3 in favor of a more Bioware-style dialog option tree, though I guess we'll see what The Elder Scrolls V might bring us.

The problem with this system is that it's value is left purely in the hands of the designers. Nowhere was this made more clear than with Bioware's Neverwinter Nights series. Social skills were mildly useful through Bioware's campaigns, but their value became wildly variable (tending towards utter uselessness) with player-created modules. This is unfair and frustrating to players. It's like giving us a "drive tank" skill for us to spend precious points in, only to never provide us with an actual tank to drive except for a short mini-game sequence near the end of the game.

Even in dice-and-paper games, we run into problems. Quite simply, some results are going to be utterly impossible through conversation alone, which makes players feel slighted when their stellar social skill rolls fail to achieve the desired results. On top of this, the game master feels obligated to provide the players with all the information they'll need from NPCs regardless of their success or failure in social rolls, to prevent the planned adventure from going down the toilet.

This process is pretty well emulated by the standard conversation-tree system in CRPGs.

Lessons from Drama Class
Yes, I was in theater in high school. I enjoyed it, and I was considered pretty good at it. Not good enough to make it a career choice, but I had a lot of fun with it. There were a couple of interesting exercises we went through which have no doubt fully corrupted how I feel about roleplaying.

One was an exercise where we had to each say a very simple phrase, but shade it with completely different meanings. Something as simple as the word, "no," can have millions of meanings depending upon how it's said. Similarly, in some RPGs it can be very difficult to tell what kind of response you are choosing from the menu. The same sentence can be sincere or snarky depending upon how it is spoken and how well it is delivered. A snarky response intended to be friendly ribbing can easily sound nasty.

Another great series of exercises was improvisational acting ("improvs"). I could almost label these the "Negotiation 101" lessons, as they were usually set up so that character A and character B had conflicting needs, but character B could always "win" the scenario by refusing to take action. We weren't graded on our negotiation skill, but on the believability of the character interaction, but that didn't stop us from trying. The trick, as character A, was to find some kind of compromise - to satisfy the underlying goal of character B yet still get what you wanted.

While not usually as dramatic as we experienced in the class, this is a key part of life and working with others. Unfortunately, we don't get that in CRPGs very often. Instead, if we need something from an NPC, they immediately assign us a subquest.

It's not horrible, and at the very least it keeps things simple. But could we do better?

Some Ideas to be Considered
If we want to make non-combat, social encounters an integral part of a CRPG, we need to shake things up a bit. We probably need to make some fundamental changes to the very idea of how social interactions work. Social interactions need more feedback, twists, bends, and alternate resolution. As always, I think of the one thing that works reasonably well in CRPGs, and that is the combat system. So how could we make conversations reflect the kind of action we get in combat?

The conversation tree can probably stay in one form or another. It works so well because it is mirrors how conversations play out in real life. But most of the time, the conversation trees aren't used for much more than NPC exposition and ... uh, "quest requests."

But here are some thoughts on elements that could (but I won't go so far as to say, "Should") be incorporated into a new, hopefully improved paradigm (ack! I said the "p" word) in handling NPC dialog:

1. The attitude of the NPC towards the speaker, overall. And how "fixed" this attitude is. An NPC who has never met the player character before might be pretty flexible in their attitude. The widow of the villain whom the PCs just killed at the Sheriff's request might be a little less so.

2. The "mood" of the conversation. The NPC might like the player character speaker, but not be at all happy about how the conversation is going. Or the NPC may hate the player characters, but have no option other than to be concilliatory during the conversation to request their aid. Naturally, the mood of the conversation can carry over and affect the NPC's overall attitude over time.

3. The NPC's goals for the conversation - which might actually change during the conversation. Any good writer will consider this for every line of dialog - though the needs of the character may sometimes be sacrificed for the needs of the story. This could be calculated in real-time, or pre-determined based on the current branch of the conversation tree. But I swear that in many RPGs, the only goal of the NPC is to hear themselves talk! Or to please - for some reason - the complete stranger who just walked up to them and made the mistake of asking about the history of the city.

4. Why shouldn't every line of dialog involve a skill roll of some kind? Does a skill roll necessitate a branch in the dialog tree right then and there? Does every hit in combat necessitate the death of the guy on the receiving end? There should be more than just pass / fail branches in the dialog, anyway.

5. We need greater feedback on non-verbal cues from the NPC. This could be in the form of simple visual indicators on the HUD, the subtle nuances of voice actors combined complex facial mechanics on-screen guaranteed to give the wrong cues half the time, or - shock! - resorting to the same techniques that writers have been using for ages to describe the speaker. But as modern games prefer to eschew the written word entirely (it makes localization such a drag), we may have to look to the indies to do more with that.

6. What about the NPCs using THEIR social skills to manipulate the dialog, or even *gasp* the player characters? I'm not sure if that would be desirable, but it could be the subject of some very interesting experiments. I could see it now - you go to a merchant wanting to offload all your loot, and leave with LESS gold than you had before - but you now own a whole bunch of term life insurance policies, some real estate in Outer Moldovia, and a set of kitchen knives you just can't live without.

7. If all this sounds incredibly complicated for a dialog system, abstracting a lot of it is okay. While I wasn't thrilled with Oblivion's conversational "mini-game," but I think the principle was probably on the right track. Every word of small-talk doesn't need to be spoken or printed on the screen - just the important stuff.

I can't say any of these ideas are even in the same area code as "the right thing," but I would love to see more RPGs break from the stale pack and try something new in this area. We've been complaining about the same things for a decade or so, with very few attempts to improve to make this aspect of CRPGs more compelling.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:55 AM (Permalink)