Demeanor based RPGs

[presence]

I'm not saying it was a fantastic game, but Kyrandia 3 had an interesting alternative to dialogue trees, in that you'd choose a demenor when intereacting with people. You could be nice, sarcastic, or evil. "Hey kid, want some broken glass?"

Now in this particular game it basically meant you had to do every action 3 times and see what got you points, but I've been thinking it was an interesting idea and wondering if any other games tried this out.

[Gus the Crocodile]

I'm not familiar with Kyrandia, but if we're talking about the kind of system that has players essentially guessing what their character will do or say when a certain option is selected, I don't think that makes for particularly good role-playing.

The example that comes to mind is Alpha Protocol, which did some really nice things with conversation, like putting your responses on timers to reflect that real people won't just sit there forever while you think about your answer, and also making a failure to respond (or choice not to) an actual valid option. I think that stuff was wonderful. But I was never really sold on the way it presented your choices as just "Professional", "Suave", "Aggressive", etc. Sometimes Suave meant good-natured and jokey, sometimes it meant rudely sarcastic, sometimes it meant flirty, and the only way you find out was by choosing it and living with the consequences. I don't like that. That isn't me role-playing, it's the developer role-playing, and me guessing as to what they're going to do next. If it's supposed to be my character, let me choose what I'm going to say.

[presence]

That's all well and good, but most moral choice systems turn dialoge trees into game ruining jokes. I just finished Kotor, and I found the dialogue choices, especially late game, vapid and awful. Worse, they place a value judgment on honest responses that I find utterly infuriating. I said to myself "I'd rather just have had a button to press that said "Light side/darkside" and let the writers and voice actors focus their work on doing the best portrayal of those two roles they could.

Games like Torment where the dialogue trees are deep enough and detalied enough that any normal person can truly find their role are very much the exception, so I was thinking of trying a few games that did away with the idea and just asked "So, you wanna be nice or naughty?"

[Gus the Crocodile]

Not to defend Bioware too much on that one since I generally agree, and I think similar points extend to much of their other work, but to be fair, Star Wars's binary lightside-darkside metaphysics was never going to be a good place to look for sensible and nuanced "moral choice systems". Oversimplification is the order of the day.

But yeah, Mass Effect's paragon-renegade system was an absurd "no, we haven't learnt anything" statement, then there's things like Dragon Age being full of completely inconsequential lines and characters that let you buy intimacy with gifts. These days, the place Bioware games have in my life is as the equivalent of "screw it, I'm gonna order pizza" - trashy, indulgent "comfort food". Which is fine.

In any case, thread's not about me, sorry :) I can't think of other examples at the moment, best of luck though.

[presence]

Well, I'll buy Alpha Protocal when it's on sale at the least, so thank you for the idea.

[Zeetarb]

Kyrandia sounds interesting, but given it's an early 90's point-and-click game I'm not sure how it'd hold up. One system like that I found interesting was playing the even-older "Castles" from GOG, most of the game's focus was castle building and fighting off weird little invading Welsh troops, but every few month's or so these little event chains would pop up requiring a decision from you which influenced how things played out, future invasions etc.

The interesting part to me was the choices weren't really moral choices, they were just, well choices I suppose. Far more liberating than making moral choices, since it's more "which of these scenario's is the most Kingly, which one will give me the least trouble etc." To be honest I'm a bit sick of the moral choices, naughty/nice dichotomy; I think it's a bit unrealistic to have every decision framed in that way.

Bioware ... yeesh they can get bad sometimes, generally the moral choices tend to the extreme and the "nasty" one's tend to be a cutting off your nose to spite your face type of nasty. Not many other alternatives out there that I know of, other than Torment which as far as I've experienced is probably the gold standard of dialogue in games I think.

[RZW]

Fallout New Vegas is pretty good when it comes to dialogue options and roleplaying the the type of character you want to play rather than just good/evil. Obsidian are way better at writing for rpgs than Bioware (or Bethesda for that matter...). (in my opinion)