u/Alive-Dog7374

Would you enjoy a CRPG where some conversations work more like tactical encounters than normal dialogue trees?

The protagonist has enhanced empathy and can read and manipulate emotions like fear, anger, trust, or attachment. During certain conversations, you would need to react quickly, choose what emotion to push or suppress, decide what to say, and sometimes use violence.

The goal would not always be to “win” the conversation. You might get the information you need but damage the relationship, scare someone into cooperating, make them hate you, or create consequences that come back later.

I’m curious whether this sounds interesting as actual gameplay, or whether it would feel too quirky.

Imagine a narrative RPG set in an autocratic, technologically advanced empire. You play as a special agent/spy with enhanced empathy who tries to build a life worth having while navigating between opposing factions, each of which has something you want.

You start in a laboratory where you were augmented, performing missions in a crumbling, torn society, which require you to use your empathy, manipulating people's emotions, as well as your falx sword. Eventually you realize that your family, which you thought were dead, is alive and offers a way out of servitude. You may choose to follow this pull or stick to the laboratory and the government, or choose another route and join anti-technology rebels who seek to destroy the ruler - a digitized emperor. None of these paths is meant to be the correct path.

Gameplay-wise, I'm thinking a turn-based combat like in Clair Obscure, but with dialogues. Some dialogues are the normal thing, like in any RPG, but some require you to act and choose your words swiftly, where your empathy is a part of the fighting system, and your sword is one of the methods you may employ to manipulate or defeat the NPCs. But whatever you do is going to matter, and they will remember it in the future.

Would the combination of tactical dialogue and physical combat make you want to try a demo? What part of this would you want to see demonstrated first?