Ooh... [Allure] looks intriguing.

My problem with vanilla dialogues (well, one of my various problems) is how the persuade, bribe, and intimidate options work.

It never seems like they do what they're intended for. I mean, I have yet to fail a persuade check with almost anyone... and those I do seem specifically designed to prevent it. Like, the Caught Red Handed quest in Riften - one of those guys (can't remember which right now) will only work with the Intimidate option, regardless of your speechcraft level, relationshiprank, etc.

I seem to remember reading that it's because of their combat AI settings... the "aggressive" or "cowardly" flag or whatever. Like, some dev had a bright idea and merged the two systems in a way that makes perfectly logical sense, but the interaction just didn't pan out.

I dunno, maybe it's just happening to me... but when you can [persuade] 95% of the NPCs in the game if your speechcraft level is above 25, it seems a bit broken.

Ooh... [Allure] looks intriguing.

 

Yeah, it's one of those standard perks that never seems to do much. That's the trouble with most of the perks in Skyrim. They get computed behind the scenes and you get the results, but you rarely get to see them working.

It never seems like they do what they're intended for. I mean, I have yet to fail a persuade check with almost anyone... and those I do seem specifically designed to prevent it. Like, the Caught Red Handed quest in Riften - one of those guys (can't remember which right now) will only work with the Intimidate option, regardless of your speechcraft level, relationshiprank, etc.

 

Or the persuade checks outside Whiterun and Riften. I've never once failed on of those things.

I seem to remember reading that it's because of their combat AI settings... the "aggressive" or "cowardly" flag or whatever. Like, some dev had a bright idea and merged the two systems in a way that makes perfectly logical sense, but the interaction just didn't pan out.

 

Sounds like Skyrim in a nutshell, some days.

Anyway, the plan here is you get a starting point and then if your speechcraft is something like 20 or so you get an extra dialogue option that let's you haggle and the price drops a bit. If your speech is 50 or so, you get another haggle option in the next dialogue, and that drops the price a bit more.

Finally once you've reduced it as far as you can go, if you happen to be female and have the allure perk you can get him to knock 10% or so off the price on top of everything else.

After which he can get quite sarcastic if you don't have the funds to meet the negotiated price, of course.

Mind, I'm only doing this in one place. The amount of writing is insane. At least compared to saying "the price is X - take it or leave it" and adjusting it for the player's skills. But if you can't occasionally see a skill working, it sort of takes away the point.

Sorry - bit of a rant there.

Na, man, I hear ya. I understand some people's argument that seeing a skill work reduces immersion - i.e. if I see the word "allure" in the dialogue, it takes away from it - and I do agree, to a point. But it's nice to know that your character build actually matters - hiding everything behind the scenes makes it seem like that's the only way it is.

Fallout 2 (and maybe Fallout 1? Never tried being stupid there) had a system where the dialogue would actually change quite dramatically depending on your stats. High intelligence characters would have very different interactions with NPCs than low intelligence ones.

p.s. Maybe it's just bad jpg compression making the kerning look off, but is there a space between "wasn't" and "talking" in dpv_pretty_vacant_crazy_person?

p.p.s. How did you get allure to work properly? I tried to get Frea to work off perks in Reward Your Followers, using the hasperk() dialogue condition, but it never actually worked (i.e. I had the perk but she wouldn't use that dialogue, as if I did not have it). I had to switch to skill levels.

Yeah, there a space there. It looks like that in the CK too, but it's OK int the game.

Allure - just the way you see, really. I have one option that's condition with if HasPerk Allure and Player is opposite sex then choose that option. Then the next one (in this case) is the allure option with insufficient cash. After that I do the non-allure cases.

[edit]

Do people really think that [Allure] breaks immersion? I never heard that one before. Oh well...

Do people really think that [Allure] breaks immersion? I never heard that one before. Oh well...

I've only read one person complain about [Persuade] and [intimidate] but I've seen a couple people not liking (Sex) IIRC on sex-starting dialogue options.

I can sort of see the point for (Sex). I mean for [Allure] you're offering feedback that a skill is having an effect, for [Persuade] you're saying "this uses a skill and may fail" (allegedly).

With "(Sex)" though you're not telling the player anything that isn't going to be obvious from the dialogue and from what happens immediately afterwards.  I could see the it, maybe, if the dialogue was particularly indirect and flirtatious ... but to my mind you'd spoil the effect of that by adding "(Sex)" to the front.

Probably better, to my way of thinking at least, would be to have a topic saying "Let's talk about sex, baby" (maybe not those exact words) and stack all the nookie related options underneath.

Of course that only works if there's just one mod offering sex options. 

Different subject: is it just me, or has this place been kind of dead the last couple of days?

It has felt sort of empty. Few comments, few updates, few questions, few answers.

On the other hand, few trolls.