Fallout and the Trouble with Speech

good afternoon unless you're what i'm john says buddy a true and welcome to something i've been thinking about for a long time the place of speech and fallout and all the problems it's created over the years so today we're going to be talking history we're going to be talking fallout games that never were and we're going to be talking about the time we almost got to specialize in carousing in fallout so let's begin with one of the most well-loved fallout games new vegas you see fallout new vegas is unique in the franchise in that it tells you right at the start how the game is going to end before you actually start playing you know there's a battle coming for hoover dam to decide the fate of vegas and no matter what path you choose that's where the game's going to end in three of the four endings you'll be facing off against lanius you hear how he slaughters a tenth of his own men as punishment on the radio caesar tells you the story of a man who attacked entire legion patrols alone who was so fierce as a warrior that he turned on his own village when they tried to surrender to the legion he became the monster of the east the butcher and finally at the end of the game after cutting your way through the second battle of hoover dam after charging ahead of the rest of the army into the leggett's camp by yourself you face him and you tell him to go away and he does because fallout has a long-running problem with speech it's been fairly consistently one of the most powerful skills in the gamer capable of automatically defusing conflicts and completing quests in moments and this goes back so far that just about any character build guide you can find for the classic fallout recommends you tag speech under all circumstances no matter what else you're planning to do with the builds so how did this happen well to answer that we need to go back in time and probably further than you're expecting all the way back to 1986 the year that steve jackson developed gurps now depending on how well you know your rpg history there might have been some unfamiliar words in that last sentence steve jackson is an american game designer who you might better recognize as the creator of munchkin he's also delightfully nerdy and enjoys pirate themed lego and model trains but perhaps his greatest creation is gupps the generic universal role playing system a set of game mechanics for tabletop role-playing games with a strong focus on versatility unlike most of its contemporaries it was a role-playing game that had the flexibility to support games in just about any conceivable setting rather than being designed exclusively for say high fantasy so how does that fit into fallout well originally and for perhaps a surprisingly large part of its development the original fallout of 1997 was going to fully utilize gerbs for its core game mechanics the deal was signed in 1995 and dropped some time after that though there is some disagreement over the exact reasons for the split brian fargo in 2011 commented that it was due to steve jackson's objections to some of fallout's more adult content as a result of that the fallout team had to remove the gerp system and develop their own instead giving us the now iconic special system but here's where we can detect the origin of the speech problem because we have a small handful of screenshots of fallout from this stage of development or to be precise vault 13 a gurps post nuclear adventure as it was called at the time which were released by chris taylor in 2007 giving us a look at what the game might have been like had the deal not fallen through and straight away you'll notice that the available skills were very different indeed and i want to draw your attention in particular to one skill that didn't make it into fallout carousing a skill about partying and socializing which also includes low-level dancing ability according to the gurp's wiki now that probably sounds very specific and it is and now we need to dive a little bit deeper into girps and how it works you see the reason gerps is flexible enough to cover just about any conceivable setting for a role-playing game is the game includes just about any conceivable skill falconry stage combat fire eating accounting sumo wrestling housekeeping heraldry exorcism speed reading anthropology freight handling and well over a hundred more now that does not mean that fallout would ever have actually had that many skills available the point of all those skills is that developers can choose skills that are appropriate to the setting they want to build a game in so a bunch of skills that are explicitly magical or appropriate for medieval societies wouldn't have been included but the crucial point here is that in this vast array of skills there is no speech skill instead there are depending on how you define speech between 10 and 15. now we have no way of knowing how many would have ended up in the theoretical gurps fallout but we do know that carousing was in one build of the game at some point and given that carousing does exclusively cover socializing in a particular setting in gerbs and we can see how karate and brawling or pistol fast draw and guns pistol are separated in gurps we can be very confident there would have been other social skills beyond carousing to my mind the most likely candidates would probably have been streetwise and savoir faire the latter being the ability to conduct yourself properly and say the right things in high society the former more appropriate for engaging with rough company now i flagged those two in particular as just before fallout came out in 1996 the elder scrolls ii daggerfall released with two very similar matching speech skills etiquette and street-wise but there are plenty of other options in gerbs too diplomacy public speaking intimidation data all be viable the point however is that there was almost certainly more than one speech skill and this is very