Something that's bothered me in RPG games is when players were presented with the option to specialize characters in physical or magical combat, but anyone who tried to do both at once would end up being a master of none, and the option would be suboptimal in the end. I don't think MARDEK suffered from this, for several reasons which I won't go into because this was just a segue for the next paragraph.
I agree with the others that the ludonarrative impact of a separation in violence and argument is quite compelling. However, I was curious about the mechanical significance of such a divide. I think it would be interesting to have interactions such as opening with sentimancy to reduce the physical threat of an opponent, or lowering their HP making it easier to make them surrender.
Though, thinking about it, it's actually rather immoral to exploit the feelings of people to beat them up more easily. It might be better to restrict such things to explicitly being a feature of a few skills, such as a punch that's just used to vent anger or get somebody's attention.
I agree with the others that the ludonarrative impact of a separation in violence and argument is quite compelling. However, I was curious about the mechanical significance of such a divide. I think it would be interesting to have interactions such as opening with sentimancy to reduce the physical threat of an opponent, or lowering their HP making it easier to make them surrender.
Though, thinking about it, it's actually rather immoral to exploit the feelings of people to beat them up more easily. It might be better to restrict such things to explicitly being a feature of a few skills, such as a punch that's just used to vent anger or get somebody's attention.