I think you for your considered and thoughtful response. Unfortunately, it goes wrong right with the initial assumption. You start out well enough, but you end up focusing on what is I think a rather minor characteristic of the concept of speaking - namely, affectations of mannerism and accent. Now, I like acting and accents and affecting different voices for characters. In general, I think these are all net positives, and I'd strongly encourage people to at least try these things, practice doing it, and get better at them because of the value that that those skills can bring to the table. By all means, put points on your "character sheet".
But ultimately, that's not really what I've been focused on here. What I've been focused on as the essential element of speaking is concrete dialogue. In other words, the most important element of the conversation is the words actually said, and that these are much more important and much more evocative than merely stating some abstract intention. At some point, I might develop a longer post about when you might want to use some writerly technique or cinematic cut to skip over dialogue that doesn't add anything to the story, but for the purposes of what I'm talking about, anything that involves some sort of fortune test to determine what happens that does involve a potentially important plot point in the transcript of play deserves to also have dialogue as part of that transcript.
With that in mind, I'll try to tackle the argument you develop, although hopefully you already see why I can't respond usefully to every detail of your your argument despite it's elaborate structure, because the assumption it's based on doesn't really reflect my position.
This is a pretty big shifting of the goalposts from “acting” to “should provide concrete dialog, in some form.” You’re able to dismiss large parts of my argument because you assign them to the performative aspects of acting while you try to focus on the provision of dialog – a distinction you may have intended all along but have failed to illuminate until now. And, to top that off, you dismiss some of my arguments because you can assign them to performance and ignore that they are still talking to your dialog points.
Here you introduce a concept close to my concept of "reification" of the action. You want to reify the character through its representation. And while that's a slightly different idea than I've been using, it's congruent and I don't disagree with it as a goal of role-play. If no one could ever say what character you were playing, or if the character seemed to have no fixed identity beyond that of a playing piece, I think we both agree that's inferior role-play. Indeed, in point two you outline something similar to my argument by noting that the performative acts you care about can indeed increase character fidelity if done well, which is a parallel structure to my argument and honestly I think if you accept that then you ought to have no particular quibble against my argument.
Yes, but CAN doesn’t imply MUST, or even ONLY. May be sufficient but not necessary is something I keep saying.
However, you then go astray by focusing on the visual and audible elements of a performance, which as I said for me aren't crux of the matter. My argument applies equally if we are playing some sort of MU* or PBEM game were we can only communicate by text. Nor for that matter am I particularly concerned about first person or third person. What I am concerned about is the generation of actual dialogue. For example, I don't consider, "Good morrow, Captain. I am Sir Reginald, and as you may have discerned, I am a Knight Templar of Holy Aravar the Traveller." and "Sir Reginald says to the Captain, "Good morrow, Captain. I am Sir Reginald, and as you may have discerned, I am a Knight Templar of Holy Aravar the Traveller." to be very different. Indeed, while the first person construction is preferred in longer conversations, the third person construction has it's place at the table. For example, you might use it when it's not clear whom you are addressing, or to serve as a cue to end OOC discussion, or in an early session of play as a courtesy to reinforce the name of the character to your new comrades and to get the other players to begin to think of you primarily as your character for the duration of play. However, both the first and third person constructions of dialogue are very different than the proposition, "I introduce myself to the Captain.", and at my table, that would often by rejected as an invalid proposition and as a GM I would follow up, with a prompt like, "Ok, tell me what you say. Introduce yourself to the Captain." If the player is nervous and stumbles about doing this, that doesn't really present a problem. We have his character sheet to help inform us how charismatic Sir Reginald actually is. But not having dialogue introduces at times unsolvable problems for me as a GM, as I'm unable to determine the content of the player's action, and further produces and inferior transcript of play and an inferior experience of role-playing.
