Hello. As I wrote earlier this week, I'd like to throw up some ideas for broader applications of what are often called "Charisma Boy" or "Diplomacy Boy" skills. In Fallout and Fallout 2, such characters could focus on two skills with good, but fairly limited, applications: Barter and Speech. Barter affected buy and sell prices, Speech affected dialogue options (along with attributes).

Combat boys not only have skills but tools to help define their characters. Three characters who focus on Melee can all use different weapon sets for different purposes. This gives a level of depth to match or exceed that character type's skill breadth.

In my opinion (though some may [read: will] disagree), the Charisma Boy has neither depth or nor breadth in character development. He's got two skills, one with no depth, one with slight depth. Barter is pretty flat. It's just a score that goes up and changes store prices. A player can't do much with it to change his or her gameplay experience other than dump points into it and save money. Even the perks available for Barter don't really allow the player to do anything new with the skill.

Speech opens up a lot of dialogue options, but that's its whole point. It doesn't go beyond that. Attributes can be checked with Speech in dialogue, but ultimately those static checks are just pass/fail. Randomized checks in speech are easily overcome by the ol' "uncontested reload", so there's not much point to them -- they need to be static checks because of the environment in which they appear.

For these reasons, I would like to keep Barter, but divide Speech into two skills: Deception and Persuasion. However, this division is harmful unless the Deception and Persuasion skills have a broader application in the game outside of standard dialogue. [More]