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

[Lemming42]

Everyone agrees: Speech and Diplomacy skills suck. They haven't evolved in about 25 years, and all too often they're an auto-win button. Click the [Speech] option, win the quest. In addition to this, they often actively restrict players from accessing content - if you persuade an NPC, your "reward" is usually to skip ahead in a quest or just have it end right there, meaning you've just missed out on part of the fucking game.

Some ideas for solutions:
- Make Speech a into a minigame with its own mechanics. Famously, and disastrously, attempted by Oblivion. The idea here is that the Speech skill, like all other skills, leads to the game becoming tangibly easier as the player character's talents expand. Have a minigame that abstractly represents your attempt to persuade someone, and have it get easier as your Speech skill increases. The snag here, of course, is that coming up with skill-based minigames in RPGs almost always leads to calamity.

- Make it so that Speech simply gives the player access to a new dialogue tree where the right options must be selected to convince an NPC. I hate this and can't see how it'd work; basically you have to read the devs' minds and pick the answers they want you to pick. Boring.

- Integrate speech skills entirely into gameplay (think Daggerfall, where speech skills are rolled when near monsters to see if you pacify them). Interesting, but how would it work beyond just pacifying enemies in a way that feels very gamey and abstracted?

- Have it so that the Speech solutions may not be the optimal ones, forcing the player to compromise or acquiesce. This is cool in theory, but in practice, what's the point? It just means that investing in Speech will turn you into a loser who never wins.

- Divide Speech into lots of different skills (Intimidate, Persuade, Deception, etc.) 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. Either every quest makes equal use of all these skills, in which case there's no point even having more than one Speech skill, or quests just randomly use one of these options out of nowhere, leaving people who invested in the others completely fucked. Bad idea.

Of these ideas, I lean toward the first. The whole point of a build in an RPG is to give players access to game mechanics - combat builds may engage in combat, stealth builds may engage in stealth, etc. Why not make it the same for speech? The question is how to come up with a speech minigame (or other form of mechanical expansion) that isn't utter dogshit. Oblivion's bipolar pie chart madness is a non-starter, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution's pheremones thing is just sort of odd. Over to you.

 

[Spukrian]

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

Have dialaogues 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.

 

[Bester]

Have a minigame that abstractly represents your attempt to persuade someone, and have it get easier as your Speech skill increases.

A turn-based combat in the arena of the mind, where you're using "trade" skill as a weapon to fight the guy's "greed" and various related vices as its minions? The stronger your social skill, the more powerful your equipped weapon?
Seems like a lot of hassle. And the unskippable part of the battle seems annoying.

But if you make it into any kind of minigame that isn't combat, it's going to be Oblivion all over again.

 

[std::namespace]

anno 2023!

Everyone agrees: Speech and Diplomacy skills suck.

there is no such thing as speech skill, retard

there is only skill1 skill2 skill3 ... .. .

and there is no solution because money is limited

and if it wasnt limited, it wouldnt matter, because shiteaters like you wouldnt get it anyway

 

[Lemming42]

A turn-based combat in the arena of the mind, where you're using "trade" skill as a weapon to fight the guy's "greed" and various related vices as its minions? The stronger your social skill, the more powerful your equipped weapon?
Seems like a lot of hassle. And the unskippable part of the battle seems annoying.

Sounds insane but one thing I was thinking is a deck-building card game kind of thing where you and the NPC both play cards that abstractly represent the flow of a conversation. You could add cards to your deck prior to each "battle" by doing things in the world - learning information about the situation or person, convincing other related NPCs, doing quests, casting Detect Thoughts, etc.

The other important component, regardless of how speech is dealt with, is for games to have interesting fail states, so that failing a speech attempt leads to something interesting (captured, exiled, whatever) instead of the usual combat encounter that a) your build probably isn't suited for and b) ends the quest the exact same way regardless.

 

[antimeridian]

Tough question. First off fuck any minigame for speech, or even turning it into a combat encounter. Tedious and shitty.

In some ways I really like how Fallout 1/2 handled speech, with stats (INT, PER, CHR) likely to be boosted for talky characters, combined with the speech skill itself, to roll for additional dialogue options that aren't marked as winning options. This is closest to option #2 in OP. When it works and feels organic, it's awesome - rewards both the character built and the player's attention to the NPC's disposition and positions, but not 100% deterministic (the New Vegas problem). Unfortunately it usually leads to the correct options still being incredibly obvious (it's the paragraph response listed along three one-liners), or else stuck guessing dev intent as mentioned above. These problems could be partially addressed if the dialogue was better written than Fallout's, but they're inherent issues nonetheless.

