You don't get xp for roleplay in 4e
It depends what you mean by "roleplay".
4e doesn't have "Thespian" XP - it is not an important part of the game, therefore, whether players talk about their PCs in 3rd person or speak in 1st person (although some social interactions can be a bit stilted if done only in 3rd person).
4e does have quest XP, which is XP awarded to the group when one or more PCs achieve goals for those PCs. The guidelines for establishing quests aren't the best written, but include the following (DMG pp 102-103):
Don’t be shy about letting the players know what their quests are. Give the players an obvious goal . . .
You should allow and even encourage players to come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure. Evaluate the proposed quest and assign it a level. Remember to say yes as often as possible!
For me, the best way to make sense of this is that quests are set by the GM in close collaboration with the players. This fits within a (non-Thespian) definition of rewarding roleplaying.
The DMG2 also has the following rule (p 25, under the heading "Drama Rewards"):
Award the characters experience as if they had defeated one monster of their level for every 15 minutes they spend in signficicant, focused roleplaying that advences the story of your campaign.
And then, as Hussar pointed out, there are skill challenges.
My group may have done skill challenges wrong, but aren't they basically "pick a skill and apply it"? Rolling high, not roleplaying, being the chief factor? I admit, I may have an incorrect view of skill challenges.
Apologies in advance!, but you've just pressed the button in my brain that forces me to post the relevant rulebook text on skill challenges:
From the player’s point of view (PHB pp 179, 259):
Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks until you either successfully complete the challenge or fail…
Whatever the details of a skill challenge, the basic structure of a skill challenge is straightforward. Your goal is to accumulate a specific number of victories (usually in the form of successful skill checks) before you get too many defeats (failed checks). It’s up to you to think of ways you can use your skills to meet the challenges you face.
From the GM’s point of view (DMG pp 72–75):
More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure…
Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. . . You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results...
When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it…
In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth…
However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, “Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing … Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.
To me, this makes it pretty clear how a skill challenge works: the GM sets the scene and describes it to the players; the players explain how their PCs are engaging with that scene to achieve their goal; in doing this, the players also nominate skills as the mechanical implementation of how they are engaging; and the GM adjudicates such nominations, determines the difficulty if such a nomination is approved, and adjudicates the results of success or failure.
What these rules don't entirely spell out, but what is a pretty clear implication (and it's hinted at a bit in the example of play in the DMG p 77, and a bit better in the example of play in the Rules Compendium pp 162-63) is that the GM should also be narrating the result of each skill check - whether a success or a failure - in such a way as to set the context for the next PC (or perhaps the same PC again) to engage the ingame situation.
Played in this way (which, in light of the quotes and examples, I'm pretty confident is the intended way), a skill challenge is a roleplaying experience.
My impression is that a lot of 4e groups run skill challenges in the way you describe because they've been misled by the examples in the DMG and in the modules into assuming that the setup of the challenge involves the GM tellilng the players what skills to use, and what is going on in the gameworld when those skills are used.
But given the actual rules that I've quoted, the only way to make sense of the DMG examples is as GM's notes: the GM has noted the likely relevant skills, and the sorts of things that the players might do with them (just as, in prepping a combat encounter, a GM might note what the monsters will do in response to likely actions on the parts of the players). But these "GM's notes" are not a template that the players have to work their way through, any more than tactical notes in a combat encounter are a script for the players.
Skill challenges are very obviously based on action resolution mechanics in some indie or indie-style games like Maelstron Storytelling, HeroWars/Quest, The Dying Earth and Burning Wheel, and I think one reason they haven't taken off is because many D&D players aren't familiar with those games, and the WotC authors didn't do as good a job as they might have done explaining how they are meant to play out. (I don't mean to rudely impute to you ignorance of any particular RPGs - but from the way you describe your skill challenge experiences, I'd be surprised if you have very much familiarity with these other games.)
EDITED to respond to this:
I dunno why it gets singled out...maybe because the focus is more strongly on "the encounter" and "not the encounter" the way the mechanics work?
This is another area where I think there's a degree of confusion.
The
encounter, in 4e, is what is called at The Forge
the situation. The idea is that, in an encounter/situation, something is at stake which (i) the players care about, and (ii) they can attempt to engage with via their PCs.
The contrast would be with an exploration game, where much of the game is devoted not to encounters in this sense, but to the players learning about (in a sandbox) the gameworld, or (in a railroad) the GM's pre-determined story.
I 100% agree that 4e is not an exploration game - or, at least, not best suited to that. It does have strong exploration elements, though, like most RPGs, and there is a thorough discussion of exploration in chapters 1 and 8 of the PHB and chapter 2 of the DMG. And of the 4e GMs who post on this board, LostSoul is at least one who is running a sandbox game in 4e (although it emphasises exploration less, and gamism and players' emotional engagement with the setting more, than perhaps is the case for some sandboxes).
But the notion that a game that reduces emphasis on exploration has therefore downplayed roleplaying is, as far as I can tell, only plausible for those who aren't familiar with the huge range of situation-driven RPGs that have been in print since the mid-to-late 1990s, like those I mentioned above. When a skill challenge is being presented and resolved in the way I described above, the players aren't exploring a pre-given world or story. And they're not necessarily being 1st-person Thespians. But they are certainly roleplaying!
