How to start a pointless nerd fight
Ask if HP in D&D represents just your physical ability to take damage, or your ability to keep fighting/morale/luck/a bunch of other invisible factors
If somebody says both, ask how much of it is meat and how much of it is mental.
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Comments
insist that a player should be able to just say they use their diplomacy or bluff skill, without actually coming up with an interesting line of reasoning or fabrication themselves, because the whole point of a tabletop RPG is to abstract characters' abilities and what happens in the fictional setting
more broadly, argue that it's okay to roll-play rather than role-play
(serious answer: it depends on what the group and GM on)
Saying "My character attempts to plead the guard to let him in" and then rolling a diplomacy check to see whether it works is roll-playing.
Actually coming up with something to say to the guard -- especially, a way of phrasing what one says to the guard -- and then rolling a diplomacy check to basically see how well the guard's current mood receives it, is role-playing.
I think it works better for someone like me who isn't good with words, because then I can just say, I let the game mechanics take their course, and based solely on those game mechanics I have a better sense of what I as my character can or can't do in the game world.
Like for example I could say that I want to gather enough money to buy a horse in this small town so I can go across the country to the big city. I can roll dice to see whether I get myself a job or whether I get fired or whether I can beg for money or find enough loose change or whether I starve to death in the streets or whether I am able to gather enough food in the nearby forest. And then if I succeed at that, then I get my horse, and if I don't, I die off, and roll up another character.
As opposed to, say, having the GM elaborate a ton of details about whether the local inn has any openings and then having to roleplay what I'm going to say to the owner to ask him to hire me and so on and so forth.
I guess the definitions you're using are sorta more extreme examples of what I mean.
But how you define "roll-playing" is probably closer to what I'm thinking of as "roll-playing", than your and my "role-playing"s.
And fair enough, I agree that good play should use some of both. Though the question is where that proper balance lies.
But what if a person dreams of being a smooth talker but is really awkward in real life and can't come up with a good way to convince their friend to put down that ritual knife?
I mean, we don't fault a person for being physically weak if their character is strong, so why fault a person for being awkward if their character is charismatic?