This thread is mostly about dialog trees. Every time I start planning one of my embarrassing number of terminal WIP mods, I stop and think, what attitudes should I let the player take toward this quest? and try to think up dialog and journal entries appropriate for that kind of character.

But really, I don't know much about what the player would want. I'm just guessing at categories they might fall into based on myself. There's the obvious scholarly/greedy/barbarian/evil set for really plain motives to do some standard quest, but that doesn't always apply. For example, right now I'm in the thinking-up-cool-ideas stage (the best part!) for a companion who's kind of amoral anyway, so what matter are ways for her to interact with different player personalities, not classes. Because if you've decided to get a companion you've probably already got your reasons for helping her, so whether you're an assassin or hero isn't actually such an issue, but different heroes would have very different relationships with her as people. So I can't just write an option for each major alignment; I have to write one for each major character voice players have, if that makes sense.

Or I might be entirely wrong, and people really do just want options to do everything in the magely/barbaric/sneaky/evil way.

So I am wondering, what kind of choices do you tend to want when you're talking to an NPC/doing a quest, character-wise? And what kinds of sets of dialog options leave you sitting there thinking, these are all equally terrible for me/my character? Examples (real or made up) would be extra-helpful, but even general advice will enlighten.

I would love to be able to outsmart people in conversations.

I like the outsmart idea, falls in line with one of my favorites, talking over someone's head to make fun of someone whose not so bright.

Also complete complacency to whatever's at and or agitation that there being called on to be the hero yet again.

Another favorite is [censored]ting your way through the conversation or just complying with whatever they say but still hinting at your dislike for them or your ulterior motives.

Lastly you could go the complete badass/ heroic rout ie. Mass effects paragon dialogue option, but to add further complexity have the character have an unjust sense of confidence.

Two of my favorites:

You were just asked something, offered a position, asked to surrender, etc. and you are only offered one response. It is either of these:

[lie]
or
yes.

Basically when the game/mod forces you to lie or agree to something. Same goes for extremely blood thirsty responses like "I'll devour your bones!!!", or some kind of extremely money grubbing response, or unneccesarrily flirty/sleazy stuff.

I mean all of the above options arefine, but when you offer them alone then you're basically being forced into a role, and not playing one. It's like you stopped playing an open world, immersive, C&C, realistic, beliveable RPG and got up to go watch a formulaic horrible b action movie.

I think the basic options of:
Yes
no
If I get around to it

Followed by:
slacker,
perfectionist,
incompetnant solutions

make for a decent quest branching and freedom without havingto resort to the millions of different potential roleplay types. Integration: The Stranded Light does it pretty well. A lot of quests you can flat out refuse to do and still continue the main story line, you can fail quests and still continue, you can do the bare minimum in some quests, or do the absolute most, and most of the time you don't really present anything insanely over-opinonated. As an example... the quests are mostly pretty "nice", goody two shoes type things, but in my video walkthrough I kind of played a selfish money grubbing theif who only does nice things to feed her denial and sense of self worth. In a lot of the quests she would steal, exploit weaknesses, and overall just have the worst motivations, methods, and thoughts regarding things despute how nice and world improving the goal ofthe actual quest was. the amount of gameplay options, and multiples olutions allowed you to do nice things while still being an ass and intentional screwingthings up sometimes.

On the Subject of ambiguity Deus Ex is a good example. The main character displays no emotion(mostly in his voice) for most of the game, and for once it's not for the that lame "Oh that means he's a badass." excuse. It was done that way so that you would feel immersed as the character and you wouldattach your own inner emotionsto things he would say and the choices/actions you would choose.

This is something I've struggled with a lot designing my own persuasion mechanic for Balzu. It seems that, no matter what you write, the player character's response is going to sound wrong in a lot of players' ears. The fact is, the nature of the problem is very complex.

In general, dialogue choices can be created on a scale that ranges from high textual specificity to high textual generality. There is a strong, positive correlation between high specificity and high immersion and low specificity and low immersion. For example, given a quest by the emperor, one of the player's dialogue choices might be: "You are Uriel Septim, the emperor. What choice do I have but to bend to your will?" This is an example of a highly specific textual response. A different designer might have instead provided: "[Accept]", which is a highly generic response.

As is immediately apparent, this correlation is complicated by a second factor: how well the textual response matches the player's conception of their character. A strong match between the response and the player's concept of the character will result in a significant boost to immersion. A strong mismatch will result in a significant loss of immersion. This is the dilemma you're referring to, of course. The problem that the player expresses eloquently as "My character would never say that!" The challenge, then, is trying to decide where on that line between specificity and generality you need to place your choices.

One of the ways of getting around this is to provide stock choices (as you mentioned in your post): Do-gooder, self-interested, evil, etc. (Good, neutral, evil.) This increases your chances that highly specific text will still result in some sort of match for the player and prevent a break in immersion. The problem then shifts a little from 'where on this scale should I place the text?' to 'how many options should I provide?', though, of course, you still have to answer the first question in each case.

