Patcharoo
There are lots of differences.
In competitive fighting you're trying to win.
In roleplaying you should be trying to make an interesting story.
Not mutually exclusive, so this isn't a difference. I try to win every fight I take part in and I'm still trying to play my character and actually write something that's interesting to read.
If you can't do the former while doing the latter, chances are you can't walk and chew bubblegum at the same time either, so this shouldn't be an issue for any of us. Last I checked we all know how to use a computer, so chances are we're capable of keeping these two things in mind while fighting.
So no, not a difference, and on that note, purely from personal experience: people who try to do the former without doing the latter tend to suck at doing both.
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In competitive fighting you're against each other.
In roleplaying you should be working together.
Also not mutually exclusive. Competitive fighting is still collaborative in that you and your opponent have to communicate, agree on, and work with common bases of reality. Meaning that when there's confusion about a given attack, you have to actually sit down and work out the confusion and usually make some form of a compromise, or make some changes. At the end of the day, collaboration exists. If it didn't, then fights would never move past the opening posts.
So again, not really a difference. It's more accurate to say that the competitive nature is merely an added layer to roleplaying. At the end of the day, you're still working with your opponent in some form or fashion even if you're competing against one another. You can't compete in a vacuum, and this is especially true in roleplaying.
Without collaboration, fights would get up to the opening attack and the other player would just go "YOU CAN'T DO THAT."
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Not being able to tell the difference leads to roleplays that get derailed sharply by the first two egos who break into a fight and have three pages of throwing their awesome attack sat each other trying to kill each other with barely a post from any other person in the RP.
Maybe if someone is socially retarded. It's roleplaying. Playing a role. If somebody breaks character to have a fight so they can sate their ego, they're probably awful at roleplaying because they can't figure out how to appropriately play a character because they let OOC bleed into IC. If a player cannot look at a situation and go "What is my character's most natural reaction?" and then go with that, then they're not a good player, and that there's some imaginary difference between "textfighting" and "roleplaying" isn't an excuse for being a poor player.
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Roleplaying is collaborative, not competitive. If you go in with a competitive 'I want to win' mindset, you're prone to playing aggressively and fighting against things like getting kidnapped or losing dramatically in a fight and can end up raging at the GM as a result.
See above: you're playing a role, whether you're fighting competitively or not. If someone is bad at roleplaying, they'll do exactly what you just described. If they're even vaguely aware of being capable of separating IC and OOC, then they can play their character as the situation demands; if their 10x world champion fighting character is sitting at a bar and gets cloroformed, then anyone with an ounce of understanding of what roleplaying is will roll with it.
Being incapable of actually accepting the consequences in roleplay has nothing to do with competitive fighting or any separation between the two. It has to do with being a shitty roleplayer. You can spend ninety percent of your time fighting and have your character waltz out of a tournament and right into any given DMed scene or other context just fine provided that you, as a roleplayer, are sufficiently capable of playing your character as is appropriate to who they are.
There is no difference between "textfighting" and "roleplaying." They're the same thing, either way you're playing a role. You cannot take part in "textfighting" without roleplaying a character. It's functionally impossible to do the former without doing the latter because the former is merely a facet of the latter. You're still playing a character. You're still portraying that character. just in a fight. It boils down to two people playing pretend, it's the exact same thing.
There's no difference between the two, there are just people who are bad at it. People who try to play up how badass they are at "textfighting" are often just shitty roleplayers, and they attempt to portray a difference between roleplaying and "textfighting" because it makes them feel better about the fact that they're shitty roleplayers who have to play pretend on the internet to sate their egos.
That's not a dig at you - but rather, at people I've encountered who insist that there's a difference and that they "don't roleplay, they have textual fights" as if there's an appreciable difference between the two. These people are just bad at both, because you cannot have one without the other.
I've played the same character from late '07, and I have movde seamlessly from fights to tournaments to normal roleplaying scenes to GMed events and back to tournaments. I've never had any issues doing so. Why? Because it's all roleplaying. It's just different facets of roleplaying.
I can roleplay competently, ergo I can do competitive fighting and turn around and do normal roleplaying with the exact same mindset, because nothing changes. I'm still just playing my character. These supposed differences between competitive and non-competitive roleplaying only exist for people who are incapable of keeping their egos in check.
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