My point being that the group may or may not have an interest in engaging the actor, irrespective of their use of SP. The former is far more important than the latter (IMO).
I mean, yes, but we aren't talking about "a group should discuss the game they're playing before they play it." That is a best-practices action that precedes
literally all forms of group activity, it isn't even specific to tabletop roleplaying games let alone SP-focused D&D. To be so focused on this is a bit like saying that before we can talk about legal drinking age, we have to have established a
language to communicate between residents of the state in question--that is theoretically true, but is so utterly fundamental to doing any activity even the tiniest, vaguest bit LIKE the activity in question that it is actually reasonable to presume that conversation has already happened to some extent.
I understand that you're looking to analyze a technique/play style. That's fine. I even agree with you that, in general, SP is not well suited for actors. However, it's also important to remember that such general observations frequently don't hold up when applied to individual instances.
The issue isn't so much that it isn't well-suited to actors, but rather that it is actively opposed to best-practices in actor-supportive play. That is, actors usually want to have the freedom to explore a variety of personality traits even if they settle down on only a few for any given character. They want to tease out the reactions, the realizations, etc. SP almost always builds on a foundation of throwaway characters (directly opposing the "see a character respond/adapt" motivation) and outright "punishes" players who try to only make decisions based off of what a specific character could know given that character's history and experiences.
Quotes on "punishes" because it's not strictly a punishment per se, but the rules and the people who run them have the expectation that knowledge carries over always, no matter the context, and failing to abide by that WILL mean you lose characters...a lot, actually. E.g., if the previous campaign's character knew that black puddings and ochre jellies split when subjected to lightning damage, every character you play from there on out knows this, even in completely different campaigns with no connection to the original. That's really,
really hard to justify from an actor standpoint unless you basically abandon any notion of "acting" other than a single archetype repeated forever.
It may not be OUTRIGHT "if you're an actor-type player, do not play this," but it's about as close as it can get without being so. In much the same way, for example, as the LARGE number of people have told me that "characters don't permanently die unless the player wants it to happen" completely ruins their D&D experience. It robs the experience of any joy or meaning, as far as they're concerned, and for many of them it's literally not possible to see how such a game could continue to have stakes and consequences. That may not be
quite "if you're an SP-type player, do not play this," but the difference is academic at best.
Personally, I think you're rather overblowing the "trends are not ironclad causation" idea. Yes, these are trends, not absolutely irrefutable A-to-B-to-C chains. But they're demonstrably very common, and the whole
idea of calling a player type "actor" was because such a thing had fairly consistent, durable meaning across different groups.
Awareness that SP and actors don't necessarily jive well can be useful if you're trying to diagnose that particular issue at your table. But it would be a mistake to extrapolate from it the reverse. An actor could play with an SP group and everyone could have a great time, depending on the individual actor and the group.
I disagree. That is, just as you say, it
can be useful to know in advance that SP-focused systems are
very unlikely to please your actor friend without some concessions on one side or the other. Maybe that means you just tell your actor friend, "Hey man, I don't think this game would really be for you. I won't tell you you
can't play with us, but there's a good chance you wouldn't
want to play this." Just as, again, if I had a hardcore SP-only type friend back when I was putting together the group I run for, I probably would have offered them the chance to join, but also warned them that my style of DMing is
likely to fail to meet their needs unless we work stuff out ahead of time.
Because I can reasonably predict that a serious SP-focused player won't like such a "character-driven TV show" type game, even if I can't be
absolutely perfectly certain, I can leverage that knowledge usefully.
I don't see anyone claiming that it is
absolutely impossible for someone who likes actor-type play to enjoy an SP game. Nor do I see anyone claiming the reverse or most other variations. I instead see that people are saying, "Well, these two styles are pretty close to diametrically opposed on these highly important axes. That's very likely to cause problems, unless at least one side makes some compromises, and probably major ones."
