LE Roleplaying Traits System

[Nathaka]

Yes, I actually tried to suggest it to the developers first. But the first time I got no reply, the second time I tried... uuuh, the letter was too long and it didn't submit. It will be tl;dr for most of you, I know, but maybe someone will find this interesting. So here is the letter, as I actually sent it to Bethesda.

 

Dear Bethesda,

and Elder Scrolls team in particular!

 

I used to be a regular gamer like many others, but then I took an impulse from above. This very day (I have 3:11 am in fact) I realized I could try to contact you and suggest something instead of just imagining neat Skyrim (or Morrowind) enhancements. I don't want to waste your (whoever is reading this) time on bulls*** and therefore I will skip the part about me being a huge fan and talented writer and so on... I guess you already have more than a few self-proclaimed game-designers on your tail. What I will say is that I am a student from Czech republic and because of that I am really sorry for possible grammar mistakes on my part.

I would also ask for at least a bit of your attention. I have no idea who reads these letters, how many of them are received every day and how constructive they mostly are. If someone from the Elder Scrolls developer team could reply to this message and explain in more than just a few words what does he think about this suggestion and whether I should suggest anything else as well (for this is not my only idea), that would be great.

 

Now, in the subject of this message, I am offering Dialogue Overhaul, Roleplaying Possibilities and Personality Exploits suggestions. Should my dreams come true, these could make up for a hefty patch or even an official plugin for roleplayers. Let us begin.

 

A) The first thing is really simple. In Skyrim, the dialogue box is small and often not entirely reader-friendly (especially the dialogue options which were already used). I'm sure many people are complaining about this (as they are complaining about the Inventory interface and many other things), but what do I know, maybe they just didn't think to suggest an improvement to you directly, like me before.

Suggestions:

1) Make the dialogue box much, much bigger. At least twice as much, but even more vertically (which is more important). Even this modification alone would make the game better. I understand that Skyrim is all about this new elegant, simple, minimalistic design and that it probably raises the sales (as it is "cool"). I guess you also wanted to show more of this "living world during dialogues", but believe me: the whole left side of the screen is still enough to show.

2) Change font colors OR make the dialogue box background less transparent. It hurts my eyes to read anything on some backgrounds.

3) Use a little smaller OR a more compact font. Even better, allow a "font size" option, so that people can set it to suit the desires of their eyeballs.

The true purpose of these modifications is not just to show all dialogue options currently available without scrolling , which is also great, but to allow much more dialogue options to be added, while still showing as much as possible. In other words, you should be able to pick your dialogue line from a monstrous list of options. (It could even beat Planescape: Torment! How awesome would that be?)

 

B) This could take a while to explain. As mentioned, I want to enhance the possibility of roleplaying in Skyrim. The intent is to make this possible by 1) offering many different ways to act during the dialogues, 2) keeping track of player-made choices and 3) accenting the results.

1) How to offer many different ways to act during the dialogues without drastically changing the game (e.g. adding completely new lines) or even making a whole new complex dialogue system similar to the one in DA:O?

Easily! By duplicating and altering existing dialogue options. For example, the commonly used line: "I'm looking for work. Got any leads?" could be duplicated and altered as follows: "Give me something to slay..." Response will remain the same, but it is clear that you are a bloodlusty bounty hunter, not a Breton nobleman.

This is merely an extension without much effort. It would be much better to simply add more lines to the dialogues, but that would also be much harder, I presume. But the second part of this system is much more important.

2) How to keep track of player-made choices?

With points - yup, it could be that simple. Every chosen line will add different Personality Points, or PPs for short, to the player. Some lines give 2 points in Arrogance and 1 point in Impatience, some lines give 1 point in Empathy and 1 point in Dignity. (However, I would not reccommend these PP gains to be in-game visible.) It is crucial to build a balanced set of Personal Traits, preferably based on opposites (i.e. scales) so that Arrogance could interfere with Modesty and player character won't become both arrogant and modest at the same time. Empathy counters Ignorance, Activity counters Passivity, Violence counters Pacifism, Honesty counters Deceit, Joviality counters Dignity, Reputation counters Mystery and so on. Special mentioning goes to the Understanding vs. Hostility scale, which is a classical set for any TES Speechcraft minigame - with bribing, admiring and persuading for gaining PPs in Understanding and intimidating, taunting and insulting for building up an aura of fear and Hostility. The game will keep track of these Personal Traits Values and save them... Wherever it saves this stuff.

