Fallout V (WHat would it be )

[GloatingSwine]

How do you picture such talky resolutions going? Do you have an example of a game where it works this way? In my experience, diplomatic solutions in games tend to boil down to having the right stats/skills and choosing the correct options.

Quite a lot like the modern Deus Ex games, but with an Alpha Protocol style timer to input a response with no response being taken as "your character stayed silent".

With the aim in a lot of cases being to distract the person you're talking to, to keep them talking whilst something else happens you don't want them to notice. Which could be your party setting up for a decisive ambush, or stealing something, or freeing a prisoner, or any other thing a party face might distract people to accomplish.

(That's something that is very rare as an outcome in games, part of the problem of conversations as implemented in CRPGs is the unimaginative nature of success, it's usually just "win without a fight", but there could be lots of other ways that can be realised).

[Rodin]

How do you picture such talky resolutions going? Do you have an example of a game where it works this way? In my experience, diplomatic solutions in games tend to boil down to having the right stats/skills and choosing the correct options.

Actually having to make a cogent argument would be a nice change. Most games with a speech check will just have you select the highlighted option that says "Speech skill 7 required" and if you roll high enough then the NPC believes you and that's it. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was mentioned, and that game had what I call "conversation bosses" where you go into a full cinematic and debate an antagonist. Not only do you have to pick the correct conversation option several times, but the way the conversation goes is semi-randomized and follows on from your opening statement. You can give the same answer to the same response and get a different result based on how the earlier conversation goes. The only way to actually win the battles is to learn what argument style works best on the person you're talking to and then craft a compelling argument where you don't contradict yourself.

It's the coolest speech feature I've ever seen in a video game, and it's never been replicated. The Council came closest, but it still felt much more stilted.

Sure, make it so that the speech ability gives me a greater chance of success. Just don't label it with "Press here to win the debate!" An example of this done wrong is Tali's trial in Mass Effect 2, where having sufficient Paragon or Renegade reputation gives you the appropriate Blue or Red choice. You just mash that choice repeatedly, and the game rewards you. The game should be hiding what the Paragon/Renegade path is, and force you to actually put an argument before the court that follows your actions and your character's personality.

Speech checks are an area where I feel the game needs to be hiding the dice, and few games bother to do that.

Edit for ninja:

By the way, the Deus Ex games did have the "remain silent" timer. It was hidden, but if you took too long the NPC would take your silence as being rendered speechless and would triumphantly press on with their argument.

[Erloas]

@Withur Strength is also required to use a number of different weapons, at least if you want to use them well. And even with the car carrying weight has a pretty big impact on how the game plays. Event requires X still/state to pass is not the only measure of how useful something is. You can't say trap sucks because there is only a couple skill checks that use it when you could also use it in a huge number of fights by setting up explosives before a fight, which was my friends preferred method of dealing with many encounters in the game, it was a very viable and fun way to play. And for healing, I don't remember the exact amounts, but I remember first aid being better at HPs while doctor could do limbs, as well as first aid kits being much more common than doctors bags and first aid being easier to get to higher levels. They were similar but they were also different and both were viable. It just seems like you've defined the game based only on your own very specific idea of what is best and how things should be done.




I think in general the yes/no versions of speech "skill" checks isn't good, but some options shouldn't be available if you're way too low so you can't just save/reload a 5% chance until it happens. I'm actually fine with a percent chance of success being part of the dialog though, because having "black box" interactions with a game world is never fun and short of searching online for someone that has broken that box you don't know if you failed because it was never going to work or because you had a 10% chance and was bound to fail or had a 90% chance and just unfortunately failed change the feelings on a game and interaction quite a bit. Of course that is why they're hard pass/fails now, because many (most?) players that want to go in a specific direction are going to reload until that happens if they can, so why have a 10% chance of failure if all that means is you're training the player to hit quick-save before every dialog?

I also don't think most games, Fallout games in particular, should have "combat free runs." There can be quite a few options where combat isn't required and you can get similar results in completely different ways, but I don't think *every* encounter needs all of the same options and that all of those options should have the same net positive or negative. There shouldn't be a "diplomatic" way out of every encounter with super mutants, deathclaws, and rats. Just as there shouldn't be good ways out of every area simply by killing everything that moves.

[Morty]

Quite a lot like the modern Deus Ex games, but with an Alpha Protocol style timer to input a response with no response being taken as "your character stayed silent".

With the aim in a lot of cases being to distract the person you're talking to, to keep them talking whilst something else happens you don't want them to notice. Which could be your party setting up for a decisive ambush, or stealing something, or freeing a prisoner, or any other thing a party face might distract people to accomplish.

(That's something that is very rare as an outcome in games, part of the problem of conversations as implemented in CRPGs is the unimaginative nature of success, it's usually just "win without a fight", but there could be lots of other ways that can be realised).

