Persuasion Guide - How to Build Persuasion Meter

Persuasion in Starfield allows you to avoid conflict or win over people to your side with a simple dialogue mini-game. Read on for more info on what persuasion does, the odds for success for each choice, color, and point value, and how to build the persuasion meter!

How to Build Persuasion Meter

How the Persuasion Meter Works
Fill Up Meter Within Number of Turns The Higher the Value, the Faster the Meter Fills Up Take Persuasion Difficulty Into Consideration Add Points to Social Skills Backgrounds Add More Dialogue Options

Fill Up Meter Within Number of Turns

In order to successfully persuade someone, you must fill up the Persuasion meter with all 6 required bars. This meter contains a set number of nodes that must be filled up in white within the set number of turns given to you.

You Can Never Lose On a Success

Whenever your final choice ends in a success, you will get another turn for free. This can happen multiple times in a row, as long as you don't have any more failures, which will immediately end your negotiation.

The Higher the Value, the Faster the Meter Fills Up

The number values next to the colors indicate how many nodes on the persuasion meter will be filled up. You must carefully do the math on how many nodes you can fill up, taking into account both the difficulty and number of turns you have left.

Rarely, Succeed Instantly with a Critical Success

Sometimes, when doing a Persuasion check, you'll suddenly succeed even without filling up the entire bar by achieving a Critical Success. Based on our testing, this has about a 2.5% chance of occurring. This can occur even on your first choice with a Green 1-point option, so higher-risk options don't seem to be connected. You'll just have to get lucky!

Take Persuasion Difficulty Into Consideration

Color		Meaning
	Green 1/2 pts.	High probability of persuasion success (~65% base for 1 point, ~47% for 2 points)
	Yellow 3/4 pts.	Medium probability of persuasion success (~40% base)
	Red 5 pts.	Low probability of persuasion success (~30% base)

There are three colored bars before each choice that indicates the difficulty of the dialogue option. Choices in green may have a very high chance of success but will fill up less nodes on the persuasion meter. Red choices, on the other hand, can quickly fill up the meter but may straight up fail, wasting a whole turn.

Game8 tested the Persuasion check with Sheila Holbrooke during the Breaking the Bank quest 40 times and found the above estimations for success probability of each result without any boosts. Note that Green options yielding 2 points have a lower success rate than Green options yielding 1 point, so the 2-pointers do come with higher risk despite being the same color. (We were unable to confirm if this is true for the Yellow options due to a small sample size of 4-point Yellows)

Add Points to Social Skills

Your Social skills may come in handy when persuading other people. Invest in these skills and you might have an easier time getting your persuasion checks to succeed.

In particular, Persuasion, Negotiation, Diplomacy, Intimidation, and Manipulation can open up new options in Persuasion dialogue trees.

Backgrounds Add More Dialogue Options

The Background you choose at the character creation screen can have an effect later on, as certain dialogue options will open up to you. For example, being a Beast Hunter may make it easier for you to persuade someone who deals with beasts, and so on.

List of All Backgrounds

Best Persuasion Choices

There are No Choices which Always Succeed or Always Fail

On comparing the results of Persuasion checks with Sheila Holbrooke 40 times, there were no dialogue options which consistently always succeed or fail. The more times a single dialogue option is tested, the more it gravitates toward the 40-60% success range with variation depending on the Point value, implying that there isn't a correlation between the written text and the result.

Note that this test excluded special dialogue options specific to a Background or gained from a Skill. It's likely that these options do have a higher chance of a better result, and we may test this separately in the future.

Not a Huge Difference Between Point Combinations

We took our estimated odds for each color and point level, and estimated the probability of success with several possible choice combinations. Overall, we found that choosing only the Yellow 3pt. choices has the best odds, but it really doesn't make a massive difference since the success rates are adjusted to match the point values.

Not Actually Worth It To Use Less Risky Options on the Last Turn

It seems logical to say that since you cannot lose unless you Fail a Persuasion check when you only have one turn left, it's better to take risky options earlier on when you have multiple turns remaining and stick to options with a higher chance of success on your final roll. However, based on our current estimations, this strategy doesn't actually seem to be more effective.

Let's say it's your last turn and you need 3 points, and your options are a +1 or a +3. Yes, you are more likely to succeed on the +1 which will keep you in the game, but that will not change the fact that you need to continue getting more successes. If two more +1 options appear on the next two turns, you'll need to get Successes on those as well.

• Odds of getting Success on one 3-point choice: 1*0.3684 = ~36.84%
• Odds of getting Success on three 1-point choices in a row: 1*0.6522*0.6522*0.6522 = ~27.74%

It's true that having more turns will increase your chance of getting a Critical Success increase; however, because Critical Successes are very rare (about 2.5% chance), it's questionable whether this makes up for the decreased odds overall.

What is Persuasion?

Peaceful Means to Resolve Conflict

Persuading characters is a way to peacefully avoid conflict, and is done via a dialogue mini-game, where you must choose certain dialogue options that they would like to hear.

By persuading characters in the game, you will be able to get them on your side, or let them give you access to a certain area, or even avoid a bloody battle altogether.

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