The option to remain silent during a Dark Brotherhood killing is one of the few examples of roleplay in Skyrim. It depicts the player character as fearsome, cold-blooded and mysterious figure. PPs are given accordingly - something like + 2 Mystery, + 1 Dignity, +1 Tranquility. The possibility to Lie is also very common and immediately brings some PPs in Deceit when picked.

This is a relatively simple and intuitive system to evaluate not only dialogue choices, but also fraction choices, quest choices and even activities with PPs. Personal Traits Values are easily recorded for further use.

3) How to affect the gameplay with resulting PT Values?

The easiest way to use the PT Values is to reveal completely new dialogue lines only available to those with a strong inclination to some traits. For example, one who is very deceitful and lies fairly often could from some point tell even bigger lies, just for fun. This would bring roleplaying to whole new levels.

Other impacts of the Roleplaying Traits System (RPTS) are more or less dependent on other expansions and further evolution of roleplaying support. But the possibilities are endless. There could exist tons of content dependent solely on Dragoborn's personality and roleplay. Some NPCs could offer some dialogues only to the right character. Quests or even factions could change their course entirely because of Dragoborn's character. Horrific daedric artifacts could passively fortify Mystery and Hostility traits. The opposing ways of Understanding and Hostility are excellent for Speechcraft use. Traits like Curiosity, Activity or Cleverness may help to increase skills faster. Whole new quests are open for masters of roleplaying traits - masters of deceit can plot against important NPCs or strike a pact with Boethiah, masters of empathy can make a pilgrimage around Skyrim to soothe those in sorrow, curiosity enables the player to ask for undiscovered areas and so on and so on.

 

C) This will be a piece of cake after the RPTSystem explanation and integration. (And this time, the cake is not a lie.)

Since we already have many dialogue options which add different amounts of different PPs to particular PT Values, all that remains is to let the player see it somewhere. This could be easily done via General Stats table named Personal Traits. Once you have this table, it will automatically display the exact value of each Trait as well as in-game descriptions. If the player has 14 points in arrogance, it can show "a little too self-confident", while 34 points can describe the player as "extremely arrogant". There is nothing more left to say, really. Just like collecting Nirnroots, only bigger.

 

Note that the basic system suggested, while quite complicated at first glance, doesn't actually add nothing more than a respectable amount of ALTERNATIVE dialogue lines FOR THE PLAYER. In other words, no voice-acting needed, nothing changes in the game and the dialogues are still the same. BUT your dialogue lines are sometimes duplicated (or more) so that you can say the same thing differently, accenting your chosen personality, mood and attitude. And whenever it is possible, the way you act, talk and behave defines your personality. Of course there are downsides as well, but not so horrific...

The first downside in this phase is that you cannot alter a dialogue too much. If, for example, an NPC reacts with "Oh, thank you very much for your kindness!" during your quest acceptance, you cannot add an option to get this response through "I will help you, but only for the reward!" (Unless you want NPCs to sound very, very ironic.) But there are ways to be creative and still add many viable options nevertheless. It also means that you cannot obtain PPs in every conversation, you have to hunt for them a bit and acquire them throughout the game, which is actually good. (Furthermore, only the Elder Scrolls themselves can foretold how NPCs are going to respond in future Bethesda games... *wink*)

The second downside is this occasional yet annoying need to remove all duplicate dialogue options except for the one used after the response is given AND to give the PPs only once for the chosen option, without possibility to repeat and earn PPs indefinitely. But as I recall, both removing dialogue options and flagging dialogue options as "already used" are commonly used in vanilla Skyrim (altough the second one suffers from bugs), so it should be possible to solve this without too much effort. An improvised solution would be easy, though: Just put a PP limit on every NPC (would do that anyway, just in case of bugs).