important for role playing because it means that no character simply has natural charisma so strong that they can talk down literally anybody in any situation because one that's unrealistic and two there's a danger that would be overpowered but then the change happened from gurps to fallout and we can see from the gerps character sheet a bunch of formally available skills went missing karate and brawling merged into unarmed pistols rifles and skills related to their use all merged into small guns and however many speech skills had once been intended for fallout they all blended together into a single one speech as a result of that speech was conceptually very powerful as a high speed skill would get you access to all the best hidden dialogue options such as say the ability to easily resolve the khan's kidnapping of tandy or getting past the mutants of the water pump despite this powerful single blended speech skill however i think overall fallout 1 did a competent job of balancing the power of speech so how did they square the circle well to my mind it was a consequence of the setting in fallout 1 society is at its least developed in the entire fallout universe with the possible exception of fallout 3. huge areas are empty wasteland tiny villagers struggle to survive against the monsters of the wastes death claws are a horror story even in the relatively advanced harbour and the vast majority of the super mutant army won't engage in conversation at all either ignoring you or shooting on site the key point here is that fallout 1 is filled with situations where society's biggest problem is a scary monster in the wilderness right from the very first encounter with shady sands there is no speech solution to shady sansa's first quest because you cannot negotiate with rad scorpions in aditum you cannot talk down death claws in the wasteland many of the hostiles you encounter physically cannot communicate with you on occasion speech is extremely useful at other times it has no utility whatsoever this to my mind is a fair balance i've never expected every problem to have a perfect solution no matter what skills you've invested in part of the joy of building a character is that some scenarios become very easy because you're well suited to dealing with them meanwhile others are relatively tricky if you don't have a specialization appropriate to the situation and this right here is where i think fallout 2 went wrong now i can't find much discussion on this topic from the original dev team so i can't really say whether what i'm about to discuss was the result of an intentional design choice in the making of fallout 2 or an oversight that came about an error you see the world of fallout 2 is much bigger than the world of fallout warner and specifically it's much more populated fallout 1 had 12 major locations of which around half could be considered towns of some description civilian population shops quest givers that sort of thing the other half are neutral or hostile environments like the ruins of vault 15 the raided camp or the glow though there are some edge cases like necropolis or the boneyard where large parts of the area are monster-infested ruins fallout 2 is built very differently of its 24 main locations a good 80 of them are towns and those towns are much larger than they were in fallout 1 with the majority made up of multiple large external districts in short you're spending a much higher proportion of your time in an urban environment talking to people on top of that almost nobody is scared of nearby monsters that need to be hunted down the majority of quests instead take the form of a conflict between two groups of people in some cases this uses the structure of a pair of towns that can be reconciled modok and ghost farm or vault city and gecko and sometimes it's an entirely internal political issue like in reading and the factions that favor siding with various outside powers again the key point here is the huge increase in the number of people you're dealing with on a regular basis you spend your time in towns talking to people who want you to deal with other people on their behalf this means you spend a very large amount of the game in dialogue and naturally that means the speech still got elevated from a good skill to an almost compulsory one in brief speech worked well in fallout 1 because the world was evenly divided between times when it was useful and times it wasn't in fallout 2 the world is filled with a lot more opportunities to use speech but the skill stayed the same regardless fallout 2 in fact would have been the perfect game to have separated streetwise versus savoir faire skills just consider volt city where the former would serve you well in the outlying slums while the latter would help with speaking with elite citizens instead speech just works for everybody now obviously an imbalanced skill system where one skill is clearly superior to others is fundamentally not desirable but let's dig into exactly why this creates a problem for fallout 2. in brief to my mind it's because it teaches you a bad lesson let's say you start a game of fallout 2 having never played it before and you choose to focus on speech at the end of the temple of trials you can bypass the final fight with a speech check great that's a useful way to avoid combat but it never stops speech gets you straight into vic's room speech gets you an immediate three-day pass to access vault city you can speech ken lee into just giving you access to the emperor and the fuel in a single conversation persuade an enclave scientist to sabotage his own life's work and murder his colleagues every investment in speech just seems to be more and more rewarded right until the last five minutes of the game the final boss frank corrigan cannot be reasoned with in any way the only way to finish the game is for him to die speech can get you a few extra enclave soldiers on your side but they will be destroyed by