Gamifying Conversation: best examples?

For a while I've been rolling around in my head various ideas for giving the non-combat aspects of RPGs a game mechanic of their own. In particular dialogue -- I often choose the talky route through games where that's an option, but that can make games feel rushed and thin when what would have been an hour of fighting through a quest is replaced by fifteen seconds of conversation.

In my hypothetical dream-game (I'm guessing most people here have them) the system for conversations would be as tactical as combat, with its own strategies and rewards.

The obvious example of trying -- and failing -- to do this would be Oblivion, with its half-hearted minigame. I'm one of the few who didn't hate that one, bare bones as it was, basically just because it was an attempt at something that I find interesting in theory. But there was very little substance to it, and it was no real surprise when Skyrim quietly dropped the system instead of trying to improve on it as I would have preferred.

Is that the only real attempt at something like this that RPGs have seen? Are there less high-profile games that've done it better?

I think it's a very hard thing to do. Particularly if we had deep, complex and human characters in an RPG, all the subtleties of speech reflected by their various emotions and motivations. Turning that into a strategic matrix that could produce good gameplay - that would be a very tall order.

I don't think this would be a way of presenting story or character material as such -- any more than RPG combat typically is. Generally you fight in order to unlock story content, and then that story is presented separately. Defeat the boss, and then he has a monologue and you get the new quest from his captive (or what have you).

It would work the same here. You could fight through three sets of guards to access various rooms in the palace, or you succeed in a series of dialogue challenges with three different maids.

There could be times when a complex story sequence would incorporate dialogue challenges as part of it (much like how the Landsmeet sequence in DA:O interwove combats with cut-scenes) but they wouldn't be the same thing.

I think, though, it would be very hard to create the equivalent of the tactical, yet fair, conditions of combat in a dialog situation. Combat is relatively well-suited to being reduced to a simple set of gameplay 'moves'. It's a fairly natural progression to create the game of chess as a simplified expression of the experience of tactical combat.

I think it would be vastly more difficult to do the same thing with the complexities of conversation. I think that, in the absence of unrealistic AI, it would be so reductive as to turn dialog into a limited set of options that would essentially be a card game, or something similar.

That could be fine, in a way, but I think it would have to be a trade off against deeper and more complex character writing.

The Oblivion Speechcraft game was silly, but man, I loved it! It was just fun to me. It had a simple-yet-fun puzzle element to it with an extra layer added with the time limit. I thought it was great.

I dunno. I guess I could see a game adding some sort of tactical challenge in conversations. I think Mass Effect was sort of like that, with varying responses based on what you said, and RPGs that have different branches in conversation can be somewhat "tactical" if you are trying to solve a problem or get a certain response. Sort of like in Tactics Ogre, where depending on what you said to certain NPCs, they could join your group or not join, and your actions in dialogues also determined if certain characters would stay with you even after they initially joined. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is another one. Certain choices in conversations could drastically change things and often had interesting and different outcomes based on what you said.

Also, I think Alpha Protocol had a time limit to answer a question in dialogue, and each answer had a different outcome. Something like that could be interesting. But really, I like just casually reading the dialogue and responding how I'd like to. Dialogue, like exploration, can be relaxing and not really a time to flex your tactical abilities to the fullest. I also find the dialogue itself to be enough of a reward and plenty of RPGs already give you certain rewards based on how you respond in a conversation.

I'm all in favour of better dialog writing, and choice and consequence. I'm just saying that I think although you can add a certain amount of value to conversation in rpgs, I can't see how it could even approach gameplay parity with the depth of combat mechanics, in the foreseeable future.

Ripper said:

I think that, in the absence of unrealistic AI, it would be so reductive as to turn dialog into a limited set of options that would essentially be a card game, or something similar.

That could be fine, in a way, but I think it would have to be a trade off against deeper and more complex character writing.

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I wouldn't think that the character writing would be in the gamified dialogue, though.

