But, ultimately, however you define it (unless you define it as "what you are doing when not rolling dice", which I do not agree with):
Well, it's narrower than that (there are plenty of non-dice activities that aren't roleplaying), but in general time spent interacting with game mechanics is time not spent roleplaying.
serious question, why do there need to be rules for RP?
Part of the question is that you first have to agree on "what is roleplaying?"
But, ultimately, however you define it (unless you define it as "what you are doing when not rolling dice", which I do not agree with):
Players want the differences between their characters to have mechanical weight
Roleplaying can have conflicts, and people want ways to resolve them
The thing is, "it's what you are doing when not rolling dice", is the definition a vast majority of people use to describe roleplaying.
I think what you describe, however, is probably closer to the definition the OP is going for, and the only issue he's having with 5e is the level granularity of the rules, weight, and methods of conflict resolution.
It's the one thing you can't solve with 5e because adding granularity is quite literally an opposing design philosophy on which 5e was designed. It was the objective of the game design to be light, simple and straightforward, offering abstracted solutions to make the game faster and easier to play. Adding granularity of rules to that would be in effect, undoing all that effort.
You could do it, but what would be the point if other game systems have already done it for you.
serious question, why do there need to be rules for RP?
Part of the question is that you first have to agree on "what is roleplaying?"
But, ultimately, however you define it (unless you define it as "what you are doing when not rolling dice", which I do not agree with):
Players want the differences between their characters to have mechanical weight
Roleplaying can have conflicts, and people want ways to resolve them
Exactly this. The confusion seems to be around the fact that I used the term role playing rather than saying out of combat interactions or something like that that might be more precise or at least not have the connotations people assign to the term role playing.
There are loads of non-combat situations that involve some kind of thing you want to accomplish that should IMO be arbitrated by rules reflected on your character sheet rather than based on how good the player is at describing something or coming up with an argument for a certain thing or whatever. If my character has a silver tongue or is a better than average cook or is absolutely amazing at athletics IMO I should have a meaningfully higher chance of doing those things mechanically. There is certainly room for advantage or some other benefit to the player doing a great job describing how they attempt to go about a thing. And that does make the game better IMO but I feel there should be some fundamental way in which my silver tongued character is significantly more likely to convince an NPC of something, even if I as a player use the same argument as a player who's character is supposedly not good at persuasion.
The combat rules very much do exactly that in combat. A character who is a fighter and master of the sword can pull of a whole bunch of things with a sword that the wizard cannot even attempt. The results of their attempts mechanically reflect significant differences between their skill levels. But outside combat there is very little differentiation, and the differences that exist are binary not continuous.
Again there are loads of situations outside combat where you have meaningful consequences for succeeding or failing at something and where *I* would like to see the game system be able to arbitrate that success or failure rather than me as the DM just making it up, or it being essentially completely random. You can absolutely play a game system where success is entirely unrelated to your characters supposed strengths but I don't like that play style. D&D is extremely 'granular' (For lack of a better term) in combat and I think that leads players to emphasize combat as a focus of their actions because it is objectively the focus of the data on their sheet.
It's the one thing you can't solve with 5e because adding granularity is quite literally an opposing design philosophy on which 5e was designed. It was the objective of the game design to be light, simple and straightforward, offering abstracted solutions to make the game faster and easier to play. Adding granularity of rules to that would be in effect, undoing all that effort.
You could do it, but what would be the point if other game systems have already done it for you.
I disagree to some extent with that. D&D is indeed very light by design outside of combat but it is not nearly as simple or lightweight when it comes to combat. IMO that is a clear disconnect. The same in terms of how much weight the dice have vs. your abilities. In combat what you chose as class, abilities, feats, etc. mater a lot more than they do outside combat. As a result character creation largely is making decisions about what you will be capable of in combat and IMO that leads many players especially new ones to view things through that lens. Combat is the thing we are doing. That is how you solve problems, etc. It also puts extra weight on the DM to try to fairly arbitrate non-combat situations in a fair and realistic way vs providing some level of structure to base that on. If you get to succeed or fail at things based on your backstory that means extra effort to try to get peoples backstories to be balanced, and extra effort figuring out what fits with a particular back story, as well as opens up more creative players being more likely to find excuses for why their background applies etc. The rules don't provide meaningful support for arbitrating what succeeds or fails outside combat in anything like the way they do for in combat actions.