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

Have dialaogues 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.

I was going to post something like this but you beat me to it. I think this approach should be used more. Instead of a speech skill, have speech options unlock through actual gameplay - exploration to find info, factions, and quests. This way the character will only maintain access to speech options that make sense for the actions they have taken. RPGs haven't convincingly figured out speech skills after all these years, so might as well base conversations on what RPGs DO in fact do well, which is interactivity, exploration, and questing. I find it more rewarding when a convincing argumentative speech options up because I did something in the world than because I pumped a skill.

 

[Bester]

card game

I liked Arcomage in MM7, but it was a reprieve and a change of pace after travelling to a new town.
To stick it into dialogues, I wouldn't welcome this as a player. I'd avoid conversations, because I wouldn't want to play it as often. In-game this would make my character a sociophobe, but in real life it would make an annoyed player.

 

[lukaszek]

- create 3 speech skills
- make 1 of them kind of optional and have it lvlup automatically. Extra points if its always high enough to help in checks this way
- 2 skills left is kind of hard to manage, make sure that if you focus on 1 of them you can pass all the checks in the game
- profit

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Speech is definitely an issue. Oddly enough, this is one thing mechanically that D:OS did well. Speech checks are abstracted by a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) minigame that has the amount of successes modified by the PC's charisma and speech skill.

A difficult argument with low skill and ability will require the PC to win several times in order to "fill up the meter", whereas the opponent may only have to win one or two rounds of RPS to end the argument in their favor. The opposite applies if the PC is very persuasive or has a low stakes persuasion to make. It's a really clever solution. There is chance, but the outcome is heavily influenced by skill, circumstance, reputation, etc.. The player also has some choice to make, even if it's arbitrary. I like it, in that it's a decent approximation for the "je ne sais quoi" of conversation. I'd like it if Larian improved upon this concept and maybe took it further.

 

[Modron]

Codexers advocating for minigames in dialog :D

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

I think that speech is a silly idea for a skill in the first place. There is one skill that determines how well your character is at conning people, negotiating trade deals, convincing people not to kill themselves, debating, negotiating payment etc. At the same time every type of weapon has it's own dedicated skill, and being a burglar requires you to invest in at least 3 different skill. Sometimes it's split into 3 or more skills (intimidation, bluffing, persuasion), but classic persuasion still usually unlocks the best content.

Just get rid of it and test all the different things the game keeps track of:
-Your part member wants to kill himself? Simple relationship points check.
-You need to convince the master that his army of supermutants is a flawed idea and he should kill himself? Just let the players pass without a check if he gathered enough evidence
-Intimidation? This should be determined by strength and gear.
-Political/philosophical debate? Just use appropriate lore skills.
-Player needs to convince a particular NPC that he shuldn't pay him for some service? Make everyone prejudiced. Dwarven mercenary will lower fee for his service if a fellow dwarf asks him but will demand more from an elf. Guards are instructed to not allow anyone into the city? They might make exception for priests of a local deity. Etc.

Using this method you get rid of "I win button" but at the same time you don't force players to guess which of multiple otherwise useless skill he should invest if he wants to read the best version of game's dialogues. Also "my knowledge of religion really paid off at the end of the game when I convinced the grand inquisitor that the king is a heretic" is a much better story than "I pressed I WIN button and gained a new ally, it was the right decision to max social skills as a did in every RPG for the past 25 years".

 

[antimeridian]

Using this method you get rid of "I win button" but at the same time you don't force players to guess which of multiple otherwise useless skill he should invest if he wants to read the best version of game's dialogues. Also "my knowledge of religion really paid off at the end of the game when I convinced the grand inquisitor that the king is a heretic" is a much better story than "I pressed I WIN button and gained a new ally, it was the right decision to max social skills as a did in every RPG for the past 25 years".

Spot on.
But if devs do this, 99% of the players won't be able to solve anything diplomatically due to their own adhd/retardation. We're way too far down the New Vegas route where players pump speech to get mindlessly get the best outcomes for everything and feel smart while barely paying attention.
(Also doing things this way would be a lot more work for devs. Fuck devs)

 

[0sacred]

hide skillchecks/thresholds, write actually intelligent branching dialogue, leave it to the player to figure out how to persuade the NPC. Don't telegraph to the player what went wrong if they don't get the desired outcome.

