LogFAQs > #964319388

Sahuagin posted...

the problem with the Paragon/Renegade system is that it rewards you for focusing on one or the other... when the whole point of such a system (and the fact that it's an RPG) is to be able to choose one or the other as you see fit.

That's part of why I loved how Dragon Age 2 handled things. It wasn't perfect, and it could definitely have been a bit more granular differentiating between who you were talking to in certain ways, but it mostly allowed you to pick whatever you saw as the most appropriate choice for a given situation, without forcing you into picking a specific persona and then only picking those choices. And then allowing personality to shift over time via a preponderance of options.

Which is why I mostly interacted with my family and the more innocent characters with the "polite" options, my friends and love interests with the sarcastic/charming/flirty options, and enemies who'd successfully pissed me off with the hostile/direct responses (which generally meant that I spent Act 1 as "nice", Act 2 as "smartass", and Act 3 as "pissed off engine of destruction").

Alpha Protocol handled it fairly well as well, but suffered from other issues that kept it from being trend-setting.



Sahuagin posted...

I don't exactly have a great suggestion for how to improve it though, necessarily, if for example you want it to be hard to be able to make the late game checks...

Arguably you shouldn't be tying your morality to your ability to succeed at persuasions at all. Other games don't (ie, Fallout just uses Charisma, Dragon Age has a separate Persuade skill, etc).

Mass Effect 3 actually handles it better by tying it at least partly to Reputation, but morality still plays into it, so you're still forced into mostly picking one and sticking to it forever (and again, no neutral options means most of your dialogue choices almost become meaningless by default).

The ideal balance is figuring out a way where your choices matter in terms of having an effect on you, but not necessarily becoming so important to gameplay that the effect forces you to make specific choices. ie, having characters comment about how you are noble or scary or a smartass or whatever, but not locking you out of choices or attempts to persuade people solely based on the sort of choices you've already made.

The other ideal way to handle persuade attempts is something along the lines of how Alpha Protocol and Deus Ex: Human Revolution handled it. Namely, that the person you're attempting to influence has very specific personality traits that require specific responses to trigger their best outcome. So, say, in Alpha Protocol (where you can respond to any dialogue with Professional/Sarcastic/Aggressive/Situational response) you meet someone who has a very serious personality. They will tend to react well to you if you use Professional options while speaking to them, while Sarcastic options may annoy them to the point of turning on you. In the same way, Human Revolution tends to have a few persuade conversations where each dialogue choice either improves or degrades the person's respect for you, and by the end of the conversation the overall number of points determines how well they respond to your persuasion.

That way, players can choose for themselves if they want to pursue a singular personality (say, all Sarcastic, or all Aggressive), choose more situationally (ie, being Professional with allies and Sarcastic with enemies), or just outright game the system (by being a "social chameleon" who deliberately acts in the way most likely to generate the optimal result from the target). Thus catering to both roleplayers and power gamers.