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.
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.
That works exclusively for people who are already excellent role players. If it is up to the player to remember they are an alcoholic and give themselves a disadvantage because of it in certain circumstances that works great for people who are excellent at role playing but it doesn't work well for people who are not yet at that level. It leads to the same problems you would have if you left role playing that you are fragile in combat (low HP) up to the player. Most players especially new ones won't play themselves dropping after one hit they would find an excuse to not have that happen. You already see this in combat with HPs. Because there is no mechanic that says you are less capable as you get damaged the overwhelming majority of players, GMs, and games leave the PCs and NPCs fully able to act just as effectively at 1HP as they do at 100HP. Nobody is limping around form their leg wound, nobody has an arm that is incapacitated, etc. Yes top role players and DMs would play those things out if there were no HP system or combat system at all so you can say the system creates that problem... but I don't think that is actually a good reason not to have any combat system. I see it more as a flaw in the way the combat system is designed where a relatively minor mechanic (like the bloodied applying serious negatives, or any number of other design choices) would address.
The entire point of having the system is to support arbitration of things your character tries to accomplish in a balanced way because not every player or GM has the skill and social skills IRL to tell do decent collective story telling without that framework.
D&D just does not have a anything nearly as robust or granular as its combat system for resolving actions outside combat.
If you'd just said that I don't think there'd be any argument (there is, however, quite a lot of disagreement about how desirable it is for the system to be robust and granular; do you really want fifty subsystems, all just as complex as the combat system, in one game?)
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?
In a super light game system you generally just treat an attack sequence as a single action, even if it's narrated as multiple attacks.
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.
I'm not sure I would describe D&D as having little to no system support for out-of-combat actions, but the ones that exist are very abstracted to keep the sub-systems simple. More importantly, they are designed in a way to help players and GM's understand the design space to expand the game on their own.
The other kind of important aspect of D&D is that "balance" is pretty low on the list of design goals.
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.
Well.. ya, I mean, you described the game's design goal here. A story-light, fantasy-combat adventure game. I think it's selling the game short to not at least admit that there is wiggle room here within the system for more robust storytelling. I think Critical Role has proven that, but generally speaking, you're right, running deeper stories usually takes more experienced role-players. I don't see however how adding more rules and making the game more complicated will somehow make it easier on inexperienced role-players.
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.
I don't think I would argue that point. D&D as much as it claims to be for novices, really isn't. It's a moderately complex game in general mainly because of the combat rules and I actualy think it would be a much more approachable game if combat was as light as out of combat mechanics. In either case, I don't see how making out of combat in addition to in combat rules more complex would somehow make it more approachable or simpler for novice players.
I will say, I do understand what you're after, I just don't think you will find it in D&D in the present or future. You might consider 3rd edition, it made some attempts to be more granular, but most people who have played D&D over the years will tell you that the granularity of 3e was at the heart of all the problems with the system. It's quite literarly because of trying to have more granularity in D&D in the past why we don't have it today.
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.
A.) D&D 5E has clear, general rules for how to handle non-combat encounters. By necessity though, the social mechanics are more open-ended to accommodate the fact that social encounters can take an infinitude of forms, while combat can be a lot more specific and crunchy because it's just combat.
2.) Meanwhile, running satisfying combat encounters requires a skilled DM just as much as non-combat play does. A DM has to learn how to make the most of monster mechanics and how to balance challenge and fun during a fight. And there are no mechanics for giving exciting, vivid descriptions of the story of a combat encounter. The game experience gets better when the DM and the players are creatively firing on all cylinders, both in combat and in social encounters.
In general, systems designed to be more detailed about out of combat abilities tend towards one of three models:
A vast explosion of skills. GURPS, for example, has upwards of 400 skills. This tends to make creating and using a character extremely tedious.
Define-a-trait systems where the cost is determined when you create the character, based on some evaluation of how useful it seems likely to be. This tends to run into the problem that it's often very hard to determine how useful a trait actually is.