Alignment-based responses, unfortunately, don't address a third factor that affects the player's decision: opportunity. In the simplest sense, opportunity can be split down the middle as "Can/Can't". "Yes, I can take this quest" or "No, I can't, I'm busy." Note that this choice is different from the "Will/Won't" choice that alignment choices represent but is always a factor in the player's decision to pursue a quest. A player may want to help, but have too many plates in the air already.

Even at it's simplest level, then, an adequate range of choices will have to account for both alignment and opportunity:

• Yes, I can and I will
  
• No I can't but I want to
  
• Yes I can and I will if you reward me
  
• No I can't but I would if you did reward me
  
• Yes I can but I won't
  
• No I can't and I wouldn't anyway

In practice, however, even this range of choices is not going to satisfy a great number of players. For example, I often want a choice which goes something like this: "I would like to think about your request, and maybe do some background checks on the people involved before I agree to anything". Or, "I'd be interested in doing it if the reward were greater. Can we negotiate?" These kinds of options are operational choices. They act as modifiers for alignment and opportunity considerations. "I will IF...", or "I won't UNLESS...".

As you can see, the number of possible options is proliferating rapidly, and you're still only considering the answer to the simple question: "Will you help me?"! To make matters worse, the examples above have all used more or less generic responses which do not communicate character or atmosphere. They are factual replies. Factual replies may resonate with certain players playing certain characters, but they are low on the immersion scale. In order to bump up the immersion, you have to add texture to the responses. For example: "My apologies, sir. Though I have sworn to protect the innocent and bring ne'er-do-wells to justice, I know nothing of this matter and must give it careful deliberation" depicts a certain type of character which will resonate with certain players and provide great immersion. But (ignoring game limitations which prevent textual responses of this length) how portable is this method? What if my character is a spunky, free-wheeling elf? Although my alignment, opportunity, and operational parameters may be the same ("Yes I can and I will, but I need more data") it is completely at odds with how I perceive my character. This is where the personality types in come into play (slacker, perfectionist, etc.). You could write a second response along the lines of: "Something stinks like goblin feet about this whole situation. You can bet I'm going to get to the bottom of this!" The result might be the same, but the texture of the response is completely different. Depending on the character the player is role-playing this response may be either better or worse, either increasing or decreasing immersion. The point is: You don't know, you can't know, and you never will know.

This is one of the key challenges to designing true, open world RPGs. Many RPGs side-step the entire issue entirely by choosing your character's personality for you. If you can identify with the character they give you, having resonant dialogue that is always in character can be a great aid to immersion. If you can't identify with the protagonist, however, you may not even want to play the game even though everything else about it may be fantastic.

The choice you have then, at least as I see it, is between selecting from a range of stock characters and providing the best dialogue you can (hoping that the player will identify with at least one of them) and using generic, factual responses which 'get the job done' at a small cost to immersion. My own position at the moment is to go with the generic responses. I'm replacing specific dialogue text with options like: "[Accept]", "[Postpone]", "[Ask for more information]", "[Refuse]", "[Negotiate]", etc. Which is better? I don't know. I think that depends on the designer and the objectives of the mod.

Thanks for broaching the subject. It's been rattling around in my head for weeks now. :bonk:

I faced this same problem when doing dialog for my Pell's Gate town and the quests, and I am dealing with the same thing right now as I add dialog to another of the towns in my Shezrie's Towns mod.

The problem is of course catering to the many types of role play characters people play without putting the wrong words in peoples mouths. I think the key is not to personalize the dialog too much. Keep the dialog pretty generic avoiding 'I think' or 'I feel' or even 'I' altogether.

When doing my dialog I came up wtih certain situations that I wanted to cater to a certain type of player character. Perhaps a situation for the good character. But in doing so I was alienating the bad character. So where I can, I put in options for each of three levels of characters:

-Evil
-Neither particularily good or evil (this was not always used, sometimes the other two are enough)
-Good

Using that scale I would attempt to cater to each one in any given situation, although it was not always possible. If I had used role play such as thief, ranger, warrier, mage etc I would have gone mad trying to cater to them all. So I stick with my simple three categories and insert somewhat generic responses and sometimes smart arsed, that the player can role play with.


For a general small example, the player is accosted by a young boy thief and the dialog goes...

Boy - 'Your m...money of your w..wife! Erm...life!'

Player has two options -

1) 'Die you little fetcher!' This gets my evil character out of the way and ensures they are not forced to be good. Combat starts.

