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Having the suspicion (erm, ok, maybe paranoia) that the original poster may be talking about Lusternia, I’ll readily admit that I am not sure what the “official” definition of RPE is and further admit that, at least insofar as Lusternia is concerned, we may not meet such “official” definition. That said, I will tell you what I think RPE means to me and how I go about game design to encourage roleplay. First, it is my opinion that roleplay is its own reward. Thus, I am not an advocate of “roleplay points” or other gold stars to give players who meet some nebulous roleplay standards as subjectively determined by some roleplay council (whether other players or administrators/gods). This is not the type of ‘encouragement’ I’ve ever really witnessed that truly encouraged a good roleplaying atmosphere.
Of course, roleplay is often directly encouraged by gods (volunteer administrators) when they see good roleplaying, the reward of which is often divine interaction or involvement in an event or whatnot. I’d make a guess that almost all MUDs do this in some manner (and isn’t it encouraging roleplay?). However, going deeper than that, when designing a game system, I often ask myself how can the game design itself encourage roleplay. Sure, there are many skills for slaying mobs and thus rewards for doing same. But rather than just building areas full of mobs to kill, we pioneered the influence system (non-lethal combat) for those who wish to roleplay someone who can compete with ‘bashers’ without killing. Further, we designed areas that were loyal organizations so, for example, killing an orc in orc town will enemy you to all of orc town. This means you cannot do any quests in orc town without paying a high price to lift the enemy status. On top of this, player organizations could control some of these areas, so players would end up coming into conflict with player organizations by ‘bashing’ these areas. For many areas that weren’t able to be controlled by player organizations, they were part of quests which could either help or hurt a group of players.
In practice from what we’ve seen, players are very careful in which ‘sides’ they pick to ‘bash’. The players of the dark city go out of their way to never bash any of the mobs in areas that would hurt them. Thus, I feel for these ‘hack and slashers’ that RP is encouraged in that players do feel part of a somewhat real world in terms that their actions have consequences. The dark players protect dark villages and refrain from killing the demonic beings of the higher planes. In other words, a player used to bashing anything and everything they run across will soon find themselves ostracized or even hunted by other players for their indiscriminate actions.
Also, there are systems which I feel encourage roleplay, quests that affect a population of the world so that those who enjoy questing may quickly find that raising the ship of the dead will generate a lot of reaction from the player population.
Given the initial poster’s example of how to reward a scholarly mage for pouring over the books, I’m not really sure if that would be desirable (much less doable). For one, roleplay generally involves interaction with others and rewarding someone for sitting at a desk seems counterproductive. Interestingly enough, however, I was discussing an upcoming design for a library system with my volunteer administrators and they almost have me convinced of a design that would encourage players writing books. Though keep in mind that where game play is concerned, it is usually the actions of players that enhances roleplay, not so much any stories or treatises they may write.
Anyway, my point is (yes, I have one) is that, in my opinion, encouraging roleplay could be the systems and design of the MUD itself. Any MUD with a dynamic guild system encourages roleplay, any craft system encourages roleplay, quests could encourage roleplay, etc. To me, RPE is designing these tools for players that do indeed encourage roleplaying.
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