Royals missing flavor text?

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BansheeXYZ
Posts: 555
Joined: Fri Oct 23, 2015 8:19 pm

Royals missing flavor text?

Post by BansheeXYZ »

In the conversation window, there is certain flavor text that has a random chance of appearing at the beginning of a response. In the throne room of Gothryd, asking about the Underking, if I get the info...

These intros for nobility show up:

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My dear [player name].
My spies told me about this.
I have impeccable sources.
The talk among the court is amusing.
However, in classic, nobles that have titles get an extra set of possibilities. They seem to appear rarely, but I've seen these occur:

Code: Select all

You are lucky to have asked me. Court gossip has its benefits.
Your loyalty to the king has its reward.
You have always been loyal to me.
Is anyone able to trigger royalty text with 100 PER and 100 rep in DFU?

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Nystul
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Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2015 8:31 am

Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by Nystul »

royality texts are not implemented in dfu, we need to find out what the formula is (when this texts are triggered in classic and by what chance)

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Ferital
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Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by Ferital »

BansheeXYZ wrote: Tue May 28, 2019 5:45 pm Is anyone able to trigger royalty text with 100 PER and 100 rep in DFU?
After digging into classic code, I can say DFU uses almost the same method to get an NPC talk reaction as in classic. The difference actually comes from a buggy behavior from classic, which only updates the NPC reaction when the player opens the talk window or changes his conversational tone, but not when he changes the kind of question he wants to ask. This makes classic gives a default +10 tone modifier to "Tell me about" kind of questions while this modifier is supposed to be available only for "Where is location" kind of questions.

DFU does not have the bug, it correctly uses question tone modifiers, therefore it uses the correct modifier value for "Tell me about", which is... 0. This is why it's so difficult to get the best NPC reaction in DFU: you need a character with a 100 Personality stat to get +20, succeed a Streetwise (for Blunt tone) or Etiquette (for Polite tone) skill check to get +10, then be very lucky to obtain 0 on a D20 dice roll! So, actually, nearly impossible.

I'll submit a PR to fix that because it's clearly an issue.

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Interkarma
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Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by Interkarma »

Ferital, I can't thank you enough for your work reverse engineering all these systems recently. :)

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Ferital
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Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by Ferital »

Thanks Interkarma, actually I like it a lot, I find it very interesting to uncover classic mechanics :)

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Ferital
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Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by Ferital »

I submitted a PR. For those who don't check the GitHub repo, here are the changes I made:

I decided to give Streetwise and Etiquette more weight by setting reaction modifiers related to NPC social groups. For example, talking bluntly to a Noble or Scholar will now give a penalty, while doing the same with a Commoner or a member of the Underworld (Thieves Guild or Assassin) will give a bonus. Of course, using Etiquette through a polite tone will trigger the exact opposite. Merchants, as a sort of middle class, will be unaffected by this change. I gave them a default modifier of +5 when using both skills which makes them behave the same as before as I also changed skill check result: failing will give a penalty of -10 while succeeding will give +5.

I also lowered the required value to get the best NPC reaction, though it's still difficult to get, especially with a low personality and low Etiquette and Streetwise skills.

Finally, I also set default modifiers for "Tell me about" kind of questions the same as there "Where is" counterparts.

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Interkarma
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Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by Interkarma »

Awesome! That last one will count for a lot I think. The negative weighting when asking about people was a shocker.

I'll admit I rarely use etiquette and streetwise. Definitely going to play with them more once this is merged. :)

BansheeXYZ
Posts: 555
Joined: Fri Oct 23, 2015 8:19 pm

Re: Royals missing flavor text?

Post by BansheeXYZ »

Very nice. That and the longstanding bug you found reminds me of how problematic it is to make all this so hidden, especially when the skills are 0-100 and change over time. The player needs a general idea of their impact and what he can get for his skill. He is in total darkness as to (a) the possible range of reactions and (b) how effective his tone skill levels are in boosting him into new reaction ranges. It would be so much better to see some kind of reaction guage below the npc portrait, and see it change in real time upon selecting your tone skills. It would also be a visual aide for npc classes, so you could see how being polite to a peasant hurts you even though your etiquette skill is high.
reaction.png
reaction.png (60.45 KiB) Viewed 931 times

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