Celebrim
Legend
You clearly said "acting" in your earlier posts.
This claim so shocked me that I did a text search over the last 140 posts, just to see if I had misspoke or what I had written that had so mislead you. And you know what I found?
Despite being a wordy often overly verbose writer, I hadn't used the word "acting" except when quoting you. In fact, other than you, no one was regularly using the word "acting" in the same sense as you are until you introduced it. Whenever someone else was talking about it, they used in the sense of "doing" such as a GM "acting in the role of referee".
In particular, please start with post #200 where I began to outline my viewpoint with respect to why combat and social interaction needed different proposition declarations. When you initially quoted me in post #264, the entire post you quote doesn't contain the word "acting", yet you respond 4 times with the word "acting" in your brief refutation. Then when I replied and you started to develop your argument, you used "acting" 10 more times even though I still hadn't mentioned it once. Only in post #281 do I start using the word "acting", but the 5 occasions are either quotes of the dictionary or otherwise only in refutation of your claim that acting is unrelated to role-playing and only because I had to that point assumed you were using acting in a way synonymous with my earlier claims and not to specifically to mean mannerism. I still was unaware how far we were diverging in the conversation. When you respond, you use acting 13 more times, and now start insisting that acting includes mannerism and the like, which I don't refute, but never considered particularly important. Only at that point did it hit me that you considered the essential part of acting as you were using the word to be the performance aspects. Acting has always been your thing in this thread not mine, and it's very easy to go back and read the last 140 posts (or just our exchanges) and see how you have been from the start trying to hijack what I was saying with "acting", something I admit I never realized until you outlined a detailed counter-argument that depended on contrasting books with movies (!!!).
Yes, I concur. Fidelity through acting would be great when it can be achieved. Good acting would be superior to poor acting. But those statements, while true, don't address my point (which is why I'm happy to agree with them). Further, you continue to try to treat my argument as a binary qualitative one (either it's necessary or not, for example) and not a quantitative argument. So whenever you admit to "better", whether you know it or not, you agree with me. Nor does one counter-example in this case refute me, and if you go back to post #200 you'll see why when I explain for example why it's not a counter example to claim that my position would require RPers to be LARPers.
Again, what I am talking about and have always been talking about works pretty much the same way whether we are at a table together or playing a MUSH. So I can separate dialogue from acting. All your issues of mannerism and description and what have you can be addressed just as well in text as live performance, and pretty much anything that can be written can be stated in play to address gaps in the players ability to act - which again I consider largely irrelevant to the conversation but has, as I've demonstrated, been your thing.