The Origin of Dumb Dialog

Hi, it's me, Tim.

Today, I want to tell a story, one of my favorite stories. It's the origin of dumb dialogue in Fallout, and not just in Fallout. Once we used it there—we did Arcanum–we kept using it. Most recently, it appeared in The Outer Worlds. In fact, one of the narrative designers, Nitai Poddar, came to me one day and said, "You know, dumb dialogue's a lot of work, but whenever I get stuck, I just think: 'What would Tim say?'"

I think he meant that as a compliment.

Anyway, let's talk about dumb dialogue.

Need some context for it. The time is 1979. The Starship Enterprise had only ever had one captain. The Atari VCS was the console that ruled the land, and clear sodas were still 10 years off in the future. This is a story of how 14-year-old me learned how to play Dungeons and Dragons.

My mother came home from work and she said, "Hey, Tim, some boys at work are playing a game I think you might like." And by boys, she meant naval officers, captains even. There was even an admiral, because my mom worked in the Judge Advocate General's Office of the U.S. Navy, and some people there were doing weekend gaming sessions.

So, we went to someone's house one weekend, and we all made characters, and we played through a dungeon. Yes, I played with my mother! Now, she didn't really get into it, and she spent a lot of that time trading recipes with this captain's wife. But as soon as we got home, I was like, "I must have these books." I went and bought, I think, the Monster Manual and then the Player's Handbook and then the DM's Guide. I started making all these ideas, all these adventures and dungeons. Got together three or four friends from high school, and we played every single weekend, and we'd switch off DMing.

And one thing I learned as a DM—I learned two big lessons when I was a Dungeon Master, that stuck with all the games I made.

The first one was, players will never, ever, ever do what you think they're gonna do. I make a big dungeon, and my characters would spend most of the session looking for a shopkeeper's missing cat. So what I ended up doing was making a lot of lists of ideas, sometimes not even fully formed ideas. I might be like, "Oh, there's a bandit camp out in those woods, and there's a necromancer's lair in those mountains, and somehow, they're connected!" That way, if they asked for rumors and they wanted to have a mini-adventure when they were going around, I had things ready to throw in their way. These were where side quests came from: I learned to anticipate players aren't going to do what you think they're going to do. That even applied to individual quests: They maybe didn't go in the front door, maybe they wanted to parlay with the villain rather than kill him. This is what all factored into Fallout's multiple ways of solving quests.

The other thing I learned though, was that my players liked it when they got special rules applied to them. Either they found a magic item that was specialized, or—in the case of one of my friends... Joel–he had a cleric and... I decided that it was kind of boring that D&D treated all clerics of any god the same (this is well before Third Edition had their domains).

So for each god, I created a special ability and a special restriction. Joel's god's ability was he could send a message once a day to any other priest of his god, 15 words or less, anywhere in the world. Boy, did he use that. He used that to find information, to send out distress signals, to warn other people. It was really cool.

The restriction was anything that came off of him—clothes, hair, nail clippings, poop—he had to destroy. So every at the end of every adventuring day, the other players got used to the fact that Joel's priest would build a big bonfire and burn anything that he was getting rid of. It also meant that once a magic item went to Joel, it was his.

What was interesting about that is later on, he built a cleric stronghold. I think he made a temple. He didn't want to do the bonfire thing anymore. So what he did is he dug a pit, and he threw green slime into it, and he just threw things in there, and the green slime would destroy it. And when the green slime got too big, he'd take a little scraping off of it, throw a disease, to kill the big green slime and put the scraping back in. So that was fun.

So Joel really liked it, and he was saying, "I really love it. More interesting to play a character." Which might have been the origin of flaws in The Outer Worlds, which also came from disadvantages and quirks. But this was way before even that stuff existed.

So one day, the group is making a new character, and Joel wanted to make a character. And we did the 4d6 method, and he rolled four ones, which means even if he threw away the smallest one, the lowest number, he still had a three. So Joel was like, "I'm gonna make a fighter. I'll put that three in intelligence, and it's not gonna matter." And in D&D intelligence controls languages and spell use. His fighter didn't care.

I told him, "Okay, because you're so dumb, you can only speak in single-syllable words." And he was like, "Fine." And I said, "Okay, but I'm gonna ding you if you say anything that's more than one syllable." So we started adventures. Joel was really good at it. His character was like, "You know, me kill bad guy. Super good." They went into a dungeon, and a portcullis fell and separated the party. There was Joel on one side and the rest of the group on the other. They said, "Hey, you're the fighter. You'll find a way back to us."

Joel went off into the dungeon on his side, checked out some rooms, had a couple encounters, but then he came out onto a ledge that overlooked a big, huge cavern. There was a pile of treasure, a glowing sword, a staff, and some chainmail... But on top of that pile, a big red dragon. Joel backed out the ledge, keep kept going through the dungeon, and finally met up with the original group. He was so excited - but I told him, "You can't say dragon, you can't say lizard, you can't even say fire."

So dude's like, "Loot", "Big", "Red", "Heat", until someone went, "Is there a fire elemental?" And he says, "No, uh, red heat." [Other player says], "Is it a trap of some kind? What are you talking about?" He said, "No, bite." They said, "Is it a vampire?" And he [goes], "No."

They probably spent five minutes trying to figure out what it was he saw, and it was so funny. The whole campaign went on like that with this really, really dumb fighter, and it was so much fun. When we started working on Fallout, and I had to slowly assemble a team and bits and pieces from everywhere, we used to play groups every Thursday night to try to learn the system, because Fallout was originally based on GURPS.

I told that story, and people really liked the idea of putting that in as a low intelligence restriction. I [said], "Okay, but our narrative team has to be on board with that." They were, and so they started writing these really funny dialogues, to the point where there are even a few quests in Fallout that you can do faster and easier if you're dumb. I still remember there's a super mutant, and he just says, "Huh?" And you're like, "What?" He's like, "Duh." And you're like, "Mom?" And he gets so confused, he just steps aside, and you can walk into an area that normally you'd have to fight that guy. I just loved that. Almost 15 years after I learned how to play D&D, here we are, making a computer role-playing game that would turn into Fallout. And this is the genesis of this whole idea.

Anyway, I guess the moral of that story is a lot of experiences can go to inform your game design. One day, I'm gonna record my "10 things I learned about level design" that I learned by going to Disneyland a lot. I'll record that soon.