[Throttle]

I get the impression that you don't really know what RPI is about. If you think it's all about pk, you've either played the wrong muds or you haven't played RPIs enough to get it. Free-for-all pk is there because it has to be an option for your character when the situation arises where it's in-character to do so. As opposed to many muds where you either kill someone and they come back right away, or you simply can't kill somebody because of a set of rules.

That's just silly. Slain NPCs on roleplaying muds return because it's natural for them to do so. If you kill a young deer, and the next day there's another young deer, it's because - surprise - animals tend to reproduce. Such NPCs are disposable because they're not unique, and they return because there's not an exhaustable amount of proverbial deers in the world. And with permadeath, if you kill a character, another character is created. That's so much less jarring than the alternative, where when you kill someone they face some penalty or sacrifice and then they bounce right back in. If the NPC you want to kill is of the unique kind, where having it return after a while isn't logical, you should be able to arrange with the staff for your character to assassinate the NPC in question and they should remove/replace the NPC to reflect in-character events that affected the game world. That's part of what makes a roleplaying game: your character can affect the world in a tangible way.

On the several RPI muds where I have been an established player, this has never been a real problem. If someone is pk'ing without a valid in-character reason, and especially if they do so repeatedly over a long period of time, the staff will intervene and make sure the player either stops or is removed. Again, if that happens, it's a good indication that the game's focus is on roleplay. If it doesn't happen, I see it as the opposite.

I am talking about RPI versus RPEnforced. I have seen many RPEs where many players do not roleplay at all times. Even ones ranked top20 on TMS.

Roleplaying muds still have score, health, stats and so on. A living, breathing person has physical and mental attributes compared to others, one man isn't as strong as the next, so of course there's a way to see this. It can be kept to an acceptable minimum, and one of the RPIs that I play on has a wounds system as opposed to a hit points system, which is a very good example of where realism can be an extremely valuable roleplaying asset. There are going to be OOC commands because it's ultimately necessary, it's a text-based game after all. And on RPI muds, it's certainly not unheard of for people to turn off the TV, ignore calls and become as fully immersed as it's possible in a computer game. I'm being very realistic.

I'm not denouncing the rewarding of roleplay. I am questioning the idea of, on a roleplaying mud, rewarding somebody for roleplaying often. How is "often" good enough if roleplay is enforced? How is it good enough for rewards? If everyone on an RPI/RPE mud is not roleplaying at all times, it's because something's wrong. Usually it's either because the players are bad roleplayers, or because the game isn't good enough for them to want to roleplay at all times.