Dialogue Trees: The art of deception

A common complaint about dialogue trees is that the player's choices don't matter. No matter what option you pick, you wind up in the same place. The choice of words is just a nod to geeky roleplayers who imagine their characters outside the confines of the game - or worse, a deception meant to fool players into thinking there's more to the game than there really is.

To which I reply: Yeah, so what?

Sure, there's an illusion here - just like there's an illusion in movies, plays, and TV. However, it's an illusion created with the assent of the audience. Does it bother anyone that Two and a Half Men is filmed on a set with flimsy portable walls? Of course not. We want to be deceived. The only time the phoniness of a show bothers us is when it's too obvious, interfering with our ability to believe in what we're seeing.

The same is true of all aspects of game design. In the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset, there are flat buildings and tree models that look just like stage props. They're for placing at the edge of an area to create the illusion of a bigger world. Similarly, if you pop open an area from Dragon Age, you'll probably find things like towers floating in the air far from the playable area - meant not to be visited, but to fill out the skyline.

But this is the last post in my series on dialogue trees, so I'm going to focus on how you create the illusion that the player's dialogue choices really matter. Of course, sometimes those options do matter. Sometimes they determine a course of action, such as whether to attack an NPC, or open a store, or do any number of other things. However, by necessity most options are Roleplaying Responses that don't have a direct impact on the game. Its those options - the stage props of RPG conversations - that I'm going to focus on.

Dialogue Trees: Rules to bend and break

There are a number of rules I follow when modding. Fortunately, none of my rules of modding prohibit me from talking about modding,* so that's what I intend to do in this post. Specifically, I want to discuss some of the rules I follow when writing dialogue trees. My last post provided an overview of dialogue trees and the different types of PC responses. This one is going to delve into greater detail, with the sort of concrete statements that might be found in a standards document for a game company.

* That's a Fight Club reference, and obviously not a very clever one since I feel the need to point it out.

Before I start, I should mention my last rule of modding, which is to break every one the rules at some point in the game. This rule is a paradox, because it requires you to break it, which means there are rules that should never be broken, which is actually true. But never mind all that. The point is that slavish adherence to rules tends to make games predictable, so once in awhile, it's good to break up the pattern.

With that, here are some rules, guidelines, pieces of advice - whatever you want to call them - to consider when creating dialogue trees.

Dialogue Trees: From roots to branches

RPGs come in many forms, but almost all of them have one design element in common - the dialogue tree. This method of constructing conversations has been around for a long time, and while it's reviled by some and mocked by others, no one has yet come up with anything better. Even the dialogue wheel used in Bioware games is just a shiny interface hiding the same underlying structure. It brings to mind what Churchill said about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

Yes, that just happened. I quoted Churchill on a blog about video games.

With dialogue trees being ubiquitous in RPGs, I thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time discussing their structure and some best practices for creating them. Much of what I'll say represents solid RPG standard, which I've learned either through playing the games or from following the standards set forth by Ossian Studios. Other points - perhaps the more contentious ones - are based on my personal experience writing RPG conversations over the years.

I can't cover everything in one post, so let's break this up into three parts. In this first part, I'll focus on PC responses, which create much of the "branching" in dialogue trees. Specifically, I'll talk about the different types of PC responses and how to approach each.