Dracurouge is a Japanese TRPG about vampire knights fighting for honor, love, etc. and as a general rule, it slaps. At this exact moment I specifically wanna talk about how it handles combat scenes and social scenes, because just from browsing the rules there's some very cool tech here I haven't seen in many other games.
Combat scenes
Every player character has two resources they need to balance: Noir, which represent negative emotion towards a specific character, and Rouge, which represents positive emotions towards a specific character. Gain too much Noir and your Thirst increases, which raises your power, but also your odds of transforming into a monster. Gain enough Rouge and you gain Warmth, which you can use to reduce your Thirst back to a manageable level. You can have both Rouge and Noir towards a character at the same time, or even multiple types of each to represent particularly complicated relationships. NPCs don't track this as closely, they have a unified Presence stat that reduces when they gain either Rouge or Noir. If presence hits 0, they exit the scene or otherwise become insignificant.
Combat takes place in a metaphorical arena that reminds me of Ryuutama's "battle egg," consisting of the Garden, the Court, and the Throne, each of which can trigger extra effects from abilities. Range and movement tend to be very short, most frequently only able to affect the area you're currently in.
At the start of your turn, you roll four d6s, or more if you spend a resource called Noblesse Oblige. To use your combat abilities you spend dice with combined value equal to or exceeding the ability's listed cost. This immediately reminds me of Panic at the Dojo, or what I've heard about the Japanese Dark Souls TRPG, although Dracurouge predates both of those. play ARISE btw it does this too. I like this dice system a lot because it relocates uncertainty from "does my attempt work" to "what's the best way to use the resources immediately available to me." And if you just roll really bad, you can take a point of Noir towards yourself to reroll them.
Social scenes
Social scenes work exactly the same way.
Same map, same action dice to spend, you're just working from your set of social actions instead of combat actions, and primarily handing out Rouge instead of Noir. This rocks so hard. A ballroom dance and a fight scene will give extremely similar mechanical experiences for the players, needing to convince someone to aid you or intimidate them at a society function is the same kind of challenge as driving off a monster or a heretic knight, but the RP and fictional implication of the actions are going to be entirely different.
But! Social actions for players and several NPCs tend to give much more Rouge than Noir. This doesn't put you under pressure the same way as a combat scene, although the specific actions may suggest fictional complications. That means that without specific goals like "flatter the local lord into leaving you alone" or "protect the prince from disguised assassins" Rouge-focused social scenes are much more open-ended and can result in, from a purely mechanical perspective, healing breaks with a resource management minigame. Is that fine? I think it probably is, although I frequently prefer having victory conditions pre-baked for me even as a GM. And if you decide to focus instead on NPCs that give Noir in social scenes, there's now a much more immediate challenge to overcome, closer to the directness of combat scenes.
also in the finale of a session or mini-arc you get access to both Social and Combat actions at the same time, so it's completely up to you how you want things to go. Dracurouge rules so hard. for more go read Noelle's thread on it.
