[smascrns]

Originally Posted by Nightwalker

defining role as "tactical position" does not do justice to the word. A role is a series of attitudes, beliefs, and concepts, not simply a position in combat or a title to one's chosen profession.

I have nothing against this. On the other hand... you are fighting your own windmills, aren't you? Because I never defined role as "tactical position". I defined role as a social function, true. A function that can be learned, no less. But any social function requires "a series of attitudes, beliefs, and concepts". When a prospective salesman goes for a roleplaying learning session in our real world the people that are training him to be a great salesman want him to acquire "a series of attitudes, beliefs, and concepts", not simply "a sales technique" or the salesman "title".

Warhammer handles it by calling it a career

A real world career is a role as I defined it: A social function. Of course, social functions are complex and have scope for change and growth. That's why we change roles in life or live the whole life doing the same thing, the same role. In this case we say that we have a "career".

As written, I don't think D&D engenders the idea of a deeper role

Once more, you're fighting your own windmills. I never said that roles have to be deep. They can be superficial, shallow, stereotyped. Or they can be complex, deep, individualised. D&D has its own take, other games handle it differently. The critical issue is pointed by yourself, though: Roles can be deeper or shallower, thus a shallow role is still a role.

So, I would argue that D&D is NOT an RPG, as I define the term, but rather a tactical board game with overtures at being an RPG.

D&D is definitely a roleplaying game, and it is a roleplaying game according to your definition of 'role'. Yes, it has a very limited set of roles - fighting roles, to be more precise - but it is still a role playing game. Let me be more precise: You define role as "a series of attitudes, beliefs, and concepts". You find all of this in D&D classes (in previous editions) and the role/class combine in 4ed. Even if I only read the game book very briefly this was something that it incorporated the concept of role rather well. As I said, it only covers a focuzed and limited set of roles. Any role that falls outside of this set it's not covered by D&D. But that doesn't diminish the fact that D&D is centered on roles. Since these roles are all related to fighting specialists, it incorporates a lot of things from tactical wargaming (besides, the origins of D&D are in tactical wargaming), but it is not tactical wargaming.

all roleplaying aspects tend to disappear during routine combat (...) and it's replaced by tactical positioning and careful use of spells/abilities to assure complete victory (dice willing).

Of course, your perspective seems to be self-fulfilling. It seems you define "role playing" in such terms as to exclude D&D style of combat; and then you point that D&D can't be role playing because it does not fulfill the required pre-conditions...

Outside of combat, we play our characters and usually put the dice aside, but once combat occurs it turns into dice rolls with short, nifty descriptions of our actions as set dressing. And then we crack wise on other peoples' turns.

Ok, let me ask you a question: Can combat be roleplayed? If not, why? If yes, how?
Second question: Can non-combat situations be handled with "dice rolls with short, nifty descriptions of our actions as set dressing"? If not, why? If yes, is this role playing?

I don't play D&D for the roleplay aspect, I play it as a way to spend time with my friends doing something fun and light (not necessarily rules-light) with few negative outcomes (other than crap dice rolls), the game hits the spot.

For me that's the reason for roleplaying, whether with D&D or with any other game. And I know a lot of people that agree. For us roleplying is "a way to spend time with [our] friends doing something fun and light (not necessarily rules-light) with few negative outcomes (other than crap dice rolls)". We could be playing many other types of games, but we prefer roleplaying. Still, that's the spirit behind it.

When we want heavy and dark with the ever-present risk of death, out comes Warhammer or Call of Cthulhu...

And why are these games 'roleplaying' instead of D&D? The fact that they are "heavy and dark"? Then there are countless so-called rpgs that are misnamed since they are not "heavy and dark". Toon. Paranoia. Star Wars. Feng Shui. The list has no end.