They are are not bad persay but rather filed with holes and meander about the story leaving an off taste in your mouth(Dragon age/Mass effect).

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Heres what I wrote out a few days ago.
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Alignment(or krama) systems good, bad and the lack of choice.

Updated 1/19/011, 1/20/011, updates in italic.

Notes:2-5 sentences a paragraph keep paragraphs on subject,try and detail information for those who are not gamers or are aware of mechanics.

Alignment(or krama) systems good, bad and the lack of choice.

Updated 1/19/011, updates in italic.

Notes:2-5 sentences a paragraph keep paragraphs on subject,try and detail information for those who are not gamers or are aware of mechanics.

Most games that try and offer depth in their story telling by allowing you the player to make choices in their dialog pathing system which results in taking different story paths thought the game. If you do not quit understand the concept you go to a guy in the game and are given a few ways to handle that story path either ignore him(non choice) take the mission for more than what he can afford or steal or sell the item before you return to him(evil) or finish the mission for no payment. Typically these choices revolve around doing something positive, kind or good and doing something evil, selfish or negative. These choices tend to lack depth as a game slowly becomes picking A or B option that ultimately ends in a predictable manner.

Since the last 90s developers have not really advanced or made deeper dialog pathing system options. Yes some have had good story telling but most have had fair story telling on an over simplified choice system. Some may have even given a 3rd option of being less or more of an ass but I feel even that is not used well.

From my musings on the mechanic of a multiple choice dialog system that offers a varied pathing structure that is deep but not overwhelming from a design and development standpoint. You first understand the concepts of good and evil and then yes place them on a measuring bar that is half good and evil. Then you must comprehend how mired humans are in shades of gray.

So instead of having 2 absolute points you have 2 end points (good and evil) with about 5 markers in-between. The total markers are something like so, Angelic, good, friendly /bad ass/ asshole, Villain, Baby eater/Monster . Bad ass tends to be on the flip side of neutral a mix of asshole and friendly. Then you have the gauge bar pop out a side or bottom bar to display levels neutral type characters ones that work based off their sense of honor or life style as well as one for bass ass.
Basically if you stay at a chosen point on the bar long enough you get to open up the secondary bar, but all this is mainly to show where you are alignment wise as one part log one part your score/level the game uses for calculating nuances in your encounters with people.

Something I missed in my previous post how people “see” you. Depending on how cheery the town is thats the base like/hate score for you, it raises as you do jobs locally and raises even more for the people you work for, at least if they are happy with the jobs outcome. Of coruse the more you annoy them the more they are going to hate you like bartering in morrowind only more dialog based, if a person hates talking to you the more annoyed they are at you like on morrorwind when you haggle prices down and after awhile the trader hates even to the point or attacking if I recall, but rather taking it to such an extreme when you get into a fight or whatever everyone’s opinion of you drops some are more likely to attack than others during the fighting event but heads cool off and no harm is done unless you go out of your way to kill them.
An easy way out is use money/items to help in people not hating you as long as its not the focus of the game *cough fable2cough*.

Something I missed in my previous post is an explanation of how events and choices change you make effect the game , even if its obvious it dose not hurt to go over them.

First off blind karma counters suck you should only get dinged for a good/bad score if its not witnessed IE instead of a whole point of 1.0 its more like 0.001, not being seen is something that should always be on the mind of devs when they work on deeper mechanics. IE if you are thief or pickpocket you are going to get much lower negative Alignment/karma hits if you do so a.without anyone around b.with accompanying stats for hiding and when there is no one around in line of sight then you will always get lower results as long as there is nothing around to see you doing it.

With dailog and choices for quests those choices on the end of the quest have varying but high points/effects 5-25 or higher but those choices result in a greater shift in your alignment thus a greater shift in how the locality the region and the world looks at you and from those perspectives the story can be weaved and layered out to fully taken into account your total choice score so far.

Now the fun part begins having the game world deal with you and your alignment. Just having them deal with it via a single value is a bit… limited IMO. A single value is you walk into a bar the people see you if you are an experienced character (heroic/demonic) they size you up based on your values.
This works well for maybe the first area after that it kinda gets repetitive, instead let’s do this your alignment merely shows your total alignment so far but not the alignment or what the world thinks of you for the town or region or world as a whole. Your alignment should be augmented by the town/region you are in and the town region should have a separate score of what they think of you as a general populace.

A town is merely a group of people a region is a group of towns that share the same mindsets so you can have at least 2 different mindsets in a region, this way you can place a character on a mostly good path where they can walk in the streets of a non chaotic town or be spat/shot at because the character is a villain and so he can walk in more chaotic crime ridden areas without issue most of the time.

This allows your character to open up a new region to likening you and adds nuances to pathing, tho realistically one or two quests in that region will open most of the people up to you. The world’s alignment score for you goes up slowly and marks your progression as a famous or not hero/villain/other. And yes we see shades of this being used but its more random than a well polished system.

With this in place you can use a 6 tiered system to offer up to 6-12 options per encounter with the public and the game actually taking note of most of them. I do realize I missed things I am far from perfect and have issues with grammar but I am trying to convey my passion for game mechanics, one bucket at a time.

When I read the title I thought of things like using cars to block off key intersections or alleys in GTA, or leaping from rooftops to avoid guards in Morrowind.

I think you could almost have two separate articles here, one on cheats/bug exploits, another on using the intended game mechanics to get unintended results.