lol
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Does the sword fighting in Monkey Island count?
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At the risk of stating the obvious, there’s the game actually named Diplomacy…
I wouldn’t say they “focus” on it, but many RPGs have systems that give you different dialog options based on things like your character stats, various measures of how NPCs or factions perceive you, members of your party, and so on. Fallout has a lot of this, Mass Effect does this, there’s a lot of it in Deus Ex… now that I’m thinking about it, I’m tempted to say most RPGs do this.
I wouldn’t call them “combat” mechanics though, they’re just dialog. They’re also usually fairly shallow, so calling them “diplomacy” is generous at best.
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Thea: The Awakening has social combat. I highly recommend it if you like strategy games.
cool! cool, ill have to check them all out!
haha that monkey island sword fighting is funny! … never seen that game thanks!
yeah plenty of games have diplomacy elements, but dont really focus on it, and its rarely ever all that incredibly exciting,
i guess the abstractness of undertale is a way its done well… i kinda see undertale’s system as an abstract representation of … relationships/ conversations … various social interactions
i would like to make an adventure game… like Zelda or Secret of Mana, ARPG kinda game, kinda sorta, but replace ALL combat… basically have 0 bloodshed, and instead have it be like puzzle conversations or something?? but its kinda hard to grasp exactly… not sure how id do it, its just a general desire … i found the gameplay of those games to be the most compelling to me personally… i might not make it exactly 0 bloodshed, but id wish to have some kind of system, or representation that is abouts equally, or moreso compelling than action physical violence combat
Thea The Awakening looks cool! looks like civ or heroes of might and magic … well, like Elemental games or Warlock
I might add crusader kings to this thread too. I’ve not really played it, but from what i gather there is a large focus on personal relationships.
Thea: The Awakening is pretty unique. I can’t think of anything that is really an accurate comparison. I think if you like Civ, Elemental, and Warlock you will like it (even though it is pretty different). It’s got some amazing developers (2 big pieces of free DLC they easily could have charged for), and it is made with Unity.
There used to be a game, Imperium Galactica, that heavily focused on diplomacy between races in the galaxy, it’s almost impossible to make it run on modern computers, but i’m sure you can find some videos on YT 
Diplomacy is really hard to do in video games. Largely because AIs suck at it. Players can quickly figure out how to manipulate the AI to get whatever they want. My five year old daughter is a better diplomat then the Civ AI.
It gets better when humans are involved, but even then it’s hard to manage without the face to face contact.
Look to board games for better examples. Anything with a high focus on trade tends to encourage diplomacy. Settlers comes to mind, as does Monopoly (shudder). Both of these games don’t have a combat mechanic at all. Which is a good way to go if you want the focus to be on non combat options.
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come on, don’t be always like this, Civ has avery complex AI system:
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You forgot if (turns>threshold) DeclareWarForeverAndGandhiNukesYou();
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You could try making one of them new fangled neural nets the kids are talking about these days.
That would actually be awesome, and someone here should do it.
lol
Maybe you want to check out some dating sims?
lol
???
Vanilla Settlers of Catan has zero combat. There is the soldier/robber mechanic, but that’s not combat.
oooh yeah… yeah, i was thinking of this game, played it as a kid
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As silly as this sounds he’s not completely wrong, some dating sims (The more VN based ones) make you go through a “combat” system with the person you are trying to “woo” before you can “woo” them, so it’s not impossible.
Is it engaging? Eh that’s something that depends on the design, you have to make shaking hands as pulse pounding as swinging a sword (Especially if you are removing all sword swinging from the game!) and that’s going to be hard to do no matter how you look at it. But with high stakes and good writing I can see it being possible. The AI involved in making this viable though would be pretty complex, far more than any normal combat system, plus you’d likely have to write a LOT of content for the player to read so what the AI says that you are talking to doesn’t become repetitive and predictable.
Last Word is one that takes a kind of RPG approach. It’s pretty nifty.
A lot of RPGs have dialog. In most of them it is for character expression, which as you say isn’t really related to this. However, in a few it is actually a gameplay element.
In Alpha Protocol, for example, dialog acts as a gameplay system where the main character can manipulate people to get his way, and it affects different characters in the game. For instance, (spoilers I suppose) there’s a character you fight with near the end of one of the main arcs. Normally they run away when near death. If your “relationship” level (1-10) with that character is low enough, however, they will finish the fight–and die, of course. On the other hand, if your level is high enough (10 I think), at the end of the game when that character is instructed to kill you by another, they will simply walk away (rather than attempting to kill you).
Also, in Wasteland 2, there are a number of situations where the “normal” sequence would be to use guns to murder a bunch of people, but with dialog you can resolve a situation peacefully. It isn’t about expressing your character, it’s about solving a problem.
Bethesda games’ dialog systems have almost no complexity and almost no gameplay element (no “progression” system like a reputation and no content-gating). Bioware games have a bit more of both. Finally you have very few like Alpha Protocol or the older isometric RPGs where it’s a fundamental gameplay system.
What does any of this have to do with dialog as combat/a gameplay system?
For a brief, nauseating moment, I imagined a dialog-based game written entirely in Millennial Chat Gibberish.