You can thank a bad Dungeons & Dragons DM for one of Shin Megami Tensei's coolest mechanics
Overview & Key Takeaways
Like all great inventions, it's all thanks to spite.
Many years ago, everyone made fun of one British Doom reviewer who lamented that you couldn't talk to the monsters in the beloved FPS. Everyone probably should have been more relaxed about the whole thing, since even back then there were games that were all about letting you cut it up with the foes you encountered, like 1987's Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, which let you try to persuade monsters you encountered to lay down their arms and join you.
That system continued throughout the Shin Megami Tensei games and (some of) their offshoots right up to the present day, and in a recent chat with Encount (translated by Automaton), former Atlus dev Kazunari Suzuki said it came about because he got frustrated with Dungeons & Dragons—or more accurately, a particular D&D DM—way back in the day.
"It never made sense to me why you can’t speak to the goblins," said Suzuki. "Goblins are also sentient creatures, right? They have a language, and form societies. But if you run into them inside of a dungeon, there is no room for negotiation—you have no option but to kill them. I really hated that."
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The man has a great point and, by the by, it puts me in mind of one of my quibbles with Atlus' recent Metaphor: ReFantazio, which doesn't have a negotiation system, but does have you tearing through entire villages of goblins like the Black Death. But I digress.
Suzuki tried to get his DM at the time to twist the rules in a way that would let him defeat enemies diplomatically, but he didn't get his way. "After asking the Dungeon Master to let me speak to the goblins, they read the rulebook and told me, 'It’s not in the rules so you can’t do it.'
"So I thought, 'Then make up the rules yourself.' Those feelings were where Megami Tensei’s negotiation system came from."
It's like the saying goes: spite is the mother of invention. So thank you, random hidebound D&D DM back in the '80s—without you I wouldn't be doing diplomacy on Mara. I shudder at the thought.
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