Actually having to make a cogent argument would be a nice change. Most games with a speech check will just have you select the highlighted option that says "Speech skill 7 required" and if you roll high enough then the NPC believes you and that's it. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was mentioned, and that game had what I call "conversation bosses" where you go into a full cinematic and debate an antagonist. Not only do you have to pick the correct conversation option several times, but the way the conversation goes is semi-randomized and follows on from your opening statement. You can give the same answer to the same response and get a different result based on how the earlier conversation goes. The only way to actually win the battles is to learn what argument style works best on the person you're talking to and then craft a compelling argument where you don't contradict yourself.

It's the coolest speech feature I've ever seen in a video game, and it's never been replicated. The Council came closest, but it still felt much more stilted.

Sure, make it so that the speech ability gives me a greater chance of success. Just don't label it with "Press here to win the debate!" An example of this done wrong is Tali's trial in Mass Effect 2, where having sufficient Paragon or Renegade reputation gives you the appropriate Blue or Red choice. You just mash that choice repeatedly, and the game rewards you. The game should be hiding what the Paragon/Renegade path is, and force you to actually put an argument before the court that follows your actions and your character's personality.

Speech checks are an area where I feel the game needs to be hiding the dice, and few games bother to do that.

Edit for ninja:

By the way, the Deus Ex games did have the "remain silent" timer. It was hidden, but if you took too long the NPC would take your silence as being rendered speechless and would triumphantly press on with their argument.

Good point about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, though I haven't played the other "new" DE. Still, something like that could work, maybe. I bounced off Alpha Protocol real hard, so I can't comment on that.

[GloatingSwine]

Good point about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, though I haven't played the other "new" DE. Still, something like that could work, maybe. I bounced off Alpha Protocol real hard, so I can't comment on that.

Alpha Protocol is quite similar in that you're choosing your style of conversation based on what you think will appeal to the person you're talking to.

It was also a bit more complex than just "winning" a conversation because many characters could be just as useful to you if they disliked you as if they liked you.

[Winthur]

@Withur Strength is also required to use a number of different weapons, at least if you want to use them well.

It's a flat -20% penalty to using a weapon for every point in Strength you are missing from the minimum. This is negligible because heavy ranged weapons can have this penalty offset with just pumping more skillpoints into the weapon or having high PE. So, basically, name of the game is, pump PE and IN.

And even with the car carrying weight has a pretty big impact on how the game plays.

The only time you're ever seriously encumbered is also the time where you have a whole bunch of NPCs and a car with a ton of storage on top of your own storage, and there's plenty of stores to dump all that stuff into to turn into cash or light drugs.

The issue with ST in Fallout is that it's a convenience stat rather than having any meaningful impact. Its effect on melee damage is hilarious. A sniper can have respectable carry weight for all of his guns with ST 5. A brawler will punch out others very easily with just ST 5; in fact, if it weren't for special unarmed maneuvers in FO2, you could make a powerful melee fighter with ST 1. Meanwhile, the game's pre-built "brawler" characters are built to be bad at Fallout combat; it's like if you asked your DM to help make you a competent but still straightforward to play D&D 3.5 melee character and he gave you a straight Monk.

Event requires X still/state to pass is not the only measure of how useful something is. You can't say trap sucks because there is only a couple skill checks that use it when you could also use it in a huge number of fights by setting up explosives before a fight, which was my friends preferred method of dealing with many encounters in the game, it was a very viable and fun way to play.

No other combat method relies on you using two skills that are utterly unreliable and lack transparency in their use (Steal and Traps are both just as likely to fail epically from time to time regardless of how you use them and how many points or even perks you put into making them work). It's a badly designed skill even for a character that relies on it. Similar to Barter between FO1 and FO2, where in the former you could pump it to the point where you could sell 2 stimpaks for the price of 3 stimpaks creating an infinite loop, and in FO2 where it was nerfed to the point of being barely worth investing into.

And for healing, I don't remember the exact amounts, but I remember first aid being better at HPs while doctor could do limbs

No, FA is worse at HP gain and doesn't fix limbs at all. It even gives less XP per "operation". FA is utterly and completely redundant outside of Fallout Tactics, where its shorter time to work actually makes some sense.

as well as first aid kits being much more common

They don't do anything special for the skill; it gives you a flat bonus to a skill you can keep using indefinitely until it finally works regardless how low you trained it, and which has no in-combat application so failure isn't an issue. After a while, you swim in Stimpaks anyway, and you can inject infinite amounts of those into your veins, even during combat, by simply spending 4 AP once.

than doctors bags and first aid being easier to get to higher levels.

