I had a dumb idea I threw out over on Mastodon/Twitter about a TTRPG where combat is abstract, theater of the mind sorts of things. You know, maybe a die gets rolled here or there, but it's mostly narrative people saying what cool thing they want to do to make the sword go stab and what have you. I honestly don't even think the players would have stats regarding combat actions.
In exchange, however, actual conversations between the players and a character take the form of dungeon crawls. Random, labyrinthine dungeons where the actual actions the characters take are metaphorical representations for what's happening in the conversation. Let me give an example: a Rogue in DnD is primarily focused around disabling traps and then doing big damage with positional help from allies. In this hypothetical system, disabling traps would mean pre-emptively avoiding tricky topics in a conversation, or preventing them from being an issue through some means. For example, recalling that a character has gone through a messy divorce so that it can be sidestepped, or perhaps using it as a means to connect further with the character in question, effectively disabling the conversation point as an issue. For the big damage, that would be something like assisting an ally with a well-placed barbed comment to help drive a point home. If you've ever read manga, that'd be something similar to the visual gag when a character has a speech bubble that pierces through another character who visibly reacts to it as if getting struck. Other classes could have similar things mapped to the style of conversation. They also don't need to be mapped 1:1, that's just an example of how the concept works using an existing character archetype.
The actual dungeons could potentially splinter off, with each branch being a different part of a dialogue tree. You start off the dungeon at the entrance, and perhaps there's three different avenues to pursue with the person you're speaking to. Two of those might be dead ends (representing perhaps bad angles of inquiry or paths that you simply don't have information to traverse), or maybe two paths can combine into one but one path is harder to traverse while the other is more circuitous. At the end of the dungeon is some kind of treasure, maybe a verbal contract for something your group needs, or perhaps it's a piece of hidden information that you're trying to suss out of a prisoner, or it might even just be a friendship increase.
The big thing I'm not sure about is what the actual point of the game is. In my mind it can fit potentially two different games: a Psychonauts-style mental therapy adventure, or a heist. In the case of the Psychonauts adventure, it's less a metaphor and more literal. You're perhaps diving into their mindscape to fix something about their personality, or implant information, etc. The important thing is it's literally a dungeon inside their mind. The heist is probably closer to what I originally envisioned, where the actual heist the characters are performing is abstracted into theater of the mind, but the setup is done via dungeon crawls. Which, all things considered, might honestly be a better way to go about it. I've found that heists in RPGs tend to be really, really fun during the planning phase, but kind of bad during the execution phase. Either everything goes perfectly, which means nothing happens and you basically walk through the dungeon, or something breaks and a lot of your planning just goes out the window. With this flipped scenario, the planning IS the dungeon, and the difficulty of various assists you're trying to get ahold of is reflected in the difficulty of the haggling or difficulty dungeon you're navigating. Then, when the heist happens, you get to flavor it up and pull all your plans together in a fancy cinematic experience.
Just my 2 cents.
Crossposted on Tumblr.