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It seems to me without some grind its hard to get true "roleplay" in the idea that roleplay is heartfelt interaction within a realm.
To the degree roleplay is consistently acting like a mystical mage, a silly jetter, or alternatively a noble knight, the grind might not be as important.
But to feel you have something to lose it really helps if it took some time and effort to get it and build it.
Now, to stinulate interaction and conflict you need to have players competing for scarce resourses or having the relative growth of one affect the routes of others etc.
Ideally you have mutiple ways of conflict in a realm so people can chose as many as they want. to actively take place in.
If you've played checkers you can kill by jumping over another piece but the win is for the eliminateing the last piece, if someone can be forced to give ground but not be killed you have something in between. You have violnce but not killing?
And perhaps a person, for a fee (which they can pay for with some "grind" like throughin salt over each shoulder at the beggingin of a day ((salt that they took the time and cost to produce perhaps?)) could summon the protection of the god of the seas or something, so that the Pvp would be curtainled in the sense not by code but by a player trumping atttacks with this sort of devine armor they aquireed.
Ideally though, there is a cost for advoiding conflict else the player avoiding conflict isn't really a "player" in the mind of the other.
But, as the person gving the merits of good sougflet making, different people play for cross purposes, and while the souflet maker might seem to have no roleplaying value in tthe fighters eyes, she might be a fierce competitor for those other cooks who rush out at the crack of each new dawn to find the rare mushrooms!
Competition can be ruthless without killing, but personally I think there needs to be competition. Think of the Avalon hill railroad barron games as an example.
If wealth has half life issues (things wearind out over time, buildingds needing to be insured at a cost or liable to being stolen, taxes/maintenance, you can have competition even without out right conflict. (sim city sort s but I haven't tried that game since it was one player 12 years ago).
If to secure water supplies for a city or to raise mounts, it helps to employ types of players who like pvp player killing which might only be allowed outside of cities or something?
I'm painting with a broad brush. But I think conflict leads to roll playing and roll playing isn't just "character" speach and dress but active pursuit of consistent elective goals.
A single checkers game wouldn't be role playing but if you have checkers players, chess players, ping pong players competin to get the space at the coffee house where only one of the games can be played at a time, and twho got it had something to do with being in line first, some abiltities to push your way to the front, tempered by abilty to bribe a reservation, well there could be a lot going on in that cofee house even though the people who finally get to a table for a period would be playing different games at them.
Mutiple ways of conflict, enough interaction so that people were forced to see each others goals and were at times inconvenienced by the cross purposes, ways to chose head vs head in areas one liked...that lets lots of roll playing without it being just I'm the Noble.. duck season rabbit season unsettablable verbal wars.
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