2) 'Haven't done this before, have you...' This is the option that caters to my 'Neither particularily good or evil' and my 'Good' characters. The player is not threatened by this young lad, they are amused and give him a piece of advice from their vast experience of handling weapons. Not thieving, that wouldn't be good as very few players are actually thieves at the time of encountering this dialog. But every player is a trained fighter no matter what their level and all can comfortably give basic knife handing advice.

I made this mistake once. I put the player as saying....'The last time I saw him my blade was running him through.' Completely forgetting that some players will be started out of their role play by this specific statement because...'Hang on, I fight with a bow/axe, not a sword.'

I apply this same idea to quests. But ultimately I think it is best to focus on making interesting characters for the player to meet and interact with. Give the player some spicey, cool lines, but in general don't tell the player who and what they are unless you are wanting to do that throughout the entire quest and beyond and the player knows they are playing that particular character when they download the mod.

You cannot cater to every possible player response and you'll go mad trying too. So using the three general levels of characters is a good way to structure responses in any situation without getting too involved and confused. At least I found it helped me alot.

Maybe not a RPG choice (or better said, a "global" RPG choice), but there has been 5 years, and there isn't any "official" (aka complete, well made, etc) Imperial Legion mod, where also the NPC's take notice that you're a soldier, and act consequently (especially your own buddies, with no more "What is it, citizen?").

It also depends heavily on the player. While you asserted earlier that generic "[Accept]"/"[Refuse]"-type options reduce immersion, some of us (I suspect it has to do with a history of playing tabletop RPGs, but I could be wrong) have no problem with clicking the generic option (to satisfy implementation details) while also filling in appropriate in-character dialogue in our heads (to preserve immersion). This is, in fact, my preferred approach: Don't try to put words in my characters' mouths, just give me brief, factual options and let me fill in the details of how it's worded for myself. With a menu-based system like Oblivion's, the only other option for ensuring that the character's voice can come through properly in the response is to attempt an encyclopedic list of every imaginable response and, as you have shown, down that path lies madness.

But, then, I have no illusions that others will strongly disagree. I mean, even for such things as reporting simple, factual information about the character's status to the player, there seems to be a significant split over whether first- or second-person is more "immersive"...

I find it difficult to relate to options like [Refuse] [Accept]. I find them immersion breaking and too 'automated'. I would rather a simple, generic 'Yes' or 'No'. For me at least it seems that my character is interacting rather then choose from a selection.

But yes it is very much personal preference.

Another technique you could use to cut down on dialogue option clutter is to prompt the player when your mod initializes to select a character archetype from a list. Example: Crusading Knight, Ruthless Mercenary, Critical Thinker, Devilish Rogue, etc. Then, once you have the archetype, use it as a condition for dialogue. Example: Player selects 'Ruthless Mercenary', therefore, only print dialogue that matches that archetype. This allows a broader range of options within each character type without cluttering up the menu.

Ruthless Mercenary Example:

• "For that much, I'll kill my own grannie" (Accept)
  
• "Beat it. I got better things to do" (Refuse)
  
• "Maybe I will, maybe I won't" (Postpone)
  
• "I need details, buddy" (Ask for more information)
  
• "Double your offer and I'll consider it" (Negotiate)

This gives you five options for a single type of character; more than you traditionally get without bloating the dialogue menu too much. To give this many options for even two character types without doing some filtering is pushing it, let alone three or more (good/neutral/evil), meaning you have to sacrifice either choices or character types. The other advantage to this technique is that you could release your mod with say, three archetype options, and then add additional options in later releases after you've had a chance to write up more dialogue.

Another area where immersion wavers is in the NPC's response to the player's response. You find this occasionally when you choose a response which seems innocuous to you, but to which the NPC responds violently, out of proportion to the text. For example: Player: "Of course, I'd be happy to help you", NPC: "Well, there's no need for sarcasm! If you don't want to do it, just say so!" Immersion broken.

It's important to match the NPC's response to the content of the text to prevent these kinds of mismatches, but at the same time you're effectively eliminating a perfectly valid range of player responses. Maybe the player's character really did say it sarcastically (talking down to the NPC). How do you represent these kinds of immersive responses without unrealistically proliferating the number of dialogue choices?

One way to do this is to shift the emphasis on the archetypes from types of characters to personality types: Kind and Compassionate, Lighthearted and Humorous, Sarcastic, Hostile, Seductive, etc., or to find some kind of hybrid system that represents both: Gentle, Serious Protector; Mischievous Rogue; Stone Cold Killer; Disdainful Scholar; Boisterous Barbarian Warrior; etc. Of course, you could always devise a system that relies on a number of settings; for example, a menu system that prompts for the player's personality type and then branches based on their class and race (and even gender): IF the player is a Knight, AND an Imperial, AND has chosen a Good Alignment (alternately test based on Infamy/Fame), THEN {text}. This gives you a system you can use to write dialogue for an unrestricted range of character types, without cluttering up the dialogue menu with hundreds of immersive choices. Of course, you're going to be writing the equivalent of War and Peace for a full-scale quest mod.

