Alternatives to Dialog Trees

I was thinking about dialog trees. I made a video about how they're not very good, but I'd like to present some alternatives.

Obviously, one alternative is keywords. Whether typed or added to a list as you discover them, this allows you to steadily uncover new topics in the world and converse with existing NPCs in new ways.

There's a lot of untapped potential in this idea, but it's far from the only idea.

Let's consider the purpose of dialog trees.

In linear, story-driven games, a dialog tree exists to A) tell the player what's going on in the story and B) allow the player to steer the story along predetermined paths. They are limited to predetermined paths because the assets (dialog, visuals, enemies, dungeons) are created custom for each choice.

This is also true of keyword systems. Each keyword is painstakingly scripted with a particular response intended to help draw the player into things. It may not be quite as plot-centric: there's a lot more choices and a lot of them are only tangential to the NPC in question, so often a response will be world-centric or NPC-centric instead of plot-centric. Still, the basic idea is the same: scripted ahead of time.

We do have other options. For example, you can generate topics algorithmically and have different NPCs assigned to know about different aspects of it. NPC 1 might know where the next event node is happening. NPC 2 might know what kinds of enemies you'll face. NPC 3 might know the treasure reward. NPC 4 might have hints for what will happen next.

We can script it in a way where we can substitute in values freely, and allow them to be generated rather than scripted.

This isn't a bad idea, but it doesn't take long before it devolves into dull clue-hunting. Rather than the NPCs being people, they start to feel like cards you just flip over and glance at to see if they're the one you need.

To have us consider the NPCs as people, they need to be more than sources of information. Making NPCs more complex is easy - I can build NPCs that have schedules, like random things, behave differently depending on the weather, whatever. But this complexity only matters if it is "surfaced" to the player. That is, if the player never wants to interact with that complexity, the complexity is just in the way of what the player wants to do.

The complexity we can create depends on the mechanics of the game world. For example, in Rune Factory the calendar plays a big role. So the characters have birthdays and celebrate different festivals in different ways. But this wouldn't work in, say, Fallout 4, because the calendar doesn't matter in that game.

This is an "offloaded" method of interaction. Rather than building a complicated way of interacting with the NPCs, the method is deceptively simple: it's limited to "talk" and "give gift". The complexity comes from managing your timing and the gift you give.

This is "deceptively" simple because it is functionally equivalent to keyword dialog. The only difference is that rather than choosing time and gift from a menu that pops up when you talk to the character, you choose it from the world. You pop up your inventory list and select the item from that. You waste time until it's the right time, and then trigger the event. It's fundamentally the same, we've just offloaded the menu options to world interactions that carry over when you interact with the character.

Of course, this is a bit more "punchy" than an ordinary keyword system, because if you select the wrong options you will suffer a penalty rather than just getting to try again. That's the real difference between this and the keyword system: choices have ramifications.

What kind of interaction system do we have where choices have ramifications?

Shops.

Shopping is about choosing things you want to buy and sell. The exact things you buy and sell depend on your resources, the kinds of things the NPC sells/buys, and what you are trying to accomplish in the larger scope of the game. It never feels complex, but choosing whether to buy a piece of armor, a potion, or a weapon is a surprisingly complex dance that players can pull off intuitively.

Right now, when we think about choices with ramifications, we tend to think of dating games. Choosing gifts and dates and pandering dialog choices. But I don't think that's a good mechanic. I think we should consider our social interactions more like shops. Rather than a given choice being bad or good, it's about a given choice suiting your needs and tactics.

There's no "bad" options in a shop, because weaker options cost less and stronger options cost more. Even meta options such as buying shares or directing supply runs aren't good or bad, they depend on how much you plan to return to this area and whether it suits your current means.

If we just push the shop metaphor, we can have various events, behaviors, and favors treated as items to buy and sell. As when they were weapons, armor, spells, and ammo, we could also make them things that are equipped or deployed in the field, rather than things which are isolated to you and the NPC.

As an example of this, let's say we're doing a sort of Power-Rangers-Style game, where you play a bottom-rung wannabee hero always struggling to put together a team for any given mission. The NPCs in the game are all Power Rangers themselves, although most have a non-Ranger life such as scientist, vampire hunter, or Teen With 'Tude.

When you interact with them, you can "buy" their participation in your battles to some extent, ranging from helping to keep civilians safe to being on your party proper. You can also get them to loan you their various power crystals, suit enhancements, weapons, cars, etc. You can buy loot - monster drops that they have little use for but would enhance your suit pretty nicely. You can also buy their words and "equip" them: they vouch for you to authorities or other rangers, their encouragement or advice in battle. You can recall their words and lean on them.

