I suggest mixing this thread with
that other one.
Never seen the need for any kind of RP projects , other than it might be fun for some.
I've personally never seen the need of TC, other than it might be fun for some.
I get bored of PvP and TC easily. My personal experience with it was
waiting in Mumble while everyone was getting ready, then our team kills militia by playing with its AI, then
waiting in the town until enemies came, then bang bang pew pew, which was the only fun there but doesn't last much. Then running to WM and
waiting to see if there's more action. And don't forget the time "spent" levelling PvP characters. But anyway I have said this many times already.
There's no competition and let's say sense of sport , as well other qualities i desire.
I think roleplaying mixes cooperative and competitive aspects to a certain extent. It is a form of collectively made "theatre" where the people who participate are always cooperating (even if they pewpew each other as part of their RP) but I also see a relatively competitive aspect in the fact that good roleplaying requires good narrative skills. Everyone can get bored of RP if the rest of the guys who participate write poorly and don't develop convincing and interesting character backgrounds. By "write poorly" I don't only mean using emoticons and that kind of stuff, I mean that in a good roleplaying game, players must create dialogue lines and actions which add some "literary quality" to this collective theatre.
If you're gonna roleplay with "noobs" then you don't need to think too much about a character background and probably your dialogues will be rather poor, but if you want to roleplay with more experienced people you need to make an effort and come up with something better. The quality of the game you play depends a lot on the the other players' skill, and you are part of their "other players" as well. You need to have skills and use them as well as possible to keep the game's quality... or increase it, in which the others would have to keep up.
By playing a good RP game you have fun and part of the fun is, in my opinion, keeping its quality and trying to increase it. It's interesting to see how every single player tries to keep/increase that quality and how, as a result, the collectively created story is developed. If in a RP project/game/whatever you got ten poor RPers and one very experienced RPer, the experienced one will probably be the one keeping the RP running and interesting, will probably get bored easily and the RP will come to an end. You need to make an effort to get to his/her level to keep the game running, so this is why I think the fun you get by roleplaying depends on the other players' skills, how they use it, and how you are able to react to them. The Game Master is not exactly the only one that throws situations at you, because these situations change with other player's reactions, through their characters. You too change these situation for the other players, and you got to keep it (or make it even more) interesting.
Also, both PvP/TCing and RPing demand you to prepare a character before participating, especially if you want to do good in the activity and have fun. But while preparting a character for PvP/TC means killing critters (as long as levelling through quests is not a real alternative) which is quite boring, preparing a character for RP means thinking about a background story, a personality, etc. You are already using the same or at least similar skills you use when actually roleplaying, it is already a real challenge for the player and if you do it well, you'll most probably have more fun when actually roleplaying.
My personal view.
