what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?
"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.
The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?
What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.
This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.
In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".
Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence".
well, no, i was actually thinking about scenarios like navigating a ball/gala type event and exploring the plot through verbal conversation, but i suppose i didn't say that, so fine, egg on my face
i ask this because i've been thinking a lot about why i keep bouncing off games like Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week, both of which like to bill themselves as "rp forward". there's a lot of tools and toys to play with in terms of social encounters for both of those games, to be applied in heist and monster mystery situations, respectively, so i think we can safely say that we're aware of what the rules want to be doing in this instance, and are broadly in agreement with them.
but in practice, i often forget that i even have those tools, or the conversation regularly grinds to a halt while people review their abilities lists, and it's just.... weirdly exhausting. and i keep thinking that surely there must be a better way, but i'm not a game designer, so fuck me if i know what that better way might look like. hence, asking an expert.
i suppose we do need more precise terminology, because yeah "roleplaying" is technically applicable to any aspect of game engagement you can think of. "navigating social situations" is slightly narrower, but maybe just "having a conversation" is what we're after. and maybe part of the problem is that most people are already halfway proficient at having a conversation? in ways that we're not proficient at the aforementioned hitting each other with sticks. so we can just Do It without needing to abstract parts of the process into dice rolls and hit points, because we can just observe what the other guy says and then decide how our character feels about it and how they want to respond.
so is the answer to this just "roleplay is a fake category, and none of it matters"? surely that can't be it. surely someone must know what they're doing here, and can come up with a framework to gamify Having A Conversation in a functional and satisfying way.
There are a couple of big issues here:
You've settled on defining "roleplaying [mechanics]" as "gamifying having a conversation". What does it mean to gamify having a conversation? In what way, and to what purpose? My previously proposed summary of "[having rules for] set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence" is one way of gamifying having a conversation, but you've said that's not what you mean by that; so, what do you mean?
Is "gamifying having a conversation" really the only context in which your games grind to a halt because nobody's bothered to learn what's on their own character sheets and they need to pause to refresh themselves? Or does that happen all the time, and you're simply more tolerant of it in "hitting each other with sticks" contexts than otherwise?
Yeah, having played Blades in the Dark with a ton of 'navigating a ball/gala type event' and 'exploring the plot through verbal conversation' myself, it sounds like your main problem, @churchyardgrim , is that you're playing with people who aren't good at picking up TTRPG mechanics, and you may be one of those people yourself as well. "The game gets slow and plodding whenever mechanics come up during the stuff I'm interested in, regardless of what game we're playing" suggests that you or the people you're regularly playing with don't deal well with mechanics period.
I haven't played Monster of the Week, but if you have to think too hard about how to use Blades in the Dark mechanics in a way that serves your navigate-social-situation goals, then you may just not have played enough of it to be comfortable using its mechanics. There are essentially only four social skills (I don't count "Attune" but I do count "Survey," in addition to the obvious "Sway", "Consort", and "Command") and your playbook has a list of less than a dozen abilities, many of which are either downtime-specific or are merely passive permanent changes to your character sheet. The designers simply don't expect you to have all that much difficulty remembering what your options are.
My experience with social mechanics that slow interaction to a crawl is the social combat system from Exalted, in which attempting to wear down an NPC's Resolve to convince them to do what you want is nearly as complex and time-consuming as defeating them in martial combat. There are different NPC-specific strategy options for literally every NPC, including the random passers-by who didn't have a name until 2 second ago, and you have to spend actions figuring out what those are or possibly inventing new ones and then attaching them to that NPC. It's therefore impossible to internalize whether you're supposed to use [x skill] in [x situation] because every interaction starts with figuring out what this specific NPC's pushable buttons might be. It sounded interesting on paper, but I got overwhelmed quickly. Though even here, a big part of the reason it was such a slog was that I wasn't very familiar with the mechanics and had to keep stopping to look things up!
Despite the complexity of the fan-made cheat sheet below, though, note the instructions at the very top indicating that all of this is expected to take place within the natural flow of a conversation:
The point is that you are meant to put enough effort into learning the game that you don't have to slow everyone down looking things up every time mechanics become relevant. You'll need to consciously remember or look up a lot of stuff at first, sure, but it's supposed to become pretty instinctive, like looking over your shoulder to check your blind spot while merging lanes. Even crunchy combat is designed on the assumption that the people playing the game are going to learn the rules of the game eventually. You aren't expected to look up your own abilities every turn any more than you are expected to get out your Driver's Ed handbook to remember blind spot rules during every lane change.
