I wish there were a lot more dialogue checks in skyrim to get info, there's not very many at all so speech is mostly about getting better prices.

Sure if by going about their business you mean standing in one spot day and night ...and also saying repetitive phrases. At least skyrims NPCs move around, eat, sleep and do stuff.

I miss the presence of a disposition system. Wasn't a fan of Oblivion's disposition minigame, but I liked being able to affect NPC dispositions via dialogue, reputation and magic.

Disposition is still in the game, it's just a lot more subtle now because it's invisible and they got rid of charm spells. Now you can only increase someone's disposition towards you by doing quests for them, or hiring them if they are a follower. You'll know when someone is your friend because they'll start saying nicing things to you, let you take anything they own worth less than ~25 gold, and if you've got the amulet of mara and they are eligible you can propose to them and get married.

I think these changes were a great improvement and much more realistic compared to the oblivion system. Being able to talk someone into being your best friend in 20 seconds or use a charm spell to trick them into marrying you would absolutely shatter any sense of immersion in the game.

It's becoming too expensive for Bethesda to keep up with the amount of subtly, choice, and branching that we saw in the days of Morrowind and before. One quest may have dozens of lines of dialog, which costs them a lot of time and money. One quest with two branches often has to be a last-minute thing where the fewest lines of dialog have to be rerecorded.

We pay a price for our voice acting.

The speechcraft system is similar to this. Options aren't common, and when they are it's usually justa minor change you get, or a shortcut.

I'd honestly love to see a mod that brought back Morrowind's dialog system, journal, and disposition-based options, including the ability to admire, intimidate, and bribe anyone we damn well please.

Well, depending on a lot of factors, I might rebuild it for Skyrim. I spent months on it and lost all of my scripts (or at least a lot of them) in a hd crash. Then they announced Skyrim and I decided to hold off. If the script guys can get most of the functionality back, I should be able to redo it with a lot less fuss. Of course, I was using AddActorValues to implement the extended AI, so I don't know how soon all of this will be possible again.

The way to get around that is to use an intelligent menu system that learns from your responses. For example, at the start of the game you have a set of canned replies: Good, Neutral, Evil. If in your first response, you choose Evil, in the next set of options you have Good, Neutral, Evil 1, and Evil 2. Evil 1 might be a cold, brutal response; Evil 2 might be a playful, yet cruel response. If you choose Evil 2, your next set of options is Neutral, Evil 1, Evil 2, and Evil 3. The "good" option has suffered extinction and been dropped from the tree, the Neutral option is still there so you can always push dialogue back in the direction of being good if you want, and the Evil options have expanded to 3 possible variations. You could extend this indefinitly, of course, but time + budget will dictate a limit.

This creates all sorts of interesting possibilities. For example, characters who habitually lie. Every dialogue can be given lie responses that are only exposed in the tree if the player has previously demonstrated that they want to lie. This can take something that is context sensitive (eg. a quest where you are forced to decide whether to lie or not) and turn it into a character trait that is available all the time. That's how I was planning on integrating the context sensitive stuff with the generic dialogue options. Essentially, different characters would have different options based on previous dialogue choices that they'd made.

This also makes it possible to have fairly refined personality for your character and appropriate responses from NPCs. One half of that equation is behavioral, and the other half is aesthetic.

In the system I was designing for Oblivion, NPCs would remember if you lied to them and they caught you in the lie (ie. you failed the Speech test). Every time they detected a lie, they trusted you less and were more likely to detect a subsequent lie. It also changed their behaviors. An NPC who trusted you wouldn't follow you into the next room, but one who didn't, would. Also, guards would be more likely to follow you if they knew you were a liar. That's a behavioral response.

An example of an aesthetic response is when the NPC responds in an appropriate way that doesn't change gameplay (to a significant degree). For example, in my system, NPCs were given a sense of humor. If you used humor in dialogue, NPCs with a high sense of humor would respond by laughing and being more friendly. NPCs with a low sense of humor would be curt and act less friendly.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

I just wish there was a faster way to level it.

Unless I'm doing it horribly wrong.

Skyrim has a horrible system for NPC interaction.

The only people who really have any options when it comes to interaction, are your companions. Everyone else there is no choice as to how you speak with them. You get 1 option, which is especially terrible on quests that should be mysteries or something, because the game walks you through it in a way that is frankly insulting. What makes it worse, is one quest I know of, even leads you to the WRONG answer intentionally... it takes initiative to NOT just foul the quest up.

Now, saying that Morrowind was a vast improvement because of that [censored] conversation pie thing, is not true. Morrowind was better because you could ask anyone, anything. If you wanted to ask Jeff Goldblume about the King of the Dwemer, he probably wont have anything to tell you... so he'll say: "The uh, what? So... did you see 'The Fly'?" You had choices here. Yeah, most of them were useless, but you actually had them.

Fallout NV did it very well. There were branching conversations. You had options to Intimidate, Bribe, etc. built right in to the conversations, and almost all conversations. You could ask people about whatever, because you were provided the option, even if you pretty much knew they had nothing to commit. That is important, because your player wouldn't have any idea how to approach a situation at first. He would need to ask many people questions before narrowing down who to talk to next. Then he would talk to them to see who to go to then... Or he would go to an inn and speak to them. Or... I could go on here, but I wont, you get the idea.

If Beth decides to fix something in TES 6, now that they have pretty much perfected the living large world thing... I would suggest this should be high up on the list.

In this same vein, is there a way that the passing by pvssyr that gets hollered at you changes as well, based on things like level or skill level or whatever? For instance, I get asked to summon up a warm bed by some guard and then his buddy walks over to me, the Dragonborn who is a bamf and has defended Whiterun from 3 spawned Dragon attacks, killed the second one to be seen ever, and then captured one in freaking Dragonsreach, and this guy walks up and says, "You disrespect the law, you disrespect me!" and another guy looks at me and says "Do you get to the Cloud district a lot? Look at you, of course not." I get it, these people are jerks, but at this point, I'm at the level where they wouldn't say stuff like that to me.

It's not that I want the pvssyr to be eliminated or even reduced, I just want it to change in a meaningful way. I get treated like I'm still a prisoner and I'm a hero of the world.