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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7623653" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.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.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 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.  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.   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.  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.</blockquote>

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