But, ultimately, however you define it (unless you define it as "what you are doing when not rolling dice", which I do not agree with):
Well, it's narrower than that (there are plenty of non-dice activities that aren't roleplaying), but in general time spent interacting with game mechanics is time not spent roleplaying.
serious question, why do there need to be rules for RP?
Part of the question is that you first have to agree on "what is roleplaying?"
But, ultimately, however you define it (unless you define it as "what you are doing when not rolling dice", which I do not agree with):
Players want the differences between their characters to have mechanical weight
Roleplaying can have conflicts, and people want ways to resolve them
The thing is, "it's what you are doing when not rolling dice", is the definition a vast majority of people use to describe roleplaying.
I've argued this before in this thread, but, in short, it creates a dichotomy between mechanics and non-mechanics that doesn't exist.
I think what you describe, however, is probably closer to the definition the OP is going for, and the only issue he's having with 5e is the level granularity of the rules, weight, and methods of conflict resolution.
It's the one thing you can't solve with 5e because adding granularity is quite literally an opposing design philosophy on which 5e was designed. It was the objective of the game design to be light, simple and straightforward, offering abstracted solutions to make the game faster and easier to play. Adding granularity of rules to that would be in effect, undoing all that effort.
You could do it, but what would be the point if other game systems have already done it for you.
Sure, D&D (all D&D) has crap mechanical support for RP, but that's created a folk wisdom that mechanics aren't RP, because the D&D players have always had to make their own fun.
But there are a good many games that have something more.
I'm not that up on the indie RPG scene, but I know that there's been a lot of interesting stuff done in that regard. For a somewhat more mainstream example, consider FATE. FATE characters have aspects -- things about the character that can be used for situational bonuses. But there's also a mechanic where the GM can offer a player a useful in-game resource to do something that fits their aspect, but that they know will have consequences. They don't have to take it, but it's a little extra incentive to act like they already wanted to.
5e sort of tried something similar with ideals, bonds, and flaws, but the implementation was too peripheral to the game, and the resource too binary and granular. If there's a 6e, we may see an improved version of that.
It's the one thing you can't solve with 5e because adding granularity is quite literally an opposing design philosophy on which 5e was designed. It was the objective of the game design to be light, simple and straightforward, offering abstracted solutions to make the game faster and easier to play. Adding granularity of rules to that would be in effect, undoing all that effort.
You could do it, but what would be the point if other game systems have already done it for you.
I disagree to some extent with that. D&D is indeed very light by design outside of combat but it is not nearly as simple or lightweight when it comes to combat. IMO that is a clear disconnect. The same in terms of how much weight the dice have vs. your abilities. In combat what you chose as class, abilities, feats, etc. mater a lot more than they do outside combat. As a result character creation largely is making decisions about what you will be capable of in combat and IMO that leads many players especially new ones to view things through that lens. Combat is the thing we are doing. That is how you solve problems, etc. It also puts extra weight on the DM to try to fairly arbitrate non-combat situations in a fair and realistic way vs providing some level of structure to base that on. If you get to succeed or fail at things based on your backstory that means extra effort to try to get peoples backstories to be balanced, and extra effort figuring out what fits with a particular back story, as well as opens up more creative players being more likely to find excuses for why their background applies etc. The rules don't provide meaningful support for arbitrating what succeeds or fails outside combat in anything like the way they do for in combat actions.
That is kind of the point of D&D design, though. Combat has nothing to do with role-playing, unless you use this very loose all-encompassing definition in which "anything you do wtih your character is role-playing". When you're fighting, you're playing a combat mini game.
In combat and out of combat, for resolving anything and everything, you have the skill system, an abstracted structure that can universally cover every situation. So resolution is not the problem at least as the OP describes it. You CAN resolve everything.
His issue is the granularity of the rules as it applies to mechanics to support character abilities/talents/skills reflected in the character's story or what have you, and having mechanics that show grades of effectiveness based on mastery over different abilities/talents/skills so that there is a granular progression. Today I'm a novice Chef, but if I put some points into Cooking, I can be a Master Chef someday!
D&D is very specifically and consciously designed not to be that. It's not a bug, it's a feature and a core deliberate part of the design. D&D basically says, Granularity is bad for the game (with the exception, as you point out, in combat).
What Im saying is that you could design that granularity back into D&D, which would be a considerable effort or you could play another game like say Pathfinder 2e that quite literally from the ground up was designed with this granularity as a core and foundational feature of the game.
