We talked the boss onto our side

The Root-Core Vault’s boss is The Dread Crimson Kraken. In a playtest on 1 October it was down to 19 of its 245 hit points, and instead of finishing it, the player opened the conversation in the middle of the fight and typed:

You are down to your last sliver of life. I can give you life outside this dungeon. You wont need to be bound to this place.

The kraken switched sides. “Then lead the way, [player]. I will follow you out of this rusted grave.” When the fight ended it joined the party, and afterwards it followed them through the Glitch Maw beside Malachar Shard and Jorn Pike.

That is the whole feature, and it took four pieces to get there.

Anyone you fight

You could already talk during a fight. What you couldn’t do was change the fight by talking. Now any person or animal you’re fighting can be argued with, and the answer is one of three: it refuses, it stands down, or it switches sides and fights beside you for the rest of the battle.

Nobody is recruited between two sword swings. Whoever turns joins you when the fight ends, if there’s room in the party. If there isn’t, you part on good terms instead. Winning a fight this way pays half the experience and no loot. You get the person, not their pockets.

Bosses, and the ones already on the floor

The first version only worked on people and animals the world already had a record of. The monsters in dungeons and towers are made for the fight and existed nowhere else, so there was nothing for one to join as. Now a mob or a boss you talk over becomes a real companion when the fight ends, with its own name, the moves it fought with, and its own level. It leaves the room it was guarding, so it never respawns there.

A boss won’t listen until it is losing.

The other gap was the end of a fight. A foe knocked to zero in a fight you won is beaten, not dead: death is written when you press Continue. So the beaten can now be talked to in the aftermath, marked “Defeated, but alive,” and spared or won over from the floor.

The boss that came home as a villager

Then we won a boss over, walked out of the dungeon, and it was a villager.

The fight knew what it looked like. Nothing after the fight asked. On the map, in its portrait and in the next fight, a won-over boss was drawn as a random townsperson, or as a generic “beast” if it was an animal. We fixed the map and portraits, and then found three more places that still didn’t ask: the party sheet, the People panel, and the line describing its body to whoever it was talking to. A won-over boss now looks like a boss everywhere it appears, and there’s a test that checks every one of those places for a boss person, a boss animal and a dragon.

Nobody forgets which side they were on

Turning a foe doesn’t wipe the slate. It remembers what was said in the fight that won it over. And if the foe you talk over leads a faction, the chronicle records that they turned their coat, someone else succeeds to the seat, and a turncoat who parted with you because the party was full can’t go back and take it.