New To Daggerfall

[Interkarma]

Fascinating. I just re-downloaded .146 to make sure I was playing from a real build instead of editor, and I'm reliably getting directions to Bargain Herbs in usually <4 attempts.

Something to keep in mind is that once you fail your reaction with an NPC, you stay failed no matter what else you ask them, even if you exit talk window and open it attempt. So 1 attempt must be equal to 1 unique NPC each time.

It's easy enough to add a small bias so that reaction has a higher chance of success even with a low personality. But from I understand the formula for this was reverse engineered from classic, so the two should be fairly equivalent.

Maybe there's an issue with random number seeding on Linux builds here? Edit: Just looked at code and reaction formula is using DFRandom and is seeding correctly each time. It's using GetHashCode() from the NPC gameObject for seed so that reaction rolls are consistent for each unique NPC. I wonder if that's what is misbehaving?

[Jay_H]

Yep, each attempt was with a different NPC. I showed off the multiple attempts with one NPC just to show that they were rude and not merely ignorant.

I suspect the bug comes from asking for an NPC instead of a location. The deviations from your experiment are that I'm in the quest Standard Protection and asking for the first NPC on the list. I just tried asking for the Alchemist and the good responses came immediately.

[Interkarma]

Ah, OK. At least you're getting similar results when asking about Bargain Herbs. At least I can rule out a seed issue then.

When asking about a quest person, you actually get a -10 to reaction roll. The NPCs are more inclined to give directions to local businesses. You need to have a higher personality to get answers about quest people.

Here are the classic reaction modifers based on question type:

Code: Select all

Location		+10
Person			 -5
Thing			  0
Work			  0
QuestLocation		  0
OrganizationInfo	  0
QuestPerson		-10
QuestItem		 -5

The formula is reactionValue=(PER/5)+questionTypeModifier+toneModifier. The toneModifier will be adjusted based on your relevant speech skill.

Your reactionValue must then beat a random number from 0 to 20 to get a positive reaction. If you have a high personality and speech skills, you'll always get over 20. If you have a low personality and speech skills, you'll come in less than 0. In the case of your character asking about a quest NPC (-10 modifier), their reactionValue calculation is always -2 so you have no chance of succeeding the roll. You need to up your skills and attributes just a little bit.

As far as I'm aware this whole formula and modifier by question type have been reverse engineered from classic. I'm still not convinced this is a bug.

[Jay_H]

Interesting, I had no idea there were different rolls for NPCs and buildings. I'll just have to bear it in mind Thanks for going along with me on that.

[BansheeXYZ]

To quote the game itself "with your personality of 19, you are considered unpopular". There should be no surprise that NPCs don't want to deal with you, they perceive your character as rude and abrasive and your very presence is an affront to them.

That isn't the clearest way of saying that personality affects reactions. Especially when other attributes have the same descriptions that hold no deeper meanings. So the game (a) doesn't tell you that Personality affects reactions and (b) tells you you have reputation levels with classes, but then hides reputation changes after character creation. Because it's only important to know where they are at the start, not 100 quests later...

When Morrowind used both rep and PER towards reactions, it didn't do it invisibly. Every npc had a "disposition" meter. I also think it was much harder or even impossible to create a character that was naturally despised out the gate. Probably because it was deemed bad design to let a player lower his stats to the point that he couldn't get quest answers at lvl 1.

Creating a character is a strategic process of assessing tradeoffs, sacrificing one thing to benefit another. Pretty hard to strategize anything when the game doesn't tell you what personality, speed, and luck actually do.

In my opinion, personality shouldn't have affected reactions, not without some kind of visible disposition system. This is because reputation does the same thing. Say you've got 15 personality and 100 reputation. If 15 PER makes you "unpopular", then what does 100 reputation make you? The opposite. So you're both popular and unpopular at the same time, that's not confusing or anything.... The conversation text doesn't even show your character talking down or insulting people. They're just questions. Personality matters more in acts of persuasion, so for several reasons it would've been better for it to do nothing but affect PER skills.

[Interkarma]

I think it's fairly clear, you're free to feel otherwise.

[Jaiysaun]

Lowering personality should have consequences when dealing with people. This makes perfect sense to me. Though, tooltips in character creation like I saw mentioned elsewhere would help to warn people that it's not just a free source of attribute points anymore.

[BansheeXYZ]

Lowering personality should have consequences when dealing with people. This makes perfect sense to me.

By the same logic, raising reputation should have benefits when dealing with people. So what happens when your PER is low but your reputation is high? Can you even predict the value of PER when you don't know the value of rep and how it interplays with it?

From a game design standpoint, attributes don't have to work this way with low=penalty, high=bonus. They can simply be bonuses where the lowest value = no bonus at all. Every other attribute in daggerfall works this way except PER. It's not that games should never do penalties like low STR prohibiting platemail and low INT prohibiting learning certain spells. It's that daggerfall does it for one attribute without telling you, ontop of a reputation system.

[Kaedius]

From a game design standpoint, attributes don't have to work this way with low=penalty, high=bonus. They can simply be bonuses where the lowest value = no bonus at all. Every other attribute in daggerfall works this way except PER.

That's not true though. You get a negative penalty to attack with low agility, penalty to regen rate and hitpoints with low endurance, penalty to melee damage with low strength. Low personality, following the same logic as those attributes, applies a penalty as well. In this case it's to your reputation.

Just like having lower agility means you have a lower base attack chance to overcome, having low personality means you have a lower base reputation to overcome. Seems completely in line with other stats and makes perfect sense. Think of lower personality and high rep as being inherently unlikable to most people, but your deeds/actions makes the people who know of you have a higher opinion.

You're right the game doesn't spell it out, but I like having a level of obfuscation like that instead of a bar that says "This person likes you by a value of 75" or whatever when you talk to a random stranger.

[BansheeXYZ]

You get a negative penalty to attack with low agility, penalty to regen rate and hitpoints with low endurance, penalty to melee damage with low strength. Low personality, following the same logic as those attributes, applies a penalty as well. In this case it's to your reputation.

That's true, although I just made a character with 11 agi and he barely misses at all. I guess I'm thinking in terms of hard penalties, not simply number reduction. Getting info and not getting it is a threshold, it's not a gradual reduction in the info you get. That makes low PER's penalty profound. And if the way to raise rep is to do quests, but you can't do quests because no one will help you, you're in an immediate hole that's hard to get out of. Sorry, I just think that's bad design.