 

The truth is, you don't even need to create this plugin all by yourself - if you don't want to . You could just 1) improve the dialogue window so that it could contain more text, 2) input bare Roleplaying Traits System into the game, 3) add a Personal Traits table in General Stats and 4) PROFIT! Well not profit yet, but that's it. You can take this, put it onto Nexxus or PlanetElderScrolls or somewhere, ask nicely and modders WILL happily produce tons and tons of possible dialogue options with assorted PT values so that everyone could develop his own character in Skyrim naturally.

 

Now the obvious questions: Why don't I make this plugin by myself? Why do I suggest it to the developers instead of modders first? Wouldn't it be better made as a regular freelance mod?

This is quite simple, really. I am horrible at working with scripts and tools and stuff. And I really think this should be implemented by the game designers themselves, not by the modders community, altough they ARE really awesome. I think you (as a team) have both tools and experience needed to create working Roleplaying Traits System and add it into the game quickly and smoothly. For a modder, it could be too much of a challenge. Aaaaand most importantly, I really think someone at Bethesda might like the idea of expanding the roleplaying possibilities and creating more complex dialogues (even though as an optionable/downloadable content, since your target audience is rapidly shifting from fantasy nerds to casual "tl;dr" gamers). Then you could adopt this system... Or make your own, slightly inspired. Do it as a plugin for Skyrim... Or try to fit it into one of your new games.That's really not all that important. I would just love to see that RolePlaying Games are still about RolePlaying.

It is clear that if I get a negative reply, I will just end up begging nice guys at Nexxus to do this, but it's worth a try. And that's it. But if you like the idea of roleplaying traits or at least anything else mentioned inside this letter, consider it yours for the taking. I for one simply hope for a reply. I honestly don't want any credits or thanks or anything (easter egg would be nice, though), just a reply, as I am excited to get a developer's opinion.

 

Here comes the farewell with a sincere hope that someone from the developer team will read this... and likes it.

So long and thanks for all the games, all the fun, all the atmosphere, all the story, all the inspiration and all the fish.

- N.

 

---

There, not that long, huh?

[rarborman]

Its a nice sentiment but developers dont often take suggestions...

 

Also if this letter is to Bethesda, it probably should go to them and not to the modding community, where it may never get looked at by anyone from the dev team or patch team.

 

Now then on to what those suggestions are... because long letter is long.

 

Dialog box changes

Radiant system overhaul

Alignment log (I'm pretty sure the activity log in the menu could just be modded to hold radiant alignment stats)

 

Doesnt sound all that imposing as the above wall of text, good suggestions.

[Nathaka]

Its a nice sentiment but developers dont often take suggestions...

 

Also if this letter is to Bethesda, it probably should go to them and not to the modding community, where it may never get looked at by anyone from the dev team or patch team.

 

Now then on to what those suggestions are... because long letter is long.

 

Dialog box changes

Radiant system overhaul

Alignment log (I'm pretty sure the activity log in the menu could just be modded to hold radiant alignment stats)

 

Doesnt sound all that imposing as the above wall of text, good suggestions.

 

Frankly, I wasn't expecting the developers to take it into consideration (mainly because roleplaying is not their primary course, it's action and adventure), but it was worth a try. Now that I know that, I have to show this (long and detailed) suggestion to modders, because there might be just the right man for the job, someone who would like to see roleplaying possibilities in Skyrim.

 

So yes, these three parts you have pinpointed are the sum of what I suggest. Now I would probably need to know if it is possible, if it is not too hard and if someone of the modders would like to do it, because I think it could be a great asset for the gameplay of Skyrim.

 

I could also rewrite the suggestion to a shorter version intended for modders, if it will help.

Edited October 29, 2012 by Nathaka