Thanks for the recs, I do plan to look into them, but I also want to point out the main reason I stick to using DnD and ttrpgs that are very similar (e.g. pathfinder) as a framework is it lets your group get right into the game instead of spending a lot of time getting used to an unfamiliar system.
Imagine a scenario where the players encounter a group of goons blocking the road. If they want to get in a fight, D&D has a ton of rules. Movement, to-hit and damage, armor, saves. If they want to talk through it, the rules are comparably thread-bare. There's no social HP.
This would be mostly RP’d discussion, punctuated with rolls to represent luck and stats to represent how the character and player might differ.
It would be something like the player asking the goons to move, the goons saying no, the player asking why, the goons giving some answer, the player rolling insight and then deciding a follow up question, probably ending with a persuasion or intimidation check with a DC dependent on how well the rest of the discussion went, with the possibility for other shenanigans to influence as well (like maybe the party mage used minor illusion to fake a badge to pretend to be cops).
I honestly don’t think something like “social HP” would be better than RP and shenanigans, but idk, I would be curious to try.
Side note: because of how D&D's stats work, you end up with a lot of characters are mechanically bad at socializing, or underperform at their prescribed roles.
This is definitely a weakness of DnD. It helps if your party is more into the RP aspects than absolutely optimizing their characters for combat. Another thing I’ve done as DM is to give players a choice, like jumping across a gap could be acrobatics or athletics, so they can use the stats they are good at.
I was curious so I'm looking at a spell list on a dnd wiki. A majority of spells are for combat, followed by spells that also have exploration uses (eg: fly, alarm), and then there's everything else.
I think the issue with combat oriented spells is you have spells at each level that do “vaguely this level’s worth of damage” for every damage type so you get a nice progression curve. Out-of-combat spells are not so easily quantifiable. What is the level 4 version of minor illusion? (There are some answers to that tbh). There also are damaging spells that explicitly have non-combat purposes (one of the main ones I can think of is Phantasmal Force), as well as ones that may not explicitly say so but no DM would deny, like using fire bolt to light something on fire at a distance.
Also I’m not sure what you have against exploration and movement type spells because those are very useful in an intrigue heavy campaign.
Anyway, DnD does have a lot of combat mechanics, but it has plenty of non-combat mechanics too. The combat is more regimented and structured, but I don’t see that as a weakness, just the difference between combat and intrigue.