horrigan the only viable way for a non-combat focused chosen one to defeat oregon is to turn the automatic defenses on him but no amount of science can do that you must have a keycard held by president richardson who also can't be speech checked in any way however killing him to get the card would also trigger the rest of the enclave to turn on you so again tricky for a non-combat specialist to the extent that in fact many fallout 2 guides recommend a strange manipulation involving jabbing him with large numbers of super stim packs to kill him through stacked health debuffs it's a very strange finale to fall out toe where suddenly a skill that has up to this point resolved pretty much every problem in the world suddenly has basically no utility at the end of the game and to my mind any player that feels a bit frustrated at that decision would be justified and the fault lies with fallout 2 for not balancing its skills more evenly as was the case in fallout 1. of course fallout 1 has one other advantage here too the master unlike horrigan fallout 1's master confrontation has a huge number of options available to the player combat of course taking place in an environment that you can manipulate to your advantage in this case by acquiring an item to nullify the master's psychic attacks but with other options too using alternative skills to sneak into the back room and destroy the entire base by blowing up the reactor without ever meeting the master or crucially talking him down if you had compelling evidence you could present to him to prove his plan was doomed an endgame resolution that bafflingly has never reappeared in any future fallout game so that was the state of speech in the interplay era but there is one other very interesting piece of evidence about how the dev team might have gone on to look at speech and its role in fallout i'd suggest that blackout realize speech was a problem in fallout 2 after the fact because we know from documents that have emerged about the cancer fallout 3 van buren that during at least one iteration of the game's development speech was not going to be in interplays fallout 3 instead it was going to be split into persuasion and deception making it much harder for a character to quickly max out social skills and thus be able to work around any problem but that didn't happen instead we got bethesda's fallout 3 and okay this one um this one's complicated fallout 3 kind of doubled down on some of where fallout 2 went wrong with speech at its highest level it is once again a god-tier skill but now rather than most things speech solves everything so let's just go through the main plot of fallout 3. you leave vote 101 and arrive at megaton moriarty knows where your father went and immediately tells you with a speech check that leads you to galaxy news radio where three doe wants you to help him use a speech check you don't need to bother he'll point you straight onto rivet city project purity then can't be speeched as it contains nothing but mutants but after that two of tranquility lane's task can be easily speeched if you fancy some side questing in the meantime speech will resolve blood ties tempany tower power of the atom rescue from paradise trouble on the home front superhuman gambit basically the vast majority of name quests back to the main plot and after the waters of life is done you can head to the lamplight and bypass paradise falls entirely with a speech check after a brief run through vault 87 you can speech the president into self-destructing then nip back to project purity to speech the final boss into walking away so speeching the final boss is back but unlike in fallout 1 it doesn't need any form of evidence or preparation a basic speech role will take care of it this is particularly frustrating because fallout 3 does contain a quest where to get the optimal ending you have to locate a piece of evidence that gives your character the context to challenge another character and force them to open up to you more than they would have done otherwise and that's the superhuman gambit where your character doesn't know the antagonizer is a comic book villain unless they've tracked down hubris comics and found a letter to the editor about the comic why such an elegant solution that surely must have been inspired by fallout 1 as reserved exclusively for this small subquest in the corner of the mappy is unclear and it's a huge shame that such elegant mechanics don't appear elsewhere particularly in the main plots but what's the real problem here because conceptually i don't object to the ability to use skills to bypass combat and create alternative solutions on the contrary that's kind of the point of a skill based rpg so let's get into some specifics here firstly like in fallout 2 speech is vastly more useful than other skills specifically while there are plenty of uses for lockpick or science say during main quest discussions and major confrontations it will inevitably always be speech that comes up in the final confrontation with autumn the choice is fight or speech there are no other options this means that under investment in other skills may lead to a handful of missed opportunities but under investment in speech leads to major mischances to bypass otherwise difficult fights or sections of the game and secondly speaking of bypass yes we need to discuss exactly what speech does in fallout 3. so let's do a quick comparison at the start of fallout new vegas you do ghost town gunfight where you can use a speech check to persuade the townsfolk to join you in a shootout evening the answer when the powder ganges show up at the start of fallout 3 meanwhile moriarty wants you to go and deal with silver but if you speech check him you don't need to he just gives you the information even though you've never been there now do you see the critical difference here in fallout new vegas the speech check led to a modified quest where you still need to do the