Define-a-trait systems where the trait has a cost to use -- for example, in FATE you can have whatever descriptors you want, but if you want the descriptor to do something you generally need to spend a fate point, and your supply of fate points is very limited. This has the problem that traits are fairly irrelevant on unimportant tests (since you probably aren't going to spend any of your precious resources) and become "how do I describe what I'm doing in a way that lets me use my traits" on important tests.
I don't think I would argue that point. D&D as much as it claims to be for novices, really isn't. It's a moderately complex game in general mainly because of the combat rules and I actualy think it would be a much more approachable game if combat was as light as out of combat mechanics. In either case, I don't see how making out of combat in addition to in combat rules more complex would somehow make it more approachable or simpler for novice players.
I will say, I do understand what you're after, I just don't think you will find it in D&D in the present or future. You might consider 3rd edition, it made some attempts to be more granular, but most people who have played D&D over the years will tell you that the granularity of 3e was at the heart of all the problems with the system. It's quite literarly because of trying to have more granularity in D&D in the past why we don't have it today.
I did play in 3e and 3.5e. And while those were flawed in their own ways they were much closer to what I like to see in a system. I would agree that D&D is moderately complex with respect to combat and it would be in some ways more approachable if the combat rules were lighter as there would not be nearly as much learning curve for players, but I think the learning curve and differences between better and worse GMs would be even more pronounced.
I think even with a fairly light system you can still have more granularity to out of combat outcome determination. Like having x skill points vs proficency in a skill that gives you a +y isn't much of a difference in complexity. And having the die roll be less important compared to skill level more like it is in combat (without all the special abilities and accompanying rules) is zero difference in complexity just making the out of combat skill humbers a bit higher. Increasing the number of skills would be a little more complexity but you already have proficiencies for some things so just making those numerical instead of binary isn't much of a change. I don't think you need an entire set of subsystems for every type of task to have very good general guidelines for how you create a new skill, how broad or narrow it should be, what different levels of difficulty look like (already in the system), and how large various situational modifiers will likely be.
I still would argue that having more clear ways on the character sheet to represent noncombat skills and knowledge, or even just making the mathematical difference between being good at something outside combat vs not being good at it more meaningful, would be likely to lead to more emphasis in play on those things. I think if you can be heroic or epic at things outside combat the way you can in combat you would see more of that type of play.
So it might help if we compared the way D&D works to a more skill based system. In combat (and to a lesser extent outside combat) D&D relies on a large number of what are essentially special rules that modify the base case. Feats and abilities. So you have a class ability that says you can take a reaction to parry an incoming attack, or counter attack or whatever. If that were something that anyone could try but it had a high difficulty so only people who were particularly skilled with their weapon or particularly skilled at parying or whatever could reliably pull it off, you wouldn't really have more complexity. You could even argue it would be simpler. Anyone can make a contested roll at -5 to parry or whatever. But by using a primarily skill based combat system sill based systems open up the exact same mechanics being used in non-combat situations so whither you are in combat or not an athletics check has the same amount of granularity, and the skill makes just as much of a difference. So characters who are heavily invested in non-combat oriented skills are just as amazing at those as the characters with combat oriented skills are at combat. And by playing with the numbers you can easily create a balance where their is some chance of a character that is not trained pulling off something fairly out of their general ability, but not the downright insane, and there is room for a bit of skill being different than a lot of skill.
The design of D&D focusing on special rules that allow you to do things in combat that others can't as a major factor in combat effectiveness, but out of combat skills using the same proficiency bonus numbers and system as combat skills, results in a fairly big disconnect between in combat and out of combat situations. In combat your good at x character can do a whole bunch of stuff the other characters can't but out of combat there is much less differentiation. There is some which is positive but not nearly as much IMO.
The proficiencies being binary also is just a bit wierd. Like at higher level you can have a +0 a +5 (proficient) or a +10 (expertise) in a given skill but not a +3 or +8 etc. That is a bit odd. It doesn't really flow narratively. There very much are other ways to curb min-maxing without that weird mechanic.
I still would argue that having more clear ways on the character sheet to represent noncombat skills and knowledge, or even just making the mathematical difference between being good at something outside combat vs not being good at it more meaningful, would be likely to lead to more emphasis in play on those things. I think if you can be heroic or epic at things outside combat the way you can in combat you would see more of that type of play.