Unless Wizards of the Coast does a complete 180 when it comes to the design philosophy of 5e, you will never see granularity like this in D&D. Adding it, would effectively be a massive shift from light abstracted mechanical execution on which 5e is foundationally designed from the ground up.
As for RP support, again, take any game that claims to have "great RP support" and what you will find is a game with less granularity of rules, not more than D&D. While games that have this granularity are not known for great RP support, case in point, Pathfinder 2e. Do people go around saying that PF2e has awesome Role-playing support? No.. they complain that the game has way too many rules, but it does in fact have insane granularity of rules.
The reason for this is that there is a huge Dichotomy between playing an RPG (The game) and the act of role-playing. Role-playing is what you do when you are not using rules. It's the conversation and the interaction between you and the DM and each other. When you start executing rules, you are now playing RPG (the game). The two do co-exist, but when people say "rules support for RP" which notably is an old conversation, it never pans out in action as it does on paper. Lots of games have tried to quantify role-playing and those game are never famous for their RP support. GURPS for example has quantified every conceivable talent and action you could possibly conceive into one of the most robust and granular system you will ever see... no one and I mean no goes around claiming that GURPS is a "RP" system... quite the oppossite.
The point being, very simply. Rules granularity does not "support" RP, it kills it. Rules are diametrically opposed to the act of role-playing. You do need some, but generally speaking, less is more.
I feel there should be some fundamental way in which my silver tongued character is significantly more likely to convince an NPC of something, even if I as a player use the same argument as a player who's character is supposedly not good at persuasion.
But, there is. Be an eloquence bard. Take persuasion expertise. By 3rd level, you won’t be able to get less than a 17. By 5th it’s probably a minimum of 20. There are similar examples for pretty much any out of combat situation. You can be exceptional at them, if you make your character that way by investing in the right skills and choosing the right class/subclass.
The trade off is you’ve invested in those skills, so you’re maybe a little weaker in combat. So, a fighter can’t be the silver tongued character nearly as well or as easily, but the bard isn’t doing what the fighter does once initiative is rolled.
Its actually more like the game does put a lot of mechanical stock in doing things out of combat, to the point that characters who are good at those aren’t as good in combat. It’s a character balance issue.
There are loads of non-combat situations that involve some kind of thing you want to accomplish that should IMO be arbitrated by rules reflected on your character sheet rather than based on how good the player is at describing something or coming up with an argument for a certain thing or whatever. If my character has a silver tongue or is a better than average cook or is absolutely amazing at athletics IMO I should have a meaningfully higher chance of doing those things mechanically. There is certainly room for advantage or some other benefit to the player doing a great job describing how they attempt to go about a thing. And that does make the game better IMO but I feel there should be some fundamental way in which my silver tongued character is significantly more likely to convince an NPC of something, even if I as a player use the same argument as a player who's character is supposedly not good at persuasion.
This particular issue is best handled by the GM not intervening in the mechanics. It shouldn't matter if the player can summon up a good argument on the fly. The player is not their character, and running things so as to overemphasize player skill makes it harder for people to play characters that are not like them.
I'm personally a fan of getting the roll in early, so the player can attempt to adjust their narration to the result. When I'm narrating my monk's attacks in combat, I don't want to describe a fancy combo and then roll nothing higher than a five. The same can be true with social skills. If you know you're going to roll a three, you don't describe your elaborate con, but something simpler and less effective.
That is kind of the point of D&D design, though. Combat has nothing to do with role-playing, unless you use this very loose all-encompassing definition in which "anything you do wtih your character is role-playing". When you're fighting, you're playing a combat mini game.
And there is still roleplaying there if you want it.
You kill your opponent, and move to support one of the other characters who are having a harder time. Who do you move to help? The guy you've been beefing with since the start of the campaign, your brother, or the character you're crushing on?
Do you kill your enemies, or deliberately knock them out? Do you give them a chance to surrender? Do you give them a chance to surrender even after a surrendered opponent stabbed you in the back in a previous fight?
Many, many of your choices of how you fight in part say something about your character. Ranged or close in? Blasting spells or control spells? Etc.
And it's especially revealing when you deviate. If the continual archer draws their sword and dives in when the enemy are orcs, that says something.