So you see, what we are comparing isn't really a novel and a movie, but a novel without dialogue to a novel with dialogue, or a movie without dialogue to a novel without dialogue. You might be able to think of a few movies or novels that use clever writerly techniques of narration to achieve effects that might be difficult to achieve with dialogue, but you'll be hard pressed to think of beloved stories that dispense with it entirely, and I think you'll agree that the vast majority of the most beloved stories feature dialogue. Heck, even the ones with just a single character tend to feature a lot of monologues, either spoken or internal, because verbal communication is so extraordinarily important.
This is the goalpost shift, and, honestly, I think it cuts against your argument. If it’s only dialogue that matters, then the manner in which that dialog is delivered should have no bearing on the representation of character. And, yet, If I deliver the line, "Good morrow, Captain. I am Sir Reginald, and as you may have discerned, I am a Knight Templar of Holy Aravar the Traveller," in a bored and sarcastic tone vice a cheerful and friendly tone, then a difference is had. You’re trying to argue that the only relevant part of acting to your argument is the delivery of dialog, but this is flat out untrue. Tone, mannerism, etc., all matter as much, as they change the intent and even message delivered. You cannot separate dialog from acting as you’ve done and have it retain meaning.
You also address the poor dialog here, and say it does not matter so long as the player provides some dialog. I, again, disagree. What you’re doing here is ignoring poor dialog and inserting some imagined delivery and speech to get to the player’s goals. All you’ve done re: in game dialog is force the player to accede to your preference and then, if the performance does not align with the character or the player’s intent, you actually ignore the performance and just deal with the stated intent. You discard your own requirements.
And, I run into this quite often with one of my players, who can describe how their character acts in character well, but becomes flustered when having to put it into dialog and often reverts to aggressive or dismissive words in that frustration. I do not require that they provide dialog – they choose to often because they’re working on this for themselves – because I, so often, must ignore the provided dialog and instead adjudicate the intent. This directly cuts against your argument that dialog improves roleplaying. It does not in this case, and you haven’t shown that it improves roleplaying in the best cases, either. That you prefer it just means that you appreciate roleplaying with good dialog, but it doesn’t mean that this is universal or objective.
You are I think coming toward the same conclusions I have made but from a different direction. Remember, what I said is that all things being equal, we should tend to prefer the procedures of play that most closely resemble the things we are simulating. That there are things we cannot closely simulate with a conversation I immediately conceded. Indeed, I right at the beginning brought up something very close to the dragon example to explain why although we would prefer to act out conversations, there are elements of a fantasy game - in my example I noted combat - where we would prefer some other device for representing them. So if you are reduced to describing a sound you can't in fact produce, that's OK. But, this still doesn't justify a proposition like, "I try to persuade the Baron." or "I introduce myself to the Captain" over actually producing dialogue. Even bad dialogue is more like dialogue than the absence of dialogue, and even bad dialogue and acting would be preferred to the absence of it on the additional grounds that you will never "get good" without practice.
This is handwavy. The division isn’t between a well delivered flowery introduction and a bald declaration. You’re taking the best of yours and putting against the worst of the others. If the declaration was, “Bob the Bard introduces himself to the Baron, using his knowledge of the nobility to recite the Baron’s lineage in glowing terms, and presenting himself as a humble supplicant for favor.” This works better for me than a partial, back and forth switch between dialog (that may be badly formed and delivered) and declarations of the things the player doesn’t know (presumably the Baron’s lineage). It’s also, in my opinion, closer to what’s being simulated, which is Bob the Bard’s impressive knowledge of nobility and his ability to easily manipulate the vain. The player may not have these qualities at all.
(Not that I accept that "closer to what's simulated" is the desirable goal.)
And that’s not even getting into the fantastical.
This assertion fails not just because it's not really acting that I'm concerned about, but because even if it were true the very same objection could be raised to playing a character without dialogue. Playing the character without dialogue will not stop the PC from reverting closer to the player over time. In my experience a minority of players can play a character that isn't basically themselves. But this isn't a real problem - most real people are interesting in themselves - and the character will still be more interesting with their own dialogue than they will be without it, even if the player is basically just saying what they might think in the same situation.