I can understand how and why you would come to that conclusion, on paper, it seems reasonable, but what you're describing has been tried in D&D (in the 3rd edition days) and it was deemed too complex.
The methods implemented in 5e for managing out-of-combat abilities/talents and skills are
1. The Skill System (an abstraction using bound accuracy, driven by the level of the character and the proficiency bonus) 2. Feats 3. Tool proficiencies 4. and to a degree, custom background creation
I doubt we will see a return to micro-managing skills and granularity beyond bound accuracy in D&D any time in the near future. 2024 edition has stuck with bound accuracy and that version of the game is likely to be around for at least 5 years, and theoretically has been in place since 4th edition so nearly 2 decades at this point. I doubt it's something that is likely to change in the next edition.
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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.
That works exclusively for people who are already excellent role players. If it is up to the player to remember they are an alcoholic and give themselves a disadvantage because of it in certain circumstances that works great for people who are excellent at role playing but it doesn't work well for people who are not yet at that level. It leads to the same problems you would have if you left role playing that you are fragile in combat (low HP) up to the player. Most players especially new ones won't play themselves dropping after one hit they would find an excuse to not have that happen.
You already see this in combat with HPs. Because there is no mechanic that says you are less capable as you get damaged the overwhelming majority of players, GMs, and games leave the PCs and NPCs fully able to act just as effectively at 1HP as they do at 100HP. Nobody is limping around form their leg wound, nobody has an arm that is incapacitated, etc. Yes top role players and DMs would play those things out if there were no HP system or combat system at all so you can say the system creates that problem... but I don't think that is actually a good reason not to have any combat system. I see it more as a flaw in the way the combat system is designed where a relatively minor mechanic (like the bloodied applying serious negatives, or any number of other design choices) would address.
The entire point of having the system is to support arbitration of things your character tries to accomplish in a balanced way because not every player or GM has the skill and social skills IRL to tell do decent collective story telling without that framework.
If you'd just said that I don't think there'd be any argument (there is, however, quite a lot of disagreement about how desirable it is for the system to be robust and granular; do you really want fifty subsystems, all just as complex as the combat system, in one game?)
In a super light game system you generally just treat an attack sequence as a single action, even if it's narrated as multiple attacks.
I'm not sure I would describe D&D as having little to no system support for out-of-combat actions, but the ones that exist are very abstracted to keep the sub-systems simple. More importantly, they are designed in a way to help players and GM's understand the design space to expand the game on their own.
The other kind of important aspect of D&D is that "balance" is pretty low on the list of design goals.
Well.. ya, I mean, you described the game's design goal here. A story-light, fantasy-combat adventure game. I think it's selling the game short to not at least admit that there is wiggle room here within the system for more robust storytelling. I think Critical Role has proven that, but generally speaking, you're right, running deeper stories usually takes more experienced role-players. I don't see however how adding more rules and making the game more complicated will somehow make it easier on inexperienced role-players.
I don't think I would argue that point. D&D as much as it claims to be for novices, really isn't. It's a moderately complex game in general mainly because of the combat rules and I actualy think it would be a much more approachable game if combat was as light as out of combat mechanics. In either case, I don't see how making out of combat in addition to in combat rules more complex would somehow make it more approachable or simpler for novice players.
I will say, I do understand what you're after, I just don't think you will find it in D&D in the present or future. You might consider 3rd edition, it made some attempts to be more granular, but most people who have played D&D over the years will tell you that the granularity of 3e was at the heart of all the problems with the system. It's quite literarly because of trying to have more granularity in D&D in the past why we don't have it today.
A.) D&D 5E has clear, general rules for how to handle non-combat encounters. By necessity though, the social mechanics are more open-ended to accommodate the fact that social encounters can take an infinitude of forms, while combat can be a lot more specific and crunchy because it's just combat.
