SUGGESTION: optional 'stance' based dialogue for bridge officers

System

I should preface this by saying I doubt seriously this suggestion would appear in the first iteration of the Foundry. Or the fifth, very possibly. Still, I think it would be an excellent addition and I therefore am going to suggest it.

In the Foundry, we have the ability to have the seniormost ground bridge officer in each division speak -- and the same for the seniormost space bridge officer. This is very cool. However, there is a monumental amount of diversity between characters. As a result, a male Klingon engineer has to say the same dialogue as a female Vulcan engineer -- and that means the dialogue has to be as neutral as possible.

Which makes it really hard to make dialogue that feels real.

Tailoring dialogue by race or sex seems impractical on Cryptic's part or on our part as Foundevelopers. There's just too many options and variables. However, there is a variable set for every bridge officer which incorporates personality: stance.

I would like to see a system that would let us add different dialogue dependent on what stance a given bridge officer has assigned to them. So, a character with a default stance would just say the default dialogue -- as would any character with a stance that hasn't had alternate dialogue written for it. But we could write something with more edge for a bridge officer with brawler to say, something without contractions and larger words for 'Thoughtful,' something a little more femme fatale for seductive and the like.

No one would be forced to put in the extra work, but for people who wanted that extra level of texture in their UGO, it would be extremely cool.

Thank you, and please enjoy the cheese plate.

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Speaking strictly as a player who has yet to get a shot at the Foundry, I'll pipe up and say... Cool idea. You are correct in that it would mean a lot more work for the author--however, it is likely that fine-tuned extra effort will make or break some missions. Or at least set some well-designed stories apart from the masses.

Having such tools, even if not used all the time, could really add some flexibility, not to mention subtle flavor.

maj!

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There have been several suggestions for ways to add "personality" to Boffs ... but they all hinged on adding new fields to the bridge officer's description.

I have to say, using stance as a key to boff personality is an amazingly elegant solution.

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This would be cool, however I disagree with your assessment that racial [or gender] variables would be too numerous to handle. Providing a default string was entered, designers could add alternatives when conditions were met, rather than designing their dialogue to explicitly function for every race.

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Walshicus wrote:

This would be cool, however I disagree with your assessment that racial [or gender] variables would be too numerous to handle. Providing a default string was entered, designers could add alternatives when conditions were met, rather than designing their dialogue to explicitly function for every race.

This would require adding additional information to the Foundry every time a new race was added to the game. One of the reasons I think a stance based system would work is because the total number of stances is relatively static. While I'm sure they will add more with time, it's far more likely they'll add new races and the like.

Further, there would be potential frustration when someone, say, had an 'Alien' federation bridge officer who they built into an Orion. He (well, let's be honest. She.) wouldn't use the 'Orion' dialogue even if it was put in, but would use 'Alien Female' instead. With a stance based system, 'Seductive' would work regardless.

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Borysthenis wrote:

This would require adding additional information to the Foundry every time a new race was added to the game. One of the reasons I think a stance based system would work is because the total number of stances is relatively static. While I'm sure they will add more with time, it's far more likely they'll add new races and the like.

Further, there would be potential frustration when someone, say, had an 'Alien' federation bridge officer who they built into an Orion. He (well, let's be honest. She.) wouldn't use the 'Orion' dialogue even if it was put in, but would use 'Alien Female' instead. With a stance based system, 'Seductive' would work regardless.

Not really - Foundry ties into the list of races and ships as it is and any races not explicitly given conditional dialogue would use the default.

And let's face it, more often than not you'd only want to single out one or two races to be different from the default; say if you had a mission on Vulcan and your security officer was listed as Vulcan.

Re: aliens... that's a separate discussion I think. As someone who's main Federation character is an "alien" intended to be a Garidian [Vulcanoid], I'm sure to feel the sting of this regardless.

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Walshicus wrote:

Not really - Foundry ties into the list of races and ships as it is and any races not explicitly given conditional dialogue would use the default.

And let's face it, more often than not you'd only want to single out one or two races to be different from the default; say if you had a mission on Vulcan and your security officer was listed as Vulcan.

Re: aliens... that's a separate discussion I think. As someone who's main Federation character is an "alien" intended to be a Garidian [Vulcanoid], I'm sure to feel the sting of this regardless.

Well, if there isn't a logistical issue involved, I can't say I'd mind seeing it (though at that point I'd want the extra layer of granularity to do stance and race alike -- honestly, being able to make someone who's lighthearted crack jokes and someone who's stern be brusque would give me much more sense of personality than "someone who is human talking like a human talks." )

Perhaps it would be best implemented as you say -- a 'flaggable' system, where it goes by stance/personality unless a given race is flagged in a mission, and then it goes to the racial option.

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Borysthenis wrote:

Well, if there isn't a logistical issue involved, I can't say I'd mind seeing it (though at that point I'd want the extra layer of granularity to do stance and race alike -- honestly, being able to make someone who's lighthearted crack jokes and someone who's stern be brusque would give me much more sense of personality than "someone who is human talking like a human talks." )

Perhaps it would be best implemented as you say -- a 'flaggable' system, where it goes by stance/personality unless a given race is flagged in a mission, and then it goes to the racial option.

Basically, every additional set of variables they open up for use in conditional dialogue increases the power of the system exponentially.

I mean, as we've both mentioned, there's stance, gender and race we'd like to see used this way... but you could also have level, faction, ship class, skills [and level of skills], mission completed flags, inventory item flags... lots of stuff. I agree that stance is a very good starting point, though.

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IMO this is an awesome idea.

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This seems like a highly elegant solution to the problem, and STO really needs some way to add more character to Bridge Officers (a problem which will become more glaring when Bioware's "The Old Republic" MMO gets released). Kudos to Borysthenis for a great idea!