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Speech checks


SirDanest

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Am I right in assuming that there's no way to turn New Vegas speech checks into percentages like fallout 3? Or at least not without editing every single speech check? If its' fairly simple, I'd surely love to see it implemented. I don't like being offered a dialogue option that will absolutely not work...

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Maybe, but I don't even know if it's possible. It could be a waste of time to even look into it, not knowing anything about scripting.

So kinda embarrassing, but it's been so long since I played FO3, (I need to get back into it, or maybe a TTW version), and I wanted to make sure I understood yuor question SirDanest. Could you contrast the differences between the speech checks in FONV & FO3 to highlight the aspect(s) you want to change?

 

Some misc points;

Each dialog option can have conditions and scripts, one of the conditions could be getScriptVariable. A separate running script could be a random number generator (getRandomPercent) and that condition could be polled the next time the topic could potentially show up, to see if it is available (if it's below the var value, it sholdnt' show up). That does mean editing each dialog topic

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The speech check in FO3 was always a percentage, so there was always some randomness to it. The higher your charisma and luck the higher your initial percentage was, and you could of course build your speech off of that, but no matter what there was always a chance of failing and always a chance of success.

 

They changed it for FNV. Now it's a straight calculation and not a percentage. Charisma and luck factor into the initial calculation and you can add points into your speech just as you could in FO3, but now if your total speech is high enough you pass, and if it's not you fail. Period. No randomness whatsoever.

 

I think the reason that they changed it was that too many players were gaming the system. They'd save right before a conversation, and if the speech check didn't go the way they wanted it to go, they'd just reload the save and try again. You can't game the system that way with FNV, so it encourages you to put more points into speech if you want to get better dialog options.

 

I can see Sir Danest's point. If you get your speech all the way up to 100, you can talk your way out of the final battle with Lanius. Always. There's no chance of failure whatsoever. All you have to do is select the right conversation options. There's no risk for the player. Similarly, with a low speech value, many conversation options simply won't appear. You don't even have a chance of persuading some NPCs to do certain things. It's just a calculation.

 

I can see the argument either way. FO3's version at least gives you a chance, which can both help you or hurt you. There's always a chance of success and there's always a chance of failure. Sometimes that randomness makes things better, especially on replays. The outcome of any conversation is never guaranteed. On the other hand, FNV treats it as you have to have a certain skill level in speech to have certain dialog options, which is basically saying if you're a smooth enough talker, you can have some extra conversation options that someone who isn't so smooth wouldn't have. In some ways that's better, too.

 

As for going back to FO3, if you've been playing a lot of FNV and you like the changes that they made, you are definitely going to want to go the TTW route. I have F03 GOTY Edition and I went back to it after playing FNV a lot and found that I didn't like it. Mostly it was ok, but every now and then I would want to do something that FO3 didn't do but FNV did, and I felt that the older game just limited me too much. I'm much happier running TTW.

 

One down side to using TTW is that the TTW mod is very, very big, and all of that bloat makes the GECK very unhappy if you try to mod things yourself (and I always mod a lot of things myself). The GECK is twitchy enough as it is. Give it a huge mod like that to deal with and it becomes even less stable. It's manageable, but it's slow and more prone to crashes whenever you make a TTW mod.

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The thing is, the speech options that you will absolutely fail still appear, and you can see that if you press that option, you'll fail -- it basically tells you ahead of time, "here a dialogue option that won't work, ever."
If unusable "auto-fail" speech options didn't appear when they weren't achievable, or weren't marked as "don't press this but we'll just leave this here anyway" then that wouldn't be quite as bad.
I suspect that there is no convenient toggle or simple script to fix this, and it would require at best going through every dialogue, which isn't really what I'm looking for as then it wouldn't affect modded quests. But who knows.... maybe. Had to check. :)

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Sorry for the late response, flu/cold thing going on

 

The speech check in FO3 was always a percentage, so there was always some randomness to it.....

Thank you for the detailed description Madmongo, I appreciate it and it does help clarify things in re: to this post. I suspect to get a better idea of how to go about this I'm going to have to fire up the FO3 geck

 

 

I can see the argument either way. FO3's version at least gives you a chance, which can both help you or hurt you.

I do prefer this concept/game mechanic myself

 

One down side to using TTW is that the TTW mod is very, very big, and all of that bloat makes the GECK very unhappy if you try to mod things yourself (and I always mod a lot of things myself). The GECK is twitchy enough as it is. Give it a huge mod like that to deal with and it becomes even less stable. It's manageable, but it's slow and more prone to crashes whenever you make a TTW mod.

Ah yes, always more than a fair share of nut shots with the geck :sad:

 

The thing is, the speech options that you will absolutely fail still appear, and you can see that if you press that option, you'll fail -- it basically tells you ahead of time, "here a dialogue option that won't work, ever."

If unusable "auto-fail" speech options didn't appear when they weren't achievable, or weren't marked as "don't press this but we'll just leave this here anyway" then that wouldn't be quite as bad.

So ideally some small (perhaps even minuscule) percent chance of success even in the most extreme long shots, but failing that, at least removing automatic failures from the displayed dialogue topics?

 

 

I suspect that there is no convenient toggle or simple script to fix this, and it would require at best going through every dialogue, which isn't really what I'm looking for as then it wouldn't affect modded quests. But who knows.... maybe. Had to check. :smile:

Yeah, it may be the case.....maybe someone with more esxperience or insight can comment. If not I can do a bit of study on teh subject and maybe post something int eh mod author forum

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