In co-op both of us can just decide who gets which trait and get rock paper scissors over with easily by letting one win to finish the quest whatever way we want.
Single player, this is much more of a hassle.
I think if I choose no dialogue during character creation, I should get to decide which one wins the argument without having to do a RPS game every time I want one character to get a different trait than the other but to have the quest go a certain way.
Alternatively, let me concede to one character but still get the trait my first dialogue correlates with rather than just spamming me with obedient points.
These conversations are usually canned and gamey anyway, and I often disagree with the stats paired with traits or the dialogue options that give trait points.
It'd be less headache if I just had control over it myself.
Even better, let me pick traits at character creation and lock them in, so I don't have to worry about it in dialogue. A single trait can be worth 5 ability points if it's in something you plan to max out, and some are also major benefits in combat for certain builds such as heartless and vindictive.
They're just too big of a deal to just dismiss as a minor RP flavor thing. I game them and I'm not ashamed to do so as I enjoy optimizing my characters, I just wish I didn't have to sacrifice my freedom to choose the dialogue options that make sense to me to get the better ones.
It's easy to beat the AI at RPS.
If I read you right, Fellgnome, you enjoy optimizing your characters for performance and would prefer that it was easier for you to do so without bothering with the roleplaying aspects of dialogue, especially because when your two characters argue, because you cannot guaranteed both get the action outcome you want AND the stat outcome you want - instead, the outcome will be chosen at random, biased in favour of the one of your characters that is best at arguing --- as if they were actual people arguing an issue rather than merely a mechanism for allocating you stat points to your preference while choosing an action.
You are entirely right that these things are not "minor RP flavour things", but I strongly disagree with your apparent assumption that they should be, rather than having significant impact.
I mean, this is a roleplaying game. It would be a crying shame if a system for dealing with character personality traits (however defined in the game), was merely "minor roleplaying flavour" rather than something meaningful that affected the player's behaviour. It is better for roleplaying games not to have anything reflecting personality traits than to have a system that merely provides minor flavour - if you want to play around with personalities, make it meaningful.
Ever since Ultima IV I've been strongly in favour of having both words and deeds influence stats in CRPGs rather than leaving everything up to the player to optimize stats as he saw fit while acting as he saw fit, with his actions and stats being effectively unrelated. Roleplaying, even in CRPGs, is to me not merely about building the stat-perfect killer (or trader, or whatever role you choose) to bulldoze through combat/trade/dialogue encounters, but about playing a role.
I do understand where you are coming from, however, as the very first CRPGs I played back in the 80's pretty much were build the most efficient party of killers games, with very, very, little actual roleplaying, and it remains a popular subset of the CRPG game genre to this very day. It was a fun thing to play at that time, and it remains so today.
It is just that I prefer CRPGs that don't reduce roleplaying to minor flavour that isn't supposed to get in the way of stat allocation, so the very thing that is a source of annoyance to you in this game is a source of joy to me.
If I read you right, Fellgnome, you enjoy optimizing your characters for performance and would prefer that it was easier for you to do so without bothering with the roleplaying aspects of dialogue, especially because when your two characters argue, because you cannot guaranteed both get the action outcome you want AND the stat outcome you want - instead, the outcome will be chosen at random, biased in favour of the one of your characters that is best at arguing --- as if they were actual people arguing an issue rather than merely a mechanism for allocating you stat points to your preference while choosing an action.
You are entirely right that these things are not "minor RP flavour things", but I strongly disagree with your apparent assumption that they should be, rather than having significant impact.
I mean, this is a roleplaying game. It would be a crying shame if a system for dealing with character personality traits (however defined in the game), was merely "minor roleplaying flavour" rather than something meaningful that affected the player's behaviour. It is better for roleplaying games not to have anything reflecting personality traits than to have a system that merely provides minor flavour - if you want to play around with personalities, make it meaningful.
Ever since Ultima IV I've been strongly in favour of having both words and deeds influence stats in CRPGs rather than leaving everything up to the player to optimize stats as he saw fit while acting as he saw fit, with his actions and stats being effectively unrelated. Roleplaying, even in CRPGs, is to me not merely about building the stat-perfect killer (or trader, or whatever role you choose) to bulldoze through combat/trade/dialogue encounters, but about playing a role.
I do understand where you are coming from, however, as the very first CRPGs I played back in the 80's pretty much were build the most efficient party of killers games, with very, very, little actual roleplaying, and it remains a popular subset of the CRPG game genre to this very day. It was a fun thing to play at that time, and it remains so today.
It is just that I prefer CRPGs that don't reduce roleplaying to minor flavour that isn't supposed to get in the way of stat allocation, so the very thing that is a source of annoyance to you in this game is a source of joy to me.
I enjoy keeping the personality of my characters separate from their character sheet. Especially when it comes to these cliche/poorly balanced traits and shallow/corny black and white stereotypical RPG pseudo-moral dialogue choices.
Many of them are just inherently better and/or only good for certain characters. For example being Egotistical means I get better prices whereas being Altruistic means I get practically nothing. Or if I'm Compassionate I get + Crit whereas with Heartless I get something only useful for a scoundrel sneak attack build. It's the difference between getting a major boost to effectiveness or next to nothing, but the actual dialogues don't result in anything substantial so it makes complete sense to game them. It just isn't a fun system to deal with.
There should be an option to disable RPS in single-player
There should be an option to disable RPS in single-player
There is, just press space bar to skip it
My only issue with the RPS, and it's a big one, is that I can loss an argument with myself and miss a side quest because of it.
I like the idea, and the arguments are interesting, but since I can't fix the outcome my next playthrough I'm picking the AI personality that just agrees all the time.