I started playing D&D about six years ago and fell in love with it.
Back then, 5th Edition was new - it was seen as somewhat revelatory: a more accessible, flexible system that evoked the feeling of older editions (it reverted somewhat to the form that 3.5 had taken after 4th Edition was seen as too much of a departure) but, again, was simple enough, at least at its base level, to welcome a ton of new people into the game.
I remember arguing with a friend of a friend about D&D's strengths. He was arguing that the game did combat better than anything else, and so he felt that a D&D campaign should not get bogged down in extraneous elements - that it should really be used for combat-filled dungeon crawls and not worry too much complex characters and plots.
His reasoning was that the rules system was focused far more on combat than on these other things.
I disagreed, but it got me thinking: is the lack of rules and mechanics when it comes to "RP" a bug or a feature?
Actually, we should address the fact that it might not be so lacking as one would think. Page 244 of the DMG has a whole section on resolving interactions with NPCs. There are, in fact, level of attitude an NPC can have to the party or a PC, between friendly, indifferent, and hostile, and there's a whole table for resolving charisma checks to change the NPC's attitude - for example, a hostile creature might, by default, oppose a character's goals and even take risks to do so, but a mere DC 10 Charisma check could steer them to merely offer no help but do no harm. (Note here that a hostile character is not necessarily at the "attack on sight" stage of things, but simply dislikes the party).
I don't think I know of any DMs who have actually run things quite by the letter here, but the rules exist.
And therein, I think, lies the issue of trying to flesh new elements of the rules. There's a lot that players are comfortable with. Combat is delineated very specifically, but two elements come into play to make players more likely to take the time to familiarize themselves with the system: one is that combat is inherently exciting. Also, every character class is built with some form of combat ability in mind, everyone has abilities that they want to bust out. But it's also an area with high stakes. When combat happens, there's a chance your character could die. (I guess in theory if you were high enough level fighting low-level monsters you might find yourself in a situation where even if they succeed on their saves against fireballs that deal minimum damage you'll still win, but you get my meaning).
Some TTRPGs try to introduce as much complexity to social interaction as there is in combat. The A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, which is actually the first TTRPG I ever played (briefly,) has a thing called "Intrigues" that are structured like combat, but they're more about gaining influence and convincing or intimidating others.
But we only did like one of those in the time that I played that game, and I don't recall even really understanding what was going on.
One of the things that really got me excited looking at Starfinder was the rules for building starships. Starships are such an important trope to the space-faring sci fi adventure genre that it makes total sense that you'd have a system for it. But as cool as it seems, I'm also skeptical that my players will get really into actual starship combat - a system that works very differently from regular combat and also mostly boils down to a few specific skill checks - piloting, computers, engineering, and in the case of the captain, perhaps sometimes bluff or intimidation.
Thankfully, starships are not purely built for combat - there are other systems the players can invest their build points in in order to have, for example, specialized environmental quarters in case you have a water-breathing passenger aboard.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh introduced some cool mechanics for giving players a ship in D&D. But movement in combat, and many of the things one can do in combat with ships has a significantly different feel from normal D&D combat. I absolutely love the idea of having a party decide whether they want to get a living hull made of wood harvested from the feywild or a hull made of magical, elemental ice. But it's another system that needs to feel cool enough for the players to invest in learning it.
Because there's a ton of nuance to D&D combat that players will, I think, naturally engage with given its central role. And part of what allows for that nuance is the vast number of monsters that one can encounter in the game that are designed to be fought on-foot. I mean, the Monster Manual alone has like 450 stat blocks or something. Within those lies a reason for a player to consider whether they'd want to have a spell that does fire damage versus another that does acid.
In a sense, these additional mechanics need to have the depth to make it worth it for the player to commit a substantial amount of their mental energy within the game to them.
And that energy is limited. Even though it's the most welcoming version of D&D that has been made, 5th Edition is still a lot to take in. I mean, I cannot tell you how long I tried to figure out how your proficiency bonus changes depending on the skills you use when I was first reading the rules - until it finally clicked for me that it was very intentionally a flat number (though things like Expertise and Jack of All Trades do blur that notion.) I remember trying to figure out if Cunning Action gave Rogues a second bonus action. I remember, in my first session as DM, not realizing that the XP for an encounter was split between the members of the party (and though I had intended to have the players hit level 2 by the end of the first session, realized I had to just kind of handwave that and give them "quest experience" in order to do so.)
So I think that any addition to the game's rules needs to be done judiciously.
The books coming in three years haven't really been defined yet as a "5.5" or "6th" edition, and I think that the popularity of 5th Edition has made WotC hesitant to do a full reset for fear of alienating their massively expanded player base.
I'm sure some things will change. We might see some very surprising changes, in fact. But I suspect that they're going to try to avoid making it more complicated than it currently is.
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