2.) Meanwhile, running satisfying combat encounters requires a skilled DM just as much as non-combat play does. A DM has to learn how to make the most of monster mechanics and how to balance challenge and fun during a fight. And there are no mechanics for giving exciting, vivid descriptions of the story of a combat encounter. The game experience gets better when the DM and the players are creatively firing on all cylinders, both in combat and in social encounters.
In general, systems designed to be more detailed about out of combat abilities tend towards one of three models:
I did play in 3e and 3.5e. And while those were flawed in their own ways they were much closer to what I like to see in a system. I would agree that D&D is moderately complex with respect to combat and it would be in some ways more approachable if the combat rules were lighter as there would not be nearly as much learning curve for players, but I think the learning curve and differences between better and worse GMs would be even more pronounced.
I think even with a fairly light system you can still have more granularity to out of combat outcome determination. Like having x skill points vs proficency in a skill that gives you a +y isn't much of a difference in complexity. And having the die roll be less important compared to skill level more like it is in combat (without all the special abilities and accompanying rules) is zero difference in complexity just making the out of combat skill humbers a bit higher. Increasing the number of skills would be a little more complexity but you already have proficiencies for some things so just making those numerical instead of binary isn't much of a change. I don't think you need an entire set of subsystems for every type of task to have very good general guidelines for how you create a new skill, how broad or narrow it should be, what different levels of difficulty look like (already in the system), and how large various situational modifiers will likely be.
I still would argue that having more clear ways on the character sheet to represent noncombat skills and knowledge, or even just making the mathematical difference between being good at something outside combat vs not being good at it more meaningful, would be likely to lead to more emphasis in play on those things. I think if you can be heroic or epic at things outside combat the way you can in combat you would see more of that type of play.
So it might help if we compared the way D&D works to a more skill based system. In combat (and to a lesser extent outside combat) D&D relies on a large number of what are essentially special rules that modify the base case. Feats and abilities. So you have a class ability that says you can take a reaction to parry an incoming attack, or counter attack or whatever. If that were something that anyone could try but it had a high difficulty so only people who were particularly skilled with their weapon or particularly skilled at parying or whatever could reliably pull it off, you wouldn't really have more complexity. You could even argue it would be simpler. Anyone can make a contested roll at -5 to parry or whatever.
But by using a primarily skill based combat system sill based systems open up the exact same mechanics being used in non-combat situations so whither you are in combat or not an athletics check has the same amount of granularity, and the skill makes just as much of a difference. So characters who are heavily invested in non-combat oriented skills are just as amazing at those as the characters with combat oriented skills are at combat.
And by playing with the numbers you can easily create a balance where their is some chance of a character that is not trained pulling off something fairly out of their general ability, but not the downright insane, and there is room for a bit of skill being different than a lot of skill.
The design of D&D focusing on special rules that allow you to do things in combat that others can't as a major factor in combat effectiveness, but out of combat skills using the same proficiency bonus numbers and system as combat skills, results in a fairly big disconnect between in combat and out of combat situations. In combat your good at x character can do a whole bunch of stuff the other characters can't but out of combat there is much less differentiation. There is some which is positive but not nearly as much IMO.
The proficiencies being binary also is just a bit wierd. Like at higher level you can have a +0 a +5 (proficient) or a +10 (expertise) in a given skill but not a +3 or +8 etc. That is a bit odd. It doesn't really flow narratively. There very much are other ways to curb min-maxing without that weird mechanic.
I can understand how and why you would come to that conclusion, on paper, it seems reasonable, but what you're describing has been tried in D&D (in the 3rd edition days) and it was deemed too complex.
The methods implemented in 5e for managing out-of-combat abilities/talents and skills are
1. The Skill System (an abstraction using bound accuracy, driven by the level of the character and the proficiency bonus)
2. Feats
3. Tool proficiencies
4. and to a degree, custom background creation
I doubt we will see a return to micro-managing skills and granularity beyond bound accuracy in D&D any time in the near future. 2024 edition has stuck with bound accuracy and that version of the game is likely to be around for at least 5 years, and theoretically has been in place since 4th edition so nearly 2 decades at this point. I doubt it's something that is likely to change in the next edition.