Dialog as Interesting Gameplay, Take 2

March 30, 2018

After looking at real interrogations and realizing they weren’t the right fit for Sleuthhounds, I took a step back to think more about the problem of dialog and how to make it interesting from a gameplay point of view. From that reflection came the thought that characters with secret information would work as barriers or walls to that information, preventing the player from reaching it. With that in mind I started thinking along the lines of how a player could surmount such a wall.

My thoughts went to various role playing games where a player character could have a certain rating in charisma or some similar statistic. The idea being the higher your charisma the more likely you’d be able to talk your way past some obstreperous non player character. Those systems rely, to a certain extent, on random chance with dice roles, which I knew I didn’t want to have in Sleuthhounds. However, the thought that you might be able to improve your reputation with a given NPC and that if you improved high enough you could then convince them to tell you their secrets appealed to me.

Generally speaking people like it when other people show an interest in them. Based on that premise I started developing an idea where the player could ask about an NPC’s background, hobbies, and interests. Through doing so the player could raise their rep with a given character. It was certainly a different way of tackling dialog. To test it I set about creating a rough functional prototype of the concept.

The rough prototype of take 2 in action.
Click to view larger.

Under this new system the player is given a notepad with various topics they can ask the NPC about, which is very similar to a number of other detective mystery adventure games. As well, the player is given a close up view of the NPC’s body language so they can see if the NPC is eager to speak with the player or closed off.

The player can choose any of the notepad topics a total of three times. Some topics may not influence the NPC one way or another. Topics that the NPC is excited and happy to talk about raise the player’s reputation with that NPC and makes the NPC more receptive. Conversely, asking about topics the NPC wants to keep hidden will make them less receptive to the point where they may just refuse to answer.

The legend for take 2. Lots of symbols.

To help reinforce the progress through such a conversation I added in a number of rough draft visual indicators. Arrows showed if a player’s reputation with a character was going up or down. Vertical grey lines showed if a “wall” had been encountered in the conversation and if so, how high the player’s reputation needed to be to get past it. Exclamation marks showed if the player had discovered an NPC’s secret.

This prototype had several things going for it. First, it made it clear where an NPC was keeping a secret. That addressed the basic problem I had with dialog trees of not knowing where to go to get to the information you needed to reveal.

Second, it was a system that would be easy to make as easy or as difficult as needed for a given character. To make a conversation harder add in more secrets or more topics that decreased the player’s reputation. To make it easier add in more topics than increased the player’s reputation.

Third, it was a system that required the backgrounds of NPCs be much more fleshed out. In order to create enough topics to gain reputation points with a character I had to write a lot more about that character and think through their past, likes and dislikes, and all that good character building stuff.

However…

There were a number of drawback to the system as well. Once I got the prototype working I found that for myself, even with the developer knowledge of what order to pick topics in, it was easiest to just methodically work through each topic from top to bottom until I exhausted a topic or hit a wall. There was no critical thinking going on. That was a big issue for me. I wanted to make dialog work in such a way that a player could think their way to a solution in the same way that they might solve a more classical sort of adventure game puzzle.

The other big problem was that in order to raise the reputation enough to overcome even modest resistance from the NPC the player had to go through a lot of dialog. I’ve played other games (Murder on the Orient Express comes to mind) where dialog trees with a given character can run twenty to thirty minutes. At a certain point during these information dumps your mind goes numb and just starts to wonder. You’ve become disconnected from the game. Never a good thing.

The negatives of this system greatly outweighed the positive aspects to me and, as with the first take, I decided to abandon this method. However, after two tries at the problem I wasn’t ready to give up. Both attempts had been useful learning experiences. In particular, they both highlighted to me the need to keep whatever system I put into place light and simple. But would the third time prove to be the charm? Find out in next week’s blog.

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