In combat and out of combat, for resolving anything and everything, you have the skill system, an abstracted structure that can universally cover every situation. So resolution is not the problem at least as the OP describes it. You CAN resolve everything.
You may be able to, but that doesn't make it satisfying. (And it's really not all that hard to come up with situations where the skill system doesn't fit well.)
As for RP support, again, take any game that claims to have "great RP support" and what you will find is a game with less granularity of rules, not more than D&D. While games that have this granularity are not known for great RP support, case in point, Pathfinder 2e. Do people go around saying that PF2e has awesome Role-playing support? No.. they complain that the game has way too many rules, but it does in fact have insane granularity of rules.
The reason for this is that there is a huge Dichotomy between playing an RPG (The game) and the act of role-playing. Role-playing is what you do when you are not using rules. It's the conversation and the interaction between you and the DM and each other. When you start executing rules, you are now playing RPG (the game). The two do co-exist, but when people say "rules support for RP" which notably is an old conversation, it never pans out in action as it does on paper. Lots of games have tried to quantify role-playing and those game are never famous for their RP support. GURPS for example has quantified every conceivable talent and action you could possibly conceive into one of the most robust and granular system you will ever see... no one and I mean no goes around claiming that GURPS is a "RP" system... quite the oppossite.
GURPS may not be a great RP system, but it's better than D&D. The character creation system incentivizes the player to give their character negative traits, and encourages the GM to bring them into play. (If you're getting points for being an alcoholic, you'd best expect that alcohol will be brought into the game.) It allows for minor aspects to have mechanical support. Tossing half a point into the poetry skill because it's an interest is no big deal.
Now, it has its own problems, most notably really encouraging the levels of min-maxing you only see in 5e from the "DPR is everything" crowd. It may well have gone too far on the side of granularity, but that's a matter of taste. But in terms of encouraging characters to exist as a complete person, it provides mechanical support for RP.
The point being, very simply. Rules granularity does not "support" RP, it kills it. Rules are diametrically opposed to the act of role-playing. You do need some, but generally speaking, less is more.
The games that are good for RP may usually be mechanically lighter than D&D or GURPS, but they're generally much more balanced in approach. D&D has a big combat system and a very small skill system. This leads to the vast majority of play time being spent on combat in most groups. Even if you agree that RP can happen in combat, it's certainly not where the vast majority of it occurs. Yes, sometimes your group will spend the majority of a session discussing whether they should kill the prisoners (or at least my group will), but that's not the norm.
To bring up FATE again, it's got a combat system, and you can use the exact same system to run a social conflict if you want; it's just that being taken out might be "humiliated in front of the queen and her entire court" instead of "stabbed into submission". In D&D, that would generally be handled with some dialogue and a skill roll or two. You could make it the climactic point of the session/arc/campaign, but it's a lot harder.
That is kind of the point of D&D design, though. Combat has nothing to do with role-playing, unless you use this very loose all-encompassing definition in which "anything you do wtih your character is role-playing". When you're fighting, you're playing a combat mini game.
Well, it's possible to roleplay in combat -- if you do something because it's what your character would do, rather than because it's tactically optimal, you're roleplaying. It's just that roleplaying is primarily about what you choose to do and how you describe what you're doing, not about the game mechanics used to resolve what you're trying to do.
That is kind of the point of D&D design, though. Combat has nothing to do with role-playing, unless you use this very loose all-encompassing definition in which "anything you do wtih your character is role-playing". When you're fighting, you're playing a combat mini game.
Well, it's possible to roleplay in combat -- if you do something because it's what your character would do, rather than because it's tactically optimal, you're roleplaying. It's just that roleplaying is primarily about what you choose to do and how you describe what you're doing, not about the game mechanics used to resolve what you're trying to do.
You're almost there. It's more accurate to say, it's role-playing when your decisions determine what you do and not the mechanics.
This is kind of my point, though. Do you roll to decide if you do something tactically optimal or not, or is it a player choice driven by their image of their character, their story and how they envision playing it out? If you decide to do something for character reasons, your role-playing, a mechanic played no part in that decision; it was your choice based on your instincts, the scene, your backstory etc... It's not role-playing if you roll a d6 to decide if you do or don't do something optimal because a mechanic you chose for your character like a disadvantage called "indecisive," forces you to. Now you are playing an RPG as a game. You can argue that is also role-playing, but that comes down to preference and definition semantics, my point is that if your character is indecisive or has some character reason to go left or right, you're the pilot of that avatar, you're deciding stuff... when mechanics intervene and force your decisions, you're playing a game.
