Read the whole thread (skipped nonsense egoOT).
Boat are you sure GM is absolutely required to make players roleplay? Can't the mechanics just encourage players into such activity that even when they are powergaming to the fullest, they still look like being part of the wasteland, roleplaying without actually knowing it. You can't force players into thinking along with the fallout storyline but you can encourage them to look like they are part of it.
The point about "roleplaying even when powergaming to the fullest" is a valid one and I agree with all my heart. Actually, that's about the only thing you can do in an open server with no rules as far as code of conduct or behaving out of character is concerned. The problem is no ammount of mechanics is going to force that, because acting like a person inhabiting the game world instead of acting like an efficient killing/crafting machine is something quite separate from them. I mean yeah, you can introduce the necessity to fulfill some mechanical goals like getting water, food, even more complicated stuff - but at the end of the day it results in people doing it in the most efficient way possible, avoiding interaction with each other because everyone is a potential threat to everyone else. You had examples of how it plays out in crafting, in mining, in doing NPC quests.
I would say that what makes a person roleplay is not a set of elaborate mechanics, but rather players interacting with other players outside of combat. Right now the only incentives to act like that in macro scale are trade and gang politics. Both have their own "narrative" - trade has people with established reputation, good buyers, good suppliers - it's almost like a meta-community. TC politics are the heart of this server right now and their narrative is even more complicated - you have people doublecrossing each other, people compromising over alliances, uneasy truces, espionage, propaganda, well-known fighters, even a bit of spontaneous artwork - generally good, very creative stuff. That's about as good as roleplaying without GMs is going to get - and some people might say that it's good enough.
The problem here, however, is the lack of a storyline. Gangs, despite all the complexity of TC politics, work to fulfill a set of repetitive goals - take control of the towns, win some battles, gain prestige, make propaganda, recruit more people, take care of the supplies, rinse and repeat. It's all being done in a mechanical manner because TC itself is a simple script mechanism lacking any real context except some aniomosity and sympathies forged in the community during months of gameplay. You can't really accuse people of acting in a robotic manner if all they're doing is adapting to a clockwork-like mechanism. The only moment this cycle stops on its own for a while is immediately after the wipe, when people have to do something a bit different and not as repetitive to set their powerbase up (and unsurprisingly, most players consider the beginning of every 2238 session the best part of the overall experience).
Introducing NPC-based FM factions with goals differing from all the "standard" gangs is basically breaking up the circle. Suddenly, normal gangs have to start taking the NCR or the Enclave very seriously, because they have the potential to influence their standing. And if NCR and the Enclave are acting more or less in accordance with Fallout lore, they force other players to act like inhabitants of the Fallout world by the very virtue of their existence. If you add gang-related events that have the potential to make a serious impact on the balance of power, the gap between cost-effectiveness of taking robotic action and acting like a wastelander widens even more. And if you coordinate the events and the Faction Masters' goals to link everything into a partially self-writing, partially prescheduled narrative, players stop acting and thinking like robots when playing the game altogether and start acting and thinking like people inhabiting the wastes, just because it gives them more power inside the gameworld. Furthermore, when the narrative is well written and the events and factions' reactions keep being surprising, unpredictable and fresh, every gaming day becomes as exciting as the post-wipe day, or even better.
Setting a simple goal required for everyone would be a start. You can't get players motivated if they don't really need anything. You told that players should be rewarded with cool hightech stuff. No APA or gauss will make someone move his ass if he's not interested in pvp related stuff or even fighting, we got such players and it's not a sin to hate fighting. It's actually more credible behaviour than desiring to fight all the time.
Agreed, and that's why faction-related storylines should include politics, trade, persuasion etc... and for players who are not interested in gangs, people like Surf-Solar could carry on with doing their thing, creating small events and breaking up the monothony of day-to-day wasteland experience. The problem of a lack of narrative and robotic nature of the game is equally familiar to loners and gangs, the difference being that you can make all the gangs participate in a TC related storyline while it'd be impossible to create a persistent narrative for loners (every few guys would have to have their own GM which in all honesty would be nuts).
