Wasteland Minigames - Fixing Fallout 4

I've been playing a lot of "Fallout 4". While it's held my attention for a long time, it's also got glaring limitations involving its AI and quest design. Twice now I've been thinking there are big missed opportunities that reduce FO4 to a game about murdering most of the wasteland. (You can't even win the main quest without slaughtering several whole factions.) Rather than just complain, I thought of two specific demonstrations that could work as mini-games using FO4's themes to show what might have been. I'm phrasing these in terms of Bethesda's intellectual property, but they don't need to be written like that. I envision each of these as a Unity code project, with minimalist text and buttons, demonstrating gameplay.

1: Surrender Or Die: The Wasteland Trader
In FO4, a typical encounter with one of the many armed camps consists of a bunch of clearly labeled "RAIDER SCUM" (or cannibal mutants, or radiation zombies) charging into battle and fighting to the death to the last man. (If you can't take a few 10mm bullets to the face, you shouldn't be in the Commonwealth raiding business.) Instead, what if you were a trader? A minimal demo is described first, then the potential for expansion.

You have resources of several types, plus skills like medicine, gunsmithing, and repair. You start at hailing distance from a settlement. "Surrender or die!" say the settlers, but this is only their opening offer! You can attack, but this is just a button that ends the encounter -- likely with your death. Instead you can make a counter-offer, talk, or approach/retreat. The goal is to trade by approaching all the way to the settlement without the camp getting so greedy that they attack.

Approaching raises the danger to you, but unlocks (or just eases) more negotiation options.

Talking involves boasting about your skills/resources or trying to persuade the camp about who you are. The camp has stats like "greed", "fear" and "morality", and they have an impression of you based on your appearance: "honest", "dangerous", "rich" and so on. If you use the Talk option you can change that impression, eg. boosting "dangerous" by boasting about your weapons. You also get an impression of the camp's stats, but its accuracy depends on randomness, distance, and a perception skill.

Making an offer involves requesting something (item type X, basically) and offering something (item or service type Y), with the implied part "let me into your camp and don't kill me". You can also express a tone when you make an offer: innocent, friendly, tough, bloodthirsty. With a raider gang, too nice an attitude might make them think you're weak, and attack. So a reply to them might be, "Back off, $%*s. I've got a shotgun. But if you play nice, I'll sell you these delicious cupcakes." (Mechanically, this is the Offer option with "I offer Cupcake x5, in return for ????, tone Dangerous".)

A camp judges your offer based on some randomized set of needs, like "need for medicine and wood is high". I'm not sure yet how these judgments should get accepted or provoke an attack. What info needs to be stored on the camp, and is there some way to prevent outlandish behavior like claiming to have a million stimpacks one moment and a million cupcakes the next? Finally, I'm not sure what balance of rules creates interesting tension and avoids there being one obvious solution of "click this until this stat is high, then click that". (That's what gameplay prototyping is for: finding out quickly if there's a glimmer of fun here.)

You get a final judgment of what happened: did you get ambushed and eaten, or did you leave with a profit and a positive reputation?

EXPANSION: Character customization. Eg. you can be "Pip Klein" who's harmless-looking, a good judge of character (accurate view of camp stats), and deadly if combat breaks out. Or "Velvet" who also looks harmless and carries few goods but has skills in charm, entertainment and medicine. Another big improvement is to have a trading career: the game continues as you visit a series of settlements (simple linear stages) that include ones you've seen before or that share a faction identity. You're a successful trader if you stay alive and get rich. (Combat would still not be played out, but would have outcomes including "you lost some ammo and medicine but escaped" and "you killed them and took their stuff".) A third upgrade would be to have companion characters who carry more goods and have their own skills and faction reputation.


2: Facts Are Stubborn Things: The Synth Campaign
In FO4, there's a plotline in which you befriend the mysterious Institute, which has some internal dissent about the enslavement of its robot "synths", which come in three increasingly human-like generations. The characters mention several opinions about this and completely miss the significance of the synth-liberation faction calling itself the Railroad. Short of slaughtering them, you can't do a thing to influence the Institute's opinion or policy. You're just the hired killer. Let's fix that. The sections labeled "Expansion" are what I'd hope to see if this system were built into a much larger game like the real FO4; the rest is what I'd build in a simple proof-of-concept game.

In this minigame, your goal is to push for synth liberation through rhetoric. There are three aspects to that: Logos (logic), Pathos (emotion), and Ethos (morality relative to the audience's culture). Your work consists of clicking on people from a list of Institute members, then selecting various topics to interview them.

-Logos: Collect evidence of synth intelligence. The goal is to persuade people of Facts A through D, something like "Synths are capable of creativity" and "Synths feel pain". By talking to people, you collect what we'll call "evidence tokens" (inspired by the board game "Android"). A token is a data object like {"A":2, "B":-1}, which would mean "helps prove A but weakens the argument for B". It'd come with text like "Testimony: I once saw a synth artistically carving tattoos into its own skin."
EXPANSION: Collect evidence through your experiences outside the Institute. Eg., did you encounter a robot spouting that line, "Now I understand. You are fleeing because you fear death"? You get a token for hearing that. Did you talk with KLEO the bloodthirsty Assaultron shopkeeper? Token.

-Pathos: Collect evidence that will influence the audience's feelings. Mechanically it works the same way as Logos, where the facts address needs and fears like "The synths won't rise up and kill us if we treat them better" and "You're not alone; other people have synth sympathies too".

-Ethos: You must fit in and be seen as "one of us". The more you talk with people, the more a hidden stat rises, representing you learning the slang and in-jokes of your audience. Interviewing synths might hurt this score but provide high-quality evidence. That's all for a mini-game.
EXPANSION: Lots of potential here. You need to play this persuasion game with individuals, because some won't offer information while you're some random yahoo who showed up wearing radioactive, bloodstained armor. A first stab at this would be to have a "go outside and have adventures" button that spends some of your limited time but gives you resources you can give to the Institute to raise your reputation or bribe individuals. Further expansion would add a choice of weapons/armor, where being seen using Institute-branded gear helps your rep but their laser guns stink. If you remember to switch to Institute clothing and hit the shower when returning, that helps. The full FO4 has way more potential for this: you did personally build up a whole network of settlements and bring electricity and clean water to the wasteland, so that should give you credibility. If you start broaching the subject of the Institute to your people and having them not panic (a persuasion game on its own), you should be able to build special Institute structures/decorations in your settlements to get credit for outreach. Did you gather intel on the Railroad and Brotherhood? Treat that as more tokens, that you cash in for reputation.

Finally, when some timer runs out, you must present some subset of the evidence you've found. (Remember, some tokens are mixed evidence.) If you're able to prove all the necessary facts, as judged by evidence values modified by ethos, the Institute passes a pro-synth referendum and you win.
EXPANSION: Have several phases to this game. Start by persuading one department to back a tentative experiment with synths, and progress to a true synth-liberation victory. Also, draw a distinction between "a campaign to change people's minds" and "a campaign to change policy". Or, of course, link it to the trading game.