Do you actually role play in RPG's?

Sort of. If I roll a female char, I go shopping for clothes (or mod them in) and collect useless novelty items.
On a more serious note, I guess I rp as a somewhat ideal version of myself - I can be evil aligned, but I tend to avoid the most evil things you can do in a game.

Only if the world is properly structured to support it beyond just posting in chat, there has to be cross-functionality held with PC-NPCs for it to work, and few barriers.

Do chef's get much of an opportunity to adventure and dungeon dive, though? Or are they stuck in town playing cooking mama: fantasy edition?

This is based on game setting and how game react on your roleplaying. Best what i play is a Arcanum and friends recommend Divinity:Original Sin 2 but not sure.

You can be everything on one character. Need honey for your recipe? grab and axe and go out and farm some bee hives, then swap to an alembic and be an alchemist to make the honey you need to cook cookies or something.
Granted the idea is friends you make can do the others but theres nothing stopping you putting on your botonists cap and heading INNAWOODS for a bit.

I try to whenever possible. In Shadowrun, for example, I was playing a Troll Decker (don't do this, btw.) who's personality was "Guy who's devoted his entire life to something realizing he sucks at it" and picked answers accordingly. But sometimes I slip like OP did.

I made an elf shaman, sure i can summon monsters but but with max [C H A R I S M A] i lied my ass through most optional encounters.

JRPGs are more meant to tell linear stories than to offer you much freedom in terms of the plot. SMT and a few other examples excluded.

Well fuck I kinda wanted to make a guy like that… I guess I won't play at all.

of course

Depends on the game. I just let it flow naturally and either create a story for my character as I go along, or just play the min-max numbers game.

I am particularly fond of imagining small interactions between party members, though. Especially in Pokemon but I masturbate to Pokeporn so you can imagine what kind of 'bonding' I'm imagining.

I think, like a lot of people, my autism also inhibits me from actually roleplaying. I think I get more enjoyment nowadays out of experiencing game systems for the first time and trying to mess with them rather than experiencing the game itself if that makes sense.

I'm an autist. I can only role-play as a sperg. Any other way just doesn't feel natural, but I enjoy RPG games anyway.

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Only if the game gives you a bunch of blank slates for a party, otherwise I'm autistically hypercritical of whether my own shitty RP adheres to 'canon'.

>Roll good miner
>Mine like an autist for days.
RP gives a different flavor to each game.
That's why I like TES games so much. With enough mods, it's random as fuck.

I just usually try to get the best loot/reward/result by taking the steps I think will lead me to them. Most of the time I roll a social character with weaker combat skills, which sucks if it turns out that they are virtually useless in that particular game. I don't really replay RPGs that much because they take a shit ton of time and I have a large backlog so I just end up trying to get as much out of them as I can with a single playthrough.

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Sort of. I go in with a general concept for a character that I kind of build through whatever customization is available, but I don't go full autismo with it. That's for actual tabletop and writefagging, where shit like that is actually worth doing.

Most RPGs have pretty strict histories and behaviors for your protagonists though, even the classics, so it's mostly a moot point. You're almost always forced to play a certain way and achieve a certain goal, if you're lucky you'll get a couple flavor options to pick and choose from.

The only exceptions I can really think of where you're not shoehorned into a certain type of protagonist/behavior is Fallout New Vegas, but Lonesome Road still kind of tried to fuck you into a fixed past for some reason. Morrowind too, since you can just drop your letter into a puddle somewhere and completely ignore the MQ while you go play an argonian skooma addict alchemist who punches shit to death and likes to murder people in their sleep for crack money and Sujama.

Ah, the troll decker. Always a good meme.

It's a shame all the character art for the player in Shadowrun games are trash

A unique problem to shadowrun I'm sure

>GOOD 3DPD

Vidya has yet to produce a real RPG. Only pen and paper has so far.

Good advice. But not always viable.

For example, I one tried playing a Black Templar is a newer RPG. Alas, I can't butcher the whole town of heretics.

Old RPG's were better. You could could polymorph little Timmy into a rat and feed it to his cat.

Looks like that skirt lift wasn't planned.

This. Returns is really on fucking rails and bothered the fuck out of me.

only in the games where it matters like neverwinter nights 1/2

I usually always do the first run of a game as myself; subsequent playthroughs I'll have a role in mind before running.

Hong Kong had some good ones.
For Troggs at least, I remember refusing to play a human cause it was filled with KS Backer neckbeards

Waxing philisophically for a moment, "evil" doesn't really exist outside of mental illness, which is just irrational. Almost all RPG villains are either supernaturally evil or have some kind of mental illness. Which is to say that there is no such thing as a rational decision which is objectively bad. However, I take a pretty detached view on RPG stories. I like making evil characters to explore that branch of the story and how other characters react.

