So, as I've mentioned before, I fall heavily into that OC/Neo-Trad background from the six cultures of play post, down to the canonical origin story mentioned about play by post forum roleplaying. My understanding of roleplaying has actually broken down in a different way recently, at one time I would have been gung ho about the idea of acting as your character 'would' independently of good decision making with the outcomes of those 'bad decisions' being the trigger to have drama between characters and be faced with exciting scenes, but I've started feeling like that actually damages the game, at least DND, and a lot of other games too. See, the rules of the game and the kinds of content that make up an adventure of any kind revolve around problem solving, and the interplay of choice and consequence-- you can fail forward, but only to an extent, and often you feel like you have a goal, and failure is a setback to achieving that goal, in other words failure still triggers a fail-state even while we're discussing how failures can make the story just as interesting.
It is about 'winning' in the sense that the incentives of the game create a framework where its very natural to set goals ("Slay the Princess to save the Dragon" or "Destroy the Macguffin") and then pit your ability to manage your resources, come up with clever solutions, explore diligently, build characters, against the obstacles that stand in your way. There's a fun kind of immersion that happens when the player lets themselves get into that headspace of exploring the game world and problem solving, that sort of starts breaking down when you demand that there ought to be a tension between that and 'what my character would do' suddenly part of the group is taking the challenges seriously as challenges, while other members of the party aren't in favor of TV show style plot twists, and even if everyone feels the same, the mechanics of the game seem to sort of get in the way as the GM has to 'handle' the logical consequences of those actions in a way to keep the story moving.
I think we take for granted too much that what makes for an interesting film/tv show or whatever is what makes for an interesting game, but in my eyes participation and chance of failure can make things that aren't that interesting in mediums that are just telling you a story much more interesting to actually play out. You don't need characters to introduce drama in the same way because the characters confronting the world around them is plenty of fodder for emotional growth, they don't need to act in ways that run counter to the goals of the adventure.
I was thinking about modern discourses about why traditional RPGs focus so much on the minutiae of simulating a game world, and especially combat mechanics, while re-watching Revenge of the Sith, and about other stuff I usually watch and comparing it-- the fight scenes involve a lot of spectacle, and there's some subtlety about what's tactically occurring if you really pay attention, but the primary thing you're getting out of the scene is the flashy spectacle and the question of how it ultimately resolves.
Meanwhile I think about the shonen anime I watch, and whether its a showy magic fight or realistic baseball, the emphasis is on blowing up the moment and getting the viewer invested in the problem solving inherent in the metagame of whatever the characters are engaged in-- like the logistics of hitting the pitches of a highly technical pitcher, or how to unravel a certain seemingly invincible technique. These anime have deep emotional frameworks and character relationships as well, but they aren't at all in conflict with the character making their best attempt to succeed (or at least, that isn't as big a part of it, the character might have to confront their ego to do what's necessary, or learn about why they actually failed to take responsibility and change it.) Its as much about the journey of every blow and by blow leading up to the resolution, as it is about the resolution, the minutia is constantly presenting interesting questions in the form of problems to be solved, and the dramatic tension is about whether the character, doing their best, can solve it, and then the character stuff is layered on top, rather than having the character's own flaws introducing new problems in the middle of the action.
I think that 'anime' model is much more fitting for games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, where everyone does their best and then tells the story accordingly, along with disagreements over goal setting, and emotive reactions to story beats as character discussions and development, rather than moving away from the problem-solving nature of the game by moving character-acting into the problem solving space (don't take this as an overstatement, how characters prefer to solve problems still plays into it, but their build probably reflects that anyway-- so if they want to solve things with a hammer, its probably in tandem with the idea that they mostly have hammers, and that their hammers are good at solving problems... and then when the hammers don't happen to pay off, even when that was a good faith attempt by the player, maybe they can deal with the fallout from that and grow.)