gunfight because the gunfight is fun but you could make it easier for yourself tip the odds more on your favor in fallout 3 you just straight up skipped some of the game you never meet silva if you do the speech check and this happens a lot the worst example to my mind is three dog normally he wants to send you to the museum of technology a beautifully designed little dungeon full of lockpick and science checks a creepy atmosphere your first solo encounter with multiple super mutants and even a secret unmarked quest to find a unique gun if you check all the terminals it's a really fun area but if you do the speech check with three dogger he just pushes you straight on to rivert city instead it's genuinely slightly baffling the bethesda went to all the effort of creating this really cool area the mall the museum itself and then just let's just skip it i promise guys i want to play the game that's why i bought it and the same thing happens again we're skipping paradise falls entirely with the speech check of the gates of little lamplight skipping another well-designed area and the really cool quest within it the problems with this generation of fallout were also exacerbated by the changes to how skills overall worked back in old fallout skills were expressed by a percentage between 0 and 300 however raising a skill became increasingly more expensive in terms of skill point investment as the skill got higher represented the diminishing returns you were seeing once you were already a skilled practitioner making it extremely difficult and inefficient to max out any skill as once the skill was approaching 200 percent you were increasing it so little per level that most players would invest elsewhere and other skills to get more of an appreciable benefit this was one mechanism by which speech and old fallout avoided being completely out of control the best speech checks could be behind skill levels so high that only those who invested it huge expense elsewhere would ever be able to use them in fallout 3 that changed skills were now between 0 and 100 with no diminishing returns as you continue to invest combined with an extremely generous skill point reward for high intelligence characters you could leave the vault with a tagged speech skill of around 40 and hit speech 100 literally the highest it can go by level 4 and that's without any skill books or perk boosts now in fallout 3's defense it did try to mitigate this by making speech a skill role that used both the speech stat and charisma to give you a percentage chance to succeed but honestly that just led to large amounts of save scumming and the possibility of characters who weren't very good at speech at all passing difficult checks anyway with a bit of patience and the quick load button there were however some good additions new perks are not dialogue of a particular flavor for example either towards seduction with black widow or ladykiller or for speaking to children with childhood heart this was a welcome way of rewarding those who wanted to role play in a particular direction with unique dialogue though two steps forward one step back they were curiously undermined by not being locked behind any noteworthy charisma or speech gate in fact literally any character even if completely uncharismatic and appalling at speaking can be a master of seduction in fallout 3 at level 2. and so along came new vegas an obsidian of course made some changes it is however hard to say how much new vegas represents the compromises of the engine and time scale that obsidium were given for example would obsidian with a freehand have kept skills limited to between 0 and 100 or restored a system more like the old fallout we can't tell and can only judge what we have in front of us so the biggest change was the removal of charisma from the chance to succeed speech checks thus converting speech into a simple numerical check if you had enough speech you passed unfortunately while this did remove any reason to spam save and load in some ways it made the ongoing problem even worse now once you hit speech 100 you would always without fail pass every single speech challenge and with charisma now basically not doing anything there was almost no reason to take it at all and so it was that the charisma one speech 100 character was born and over the years countless lanier have been chased off the field by level 7 speedrunners who managed to manipulate the monster of the east into retreating despite being literally the least charismatic characters possible though perhaps a part of the issue here is how new vegas finally made us directly confront the issue with speech that's been hanging around since fallout 3. one of the problems with speech is it's never been gamified you see back in the days of old fallout everything was based on probabilities chance to hit probability chance to unlock a door probability chance to hack a terminal probability but as a fallout 3 in the move into a 3d real-time world combat moves at least partly into a player skill based system where your abilities as a player could lead to better results equally the same thing happened with other skills lockpick and science both came with mini games that got progressively harder with harder locks and passwords that could be failed to seal the door or terminal so the player needs to have both the right in-game skill to begin the mini game and the appropriate level of player skill to complete it speech however has never gone through this transition it remains a flat character skill based ability where player skill has no impact on it whatsoever once you have that skill up to 100 and we've established that's very easy to do if a speech check comes up it's an auto win button now we'll come back to what that means precisely later fortunately as we've established before unlike in fallout 3 speech in new vegas generally opens up interesting new gameplay opportunities rather than bypassing content that