Your issue is that you're playing a badly made rpg (and don't believe what the others say about Dragonfall or HK, they're all equally bad in that respect) but still very rarely does an rpg let me do what I want my character to actually do too. All rpgs are glorified choose your own adventures. I've totally given up on the genre and only play it to fuck around.

Wrong. Read up on game theory.

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I did the same thing. Did another run where I shot my way in and it is a bitch.

i think ive made a conscious decision to do things through the characters eyes rather than my own less than i can count on one hand.

There's more roleplaying in any random shooter with a plot than in choosing dialogue options and getting railroaded to some hack writers predetermined paths.

its not like you choose your dialog in real life

In discussion I actually choose between two to ten lines handed to me by my personal life script writer, thank you very much. Sometimes he even lets me make Difficult Choises with Serious Consequences™.

Roleplaying is for fucking faggots. It's a god damn game, play it like a normal person and stop writing autistic backgrounds for your characters.

RPGs allow for role-playing within the confines and mechanics of the game itself. It's not just playing pretend, something that happens solely in your mind.
A lot of people just end up role-playing themselves (i.e., self-inserting). That's what the OP's question is really about.
You have choices in character creation, in moment-to-moment gameplay, in dialogue, and in what quests you take and how you complete them. That's where the role-playing is; it's a set of possibilities created by the developer.
You two are like those people who say, "Mario is an RPG, you play the role of Mario. :^)" You have no idea what you're talking about.

Your definition of roleplaying is retarded and you should feel ashamed that you think video games should be called roleplaying games at all. This idea that dialogue options somehow equal roleplaying is almost as stupid as the idea that incrementing stats or RNG as conflict resolution equal RPG.

I don't see a problem. The role of Mario is just as heavily predefined as any "role" in the shitty CYOA sequences of a video game "RPG".

Roleplaying as you think of it is retarded. Do you know what the original meaning of the word roleplaying is as it refers to games of all sorts? DnD came from wargames, and let you play a single character instead of many characters. It put you into the 'role' of the character, it was a roleplaying game. We've developed the definition of RPG to include stats and skills, usually armour systems, and that's fine. But your fucking theatric roleplaying where you're trying to assume the mind of the character and exclude your own knowledge, it's fucking retarded.

mario is a roguelike

Not what I said, fam. They're one avenue that allow you to role-play. They aren't the be-all-end-all.
RPGs allow you to create a character, and to make choices that are consistent with the character you've created. (Lazy or unimaginative people just make themselves the character.)
Stats serve as just another possible avenue for role-playing. If you're role-playing David Copperfield, you'd want to increase your illusion or sleight-of-hand stats, for example.
That's because you're either stupid or being deliberately obstinate. Probably both.
Role-playing is something done by the player, within the structures created by the developer. Mario games don't have those structures–and without them, you're just playing pretend.

We all know how D&D works, thanks. The wargames that it grew out of did not really have role-playing in mind. D&D (and Chainmail before it) were basically just dungeon crawlers. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean that the "role-playing" idea was something that came to these kinds of games later, after the groundwork had already been laid.
That is what role-playing is. Just because the term "RPG" was retroactively applied to tabletop dungeon crawlers doesn't mean that they were always that, because they weren't. Nobody playing Chainmail was having in-character conversations in taverns to develop their personal arc. That came later.

No, that's now what roleplaying is. The term roleplaying was applied to the classic RPGs to distinguish them from wargames. You're thinking of playing pretend. You are a fucking faggot thespian. You're probably the sort who will put up with shit gameplay as long as you can go and play pretend better than you could in a game with impeccable gameplay. You are exactly the same as those fuckers pushing story over gameplay.

Video game "RPG" really is just marketing gimmick to sell shit games to idiots.

Playing pretend is something that happens solely in your head.
Say you want to RP, for example, a lawful good warrior with a kidnapped wife and a weakness for liquor. An RPG is a game that lets you create and develop a character like that (among many other possibilities), through how you choose your stats, what quests you take and how you resolve them, and what choices you make (whether deliberately signposted or not). None of that is "playing pretend," because it happens within the mechanical structures provided to you by the game, and provides corresponding mechanical feedback. It would only be "playing pretend" if those things were possible, but had no impact in game terms.
Even if "RPG" was once used to mean "tabletop dungeon crawling," that's not how it's used now. You know this, too. If someone says their campaign is "RP-heavy," you know what they're talking about–character development (not distinguishing it from wargaming).
Also, I'm amused that you're so mad over this.