If social mechanics consistently sour your experience of social maneuvering in TTRPGs, especially in systems as relatively 'crunch-free' as Blades, then probably what you want is a game oriented toward very freeform play, where the only game 'mechanic' is some kind of time-triggered prompting or external goal structure. You might prefer tabletop games that fall into what I would call the "collaborative worldbuilding" genre, like Microscope. These games don't really have anything in the way of social mechanics per se, but they have structural prompts and restrictions related to generating social interaction set pieces, to help ensure players know what social interaction within the game is for and what they as players need to achieve through the social interactions they play out.
I'd really like if my tablemates were more interested in those kind of games, but the players I have access to are more into game mechanics that affect play on a more granular level, e.g. "roll Diplomacy with a +1 status bonus from Glamorize and a +1 circumstance bonus from that successful Aid roll" (Pathfinder 2e) or "take 2 stress to push yourself on this Controlled Sway to change the effect from Limited to Standard, and you have a bonus die from your Trust In Me ability"(Blades). Consequently I don't have any recs in the "freeform social roleplay set into a structured prompt with an explicit game-imposed goal" genre that are directly related to gala infiltration, but here's what I do have:
Microscope, a game where there are rules about zooming in or zooming out to make either macro decisions about historical eras or micro decisions about what happened at pivotal moments in history. Players both make high-level worldbuilding decisions and also get to roleplay the pivotal moments. I never roleplayed infiltrating a gala but I did roleplay breaking into a pivotal galactic senate vote on android rights, and many other dramatic things.
I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic, a Microscope-inspired game where instead of a world history you are making a city and its neighborhoods, with structured points during which the players roleplay scenes set at a neighborhood landmark. I've only used it to design relatively modern cities with urban magic or near-future sci-fi vibes, but you could definitely do a more sword-and-sorcery city with dramatic factional politics and galas and such.
The Quiet Year and other Avery Alder mapmaking games like its sister game The Deep Forest. This one doesn't have much room for galas but I bet you could get some contentious community events going since the game is all about politicking in a small traumatised community attempting to rebuild. Conversations aren't freeform—you are quite limited in what a given opportunity to speak is allowed to cover—but you also aren't expected to remember any skills or calculate any specific bonuses. You just say what you think makes the most narrative sense within the game structure.
I don't actually know the proper genre name for the "worldbuilding"/"mapmaking" type of TTRPG. Also, though I like the worldbuilding element fine, I'm really mostly interested in the way it seems to create structure for roleplay without the need for much social mechanics to determine whether or not achieving the intended social goal actually succeeds. If others have suggestions for games that are focused on providing externally structured roleplay opportunities without offering much in the way of actual social interaction mechanics, I would love to hear more suggestions!
I might be totally misreading this, but I actually had the exact opposite takeaway as above - it sounds like what @churchyardgrim actually wants is a crunchier RP experience, not a less crunchy one, if you're finding social encounters rewarding in high-crunch systems (which may not specifically have social mechanisms, but presumably you're applying what system is there to your social encounters) and seemingly have no complaints about dnd et al style combat. and frankly, it's no surprise that you have to look up your skills when they are relevant if they only come up once in a blue moon; the reason people remember their combat abilities, which are often much more complex, is because they use them. And that's also part of what makes high-crunch systems rewarding for many people - knowing what tools you have, thinking through how to use them, etc - and that plus the intrinsic relatively high stakes make combat feel like it goes fast even though it's often actually comparatively slow-paced.
I don't have a specific game recommendation here, although I wanted to toss this out there in case it's useful in narrowing down what you are or aren't looking for, whether I'm right or wrong about what that is. But also - GM makes a huge difference in terms of social encounters, in my experience, and I wonder if maybe the issues you're experiencing have more to do with who's running the game (and/or who the other players are) than with what game system you're using? In which case it might be helpful to have an upfront conversation with the GM next time you're starting a game, to feel out what social encounters will look like, how often they'll come up, etc.