 

[Lord of Riva]

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

Have dialaogues 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.

This is clearly the only reasonable solution. It's also not unfeasible.

That said it's really not the biggest issue, I mean looking at these things from a design perspective everyone can see that this is an issue *but* games have been great even with this OP skill it's a game and it can be fun to just talk yourself out of everything. It's a power Fantasy, nothing wrong with it really.

 

[antimeridian]

hide skillchecks/thresholds, write actually intelligent branching dialogue, leave it to the player to figure out how to persuade the NPC. Don't telegraph to the player what went wrong if they don't get the desired outcome.

This is great in theory but usually turns into "guess what the devs wanted you to say" because the writing effort gets put into the correct paths, so the dead ends are usually obvious

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Either every quest makes equal use of all these skills, in which case there's no point even having more than one Speech skill,

Beyond roleplaying, I guess. In my own game pitch this was the way I designed all quests because I thought it would be fun. Different options would lead to different outcomes. While a handful of quest lines would require a particular skill, such as the leader of a rowdy faction responding favorably to intimidation, these would be equally distributed.

 

[NecroLord]

I like Taunt in Morrowind.
Trash talk an NPC to such an extent that they attack you in frustration.
By the way, if they strike first, you have the right to defend yourself and kill the one attacking you AND take all his gear!
WIN!
Fallout 1 and 2 has Speech which synergizes very well with Intelligence.
More dialogue options and potential for non violent solutions. Sharp wit and the best choice of words can serve one well in the Wasteland.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

This is clearly the only reasonable solution. It's also not unfeasible.

That said it's really not the biggest issue, I mean looking at these things from a design perspective everyone can see that this is an issue *but* games have been great even with this OP skill it's a game and it can be fun to just talk yourself out of everything. It's a power Fantasy, nothing wrong with it really.

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.

No other skill in the genre duplicates that. Items goined by pickpocketing, lockpicking or bartering rarely beat these you find as loot. If you're strong enough fighting enemies is almost always better than sneaking past them. Lore/science skills rarely provide anything of value. Weapon skills are pretty much interchangable, playing as a melee character in Fallout will be more challenging but you won't really miss-out on anything. The only skill of comparable utility I can thing of is Outdoormsan in F1/2 since it's pretty hard to find Easter Eggs without it.

 

[0sacred]

hide skillchecks/thresholds, write actually intelligent branching dialogue, leave it to the player to figure out how to persuade the NPC. Don't telegraph to the player what went wrong if they don't get the desired outcome.

This is great in theory but usually turns into "guess what the devs wanted you to say" because the writing effort gets put into the correct paths, so the dead ends are usually obvious

In reality you often don't even have branching paths to speak of but three non-descript lines and one marked insta-win (requires 30 speech)

 

[Nikanuur]

Everyone agrees: Speech and Diplomacy skills suck. They haven't evolved in about 25 years, and all too often they're an auto-win button. Click the [Speech] option, win the quest. In addition to this, they often actively restrict players from accessing content - if you persuade an NPC, your "reward" is usually to skip ahead in a quest or just have it end right there, meaning you've just missed out on part of the fucking game.

Some ideas for solutions:
- Make Speech a into a minigame with its own mechanics. Famously, and disastrously, attempted by Oblivion. The idea here is that the Speech skill, like all other skills, leads to the game becoming tangibly easier as the player character's talents expand. Have a minigame that abstractly represents your attempt to persuade someone, and have it get easier as your Speech skill increases. The snag here, of course, is that coming up with skill-based minigames in RPGs almost always leads to calamity.

- Make it so that Speech simply gives the player access to a new dialogue tree where the right options must be selected to convince an NPC. I hate this and can't see how it'd work; basically you have to read the devs' minds and pick the answers they want you to pick. Boring.

- Integrate speech skills entirely into gameplay (think Daggerfall, where speech skills are rolled when near monsters to see if you pacify them). Interesting, but how would it work beyond just pacifying enemies in a way that feels very gamey and abstracted?

- Have it so that the Speech solutions may not be the optimal ones, forcing the player to compromise or acquiesce. This is cool in theory, but in practice, what's the point? It just means that investing in Speech will turn you into a loser who never wins.

- Divide Speech into lots of different skills (Intimidate, Persuade, Deception, etc.) 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. Either every quest makes equal use of all these skills, in which case there's no point even having more than one Speech skill, or quests just randomly use one of these options out of nowhere, leaving people who invested in the others completely fucked. Bad idea.

