Other than some trivialities which for these purposes don't matter, I agree with this.
Ah - here we get to it: I see the heart of roleplaying in an RPG to in fact be that characterization and portrayal piece; as the developed characterization and personality is then going to (ideally!) directly inform or even outright dictate my decisions on what my character tries to do in a given situation, with game mechanics often determining whether that attempt succeeds or not.
In other words, the characterization is what drives the decisions; not the other way round.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The way I see it, characterization/portrayal is the outward manifestation of decisions made in the mind of the player. We at the table find out who the character is based on what s/he does. And, sure, consistency is important, and there’s some feedback as far as imagining yourself as the established character when making your character’s decisions, but I don’t understand how a player’s decisions can be said to have their origin in the characterization of the character. It just seems opposite to the actual causal process of how characterization comes about. It also doesn’t sound very immersive to me. I’d much rather find out who my character is by the decisions s/he makes than decide who s/he is beforehand and try to come up with decisions that fit.
That an RPG gives more latitude than a scripted play isn't in doubt; and reading this it's possible we're trying to say much the same thing in almost-opposite ways.
I think the primary strength of RPGs as an activity is the latitude the players have not just over the characterization of their characters but over their actions/decisions as well, and I prefer an approach that embraces the player’s ability to directly author those actions in play. Placing the character’s ability scores/character sheet in an intermediary position between the player and the decisions of their character, I feel, lessens the direct experience of being one’s character.
I think there's a lot of parallels, particularly once a stage actor does any ad-libbing. But yes, actors are in some ways robots doing what they're told; the best ones overcome this and make the role their own.
In my experience, it isn’t so much a matter of overcoming the restraints of script and blocking but of learning and internalizing them so well that they all but disappear from the actor’s consciousness, so they can fully inhabit their part without those distractions. Roleplaying in an RPG, to me, is quite different because I write what my character says and does. That's the focus.
Authorship is to me a side effect of play rather than a specific meta-goal. In the moment my main meta-goal is usually to entertain those at the table, much like an actor's main goal is (usually) to entertain those in the audience; with the differnce of course being that an actor can't often expect the audience to provide entertainment in return where an RPGer, one hopes, can.
But isn't the means by which you entertain the group authoring something entertaining for your character to do/say?
I suppose I see it that while I, the player, get to make up the actions my character takes,* I also have to accept that there's some built-in limitations that go with it that are sometimes going to get in the way whether I want them to or not; and some of those limitations are represented by the numbers (and other things) on my character sheet.
* - the last word in that quote really should be "attempts", in that while many things can quite reasonably stop an action from succeeding nothing can stop it from being tried.
Of course by
the actions my character takes I mean the actions I declare for it, and those actions are, also of course, subject to the game's processes of resolution. I don't, however, see self or group censorship of my roleplaying based on the numbers on my character sheet as one of those processes.