What is your preferred use of "Tone Icons" in Dragon Age dialogue?

To be fair, I think morality systems would feel a lot more nuanced if they granted benefits for targeting a zone in the middle of the bar rather than the ends.

Obviously that doesn’t map to a good/evil scale very well, so it would have to be something more like flexibility/assertiveness or loyalty/independence. For example, imagine if DA2’s friendship/rivalry system had worked the opposite way. If you really wanted to build a deep bond with a companion, you would sometimes support them and sometimes challenge them. Too much support, and you’re a creepy yes-man; too many challenges, and they stop listening to your opinion. That would still leave open the option of going hard for one extreme, but it becomes a conscious roleplaying choice that’s made in spite of the mechanical penalty.

However, for the players who want the mechanical benefit, there are now more varied ways for that to play out. For simplicity, let’s say there are 4 decision points: A/a, B/b, C/c, and D/d. In an all-or-nothing system, people will generally pick ABCD or abcd, with only small deviations from their dominant aligment. Those are the only permutations that grant a bonus.

Now imagine that they get a reward for balancing the meter 2/4. There are now 6 target permutations: ABcd, AbCd, AbcD, aBCd, aBcD, abCD. A 3/4 balance would have even more target permutations: Abcd, aBcd, abCd, abcD, aBCD, AbCD, ABcD, ABCd; eight in total. So rather than encouraging people to take one of two largely determined paths, a balance meter encourages players to explore PCs with many different value systems.

And despite being “easier” in the sense that more permutations grant rewards, balance meters are usually perceived as more challenging,* because none of the many paths to the bonus involve blindly choosing Paragon.

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* See for example Long Live the Queen, affectionately referred to as “the Dark Souls of visual novels”, which works off of opposing mood meters. Go too far into any specific mood, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to get screwed over. So you can’t just keep repeating the same behavior and expect to survive.

Everything in the first game taught me that Paragon Shepard was polite and Renegade Shepard was abrupt. I wanted polite.

It had the choice icon, if I recall correctly. It was a branching option.

"No" had the attack icon.

There was nothing to that point that indicated Hawke had to hate slavers. That he did was a complete surprise to me.

So far, the tone icons are giving us less information, not more.

Also, while I agree that having more information is good, all else being equal, all else isn't equal. Once the writers expect us to have that metagame information, they will write options assuming we will use it. DAO had this problem with cutscenes; the game assumed the Warden knew what happened in cutscenes even if the Warden was not present for those events (Loghain's betrayal, Zevran's recruitment).

As such, I think the game would offer better roleplaying if that information wasn't available, because then the writers wouldn't assume we would use it.

I don't care if the characters are voiced. I care if I have perfect knowledge of my character's mind, and so far the voiced games have failed to give me that entirely because of how the voice was implemented (DAI and MEA were the vest voiced games in the regard, so perhaps BioWare is getting better).

I found the MET and DA2 were awful at this (especially ME2 and ME3 with that abomination that was the interrupt system).

I still don't understand any of the complaints about DAO's silent protagonist. It's like we're speaking different languages.

Bioware's silent protagonist games modeled real-world conversations just about perfectly.


We should have that information during character creation, yes. Why don't we?

If we can't have it, it makes sense to give the player more control during the run of gameplay. The silent protagonist did that.

No one complained about that before they started voicing NPCs. Maybe that's the problem we should fix.

Tabletop RPGs aren't voiced unless you do it yourself.

That's no reason to stop asking.

If we do not object, observers will think we have accepted this change. We do not.

"We must dissent." - Sister Miriam Godwinson

Errrr... tabletop RPGs aren’t a dying breed. Tabletop has experienced a massive resurgence in the past couple years.

Gen Con, the main tabletop gaming convention in the US, had over sixty thousand attendees in 2016, with more coming each year. That’s about one-third the size of SDCC, and roughly the same size as PAX.

Roll20, which is the platform most people use when they want to play TTRPGs long-distance, has over 2 million users.

D&D 5e is currently #59 on Amazon’s bestsellers list. Not just for games, but overall. And it came out in 2014.

My preferred use of "TONE ICONS" is for no icons.

We are supposed to play our character so we should decide what and how we should speak and that is what developers should strive for.

Each to his own, but for me, Dragon Age became a lot more interesting when they moved to a voiced protagonist.

I think there's a lot of nostalgia for how great the dialogue was in RPGs back in the day, but that's not really how I remember it.

I actually like the tone icons, makes it easier to pick a suitable reaction for a given situation
especially if some of the dialogue options are a bit vague, which isn't may times mind you
I also just find them pretty, they add color

in several of my DA 2 playthroughs playing as a female character I always end up accidentally starting Anders' romance by being nice to him

Probably leaning on the side of support of tones because they do give more info about intent of line.

Fallout 4 had 'sarcastic' as an option.

I'm not going to change the poll (because you can't - I'd have to make a new one and get everyone to vote again), but; have I missed/left out a really, really obvious option?

I was expecting the "just like DAI" option to be ahead, but honestly - not by this amount...

I don't understand how to play the voiced protagonists.

If I'm roleplaying, I need to have perfect knowledge of my character's state-of-mind. Since that state-of-mind is what drives every decision my character makes, I need to know what it is in order to use it to inform the decision-making.

So either I have to craft that state-of-mind myself, or the writers have to find some way to tell me about everything my character is thinking at literally every moment of the game.

The latter isn't feasible, which leaves the former as my only option. So let's work from that.

If I'm the architect of my character's state-of-mind, I need to know what he's going to say and how he's going to say it before I choose the dialogue option. Once I choose the dialogue option, I need to maintain that state-of-mind in order to correctly interpret whatever response my character receives.

If the delivery of the line either says something I wasn't expecting (a bad paraphrase) or in an unexpected tone (bad icon), I'm left having to retroactively construct my character's state-of-mind each time, and only after I do that am I ready to understand how my character will interpret any response.

That's way too much work, and it gets harder and harder the farther into the game I go, because there's more past behaviour to reconcile.

Therefore, it cannot be the case that my character's words or tone ever surprise me. When the voiced protagonist meets that standard, only then will I accept it.