Of these ideas, I lean toward the first. The whole point of a build in an RPG is to give players access to game mechanics - combat builds may engage in combat, stealth builds may engage in stealth, etc. Why not make it the same for speech? The question is how to come up with a speech minigame (or other form of mechanical expansion) that isn't utter dogshit. Oblivion's bipolar pie chart madness is a non-starter, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution's pheremones thing is just sort of odd. Over to you.

'I hate this and can't see how it'd work' = I have a zombie pigeon after head transplantation level of EQ but I reserve rights to judge eloquence-based topics.

'Divide Speech into lots of different skills, this is shit idea it just means...' - That is literally how real world works and what fantasy games reflect to the point. However, by all means, stay at least strongly profane when you can't talk someone into anything, intimidate them, nor fool them.

'Everyone agrees:...' - Bah, your crone agrees.

'How to come up with speech minigame...' - at least creativity seems to happen, there in that barren apparatus you probably call brain. Kudos. Work on that first, write later. Drinking tea and watching kangaroos mating may help.

 

[Lemming42]

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.

 

[Gargaune]

I'm not really sure I agree with the premise that a successful Speech check means "missing out on part of the fucking game." I was just horsing around in NWN earlier and this thread brought to mind getting access to the Bron's tower in TotM. The options are:
- Charm Person;
- pay a bribe;
- find a disguise;
- pass a Speech check.

None of these are necessarily balanced against each other. The bribe's arguably the worst since it's a lot of money, the disguise is the typical lowest common denominator solution open to everyone with some legwork, and both Charm and the Speech check are a reflection of your specialised strategic investments, your build. The former involves having acquired and prepared the spell, the latter requires that you've invested consistently in the skill, expending points that you could've put into something else. All instant options - bribe, Charm, Speech - mean that you're technically foregoing the bit of content consisting of finding a drunk guard and stealing his armour, but at least the latter two also feel more rewarding because you got to use specific talents you've built your character for.

Even in the more common scenario where the only alternatives are a successful Speech check or combat, I wouldn't say that sidestepping an isolated encounter is missing out on content, but rather validating the character build. The trick is that the XP reward should be comensurate to the scope of the challenge you're shortcutting, the skill investment and resources you're saving against the loot you're leaving on the table. In fact, this rationale's of enabling choice between combat, stealth and speech kinda got me thinking more and more lately that many RPGs might do better to drop combat XP in favour of progression/milestone XP - i.e. Deus Ex rather than D&D.

In any case, at some point you could make the argument that if you can go through the whole game that way, are you really playing an RPG or a visual novel, but most RPGs have nowhere near enough Speech checks to go down that rabbit hole. It's more like keeping Death Ward prepared and it's collecting dust in your spellbook most of the time, then blam, you walk into Swordflight's annual Water Elemental Convention.

To sum up, I'd say it's a matter of perspective - if your purpose in an RPG is to fight each and every combat encounter or maximise play hours, then using Speech means robbing yourself of content, but if the goal is more abstractly progressing thanks to your strategic choices, getting an occasional "I win" button in exchange for skill investment isn't missing out on anything.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

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. Then they gripe about that. The DOS speech rock-paper-scissor is good because it has quick resolution, is heavily stat & status mediated, accommodates uncertain and outlier outcomes, and gives the player some decision making capacity. Furthermore, this check only comes at the end after the player has negotiated the dialogue tree (which often influences the difficultly of the speech challenge). How exactly can that be done better, outside of some high-level AI chatbot?


The problem with speech has less to do with dialogue itself, and more to do with non-combat skill checks almost always being poorly designed afterthoughts. Language only further complicates it. Threading the needle between actual text/language or vague abstractions is really difficult.

 

[Lemming42]

To sum up, I'd say it's a matter of perspective - if your purpose in an RPG is to fight each and every combat encounter or maximise play hours, then using Speech means robbing yourself of content, but if the goal is more abstractly progressing thanks to your strategic choices, getting an occasional "I win" button in exchange for skill investment isn't missing out on anything.

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.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

You have to make it part of the gameplay beyond just more dialog or quest resolution and has to be useful in combat. There are these "Debate battles" in Romance of the Three Kingdoms games that can be used in a CRPG setting to either had it's own battle system or be made to influence to a degree a the outcome of a quest or battle.