They are also the only way to increase your stats: training with them is the only way to spend XP and raise various stats and skills. This includes stats like "heart" and "inspiration", as well as developing new battle cries, suit elements, weapons, cars, giant robots, etc.

That can also benefit them, since the only way they can improve is to train with someone at least their own rank in a stat. That someone might as well be you, right? Unless they already have a good friend that will help them train that skill...

To balance your requests, you can "sell" things. That includes all the things you can "buy", sure. But your participation in their battles and your words of encouragement are probably not very valuable. You might have got some decent loot to sell, but probably not, not unless they're lower level than you. You offering to train them is probably not going to be too much use, since most of them already have a group they train with and no reason to switch.

So instead you bribe them with the dumb B-plot events that Power Rangers is known for. You take them to McBurger. You give them advice on their crush. You go on a double date with them. You help them prepare for their school play. You teach them math. You sub in on the sumo wrestling tournament because they sprained their ankle yesterday...

We've turned the negative into a positive. We've created a way to pull you into the dumb B-plots of this kind of game.

It's just an example, but I think it's a good example of alternatives to dialog trees.

If we throw away the need to push the player into our preferred plot line, we can allow the player to wander through all the little threads and tie them together in a unique, meaningful way.

What do you think?

Writing Dialog the Weird Way

This is related to writing dialog in games, despite the rather odd start:

I have a family member who sent me a really detailed horoscope for my birthday.

Did it fit me? Sure.

It also fit my coworkers, my least favorite politicians, the bag lady who wants a nickel, and my long-dead pet dog. That's how they are written. They only start to miss as they get too specific. I'm "unassertive"? Compared to who? Genghis Khan?

But it occurred to me that horoscopes are really effective at what they do. The techniques they use (techniques shared with tarot cards and psychics of all forms) are very well documented and easy to learn. I think everyone should be familiar with them, because you're far more likely to be attacked by misleading sentences than by a man with a knife.

These methods are built to work on anyone.

Now...

One of the real problems of writing dialog in games is that the player could be playing a wide variety of characters. In some games the variety is extremely small - just the same character played in different ways. In some games the variety is absurdly huge - you can play any race, creed, gender, category, belief system... in short, you could be anyone.

The common way to deal with this is to write huge dialog trees that change depending on your stats. "If the player is playing a girl character, start the 'hit on' tree." This is astoundingly painful on both ends, since it takes a lot of effort by the writers and is very transparent to the players.

The techniques used to write horoscopes, give tarot readings, and convince you to join Scientology might be useful in this regard.

There are lots of tricks, but I'll only discuss two of them:

1) Vague statements are the staple of this kind of writing. Pointing out things that all people share and few people talk about to strangers is part of this, and the other part is making the statement itself open to interpretation. For example, "You probably have some issues with relationships" or "you don't always do all you can for people".

Tweaked for a game, these statements could be equally "prescient". For example, we can basically rest assured that by fifteen hours into the game, the player will have developed a strong feeling about one of the NPCs - love, hate, respect, irritation, whatever. We can use this method to talk about that emotion (that relationship) without even knowing anything about it. We can then use step two to gently get information from the player about the specifics.

2) Fishing for details is the art of tossing out specific suggestions which have a fairly high likelyhood of being right, and (optionally) then adjusting based on the reaction of the individual. An example might be "I see someone whose name starts with 'D'... Dehhh... dah...'" and then the target goes "Donald?"

This needs to be treated carefully in a game, though: a player's knowledge about their character is likely to be limited to their statistics, whereas most fishing revolves around people and common events like birthdays. Most fishing dialog will have to be carefully framed, as mentioned above, or the slack will have to be picked up by adaptive characters also involved in the conversation (see below).

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An additional method is to turn these tricks against NPCs. Let the player's dialog contain these kinds of techniques, or let one NPC "read" another in this way.

In this manner, you can basically get a player to learn everything about an NPC and come to think of them as a person - without requiring lengthy exposition or forced cut-scenes. It could even be done on the fly, allowing NPCs with only a vague starting personality to define details about themselves as comments and questions are made.

The trick is to get the dialog to sound natural. You don't want everyone to always sound like they're trying to be psychic, or, worse, have them switch between "normal" and "psychic" mode.

The thing to remember that you're not trying to do horoscopes. You're trying to write dialog. That means that you gently embed these techniques into dialog that follows all the normal rules of character and plot advancement.

Therefore, instead of writing "you are concerned about finances", you might write "Well, I'm going to go buy a new sword. You were doing a lot of fighting yourself, as I recall. Need anything? Healing potion? New boots? Scantily clad local?"

What do you think? Doable? Additional tricks I didn't talk about?