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I was thinking about a speech skill earlier today. A lot of games have them, but most seem to make it where you use it to just persuade people or get better prices. My thought was to make it much more useful and realistic by having it to where you could say almost nothing when prompted in a dialog if your speech was low and the few things you would say would come out wrong and confuse the NPC or whatever you were talking to. Much like someone who never interacts with people would be, but once you improved your skill you could say lots of things eloquently and charm people.

While I will probably never use this in a game, I thought it was an interesting idea and wanted some feedback. What do you guys think of this type of skill? Thanks!

Sounds cool! I like skills that are not just glorified combat stats. However, I think this would work better in a single-player RPG than an MMO or PBBG (since MMO-style games cannot branch too far in their story or the world can become painfully fractured and instanced). Maybe something like a Bioware RPG. One thing to watch, though, in a game like that is that it would probably be an extremely valuable skill since it could get you better outcomes and get you into segments of the game others could not get to, so it would probably be better to break it out into several different skills. Just think about several different traits to come up with the names of them and their functions, since most traits we as humans pay attention to today are all social traits.

mhm i think this skill is already used in skyrim,
eg. with low speech skill: u steal something and people will hunt u
instead with high speech skill: u can talk yourself out of such situations

but i find it also an nice idea

Thanks for the feedback. I agree this skill is more designed for single player type game. It could be introduced in a small multiplayer game, but I definitely agree. MMOs are out.

Skyrim does have something similar, but I am not sure it is the same as what I had in mind.

So you do think this would be strong enough to warrent its own skill and not just a type of almost subskill? I feel like an average player would definitely use and level it and it could add an interesting change to ordanary skills.

I think it'd warrant being it's own skill the more it's actually part of gameplay. If not very much, it's a subskill. If 50% of your game is 'social combat' (ie, arguing for a certain cause), then it definately needs it's own skill.

If it effects 50% of the game or more, it would likely need to actually be several skills used in different situations. You have to look out for "uber skills", because then it doesn't become an option for the player whether they will level it up or not, and players who didn't know will basically have to restart the game and level it up the second time through.

Well, alot of games are over 50% fighting and you don't get that problem. Often because combat skill auto levels (to some extent) when you level. At the 50% mark you'd have the social skill auto leveling as much as combat skills do in most games (ie, you'd probably end up with a social skill tree to spend talent points in, like wow has combat skill tree to spend talent points in (or it did way back when I played)).

True, but you don't typically simply have a "combat" stat that handles melee attacks, offensive magic spells, defensive magic spells, evasion, etc.

That is what I am thinking if the social skill would have a big impact. It could also make it more interesting and add more player choices if they had to level up aspects of social interaction rather than just having it all lumped into one skill.

IMO you could make it its own skills, then have subskills such as Persuasion, how well he talks out of sticky situations, haggling, etc.