Keep it to Yourself!

I'm all for diversity, but true diversity. When you have a palette, you keep all of the colors separate, so you can paint a lovely picture. You don't dump all of the paints into a cup and mix them into a shit brown color.

Back in the 70's, and early 80's, a lot of guys either weren't happy with D&D, or had an idea of what they wanted their "role playing" to be. These people made their own games: Traveller, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, World of Darkness, Twilight 2000, etc. These games were great because they all played differently (well maybe except Call of Cthulhu and Runequest), had different subject matters, and more importantly: they had different goals and expectations about role playing.

D&D started as a wargame. That doesn't mean what it thinks you mean. What it means, is that there are tangible goals and objectives for players to meet. There are dragons to slay, and gold to haul off. Role playing isn't mechanically encouraged, it's up to players to want to do that, and it's not necessary if they don't want to. Furthermore, there are only mechanics for slaying dragons, hauling off gold, and the tertiary activities involved in meeting those goals (i.e. searching for secret doors, making saving throws, etc.).

Quit making my D&D, some other game. Let it be itself. There is a whole plethora of role playing games out there, that cater to your need to "act and participate in drama". This is pretty much the entire point of the OSR: Old school D&D is fine just the way it is, because it meets its goal, and if you want to "role play" some other way, play another game. There's also no need to make every game out there run under the same rule set. It's not convenient, and it's not "optimal", nor is it actually realistic.

There's no real point to this, I'm just sick of seeing everyone tell me the "correct way" to "role play", or the "do's and dont's" of D&D. Keep it to yourself.