I see where the potentially came in...
Yes. There is a shaman in my current campaign that can 'tame' bears in one of three different ways - magically, via extraordinary communication powers, or via mundane animal training ability. It creates confusion as to which animals in the menagerie have what relationship with the druid and why.
but no I do not think the thing being fantastical makes any difference.
It makes an important difference. If the only means that the shaman had of acquiring a bear companion was her magical resources, things would be a lot more clear cut and quantifiable.
Just because a player is good at doing X including creating social networks and maintaining them does not mean their character will be? Do we not indeed gateway many normal things all the time so yes the character with a low charisma doesn't get an end run around to having useful social resources because his player is a clever charming talkative type even though the character isnt?
That's a change of subject. Let's just say for now that there are elaborate processes of play that are used at my table to ensure a character with high charisma gains a large benefit from social skills, while a player with high charisma but playing a character with low charisma is still penalized socially.
Perhaps yes that feat can represent offscreen story and time investment.
I'm a process GM. Generally speaking, anything important happens on screen. The only things that happen off screen are things that are basically trivial. So the PC could tell me he was hiring a house cleaner off stage, and I'd probably be OK with that or a PC with established social standing could tell me he was hiring 20 more mercenaries into his service, and that could also happen off stage. But a PC could not generally expect to acquire a vassal or a student offstage because those are 'named NPCs' expected to get important screen time.
As well as saying I want to see this come up in play.
Are you could just say, "I'm interested in acquiring a squire."
Further this brings up for me even things like those Feats for learning a language while it always struck me as a bit weird in some ways it represents the character investing time off screen in an ongoing fashion (to keep the thing fresh and functional but if what you gain is just badoom you are done being a linguist should involve you continuing to learn new languages not just the badoom I know 3 effect) and yes the whole process is in a "not necessarily roleplayed out explicit" fashion having those languages be impactful in play is implied by the investment too.
I agree that skill acquisition can be weird to tie to level at times, which is one of the reasons I think Gygax tried to tie it to a downtime training period, but the downtime training period has its own problems. In reality though, this rarely presents a problem at my table because for a variety of reasons there is enough reasonableness to skill acquisition that I usually don't have to say to the player, "You can't learn that language because no one is around to teach you." Usually players are trying to acquire a language that they are exposed to, my system allows for incremental language mastery so that there isn't just a binary you are fluent or you can't understand anything problem, and all the languages in my game world are considered to be more closely related than real world language groups anyway. If it was truly ridiculous, I'd enforce either no learning was possible or only slow stumbling acquisition.
That offscreen time maintaining social ties by stopping by to visit the baker and chat about his lovely daughter or investing in charities and tracking the tribulations of orphans like yourself and in general keeping an eye out for those in need which isn't done while he is fighting the Joker? gets expressed in Feats but which may indeed happen significantly more off screen than on screen as does pointedly time invested teaching the boy wonder and not in a lab developing a new bat toy if you will and both actually are NOT represented by a lot of frames in a comic or movie.
If it is happening off screen, it's not important story. So a player could be assumed to visiting the baker and chatting about his lovely daughter, or investing in charities, or helping at the orphanage but if he wants to gain some benefit from those connections then he needs to invest in some screen time. There are things that can be done in downtime and they sometimes have systems - training underlings, relaxing, studying, making something, researching, plying a trade, are all things with tangible benefits but which are redundant and uninteresting (usually) to play out scene for scene. But they also have systems to explain what happens. Bringing an NPC in to the game (and tons of other sorts of acquisition) is not something that costs you character points, because it can be done without character points.
Of course the game also does assume the types of conflict flavor as an expression of the genre D&D is unapologetically not much of a soap opera so that impacts those assumptions.
Which goes back to my complaint that the assumption of early D&D was that everyone was playing the exact same game. But as far back as I can remember, D&D was unapologetically a soap opera, because we were drawing inspiration from comic books (soap opera) and fantasy novels (often soap opera). Consider a book series like Raymond Feist's 'Rift War Saga' which came out when we were forming or RPing preferences and which was obviously D&D inspired and contained a story that was very much "soap opera". Consider a book series like Chronicles of the Dragonlance which also came out just when us young middle school players were learning to play, and which was obviously D&D inspired and contained a story that was very much "soap opera". Consider the soap opera elements of modules like UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave or I6: Ravenloft. Low and high melodrama were very much a part of our play.
GURPS always made these things explicitly about player communication to the DM...
GMing GURPS is precisely what made me decide that these sorts of things should never be tied to character advancement resources once play started, and the whole concept of trying to achieve perfect character balance by making every advantage trackable and convertible to a single character resource was a fool's errand.
Now, I'm not saying that there could not be a theoretical RPG with a very elaborate social system that made acquisition of allies more systematic, just that D&D has never gone that way. Presumably in such a system PC's could acquire and trade on social capital more directly in a sort of individual or faction influencing minigame often seen in computer RPGs where a series of choices lead to positive or negative relationships. But such systems would involve so much depth, subtly, and bookkeeping that I think they'd ultimately bury the RPing and story they were ostensibly encouraging under a tied of game mechanics that played out as its own tactical minigame. RPGs that tend to go the 'everything is combat, including social relationships' often have this problem, with the reification of the relationships actually making the relationships seem more abstract rather than less abstract.
You have also never addressed the problem that if you allow acquisition of social resources purely in the metagame, then you are saying "No" to any player with a high charisma PC who as part of their story reaches a place where acquisition of social capital is reasonable. In other words, if you make a feat like "Knight" which grants entrance to the nobility to all that have it, you are effectively saying "No" to any story where in the character logically becomes a knight. And typically you are saying "Yes" to play where the character illogically becomes a knight, but where the player has spent the character resource to become a knight and now you have to figure out how suddenly out of obscurity, with no social capital, and no renown this character is a knight.