In a game exclusively about role-playing, the conflict resolution mechanic can be as simple as flipping a coin (heads it works, tails it fails), and that can be every bit as engaging, story and character driven as one where you roll X skill against Y DC. The mechanic part of it is mostly irrelevant to the role-playing, its only relevant to the game, aka.. does what your doing work or not and then again, you pick it up and role-play on the otherside... it doesn't work, now how do you behave... what happens? Thats role-playing The more granular those mechanics become, the fewer choices you're going to make and the more decisions the game and the dice will make for you.
The example Jl8e gave of GURPS with the "Alcoholic" is perfect to illustrate the point. If you have a disadvantage that forces your decisions, causes you to act in ways you don't have control over because mechanics tell you what to do and what happens, you're not really role-playing, you're executing mechanics to see what happens in a game. in D&D you can choose to be a heavy drinker and you decide when that part of your character impacts the story or a scene, there are no mechanics forcing anything; You're role-playing an alcoholic, it's part of how you frame the RP experience.
There is a big difference between the two, the argument that having a mechanic that forces your hand makes for better or more role-playing because its on yoru character sheet is a matter of taste, but in the purest sense of the word, if you don't have control over your character's decisions because there is a mechanic that forces your hand, at that point you're just a victim of mechanics. Its no different than someone casting Charm Person on you are and forcing you to attack an Ally It's something the mechanics did in a game.
Again the term 'role playing' seems to be causing a LOT of confusion in this discussion. I probably should have called in 'resolving out of combat actions' or something similar. D&D just does not have a anything nearly as robust or granular as its combat system for resolving actions outside combat. You can absolutely play out your characters personality and tell their story and explore their perspective (what many people think of as role playing) with or without system support. Yes if the system is massively over complicated that can slow things down and make it harder, but having little to no structure can also very much cause people to heavily emphasize combat and introduce all kinds of balance issues as well. If you are arbitrating wither someone is a good at stuff based on backstory, then balance between different characters backstories, and balancing positive and negative things in a backstory, become legitimate issues. It also very much exacerbates any problems there are with unintentional GM favoritism, or player social skills vs. their characters skills, etc.
There is IMO plenty of room for a more robust more granular system for resolving out of combat actions in D&D without getting to the point of becoming highly burdensome. While good players and GMs can tell very good stories without that, it very much encourages combat heavy, story light games. Because the vast majority of the decisions you make during character creations and the vast majority of the information on your character sheet revolves around combat capabilities.
Furthermore when it comes to resolving any action outside of combat you require a lot more skill from the GM to appropriately arbitrate the outcome. Obviously optimally you have a great GM and it doesn't matter but it does not provide as much support for GMs who are not at that level yet. Again leading to games which are either extremely combat centric, or have less fun or balanced out of combat play.
Honestly I think if D&D went just as light on combat arbitration as it does on out of combat arbitration the problems with such a system would be glaringly obvious. Can I make a second attack with my daggers because they are super light and quick and my backstory says I am a knife fighter? Gee ask your GM and depending on what that particular GM thinks, on that particular occasion, you get to do the thing or not. You absolutely can play that way and have it work wonderfully but it requires a load more skill on the part of the GM and even a bit more understanding on the part of the players. I prefer to role play with some clear general rules to arbitrate outcomes... which is the entire point of having any system in the first place vs. just collective story telling with no system. I see a major disconnect between support for arbitrating combat in D&D and support for arbitrating other situations.
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Well, it's narrower than that (there are plenty of non-dice activities that aren't roleplaying), but in general time spent interacting with game mechanics is time not spent roleplaying.
The thing is, "it's what you are doing when not rolling dice", is the definition a vast majority of people use to describe roleplaying.
I think what you describe, however, is probably closer to the definition the OP is going for, and the only issue he's having with 5e is the level granularity of the rules, weight, and methods of conflict resolution.
It's the one thing you can't solve with 5e because adding granularity is quite literally an opposing design philosophy on which 5e was designed. It was the objective of the game design to be light, simple and straightforward, offering abstracted solutions to make the game faster and easier to play. Adding granularity of rules to that would be in effect, undoing all that effort.
You could do it, but what would be the point if other game systems have already done it for you.