you presumably wanted to see after buying a fallout game and to further defend new vegas there is of course plenty it did right while just like in fallout 2 the environment is heavily urban with plenty of towns all over the place speech is not so overwhelmingly used instead other skills routinely appear in dialogue as if they were speech checks along with reputation checks perk specific statements even the odd option that comes from karma or items in your inventory making new vegas probably the most well-balanced fallout game in terms of speech versus other skills since fallout 1 even if it does slightly fluff the landing by ending with a very dull series of speech 100 jacks and so we move on to fallout 4 and i like a lot about fallout 4 but when it comes to speech no and you know we can hardly start anywhere else than by saying that fallout 4 partly dealt with the speech skill problem by getting rid of the speech skill which was followed of course a few years later by fallout 76 which got rid of speech and characters to speak to as well bloody hell bethesda there were a lot of babies in that bath water sorry that was mean so yes fallout 4 speech is a skill is now exclusively a function of charisma now in the world of fallout 4 with far fewer special points than ever before this isn't necessarily a terrible idea nor is the level up system of players choosing between boosting special or taking a perk in fact a not historical note here the system in fallout 4 is actually strangely reminiscent of the gurps mechanic that almost made up the core of fallout warner where a single currency can be assigned to either a primary attribute or boosting a more specific skill instead but there are of course problems both in concept and execution conceptually there was the issue that this meant a player could if they wished build a character who started with charisma 10 and thus be at level 1 pretty much as good at speech as you can be leading to baffling scenarios where bleary-eyed soul survivors emerged from the vault and ran straight into nonsense like this easy there vault girl this doesn't involve you you stop waving that gun in my face or it's gonna involve me okay okay just take it easy we'll lower our weapons all right just don't do anything crazy now hand over your money all of it just keep calm all right here that's everything i have now get the hell out of here both of you you got to be kidding me fine we'll leave just my goddamn luck there's also a fair bit of frogetting here you see fallout 4 uncapped special so you could utilize gear food and drugs to boost charisma over 10 if you wanted to to maximize your chances that's good but the system is basically pointless because if you have charisma 11 you will pass every single check in the game a hundred percent of the time and with plus two charisma clothing everywhere and plus five charisma great men that's not uncommon hitting 11 was ludicrously simple even for those with low charisma that's bad so in reality coming off a couple of fallout games where it was far too easy to max out speech to low level fallout 4 made it even easier to temporarily max out charisma whenever you needed it most people just didn't realize it because it was hidden behind an unclear-coloured check system and speaking of that yes the ui as the mechanism by which players communicated with other characters itself did a lot of damage to speech checks when the four slots were already being filled up with a yes no sarcastic and one question and even when there were speech checks the majority were extremely mundane in fact speech in fallout 4 is 95 of the time relegated to negotiating rewards where a check can get you a handful of extra caps but there was really no shortage of caps in the world and generally not much to buy with them so this really didn't do much and the saddest thing is i think fallout 4 was really trying because you know how i've been mentioning repeatedly how good it is when a game rewards you for gathering a piece of information from the wider world and giving you a unique resolution to a quest if you've got it fallout 4 does that all the time that's good the problem is all 12 bits of information that assists with other quests come from the same source mama murphy so once you know about that you just nip back to sanctuary hills to put another dose of drugs into the quest solution vending machine which completely removes any feeling of achievement from exploring or engaging with the world that's bad this system just didn't work for one simple reason there aren't enough meaningful speech checks in the game to make investing in charisma just for that purpose worthwhile and far too many charisma boosting items to make it worth bothering with even if you did want to pass the odd extremely rare important speech check and plot twist here despite my snark earlier as of wastelanders fallout 76 has actually come up with a much better system of speech checks probably the best in the 3d fallout games after new vegas in fact even though it's a very simple system it simply uses all of your special stats to stand in for speech checks of varying flavors strength checks to represent intimidation charisma checks to charm perception to make astute observations it's far from perfect and feels like a very simplified version of new vegas's system in a way but it is at least vastly superior to fallout 4 and does come up with a flawed answer to some of the problems we've raised so far so how about a bit of theory crafting how do we solve the problem of speech well let's look at a handful of examples here the outer world of course was directed by veterans of the original fallout and that tried to solve this problem with a very logical solution going right back to the discussion we had about gerbs simply break speech out into different modes of speech in this case persuade lie and intimidate where it is theoretically possible to have all three maxed out by the end of