You train these skills for free with books anyway, and you can't fail them. Only Doctor has a skill floor where it gives you benefits outside of healing.

It just seems like you've defined the game based only on your own very specific idea of what is best and how things should be done.

That would be the case if any of what I said was based on feeling and not on raw game data that shows strong characters aren't very strong and charismatic characters aren't necessarily at an advantage when speaking. The mechanical side of Fallout has deficiencies and only supports mechanical variability for doing quests if you blunder your way into it by making subpar build choices; if there was a reason to create Max Stone, Natasha or Albert and they could each shine in their expertise (fighty / sneaky / speaky) it would be great, but as it stands, Max Stone is a terrible fighter, Natasha is a so-so sneaker in a game that has very few purely sneaky approaches, and Albert is a terrible diplomat. Instead, everyone and their mother runs a Gifted everyman with maxed Intelligence, Agility and tagged Speech, and does 99,9% of the content the game has to offer in one go because this build lets you easily max out everything and experience near everything; the only argument that was had from my side in this entire discussion is that Fallout tries to offer mechanical variability for skill checks, but the problem is that most of the time (in RPGs overall), some skills will be better than others, narrowing down the options to an universal build that does everything well. While I love Fallouts for their world reactivity, choices, and worldbuilding, I merely lamented that build choices are almost always horribly shallow and illusory in spite of the developer intent to not be this way, hence the complaint about every Fallout protagonist having fairly easily unlockable potential to do absolutely everything there is in the world.

I also don't think most games, Fallout games in particular, should have "combat free runs." There can be quite a few options where combat isn't required and you can get similar results in completely different ways, but I don't think *every* encounter needs all of the same options and that all of those options should have the same net positive or negative. There shouldn't be a "diplomatic" way out of every encounter with super mutants, deathclaws, and rats. Just as there shouldn't be good ways out of every area simply by killing everything that moves.

Maybe not "diplomatic", but I figure that you should still be able to wiggle your way out of an encounter with stealth, and as DXHR showed, "forced boss fight" isn't a fun mechanic to deal with. That said, not everyone should be talked down to death, and sometimes the execution of that is kinda silly, where a character who starts off horribly hostile gets swayed with just a single sentence.

Fallout has that reputation of a game where you are supposedly "allowed to beat the whole game without killing anyone", but your actions lead to two nukes going off killing everyone inside the radius, so I always found that dubious.

[factotum]

I also don't think most games, Fallout games in particular, should have "combat free runs."

I like it when games give you alternative options to resolving problems, especially if that avoids combat. It was actually possible to persuade the scientists to blow up the Enclave base at the end of Fallout 2, for instance, although the game somewhat spoiled that by forcing you to fight Frank Horrigan on the way out no matter what you did.

Related note: I liked the way Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader handled stealth. Normally, if you sneak past things rather than fighting them, you lose out on the XP you would have gained from the fight, which makes using stealth all the time a suboptimal way to play. In Lionheart, you'd gain up to 75% of the combat XP for sneaking past someone. If your sneak failed and you had to fight, you'd only gain the remaining 25%. Made actually avoiding combat through stealth a somewhat viable way to play the game.

[GloatingSwine]

Although you can also just resolve that by not having combat XP.

I like the way Pillars does XP. You don't get XP for combat, but for bestiary completion. So the first 6-8 copies of a critter you fight* will give you some XP but none thereafter, and humanoid enemies never give XP. So most XP progression is from questing not fighting and since most quests have predominantly humanoid opponents it doesn't matter how many of them you fight or avoid for XP.



* Depending how many there are in the game, rare things you might cap out after one or two, but it's never more than about 12.

[Morty]

Yes, giving XP for quests and exploration instead of combat is the better solution all around.

From what I've heard of Lionheart, it's an interesting Fallout-like game for a few hours, then it's combat all the way to the end.

[Winthur]

I like it when games give you alternative options to resolving problems, especially if that avoids combat. It was actually possible to persuade the scientists to blow up the Enclave base at the end of Fallout 2, for instance, although the game somewhat spoiled that by forcing you to fight Frank Horrigan on the way out no matter what you did.

Well, technically, you can simply set up the turrets and convince Sgt. Granite to fight for you and Horrigan dies without you ever actually shooting him yourself; as mentioned above, I never understood how this is different from nuking the two buildings in FO1, other than having to press "Skip Turn" a few times.

[factotum]

From what I've heard of Lionheart, it's an interesting Fallout-like game for a few hours, then it's combat all the way to the end.

Oh yes, it was an amaazing game for the first half and then went totally off the rails, which is a darned shame. If it had been a better, more popular game then some of its better ideas might have been carried forward into other titles.

[druid91]

Honestly, I'm in the camp of disagreeing with Fallout 4 being a bad RPG.