The game's ruleset would be necessarily reductive, sure, although I don't agree that it would necessarily be more so than game combat (my understanding is in that in real fights to the death, the combatants don't actually take turns -- very uncivilized) and yeah, a card game is one way of doing it that had occurred to me.

But the dialogue game wouldn't replace the character writing as I'm imagining it -- it would just be a different way of getting to the character writing.

Has anyone played Thea: the Awakening? That game tries something similar, although to be honest I didn't get far enough into it to form a judgment.

I'm not saying that combat is not also simplified, in terms of turn-based action and limited moves - but I am saying it is far more suited to that simplification.

Combat lends it itself much more easily to reduction to a fair gameplay system. Certain easily-comprhended factors like position, numbers, weapons-strength, etc, quite easily create a 'gamified' situation in which tactical thought can create a fair game of wits.

My point is that its immeasurably harder to create a suitably game-like situation out of the complexities of conversation. You made a comparison of how an hour of combat gameplay vastly outweighs a few seconds of conversation choices. I'm not not saying that can't be improved upon, but I think we are fundamentally stuck with that imbalance.

Ripper said:

My point is that its immeasurably harder to create a suitably game-like situation out of the complexities of conversation.

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Have either of you played Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines? The conversations in a game like that are already game-like. Anyone remember the conversation between the two "sisters"? That was a complex, involved "game" within a conversation. There were multiple outcomes, unforeseen twists and several different outcomes that could happen based on how you played it. I mention that specific conversation because it was also very tense and had very serious consequences depending on what you did with it (thus adding to the feel that it was "strategic" or a game-within-a-game).

Ripper said:

Combat lends it itself much more easily to reduction to a fair gameplay system. […] My point is that its immeasurably harder to create a suitably game-like situation out of the complexities of conversation.

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I don't really agree at all. Lots of the conventions of RPG combat -- that people take turns acting, that in conflicts people gradually wear away each other's endurance with a series of attacks, that as you become better at conflicts you are able to withstand a great many more such attacks, etc etc. -- match the way verbal arguments work a lot better than they match how physical fights work.

The JRPG format in which the two sides stand facing each other and take turns lobbing attacks until one party finally gives up is a ludricrous way of modelling a melee between two small groups -- but it's a pretty fair model of a quarreling couple.

The big difference, and the big increase in complexity between combat and non-combat version of turn-based combat is that, in a physical fight, you always just want to do one thing: make the other guy die. This is defined as reducing his HP metric to zero, so no matter what, you always want that number to go in the same direction -- down.

In a verbal conflict, you might be trying to push the other guy in a number of different directions. Maybe, just like in a fight, you're trying to beat down his confidence until he gives up. But maybe it's the reverse -- maybe you're trying to inspire him to greater confidence so he'll join you in a battle. Or maybe you're trying to move him on a metric orthogonal to that one -- not his confidence but his attitude towards you.

I think conversation could be abstracted to a model not unlike turn-based RPG combat, but with an "HP" equivalent that, rather than being a straight line, is more like a graph with multiple quadrants.

Hexprone said:

I don't really agree at all. Lots of the conventions of RPG combat -- that people take turns acting, that in conflicts people gradually wear away each other's endurance with a series of attacks, that as you become better at conflicts you are able to withstand a great many more such attacks, etc etc. -- match the way verbal arguments work a lot better than they match how physical fights work.

The JRPG format in which the two sides stand facing each other and take turns lobbing attacks until one party finally gives up is a ludricrous way of modelling a melee between two small groups -- but it's a pretty fair model of a quarreling couple.

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It's a fair model if you assume that a dialog encounter is an argument, a conflict, and thus similar to combat. This makes a zero sum game out of a potentially complex negotiation. That's a huge simplification of the possibilities of a conversation. A situation that has got to the point of conflict is necessarily zero-sum - a dialog, as you say, is not.

Hexprone said:

The big difference, and the big increase in complexity between combat and non-combat version of turn-based combat is that, in a physical fight, you always just want to do one thing: make the other guy die. This is defined as reducing his HP metric to zero, so no matter what, you always want that number to go in the same direction -- down.

