kampfbock
Recruit
I love the idea behind speak-checks, being able to resovle your problems by other means than just brute force, but the way most games implement them is the most primitive and lazy form i can imagine. And Bannerlord chose to go the easy and boring route.
Leveling up a value like charm and then raising success chance accordingly, is not an immersive or fun system. It is no fun to level up the skill and it is no fun to suceed with it, once you become a silver-tongued devil. By solving my problems with speech, i am effectively eliminating an engaging gameplay mechanic (combat), so from a game design standpoint, it would stand to reason to make dialogue as engaging as combat. But clicking something purely based on percentages is not fun. It affords no thinking, it affords no skill, all it afforded was mindless grinding of an arbitrary value and again, the process of grinding it is no fun.
A good speech mechanic would reward the player for engaging with the world and its characters. It would reward me for knowing the character i am speaking to on a deeper level, to know his secrets and motivations. Old Fallout games did this the right way. You were forced to collect information about the world and its characters to solve problems with speech.
For this to work, we would need characters to actually be unique and not just poorly made cardboard copies. There would need to be storylines attached to them, that the player can discover. Some aspects of this are already teased in the game, like the relationships and traits, but those feel empty and meaningless right now. Still they could serve as basis for deeper character interactions.
Of course i know many characters in this game are randomly generated, thus it is impossible to attach fixed storylines to them. But there are alot of not random characters, like the nobles. Or if we want to include the random characters as well, their storyline could be equally randomly generated.
Charm and its influence could still be included in such a system. But it would be a secondary factor. Primarily your success would be decided by choosing the ''right'' answer, To stick with the familiar concept of percentages, this should grant you a good chance of succeeding (~50-%60%), but if you have high speech this should be further increased. There certainly would be more entertaining ways to give a skill like charm unique and engaging gameplay mechanics, but for simplicities sake, i stuck with its traditional use.
Leveling up a value like charm and then raising success chance accordingly, is not an immersive or fun system. It is no fun to level up the skill and it is no fun to suceed with it, once you become a silver-tongued devil. By solving my problems with speech, i am effectively eliminating an engaging gameplay mechanic (combat), so from a game design standpoint, it would stand to reason to make dialogue as engaging as combat. But clicking something purely based on percentages is not fun. It affords no thinking, it affords no skill, all it afforded was mindless grinding of an arbitrary value and again, the process of grinding it is no fun.
A good speech mechanic would reward the player for engaging with the world and its characters. It would reward me for knowing the character i am speaking to on a deeper level, to know his secrets and motivations. Old Fallout games did this the right way. You were forced to collect information about the world and its characters to solve problems with speech.
For this to work, we would need characters to actually be unique and not just poorly made cardboard copies. There would need to be storylines attached to them, that the player can discover. Some aspects of this are already teased in the game, like the relationships and traits, but those feel empty and meaningless right now. Still they could serve as basis for deeper character interactions.
Of course i know many characters in this game are randomly generated, thus it is impossible to attach fixed storylines to them. But there are alot of not random characters, like the nobles. Or if we want to include the random characters as well, their storyline could be equally randomly generated.
Charm and its influence could still be included in such a system. But it would be a secondary factor. Primarily your success would be decided by choosing the ''right'' answer, To stick with the familiar concept of percentages, this should grant you a good chance of succeeding (~50-%60%), but if you have high speech this should be further increased. There certainly would be more entertaining ways to give a skill like charm unique and engaging gameplay mechanics, but for simplicities sake, i stuck with its traditional use.