Exactly this. The confusion seems to be around the fact that I used the term role playing rather than saying out of combat interactions or something like that that might be more precise or at least not have the connotations people assign to the term role playing.
There are loads of non-combat situations that involve some kind of thing you want to accomplish that should IMO be arbitrated by rules reflected on your character sheet rather than based on how good the player is at describing something or coming up with an argument for a certain thing or whatever. If my character has a silver tongue or is a better than average cook or is absolutely amazing at athletics IMO I should have a meaningfully higher chance of doing those things mechanically. There is certainly room for advantage or some other benefit to the player doing a great job describing how they attempt to go about a thing. And that does make the game better IMO but I feel there should be some fundamental way in which my silver tongued character is significantly more likely to convince an NPC of something, even if I as a player use the same argument as a player who's character is supposedly not good at persuasion.
The combat rules very much do exactly that in combat. A character who is a fighter and master of the sword can pull of a whole bunch of things with a sword that the wizard cannot even attempt. The results of their attempts mechanically reflect significant differences between their skill levels. But outside combat there is very little differentiation, and the differences that exist are binary not continuous.
Again there are loads of situations outside combat where you have meaningful consequences for succeeding or failing at something and where *I* would like to see the game system be able to arbitrate that success or failure rather than me as the DM just making it up, or it being essentially completely random. You can absolutely play a game system where success is entirely unrelated to your characters supposed strengths but I don't like that play style. D&D is extremely 'granular' (For lack of a better term) in combat and I think that leads players to emphasize combat as a focus of their actions because it is objectively the focus of the data on their sheet.
I disagree to some extent with that. D&D is indeed very light by design outside of combat but it is not nearly as simple or lightweight when it comes to combat. IMO that is a clear disconnect. The same in terms of how much weight the dice have vs. your abilities. In combat what you chose as class, abilities, feats, etc. mater a lot more than they do outside combat. As a result character creation largely is making decisions about what you will be capable of in combat and IMO that leads many players especially new ones to view things through that lens. Combat is the thing we are doing. That is how you solve problems, etc. It also puts extra weight on the DM to try to fairly arbitrate non-combat situations in a fair and realistic way vs providing some level of structure to base that on. If you get to succeed or fail at things based on your backstory that means extra effort to try to get peoples backstories to be balanced, and extra effort figuring out what fits with a particular back story, as well as opens up more creative players being more likely to find excuses for why their background applies etc. The rules don't provide meaningful support for arbitrating what succeeds or fails outside combat in anything like the way they do for in combat actions.
I've argued this before in this thread, but, in short, it creates a dichotomy between mechanics and non-mechanics that doesn't exist.
Sure, D&D (all D&D) has crap mechanical support for RP, but that's created a folk wisdom that mechanics aren't RP, because the D&D players have always had to make their own fun.
But there are a good many games that have something more.
I'm not that up on the indie RPG scene, but I know that there's been a lot of interesting stuff done in that regard. For a somewhat more mainstream example, consider FATE. FATE characters have aspects -- things about the character that can be used for situational bonuses. But there's also a mechanic where the GM can offer a player a useful in-game resource to do something that fits their aspect, but that they know will have consequences. They don't have to take it, but it's a little extra incentive to act like they already wanted to.
5e sort of tried something similar with ideals, bonds, and flaws, but the implementation was too peripheral to the game, and the resource too binary and granular. If there's a 6e, we may see an improved version of that.
That is kind of the point of D&D design, though. Combat has nothing to do with role-playing, unless you use this very loose all-encompassing definition in which "anything you do wtih your character is role-playing". When you're fighting, you're playing a combat mini game.
In combat and out of combat, for resolving anything and everything, you have the skill system, an abstracted structure that can universally cover every situation. So resolution is not the problem at least as the OP describes it. You CAN resolve everything.
His issue is the granularity of the rules as it applies to mechanics to support character abilities/talents/skills reflected in the character's story or what have you, and having mechanics that show grades of effectiveness based on mastery over different abilities/talents/skills so that there is a granular progression. Today I'm a novice Chef, but if I put some points into Cooking, I can be a Master Chef someday!
D&D is very specifically and consciously designed not to be that. It's not a bug, it's a feature and a core deliberate part of the design. D&D basically says, Granularity is bad for the game (with the exception, as you point out, in combat).
