Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General [Suggestion]Group-based social abilities in SP

Individual social abilities in SP only cause tiresome micromanagement

I think that the social abilities

- lucky charm
- bartering
- loremaster
- persuasion

should be group-based abilities when you play the game in SP, not abilities that are only applied on an individual character in your group. The overall reason is pretty simple and straightforward: reducing tiresome micromanagement. Much of the reasons comes from my personal observation that there is usually too much unnecessary character changes and inventory movements involved in these abilities in SP. But let's have a look at the individual abilities and why they could work in my opinion better if they were abilities that benefitted the whole group and not just the respective individual character:


1) lucky charm

The reason why I think that lucky charmshould be group-based ability in SP is that there is often a dissent between the character having the ability and the character you usually navigate through the world and the character who is able to carry a lot of stuff around. Lucky charm gives your character more and special loot when opening chests and containers. But usually you control either your PC or the character with the hightest wits score in order to detect traps and secrets. To benefit from lucky charm you had to manually change to the character with the highest score in this ability before opening chests. And in case this character has low strengths (e.g. a mage) you regularly have to move stuff around in the inventory, even on top of that. That's a lot of tiresome micromanagement without any obvious benefit in SP. If lucky charm was a group-based ability you wouldn't have to change your controlled character every time before you open a container and you also wouldn't have regularly move things in the inventory because your lucky charm character cannot carry all the things it collected.


2) bartering

The reason why I think bartering should be a group-based ability is very similar to my reasoning for lucky charm. Again, it only produces tiresome micromanagement in SP if you had to change characters every time before you lead a bartering dialogue. On top of that, the character with the highest bartering score in your group isn't always the one carrying all your valuable stuff, e.g. because it's a low-strength mage. So you have to move the stuff you want to sell and the stuff you just bought between you characters every single time before bartering. I don't see any possible benefit for SP if bartering is only an individual ability.


3) Loremaster

To be honest, the identifing part of loremaster is already a group-based ability. If you play in SP and you want to identify an unknown item you don't have to move the item to the character with the highest score in loremaster. It works on the fly for the whole group which is really a good call (Larian changed that during the DOS1 development). But the second part of loremaster, the identification of an enemies strengths and weaknesses is still based on the individual characters. Again, that makes much sense in coop MP (where everybody fights for themselves) but in SP it's just a tiresome annoyance because often your character with the highest loremaster score isn't the one with the highest initiative as well. On top of that, you had to remember every single enemy profile during the turn of this vry character because you can't just look the enemy profiles up if another character with a low loremaster score is next in line. Again, I don't see the benefit for SP if this ability remains an individual one.


4) Persuasion

Like I already discussed in this thread that the conversation system in DOS2 is designed with a great coop MP experience in mind. It's also a very systemic approach which serves the coop experience well. People have to talk to each other, make compromises and help each other out with their individual skills. But in SP you play alone, naturally, and all characters are controlled by yourself. There is no real-life social component to it. Right now, you can lead dialogues with everyone in your group, even the very same dialogue one after another (I already criticized that in the thread above). As long as this is the case there is pretty much no point why not having a high reasoning score for every single one of your group characters because every character of your group can lead the same dialogue and maybe start an origin or racial specific dialogue with an included persuasion process. And since you have no firm character for conversation and since you don't know when you need persuasion for which character you have to skill each and everyone with this social ability. That reduces freedom of choice significantly and makes this ability rather redundant in SP.
If the dialogue system was changed to a more SP-specific experience (like only allowing your PC to lead dialogues or only allow one character of your group to lead one dialogue) the introduction of persuasion as a group-based ability would even be more pressing. If for example only your own PC could lead dialogues he would be the only one that needed persuasion. The ability would be pretty much completely pointless for the rest of the group if it's not a group-based ability.