the game absolutely but it would take much more investment than it did in fallout 3 or new vegas making a much bigger dent in your other abilities but the outer worlds had problems too most immediately all three skills were collected in a single dialogue group meaning they level up together during the first 50 points of investment this i think is a major mistake because it undermines role-playing and the idea that your character has a distinct personality instead you're simultaneously charming deceptive and intimidating personally i would have separated these out into different groups intimidate alongside melee attacks and other physical skills lying alongside stealth lock and other underhand abilities and persuade alongside science medicine and other intelligence-based skills this would lead to characters in the early to mid game mostly having access to only one of the three dialogue skills at least initially providing a much more consistent characterization to the captain you were role playing as the other issue with this outer world system is a more general one though they're separated into three skills in real terms there's very little difference between the three extremely often you'll see two or more simultaneous dialogue options available and while each might produce a different response from the npc there's almost never a practical difference you don't have to consider the consequences of the exact lie you're telling the potential damage to your reputation from intimidating somebody prominent or generally whether your target is more likely to be swayed by persuasion lies or intimidation 99 of the time all three skills function as a free problem solve button just like speech does in fallout the outer worlds also run straight into the lanius problem how do you deal with a final boss when you want to provide non-combat solutions but speech 100 creates a huge anti-climax well basically in the outer world it's done by requiring combinations of high skill checks which works pretty well for the most part skill points aren't so liberally thrown around in the outer world but the right combination of gear and followers can get you a handful of really high stats by the end of the game the problem this goes on to create however is that the game presents you with a few different options but without the exact right combination of skills such as needing lockpick 100 to access a crucial hacking terminal you might end up as a hacking specialist who can't use the hacking solution regardless because you didn't also have access to another skill that you had no way of knowing you would need an improvement then but not perfect but perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way because perhaps we don't actually need a speech skill to handle speech and specifically persuasion maybe we don't need a number that tells us whether or not we can talk someone around so i'd like to discuss two mechanics that could form the basis of a persuasion system both of which are perfectly workable as they've both been utilized in some degree by previous fallout games and those systems are reputation and knowledge so reputation of course is a system that obsidian has played with a lot in new vegas new speech options can appear based on your faction reputation talking your way past ncr personnel if you're popular with the ncr for example the outer worlds features this system too though it does seem to have extremely limited usage fallout 3 used a similar if more basic system with karma where npcs might react to you differently based on a general perception of you being good or bad but even the execution in new vegas is fairly simple it's just a tally of how many good things and how many bad things you've done to a particular faction but what if the game started tracking more things in the background to build up a wider more complex picture of who you are and what you're known for what if the game tracked how many kills you had against your name and gave some npcs a preference for dealing with pacifists or more respect for experienced warrior because this is hardly difficult stuff every fallout game does track this number new vegas even used it to give you little perks like the tiered lord death perk fallout 2 also showed a system of special reputational perks that i've discussed previously where certain major feats made you something of a local celebrity generating unique responses now the more i think about it is there any reason why an entire speech system couldn't function like this why can't people's reactions to you be a dynamic function of how they feel about what you've done your reputation and your local actions in fact i'm going to bring up a slightly old example here consider crusader kings 2. now if you want somebody to do something for you you simply need to have them like you enough sure your diplomacy stat working a bit like charisma in this example helps a bit but it's a small part of a wider puzzle do you have a reputation for being kind most people like that though some will actively dislike it have you done anything for that person in particular have you done anything good or bad to the wider community they live in do you have a similar personality to them are you part of the same religion or society are they related to someone who you already have a strong relationship with or have you done something bad to somebody they hate have you bribed them do you know a secret about them that they want you to keep hidden all these things factor into how characters in crusader kings like each other which is itself used to determine whether they're willing to back you when the time comes and i don't see any reason why we couldn't have a relation system like that running in an action rpg too new vegas already used both faction reputation and on rare occasions karma to create unique responses it tracks kills it tracks thefts and all sorts of other things the data is all there adding a list of