The point is: for the most immersive dialogue, you're going to have to choose between a simple system that uses neutral responses, or a complex system that uses multiple conditions, player input, and a ton of dialogue.

Hmm...a balance of both may work well too. A simplistic system for the basics of the quest and then that allows room to go overboard on a really complex system for key moments in the quest mod that really makes those moments powerful and memorable.

Good discussion and ideas here. I have been mulling this whole issue over for a while. IThis is helping me see how I can improve my dialog.

I like that! I don't think I've ever seen it, either.



I know this isn't the most insightful response to make to that entire post, but. That reminds me of all the archers yelling "Jump on my sword while you can!" as they shoot me from across the room. And based on loot drops, the game is assuming the same thing you are, so don't feel too bad.



In that example, you could make it about the NPC. Hyper-sensitive, or too dull to pick up on the sarcasm, just as a rule. That would work for either intent by the player, because the NPC is just someone who will take things that way, right or wrong. The trouble then is how the player knows the difference between the mod misunderstanding them, and the NPC misunderstanding them.

As a side-note, I edited it out of the OP, but I did have an example up there of a quest in a Morrowind mod where I was actually going to push the player not into good/evil, but into sappy/sarcastic. There was a point in a generally not-romantic mod where the player had to play matchmaker, and I thought, people are either going to love the romance and do it for that, or they're going to hate this Sims crap. So I planned a whole separate set of dialog and journal entries making fun of the couple, hoping non-romantic players would enjoy the quest for that. I'm a long way from being able to release that thing though, so I can't tell you how well it worked.

I like your idea about having the player just choose a voice at the beginning, or releasing differently-worded versions of the .esp. In thinking about this, I had considered some giant points system in which the character's different responses add to and take away from running totals used to decide what kind of person the NPC thinks you are, and filter responses. And without ever thinking to include fame and infamy. I would over-complicate things horribly like that.

In my particular, current example, there is going to have to be a huge amount of very specific dialog because that's what companion mods are about. When thinking about more traditional quests, the more generic yes/no, let the player figure out why type of choices sound like they'll be my best option in a lot of cases.

I like the Fallout series approach with the dry humour. Perhaps not quite as appropriate in the Oblivion setting but possible none-the-less.

For sake of ease it is also nice to have Oblivions approach where you may have 2-3 choices but they essentially lead to the same conversation path / conclusion. Perhaps with an added reaction-prefix here or there for a bit more realism.

I'd like to be able to bargain with an NPC, and I almost never have that opportunity. For example, let's say an NPC wants my character to steal an item. Maybe my character is willing to get the item, but not by stealing. So my character offers to take it by force, but the NPC doesn't want the person harmed. So at that point there is an impasse and my character then could back down and steal it after all, steal it but demand more money in case she is caught and fined, lie, or...come up with something original. "I've heard it said he's a man who takes chances. Does he play knucklebones? I was always good at that game..." Ideally several offbeat choices representing different personalities. For me, when the only answers are a single round of yes/no/maybe or good/evil/neutral, the conversation has no real interchange, no character complexity, and no deepening of the relationship. The more give and take, the more real it feels to me.

Easy, perhaps, but that's probably the number one thing I hate about conversations in Oblivion. If my choice of response is going to have no effect whatsoever, then why am I being given a choice (or, really, even being made to respond - all the "you only have one option to click on" conversation stages fall into this one, too) at all? The reaction prefixes blunt this a little, but I still feel railroaded when the conversation has exactly one possible course to reach a single, inevitable conclusion and my choices of response have no impact on the end result.

Well, assume the worst. The player has to understand the NPC's response; if they're not intended to understand it, then it's up to the modder to explain to the player that the NPC's response doesn't seem to make any sense. (Example: NPC response is tagged with a Goodbye, ending the conversation, and the player is prompted via a quest stage update that the NPC's response seems out of character or out of proportion to the circumstances.) If you leave it up to the players to figure it out, some of them are going to think it's a bug or just poorly designed. If the player was given an option to pick a sarcastic personality type, it would probably be ok just to have the NPC respond like that and drop it. In that case, the player knows what they signed up for.


I hadn't considered the alternate .esp approach. I suppose it would be possible, but it would make updating the mod a PITA. As for the 'giant points system' that is pretty much exactly what the persuasion overhaul portion of my mod is. It assigns personalities to NPCs based on some new AI attributes and changes the NPCs perception of the character based on a matrix of disposition indexes. It's pretty complex (and incomplete) but it allows me to make NPCs afraid of players that always intimidate them, or develop crushes on players that flirt with them, etc. The dialogue responses use the player's current standing on these disposition indexes as conditions on what the NPC will say. It's pretty much a total nightmare to design, script and write dialogue for, but it explains why I've put so much thought into the whole subject.