[Will]

Snow: I know exactly what you're saying about folks wanting to be treated specially, and then when they get what they want, wanting to be treated even more specially. It's human nature. The key is, as a much more wise and talented guy than I am put it, "...making the mundane amazing, not the amazing mundane." It can be done, but it's not easy.

The game you describe is an extreme of the case and definitely not the type of solution I would propose for the initial question. To me, there's a big difference between players driving the action of a scenario and players controlling their environment as they steer the course of a story. On one hand, players are considering facts and occurrences, making decisions and reaping rewards or dealing with consequences. On the other hand, players are creating places and objects, enhancing/changing their characters and otherwise altering the world to make things proceed as they see fit. There are many obvious reasons the latter strategy won't work, from bad writing to gross abuse, but in my experience, one of the biggest is obliteration of the fantasy. Once you've seen what's behind the curtain, when you've been in control of the stuff under the hood, nothing's ever the same. It's the difference between living a dream and pulling the divine strings that make it happen. Don't get me wrong; I've done both, and at this stage I prefer building games to playing them. But that's partly because, as a player, the magic just isn't there for me anymore.

So, what's the answer? In my mind, it's sort of a symbiotic relationship between players and the folks running the game. What they all want has to coincide. The goal of administrators has to be fun for the players and the goal of players has to be a growing, flourishing game. From the dev side of things, you can't just implement spectacular RP mechanics, advancement that's a means to an end and say, "Role-play like this or leave." You need a narrative giving players a history that encourages them to embrace roles within it--without dictating how those roles must be played. You need context that inspires action and leads to difficult questions but does not include guild, governmental or any other non-player characters to provide easy answers. You have to have a staff that understands the concept of supporting instead of leading, likes doing it and is around when it needs to happen. You need advancement mechanics that don't preclude RP, but instead invite folks to RP while they're advancing. I played a game a long time ago that did all of this very, very well, and it was a fricking blast. Unfortunately, its ownership insisted on charging folks to play, to the bitter end.

It takes some compromise on all sides, but it can be done.