Idea: Social/ Leadership proficiencies

I have been playing a bit of Bannerlord 2 lately.

It’s pretty cool. You can lead epic sieges and command troops on a near cinematic level. In the mass battles, you can tell people to hold lines, charge, fall back, etc with one click. You can set uniforms and weapons easily as well.

But, I started thinking again about good ol’ Cataclysm DDA and the late NPC game.

Now I know the relationship between the player and NPCs is supposed to be of distrust at first with tension over treatment and food to where at first you would not have that control. Even if you do get them to follow you, you have to get them to the side, set rules for them individually through multiple menus. You have to activate a trade menu to get them to wear certain things and use certain weapons.

But, some post apocalyptic leaders should have fuller command. Particularly military backgrounds and high managerial backgrounds. A “leadership” proficiency based off social.

To where you COULD get ten NPCs with flamethrowers to hold steady in a line to erase mycus patches. Or to get your snipers to flank hordes while your melee armored NPCs fall back, drawing the undead menace in a trap. Where your high healthcare people would be on the edges with triage.

I mean, we DO have the beginnings of bases and assigning tasks. And, I am sure more late game enemies will come from the imagination of the devs in the future (super hordes, acidic lightning flaming skeletal shogothh hulks that shoot blob rockets, what have you).

Another social proficiency I can think of which is easier to implement would be Principles of Rebuttal. Salespeople and politicians would have it. Where if you have this proficiency and someone tells you “no”, you can immediately reroll your result but you have to take the second result and if you fail it makes persuading harder. All attempts at persuading work up to skill in this and there are training course books on this.

Thoughts?

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The concept of social proficiencies is definitely a interesting idea. And having a better more effective way to command your NPC’s on a strategic and tactical level would be very handy.

I just hope that the threats that you would be facing that require a squad or small army of NPC’s to deal with aren’t just standard bigger better monsters but instead are groups of enemies that act with a certain degree of intelligence. Think horde under the control of a master or lieutenant, a triffid horde send out to deal with you, raider raids or squads from the old guard.

Having more tactical control of your NPC’s would also allow certain locations to be made more dangerous such as triffid hearts, bandit camps/bases or to make completely new extremely dangerous locations that are only mend to be cleared by a group of people or the most prepared and mutated/cyber-enhanced ubermenschen.

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