About social attributes in dialogues

[Lawful Evil]

At the moment, during Intellect, Charm, etc. checks in dialogues, the game uses the attribute value of the character who started the dialogue (which is the protagonist in 99% of cases). The social attributes of your party members become somewhat irrelevant then, because they are almost never used.

IMO, it would be better if those checks used the highest attribute value in the party. Party members often have something to say during dialogues, so it would make sense for them to jump in and help the protagonist to find the right argument instead of just standing there and watching them fail.

[Yosuf]

I like this idea. And additional idea would be to get the option of which character you want to use for the check during the dialog. For example, if we arn't strong enough we can ask a strong character to do it. Something like:

Dialog Options:
(Strenght) - Try to force open the door
(Strenght) - Ask "x character" to force open the door for you

I think both ideas could be combined in a way. Some times you can ask, and some times they could jump in and offer help.

[vultm]

Thanks Lawful Evil and Yosuf for your feedback on this system. It's one of those mechanics we have been debating internally for some time and have been testing out different approaches, so I would love to get some more community discussion going on this.

The issue we found with the suggested approach of letting your party members jump in, is now you can have each of your party members specialize in one of the attributes, making it so you essentially never fail a check, and thereby undermining the mechanic.

The other approach we have been considering is simply removing the dialogue attributes for the party members; as you mentioned, they have little impact currently.

Anyways, expect to see some new ideas regarding this system hit the Experimental Branch soon. I would also invite feedback from other players on this issue.

Cheers!

[Lawful Evil]

Originally posted by vultm:

making it so you essentially never fail a check, and thereby undermining the mechanic.

Currently I never fail checks because I reload and approach the NPC with a different character. :D Which is basically the same, just takes more time.

I just want to avoid situations when, for instance, the protagonist finds a strange item and can't figure out what it is due to low Intellect, while there is a party member with high Intellect standing right next to them.

Maybe the ability of party members to help should depend on the context, and should be used only in some dialogues where it makes sense.
E.g. if the protagonist is negotiating with the leader of some faction, it would be rude for party members to interfere. But if the party is inspecting a crime scene, everyone should be able to use their skills.

[CloudKira]

Personally I would prefer if the protagonist had at the very least unique stat based dialogue.

Every companion being able to solve stuff makes the protagonist looks a bit less...special.

If companions being used in such regard must happen no matter what then I would prefer if they had some other dialogue options that fit their personalities.

But only with the protagonist getting the best rewards for having stats high enough. It would keep the protagonist unique while at the same time prevent the companions from being useless in that regard.

[Yosuf]

Originally posted by vultm:

The other approach we have been considering is simply removing the dialogue attributes for the party members; as you mentioned, they have little impact currently.

Anyways, expect to see some new ideas regarding this system hit the Experimental Branch soon. I would also invite feedback from other players on this issue.

Cheers!

I always play with the character i made as main character but maybe someone would prefer to have another character as lead (maybe bcs they want to play as a ranged character or something like that) and remove the dialogue attributes from the party members would take away that possibility.

I agree that to use the dialogue attributes from all the party could be too much, but what about STR, DEX and INT?

[[Ruw] Gorges]

Let every character have his/her own stats and make the challanges situational.
Lawful Evil already pointed it out. Just make sure to show whhy you have a certain option.
Examples:

[xy Intellect 7] Ask xy to...
[Group summed up charm 9] Convince them your harmless.

Like this your motivated to may try a full team of intellect Shelton nerds next time :P