preferences to npcs in an invisible back end relationship counter doesn't seem unworkable to me i think it would do a lot to make mpcs feel more alive as opposed to the current purely factional system when ninety percent of the people you meet are part of a strange hive mind where they all share the exact same collective opinion of you regardless of whether or not the help you gave their town benefited them directly in any way and we do in fact have examples of this exact system working in fallout games in older world blues the think tank can be dealt with if you've persuaded over half their members to back you but the best example actually comes from fallout 4. in far harbor at one of the dlc's key moments when the town is ready to execute dima the player character can try to step in to save him but will only succeed if the town decides to back you there is no speech check at this moment instead every person in the town has their own personality their own view on the matter some will back you if you helped them some will refuse to support you even if you did help them if you did it in a way that they disagree with some are swayed by whether other people are speaking up or not some are actively opposed to you some prefer to abstain this sort of speech system is a lot harder to put together of course because it effectively means that every character has their own personal reputation system but it is a lot more interesting and immersive than a simple speech skill or community reputation number now the second part of a potential persuasion system is knowledge and this one's very simple and already appears in fallout to varying degrees as we've been discussing quite simply you have to learn about things to bring them up in conversation thereby opening up new possibilities the most famous example of this of course is learning that the super mutants are sterile and telling the master about it though this did also appear in the superhuman gambit in fallout 3 as we touched upon now in a knowledge system there's no need for skill checks pertaining to speech your character just needs to have learnt the information from somewhere and there's a fundamental reason why i think this is a good system simply it rewards players who immerse themselves fully in the world if you engage with the law if you explore thoroughly if you get to understand the world meet people speak to them at length you're rewarded with new solutions now we've mentioned earlier how some speech systems can function as auto win buttons this is how you get around that in modern fallout if you want to fight you don't just need the gun skill you need to aim utilize cover in short there is gameplay if you want to sneak you don't just need the sneak skill you need to mind enemy line of sight use shadows there is gameplay and if you want to use speech in a knowledge based system you don't just boost your speech skill you need to have explored the world well enough to know what to say thus there is gameplay in speech so let me come back round to where we began the lanius question how would lanius be handled under this sort of a proposed system so let's say you wanted to chase him off by scaring him that would logically require an extremely strong reputation perhaps you'd need to have killed a large number of legion troopers including a good number of named legion commanders perhaps you'd have to have already stormed the fort and killed caesar himself perhaps if you were well known as an extremely skilled warrior possibly even from what you are wearing if it included some very gory trophies that could be enough to make lanius run or alternatively what if before choosing a cider you are able to learn enough about legion tactics to give the ncr a tactical advantage if you did enough work with chief hanlon or cassandra moore and impress them enough you could get yourself promoted highly enough within the ncr to start having strategic input into their formations and battle tactics and set up a superior trap to defeat the legion if the final battle went particularly well for the ncr because of your input perhaps lanius would be more willing to abandon a lost cause or what if say at the end of the great khan's quest when they choose to leave the mojave you could do some research and discover some of the legion's eastern holdings were vulnerable because of lanius moving troops the dam what if you could persuade the kanda to head east and attack those legion towns and then during the final battle tell lanius about it making him immediately withdraw to protect the east but only if you're willing to accept that will almost certainly lead to the khans being wiped out now you could come up with other examples of course but that's a handful of potential solutions one based on reputation two based on knowledge that could be used to chase off lanius in a way that i believe would feel a lot less anticlimactic because it takes a lot more setup to accomplish than simply making the stat speech have the number 100 next to it that's just some thoughts from me on speech and the history of fallout i've been meaning to do this one for quite a while actually more fallout video essays to come ladies and gentlemen but in the meantime open john's has been many a true nerd and this has been fallout and the trouble with speech thank you very much and goodbye if we just hide the bodies nobody needs to know about this yes my stupid stupid plan has worked it turns out i'm a genius the giant rad scorpion is not gone oh hang on there's more yet though i'm still being very shocked guys where's the ncr nobody needs to know

Channel: Many A True Nerd

Views: 572,030

Keywords: Fallout, Fallout games, Fallout essay, Fallout video essay, Fallout discussion, Fallout MATN, Fallout many a true nerd, Fallout speech, Fallout speech check, Fallout speech skill, Fallout skills

Id: Zfd3QW4ewzU

Length: 40min 12sec (2412 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020