Copper Dreams Update #21

The latest Kickstarter update for Whalenought Studios’ upcoming cyberpunk RPG Copper Dreams shares a good deal of new info about many of the game’s features and systems, including a look at the game’s grass tiles, cybernetic batteries, social skill, character dispositions, and more. The update also directs us to the game’s official forums where you can find some of the mentioned features described in greater detail.

Here’s a bit about the social skill and you can take it from there:

Skill: Social

We wrote a more in-depth post on the community site detailing what we want to do with the skill, and now we wanted to show that in-action. If you missed it the post is below and also goes into detail where disposition comes from within the character sheet.

In Copper Dreams characters are pretty squishy, and you have some player-advantage things in play like not being limited to vision cones and being invisible in shadow if standing still. Though NPCs also get the latter if they are sneaking themselves, so get that spot-check ready. Because you find yourself in situations where NPCs usually don’t want you around or want to eat or kill you, gameplay focuses on you creeping around like a horror movie monster where you are picking off enemies one-by-one. And that is how a lot of builds are suited to play, but we wanted to add to that with something more subtle, for espionage and stealth, and also because killing people can be loud and there can be other quiet ways of clearing a building. To this end we used the gun of the face — your words.

Social builds in games typically have the least agency, you are bound to whatever few choices the designer lets you choose from at that moment. Agency requires a degree of foresight into application of your skills, but for dialogue thats usually just at the whim of whatever conversational or story context the designer has in mind. Players often want to tell an NPC something that the designer didn’t add to their dialogue, so why not actually let them say tags to anyone they want, whenever they want?

Social actions are commands you can attempt to tell NPCs, with failure and success rates like any roll where you’ll roll 3d8 under your skill number (+challenge mods). A whole slew of things make up that challenge number, which in this case is the degree of difficulty of what you’re asking them and your disposition to one another.

For example you could tell a guard to go home for the night if they encounter you, and if successful they have some contextual things they can mutter, “sure, good, idea, I think I left the oven on”. This is to be interpreted as if the Terminator or Snake Plissken is telling someone, not asking. The NPC knows you’re trouble, so it’s you rolling to just convince them they don’t want to make things worse by not listening.

If you have a low roll odds, you have some options for additive modifiers. Bribe, which gives them cigarettes if you have them, is an easy one at the expense of bartering goods. Threaten is more potent, allowing you to choose a weapon, but makes them hostile if you fail, so higher risk. Weapons have a lethal number, so choosing the meanest thing you got is the way to go for this, but is also based on how well your skill is with whatever the weapon is designed for, so you don’t fumble.

Dialogue in Copper Dreams is somewhat detached from the Social skill — it remains tag-based, you can inquire about certain text strings to get more information, branch into things depending on backgrounds or character-sheet stats, or show an NPC something from your inventory.

NPCs talk to you or each other, and you can inquire, is how that mainly works. It’s for branching story and narrative quests, which the player chooses for their character through actions in-game and at the start of the game during character creation — more on that in the disposition post linked below.