In a verbal conflict, you might be trying to push the other guy in a number of different directions. Maybe, just like in a fight, you're trying to beat down his confidence until he gives up. But maybe it's the reverse -- maybe you're trying to inspire him to greater confidence so he'll join you in a battle. Or maybe you're trying to move him on a metric orthogonal to that one -- not his confidence but his attitude towards you.

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Right, that's what I'm saying - as you increase the number of possibilities at each point, don't you necessarily multiply the number of possible outcomes, to the point where it becomes immensely hard to create a manageable game structure?

Let me see "The Age of Decadence" doesn't have exactly what you said, but you can play it almost without combat, and it sure has a lot of options for conversation.

Undertale also tried, as well as Cult. I am sure I could find more if I spent some more time thinking.

I am also trying something for my game, it is going to be something very different from the games mentioned above though. I have no idea if it'll work or not yet though, as I didn't get that far, might need to scrap the idea.

The first idea I thought of when I read the original post was basically adding stats to something like the witty repartee in the duelling exchanges from the Secret of Monkey Island. Enemies could have a specific "humour type" that they're most vulnerable to (dead pan, slapstick, sarcasm, high brow) or a psychological susceptibility which could render them helpless....

Obviously the original Fallout comes to mind as well for its infamous diplomatic path and the ability to essentially complete it without major combat encounters.

No Truce With the Furies might be one to keep on eye on.

Ripper said:

as you increase the number of possibilities at each point, don't you necessarily multiply the number of possible outcomes, to the point where it becomes immensely hard to create a manageable game structure?

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Yes, but I think you could create a playable model that also included a number of possibilities with just two metrics: the target's positive or negative feeling about themselves, and their positive or negative feeling about you: basically an X-Y graph.

This allows for a diverse set of victory conditions for different conversations without being unworkably detailed. Trying to negotiate a good deal with a merchant? Then you'll need to lower your target's confidence but raise their opinion of you. Trying to goad someone into a fight? Pump their confidence but lower their opinion of you. Recruiting a potential ally? Raise 'em both. Not all these results are zero-sum: some are adversarial, but in others you're urging people toward a shared goal.

I think it could be fun. It would be similar enough to regular RPG combat that the principle would be easy to grasp, but would add a new dimension -- literally -- to the mechanic.

Hmmm… with the current dialog-options style, no way. At least not without a heck of a lot of choices.

But what if we went back to actually typing in our responses? Put in some smart AI and that could get real fun. I'm sure it wouldn't be easy and I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to tell it's a computer responding instead of a real person but that's no different than combat AI. (Unfortunately, requiring keyboard means all the couch gamers are out and translating into other languages would be really difficult.)

Going into the future… what if we could actually just SAY our response into a microphone? You could interrupt a long dialog - especially one where the NPC seems to be figuring out that you did something naughty. Screaming at the NPC would have a different effect than just a wooden responding. Suddenly your acting skills will be as important as your twitch skills!

Zloth said:

Hmmm… with the current dialog-options style, no way.

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I have been unclear.

Post edited, I was rambling

What's this cRPG discussion doing in off topic lol.

There are quite a few real-life scenarios where words are used as a form of combat, such as Rap Battles, court cases and the like where you could convert that into some kind of cRPG battle structure if you were that way determined. It would take an awful lot of innovation for something that might not be a great idea (for RPGs, possibly not for general gaming) in the first place.

To do a Rap Battle, for example, you could zoom your characters to the turn-based chess board battle zone and have them firing off words and phrases no different to how wizards cast spells. Don't forget that, traditionally, most spells are some form of verbal utterance and when two wizards meet to fight it is actually already just a battle of words.

In this particular case I'm not seeing you (Hexprone) deliver a convincing enough case as to why this dream needs to become a reality, mostly because the dream is so hard to put into easily understood words, I guess, combined, of course, with your low level at the skill in the first place, which is somewhat ironic as it makes one suspect that if the dream did become a reality you wouldn't be very good at it anyway...?

Out of nowhere comes … a sick burn!