What Im saying is that you could design that granularity back into D&D, which would be a considerable effort or you could play another game like say Pathfinder 2e that quite literally from the ground up was designed with this granularity as a core and foundational feature of the game.
Unless Wizards of the Coast does a complete 180 when it comes to the design philosophy of 5e, you will never see granularity like this in D&D. Adding it, would effectively be a massive shift from light abstracted mechanical execution on which 5e is foundationally designed from the ground up.
As for RP support, again, take any game that claims to have "great RP support" and what you will find is a game with less granularity of rules, not more than D&D. While games that have this granularity are not known for great RP support, case in point, Pathfinder 2e. Do people go around saying that PF2e has awesome Role-playing support? No.. they complain that the game has way too many rules, but it does in fact have insane granularity of rules.
The reason for this is that there is a huge Dichotomy between playing an RPG (The game) and the act of role-playing. Role-playing is what you do when you are not using rules. It's the conversation and the interaction between you and the DM and each other. When you start executing rules, you are now playing RPG (the game). The two do co-exist, but when people say "rules support for RP" which notably is an old conversation, it never pans out in action as it does on paper. Lots of games have tried to quantify role-playing and those game are never famous for their RP support. GURPS for example has quantified every conceivable talent and action you could possibly conceive into one of the most robust and granular system you will ever see... no one and I mean no goes around claiming that GURPS is a "RP" system... quite the oppossite.
The point being, very simply. Rules granularity does not "support" RP, it kills it. Rules are diametrically opposed to the act of role-playing. You do need some, but generally speaking, less is more.
But, there is. Be an eloquence bard. Take persuasion expertise. By 3rd level, you won’t be able to get less than a 17. By 5th it’s probably a minimum of 20. There are similar examples for pretty much any out of combat situation. You can be exceptional at them, if you make your character that way by investing in the right skills and choosing the right class/subclass.
The trade off is you’ve invested in those skills, so you’re maybe a little weaker in combat. So, a fighter can’t be the silver tongued character nearly as well or as easily, but the bard isn’t doing what the fighter does once initiative is rolled.
Its actually more like the game does put a lot of mechanical stock in doing things out of combat, to the point that characters who are good at those aren’t as good in combat. It’s a character balance issue.
This particular issue is best handled by the GM not intervening in the mechanics. It shouldn't matter if the player can summon up a good argument on the fly. The player is not their character, and running things so as to overemphasize player skill makes it harder for people to play characters that are not like them.
I'm personally a fan of getting the roll in early, so the player can attempt to adjust their narration to the result. When I'm narrating my monk's attacks in combat, I don't want to describe a fancy combo and then roll nothing higher than a five. The same can be true with social skills. If you know you're going to roll a three, you don't describe your elaborate con, but something simpler and less effective.
And there is still roleplaying there if you want it.
You may be able to, but that doesn't make it satisfying. (And it's really not all that hard to come up with situations where the skill system doesn't fit well.)
GURPS may not be a great RP system, but it's better than D&D. The character creation system incentivizes the player to give their character negative traits, and encourages the GM to bring them into play. (If you're getting points for being an alcoholic, you'd best expect that alcohol will be brought into the game.) It allows for minor aspects to have mechanical support. Tossing half a point into the poetry skill because it's an interest is no big deal.
Now, it has its own problems, most notably really encouraging the levels of min-maxing you only see in 5e from the "DPR is everything" crowd. It may well have gone too far on the side of granularity, but that's a matter of taste. But in terms of encouraging characters to exist as a complete person, it provides mechanical support for RP.
The games that are good for RP may usually be mechanically lighter than D&D or GURPS, but they're generally much more balanced in approach. D&D has a big combat system and a very small skill system. This leads to the vast majority of play time being spent on combat in most groups. Even if you agree that RP can happen in combat, it's certainly not where the vast majority of it occurs. Yes, sometimes your group will spend the majority of a session discussing whether they should kill the prisoners (or at least my group will), but that's not the norm.
To bring up FATE again, it's got a combat system, and you can use the exact same system to run a social conflict if you want; it's just that being taken out might be "humiliated in front of the queen and her entire court" instead of "stabbed into submission". In D&D, that would generally be handled with some dialogue and a skill roll or two. You could make it the climactic point of the session/arc/campaign, but it's a lot harder.
Well, it's possible to roleplay in combat -- if you do something because it's what your character would do, rather than because it's tactically optimal, you're roleplaying. It's just that roleplaying is primarily about what you choose to do and how you describe what you're doing, not about the game mechanics used to resolve what you're trying to do.
