Dialogue Choices: Generic or Specific?

Which do you prefer?

The situation is that you are playing through a mission, and have encountered an NPC that you can talk with. To progress in the arc, you have to convince this NPC to give you a McGuffin. You cannot actually fail to do this, but the writer has decided to at least give you the illusion of choice.

Would you prefer the resulting dialogue choices to look like:

(Threaten Him)
(Charm Him)
(Trick Him)

OR

"Place the McGuffin on the floor and flee this room. You have 10 seconds to comply."

"NPC, You have nothing to fear from me. I'm on your side in this. Please, hand over the McGuffin, and I can make this work out for both of us. Help me help you.

"How do I know that thing is even genuine? Let me see it; if it's real, then we can deal."

Please try to think in terms of several of your characters on both red and blue side, then post your answer. In this thread, I am only asking about 'illusory choices'. Actual branching dialogue that affects the outcome of a mission or how you character is addressed in the future is a different subject.

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Story Arcs I created:

Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!

Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!

Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!

I would prefer the latter *if* they really change the outcome, but they generally don't and so they don't feel like you're really doing anything different.

I like choice, but the illusion of choice is something that only works when it's masked well enough that you don't notice it, so you might as well just stick the generalised options.

Then again, from an RP perspective it's nice if you can take dialogue options that more accurately reflect how your character would react to a situation, but if the option you want isn't there a vague one might be better.

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First of all, I like actually HAVING these choices. Having run through Twinshot's arc on Beta and Dr. Zombie's arc on Live, I'm sick and tired of seeing dialogue "trees" with only one branch ever.

As for your duality, I could go with either, depending on the situation.

If we're talking about actual, practical choice that determines the outcome of an encounter, I'd say I prefer the more generic options, because they determine what I DO more so than what I say. However, City of Heroes is limited in how much your decisions can change, as one way or the other you're getting the next mission.

If we're talking about cosmetic choice, then I prefer specific lines. The better and more detailed these are, the more they enhance the cosmetic feel, because they determine how we act more so than what we do.

In fact, if I had my way, most dialogue trees would always have at least three different paths to the same conversation, depicting the same events and reaching the same result, but representing three different character types. To borrow from Alpha Protocol, let's call these Professional, Aggressive and Suave/********. Professionals would get straight to business and end conversations when they're no longer necessary, aggressives will yell, growl and threaten while smartasses will joke around, toy with people and occasionally spout nonsense.

Having my character's words written for him or her is a bad idea unless there is enough variety to match at least one option to my character's personality even just roughly. For instance, a contact of mine was crazy and murdered the woman he loved. I had the option to console him or tell him he's an idiot and I used him. I'm not sure what effect the different options would have had, but I'm glad to see I was given the option to either be nice or a jerk.

I don't really need functional freedom of choice outside of some very specific situations where decisions really matter, such as whether I want to kill people or take them in. I do, however, want cosmetic choices in as many places as possible.

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