How RP can work for those who enjoy it

Ok so earlier this week I brought up the topic of RP and why alot of people make fun of it. One last caveat on that. Non RPers tend to be goal orientated. PVE folks love the end game content with lotsa shinys. PvPers love to pit their kill skillz against others. This is ok. But alot of them dis on the RP community because they neither understand it nor are they willing to try to...out of fear. This isnt the case for all. When I say fear it is self fear of trying out a persona beyond their own. Again that isnt for all, but I think the least tolerant of them are very much like this.

But we go back to some of the issues I brought up earlier concerning styles of RP. We see a bunch of individualism without bringing in others to experience the interests of the individual. If they aren't THE center of attention, its an epic fail.

 So how can RP actually work? Most people can get a serious backstory and motivation down pretty easily. Often they spend a good amount of time developing these back stories and expounding upon them as the course of play continues. But in a static persistant world this becomes difficult. MMOs that have specific quest lines etc rarely ever see the player's effects brought into play. There is no evolution to affect change.
For the casual passerby, a quick jaunt into a rowdy tavern might do for some random RP. But then this can be tricky as you have several stories spinning at once and all too often it becomes a cycle of one upmanship. The key that I see for the random tavern set is toease up on being the center of attention. Let your story roll out naturally rather than forced.

Storyline Driven RP. Now this is a little tougher as it requires cooperation for starters as well as someone to play the Catalyst. In the old days we called this person the Dungeon Master. Today its more like the quest giver but alot more indepth. The rewards are less tangible for the effort with the exception of the story which is created. Specific chains of events that lead into one another culminating in an epic session which creates evolution within a guild or sets of guilds. It does require some planning ahead of time though and of course someone to drive the storyline.

Cooperative Storylines: We used to do this when I played Age of Conan. The RP guilds would get together to create a full bodied storyline. This worked best ina an RP PVP server environment and was rather successful. Furthmore, the successes were told outside of game in the format of written prose that people fed off one another during the course of events. No one there was a god moder as pvp is what it is. But, you have to be ready for the consequence aspect of the story as well. Things like death happen in this aspect.

Anyways a couple of thoughts that can make RPers have a little more enjoyment. Hope you all have a great day out there!