You're almost there. It's more accurate to say, it's role-playing when your decisions determine what you do and not the mechanics.
This is kind of my point, though. Do you roll to decide if you do something tactically optimal or not, or is it a player choice driven by their image of their character, their story and how they envision playing it out? If you decide to do something for character reasons, your role-playing, a mechanic played no part in that decision; it was your choice based on your instincts, the scene, your backstory etc... It's not role-playing if you roll a d6 to decide if you do or don't do something optimal because a mechanic you chose for your character like a disadvantage called "indecisive," forces you to. Now you are playing an RPG as a game. You can argue that is also role-playing, but that comes down to preference and definition semantics, my point is that if your character is indecisive or has some character reason to go left or right, you're the pilot of that avatar, you're deciding stuff... when mechanics intervene and force your decisions, you're playing a game.
In a game exclusively about role-playing, the conflict resolution mechanic can be as simple as flipping a coin (heads it works, tails it fails), and that can be every bit as engaging, story and character driven as one where you roll X skill against Y DC. The mechanic part of it is mostly irrelevant to the role-playing, its only relevant to the game, aka.. does what your doing work or not and then again, you pick it up and role-play on the otherside... it doesn't work, now how do you behave... what happens? Thats role-playing The more granular those mechanics become, the fewer choices you're going to make and the more decisions the game and the dice will make for you.
The example Jl8e gave of GURPS with the "Alcoholic" is perfect to illustrate the point. If you have a disadvantage that forces your decisions, causes you to act in ways you don't have control over because mechanics tell you what to do and what happens, you're not really role-playing, you're executing mechanics to see what happens in a game. in D&D you can choose to be a heavy drinker and you decide when that part of your character impacts the story or a scene, there are no mechanics forcing anything; You're role-playing an alcoholic, it's part of how you frame the RP experience.
There is a big difference between the two, the argument that having a mechanic that forces your hand makes for better or more role-playing because its on yoru character sheet is a matter of taste, but in the purest sense of the word, if you don't have control over your character's decisions because there is a mechanic that forces your hand, at that point you're just a victim of mechanics. Its no different than someone casting Charm Person on you are and forcing you to attack an Ally It's something the mechanics did in a game.
Again the term 'role playing' seems to be causing a LOT of confusion in this discussion. I probably should have called in 'resolving out of combat actions' or something similar. D&D just does not have a anything nearly as robust or granular as its combat system for resolving actions outside combat. You can absolutely play out your characters personality and tell their story and explore their perspective (what many people think of as role playing) with or without system support. Yes if the system is massively over complicated that can slow things down and make it harder, but having little to no structure can also very much cause people to heavily emphasize combat and introduce all kinds of balance issues as well. If you are arbitrating wither someone is a good at stuff based on backstory, then balance between different characters backstories, and balancing positive and negative things in a backstory, become legitimate issues. It also very much exacerbates any problems there are with unintentional GM favoritism, or player social skills vs. their characters skills, etc.
There is IMO plenty of room for a more robust more granular system for resolving out of combat actions in D&D without getting to the point of becoming highly burdensome. While good players and GMs can tell very good stories without that, it very much encourages combat heavy, story light games. Because the vast majority of the decisions you make during character creations and the vast majority of the information on your character sheet revolves around combat capabilities.
Furthermore when it comes to resolving any action outside of combat you require a lot more skill from the GM to appropriately arbitrate the outcome. Obviously optimally you have a great GM and it doesn't matter but it does not provide as much support for GMs who are not at that level yet. Again leading to games which are either extremely combat centric, or have less fun or balanced out of combat play.
Honestly I think if D&D went just as light on combat arbitration as it does on out of combat arbitration the problems with such a system would be glaringly obvious. Can I make a second attack with my daggers because they are super light and quick and my backstory says I am a knife fighter? Gee ask your GM and depending on what that particular GM thinks, on that particular occasion, you get to do the thing or not. You absolutely can play that way and have it work wonderfully but it requires a load more skill on the part of the GM and even a bit more understanding on the part of the players. I prefer to role play with some clear general rules to arbitrate outcomes... which is the entire point of having any system in the first place vs. just collective story telling with no system. I see a major disconnect between support for arbitrating combat in D&D and support for arbitrating other situations.