Speechcraft perks actually make dialogue feel pointless

[RiftenWanderer]

Playing through again on my Switch and I just realized how weird the Speechcraft tree is. Like, you get perks that literally just... remove dialogue options? Persuasion, Intimidation, Bribery - fine, those make sense. But then there's stuff like the perk that lets you pickpocket during dialogue or the one that makes people easier to pickpocket if you've invested in Speechcraft, and it's like... why is this in the Speechcraft tree at all?

The whole school feels like it's designed to let you skip dialogue rather than engage with it. Compare that to something like Ordinator if you've modded, where Speechcraft actually gives you tools to manipulate conversations in interesting ways. In vanilla Skyrim it's just "pass the check or reload."

Am I the only one who thinks Speechcraft should've been reworked to make dialogue actually interesting instead of just a gate you pass or fail? The perks feel half-baked compared to every other skill tree.

 

[DragonbornVet]

Nah, you're hitting on something real. The pickpocket stuff in Speechcraft is genuinely bizarre - it's like Bethesda ran out of ideas and just threw thief perks wherever. That perk where investing in Speechcraft makes pickpocketing easier should've been in Pickpocket, period.

But I'd push back a bit on the "dialogue feels pointless" angle. The persuasion checks themselves are pretty thin, yeah, but that's more of a writing problem than a perk tree problem. Even with Ordinator's extra dialogue tools, you're still just choosing between "yes" and "yes but cooler." Skyrim's dialogue system is fundamentally limited - it's not like you can talk your way into a completely different quest outcome most of the time.

That said, vanilla Speechcraft is definitely the laziest tree. Half the perks are just "succeed at checks you'd already pass" and the other half are stealth stuff that doesn't belong there. A rework that actually gave you dialogue manipulation tools - like making NPCs more susceptible to certain dialogue types, or opening up unique conversation branches for high Speechcraft - would've been way more interesting than what we got.

On Switch though, you're stuck with it as-is. If you're not into the pickpocket angle, honestly just ignore most of the tree and grab the persuasion/intimidation stuff if you need it. Speechcraft is one of those skills where you can get by fine without heavy investment.