This is valid, but it was your conjecture that acting improves roleplaying without qualification. Showing that this is untrue in regards to your assertion is not rendered a less effective argument if it’s also untrue in regards to other assertions. Examine: if the claim is that the sky is red, showing that it is not is not defeated if the counterargument is that the ocean is also not red.
Finally, there is a false comparison that I think you are making throughout your argument where you are insisting that there may exist some version of the preferred thing - a thing you yourself admit preferring - which is so bad that it is inferior to the best version of the non-preferred thing. Essentially you are saying that the acting may be so bad that the player would be better of not acting. Or if we apply this to what I have been saying, that the dialogue may be so bad that the player would be better off not using dialogue. I have a host of objections to this claim. First, it is like claiming that since it might be the case that an assault rifle could be jammed or corroded, that soldiers ought to prefer going into battle with high quality butcher knifes. But this is ridiculous not only because assault rifles are so obviously superior as weapons to butcher knives, but also because the same objection can be made to the butcher knife itself. It could be broken or dull. In the same way, if a player's dialogue is terrible, there is no reason to assume that their non-dialogue is going to be inherently superior role-play.
The argument isn’t the assault rifles are inferior to butcher knives, it’s that a jammed and corrodes assault rifle IS inferior to a functional butcher knife. I don’t have to show that your assertion is wrong in all cases (and I’ve clearly not made this argument), I just have to show that your universally stated assertion is wrong in at least one case.
Bad acting being inferior to not-bad declaration is sufficient to defeat your statement that acting is the height of roleplaying.
Secondly, I object to the argument because settling for not playing in a skillful manner because you aren't skillful, guarantees you'll never become skillful. I've had at least a half-dozen shy nervous players over the year begin to come out of their shell and eventually have shining moments of awesome sauce producing moments wonderful dialogue. It's not necessarily a steady path to greatness and often they'll go back in their shell from time to time, but it's ridiculous to just say, "Well that player can't role-play so they shouldn't even try." And thirdly I object to the argument because for the most part the contrived situation just doesn't come up. Even the player's nervous attempts to speak in character are better than nothing. Even putting one's foot in one's mouth still makes for more interesting play than declaring moves instead of roleplaying.
Well, as I don’t define “roleplaying” as synonymous with “providing dialog”, sure. I also having said that acting isn’t fun, or enjoyable, or something that shouldn’t be encouraged if the players enjoy it. So, now that we’re done with the strawmen, all you’ve said here is that practicing something means you can improve in that something. This is trivial, and does absolutely nothing to bolster your claim that acting improves roleplaying. It also doesn’t go to any of my points, as I’ve not made the argument that practice doesn’t lead to improvement, but that acting is not the pinnacle of roleplaying.
Finally, I reject this argument because I strongly believe that there is a great deal of symmetry between what is good play for a GM, and what is good play for a player, and in my experience all these things people are claiming to prefer as play for their player because they aren't comfortable with it, is rarely what they prefer from their GM. Sure, there are times as a GM when you might decide that the details of the conversation aren't important, and it's best to just give a summary of what an NPC says, but as a GM I long ago learned that the impact of the scene framing "The jester tells a funny joke." is vastly different than framing the scene with the jester actually telling a funny joke and nothing could change that.
Oh, I strongly disagree with this. I am a GM mostly, and I bounce between description and dialog all the time, but the crux of my job isn’t dialog, it’s description. The jester telling a joke, for instance, strikes me as badly off as an example. The point of the scene I’m framing is not the joke the jester is telling, it’s something else, and the jester’s joke is a minor detail to that point. Wasting time actually telling a joke, which may or may not be found funny by the players (and, given my propensity to Dad jokes, likely the later, although I’ll be amused), actually acts to obfuscate the important points of the scene I’m framing. I can hardly think of a better example of where dialog actively harms the play of the game but yet may greatly aid the enjoyment of the performance of the GM. It so well illustrates the underlying premise of my point – that acting is your preference because you enjoy it (doing it and observing it) and that this doesn’t mean it’s the best for roleplaying in general.
