I took the Empathy perk so I can see the values for Speech, Carisma and Intimidation on NPCs, yet Persuasion does not seem to take them into account as I often fail the check even when I have several points more than the NPC. Is that a bug or is it working as intended and if that’s the case then what’s the point of getting Empathy if the contest does not take into account the values? I tried saving and reloading and it seems to make no difference, especially when talking to the guards.
My understanding is that it’s not just a numerical comparison of your skill vs the NPC’s skill, and that what you say actually matters. As an example, when talking to a certain bathhouse maid while searching for a particular tanner’s son, you’ll have two different speech check options come available at the same time; one of those options will succeed if your skill is high enough, while the other will fail even at the same skill level.
In a way it’s kind of neat, since certain things just aren’t going to be convincing to people no matter how much of a smooth talker you may be, but it can also be kind of annoying from a gameplay perspective.
Point is it’s not transparent as i is. It seems a bug, because even with empathy you have no idea what the odds are and even if my speech is 5-6 points higher I still fail even if I load back 10 times so it seems as if I’m destined to fail no matter what especially when talking to guards, which makes Magistrate perk also useless.
So the lack of transparency and the confusing fact that the numbers lie makes it look like a bug to me, can I get an official answer on this? Otherwise if it’s really working as intended then i have to say it’s a really lousy system and empathy and magistrate perks are utterly useless…
1 Like
I think sometimes the numbers matter. Other times they don’t. Not displaying the numbers when they don’t would help eliminate confusion
1 Like
Empathy reveals basic atributes of the NPC. There are adjustments depening on what you say, (stolen, did…etc). Those are not visible.
Which is why empathy is useless, it should be transparent, it makes no sense to hide some information to the player if the player invested a talent to know that.