This is roleplaying...

http://www.castaliahouse.com/this-is-roleplaying

I quote a portion of the article above:

1. DM describes.
2. Players decide what to do and describe their actions.
3. DM adjudicates their actions and describes the new situation. 

This is roleplaying. Anything which enhances this cycle is good. Anything which detracts from it is bad. 

You may accidentally obscure the issue. You may get caught up in great Internet wars (or arguments at the table) about the right dice, rules, classes, play styles, adventure design, and so forth. Just remember: all of that is secondary to the fundamental cycle of play. Get that right—practice until you get that right—and the other things almost don’t matter at all. 

This is the core of roleplaying. It is not an optional part. Do it well or do it badly (preferably the former), you and your players must do it or the game’s gonna suck. 

As a GM, you focus on describing the game world (not the mechanics, the situation and events in the game world), providing enough info that the players know what’s going on. Then let the players respond. If necessary, ask the players “What do you do?” to prod them along. 

As a player, you focus on listening to the description, deciding how to respond (as quickly as possible), and communicating your character’s actions to the GM. Again, not the mechanics. What your character does in the game world. Description, not dice. 

As a GM, you listen to the players describe their action, and adjudicate what happens as a result. Maybe you need to roll some dice, maybe the players do, but always remember that rolling dice is the option of last resort, only to be used when you have no other means of adjudicating their actions. Maybe the GM had players roll dice to adjudicate the situations above, maybe he didn’t. The important thing is he made a judgment, then described the new situation, and play continued. 

There’s a lot of other complications that come after you get the cycle right—rules heavy or light, skill or class based, miniatures or no, etc.—but all of that, ALL OF THAT, is secondary to understanding, practicing, and implementing the Describe->Decide & Describe->Adjudicate & Describe game cycle. 

This IS roleplaying. Nail this, and everything else will follow.

Arguably, that's something that was obscured as d20 games (and others) got lost eventually in mechanics.  4e and Co. were barely roleplaying games based on that criteria; this is a common complaint, and to some degree it's overwrought, but it was a miniatures combat game with the potential for some roleplaying elements, if you did them "offline".  Pathfinder amped up the problems with 3e, and I haven't ever even read or played or done much more than a very casual, quick flip-through of 5e.

But it's fair to say that in the roleplaying community there are plenty of people and plenty of games and designers that have either forgotten what roleplaying is, or have rejected that premise in favor of something else.

And that's fine, I suppose.  I try not to get hung up on labels and policing for wrongthink in the hobby, or whatever.  But it's important to note that there could be some major assumption disconnects if you are expecting roleplaying and getting something else.

When I say that I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned in my tastes, this is exactly what I mean.  I don't like the specific old school games very much (like retroclones such as Swords & Wizardry, etc.) but I do want games where that core of roleplaying comes to the fore, unadulterated and uncompromised and not confused because of mechanics or any other issue. In my experience, it's hard and unnatural for most people to get to that core if the game is too prescriptive or detailed.  It's hard to get past the system if the system isn't designed specifically to fade into the background and just allow you to roleplay.  So my tastes have moved towards games that do exactly that; fade system into the background and focus on the roleplaying.

I admit that what is "lost" here is protection from bad experiences with players who aren't on the same page about how the game should be run; but ultimately, that's a suboptimal place to be if you're playing with players who aren't more or less on the same page anyway.  There's only so much of that that you can tolerate before it starts to break the game down and you'd rather just do something else with those people rather than try to play a game where you're not on the same page about what it's all about.  Much of the codification of 3e and Pathfinder in particular seem designed with this priority in mind; replicate the experience, protecting players from the vagaries of personal interpretation.  In theory, this was the priority of AD&D too, which is kind of ironic, given that hardly anyone I've ever talked to really ever played AD&D "as written" because doing so was so esoteric and Byzantine.

But I've completely lost the interest in doing anything like that anymore.  Give me players that I enjoy playing the game with, not just hanging out with (although they better be that too if we're going to be successful) or don't give me any players at all.  I've got a lot of constraints on my free time, and suboptimal gaming just doesn't make the cut anymore.  If I can't have good gaming, I'll go do something else instead.