A model of immersion

[Quertus]

You know for clarity purposes you should probably focus you efforts a bit more, spend a couple of posts working on an explanation before abandoning it. But this got me laughing.
Still don't get your main point unfortunately.
Well let's see... if I may each back into my memory of posts long ago, you once spoke of how you would play the same character through different campaigns and different GMs to put them through as many different situations as possible. While I'm not as interested in doing an exhaustive search but I agree with the general principle of using a variety of situations or decisions that the character has to make.

But the thing is, some situations/decisions aren't very different in terms of role-playing. Combat (which I will just say instead of "a tactical combat mini-game") has a lot of these. For instance... OK I am having a hard time thinking of some good examples, so let me say that you are attacked at the side of the road by bandits, they could attack you a whole bunch of different ways that will create many different tactical situations. But from a role-playing perspective most are just "a force capable of using 1/4 of your daily resources attacks you, what do you do?" There isn't a lot of interesting ways to express personality, background or drive there. Some yes, you can in fact role-play during combat, but it is very repetitive from a role-playing stand-point.

In addition to the excellent reply by @Vahnavoi,

Spoiler: spoiled for reference

Show

The general point (underlined by me) you're trying to make is correct, but your example is bad. "A force capable of using 1/4 of your daily resources attacks you, what do you do?" is not "roleplaying perspective", it's a metagame perspective abstracting away all details of the scenario to ask a high level strategic question. The question doesn't give a lot interesting ways to express personality etc. because you are deliberately skipping all the details that would allow answering how to do that.

Let me offer some specific examples to make the point clearer:

Who are these bandits? Does it make a difference to your decision to fight or flee if they're Robin Hood's Merry Men versus Uruk-Hai of Sauron? Starving villagers driven to banditry by desperation? Hired assassins? Does it make it a difference to which of your resources you expend in fighting them? Does which resources you expend make a difference in how you defeat them and what happens to them afterward? So on and so forth. The more attention to detail is paid in every respect, the more variety you can get, and consequently less repetition.

I have a few things to add.

Now, the problem is, I'm not sure if any of my ways of communicating those things will let you (or anyone else) hear them.

Most enjoyable TV characters aren't characters, they're caricatures. They have strongly identifiable, predictable "beats", moreso than a realistic personality.

Different languages have different cadences, different rules for certain subtleties that make a native speaker sound different from a foreign learner - and make different "base languages" result in different sounding accents.

Radio frequencies have a carrier wave, that you vary slightly in order to transmit data.

Reality having general consistency is what allows intelligence.

An RPG having a baseline "cadence" against which your choices can occur is not a bad thing.

To me, those touch on the same concept, as instantiated in 5 different fields.

To me, it's a matter of buy-in. I, personally, accept that when I'm playing D&D, my role-playing will occur to a particular background music, to a particular beat. In that vein, it is in fact highly suboptimal (from a role-playing perspective) to simply abstract that encounter as simply "bandits", and generally detrimental to think of them in terms of resource expenditure (unless, of course, "thinking of human(?) life in terms of resource expenditure" is what you want to say about your character).

Sadly, I have yet to game with a group where "you are my quest" was a line my character got to give, was something that would really fly. Even having a choice of more than one of "kill the bandits", "join the bandits", "be captured by the bandits", "convert the bandits", "take the bandits alive", "some bandit casualties before they flee (possibly with the goods)", "negotiate with the bandits", etc, is really rare. Because most GMs force *even more* of a required beats to the song than just "you will be doing your role-playing in the context of exploration, monsters, and fighting". If you cannot roleplay the character in that context, then the character is poorly suited to being used to play D&D as an RPG.

But if I get to expand my role-playing outside that, well, bonus! In fact, proficiency in the various components of "outside the core expectations" is one of the sources of my desires to roleplay my character under multiple GMs.

How about now? Any of that make sense?