RP Enjoyment Factors

[Kinaed]

What are the top five factors on a role-playing game to determine if you will enjoy the RP experience?

For example, mine are:
- Plot excitement (conflict, not knowing the outcome)
- Generous and respectful RP partners
- Social leverage (feeling important, I suppose)
- Continuity of theme and history
- Lack of external or OOC distractions

[Voxumo]

Well for me i guess mine would have to be the following
-Great Community (being able to laugh about stuff and not Eviscerating a person for making a mistake)
-The Utilization of Skills that are beneficial to Rp, such as Medicine or city lore
-Plot... Nothing more encouraging than plots be it game wide or individual plots. Plots are the spice of rp
-A wide world and Story. I find it nice when i my character can choose between various pubs instead of being restricted to one pub. Also the fact that there is such a indepth and detailed history to the game.
-The people. Nothing is better than rping with people and meeting the different types of characters people can make.

Well those are what i think then again this is the first and only MUD i have played.

[Dice]

1) The players - good RPers who write interesting dialogue, solid prose, and play characters who have realistic flaws and goals, and who can keep IC and OOC separate as they belong. This above everything else by a long, long shot.
2) Good theme - a theme that creates and encourages conflict of a sort that is fun to RP.
3) A sense of possibility - I need to feel my freedom to take ICly realistic actions isn't unduly constrained by weird OOC factors. ("You can't do that even though it makes perfect sense and your PC should be able to by any meaningful metric - it'd change <tiny thing that isn't allowed to change>!")
4) Plot/events - theme can't passively generate exciting enough RP all the time; I need big, exciting, epic things to happen to hold me in the long term.
5) EDIT: Came up with a #5 - fairness. The sense that everybody gets an equal shot, that you can earn your way up the ladder through good RP and work. That staff are not given explicit boons for being staff and that they won't engage in open favoritism of anyone. Most games I've played before TI have had serious issues on one side or the other, and I've often quit games for it - so I very much value the fairness we have here. If you think it doesn't exist - well, look at the ease of obtaining GL slots even as a new player!

[Leech]

1) Lore: Basically theme in a nutshell. If I can't sink my teeth into the world you've created, I'm not going to be able to RP there.

2) The players: Easy-going players I don't end up bickering all the time with, and who take proactive steps towards exciting RP.

3) Goals: I know that this is odd, perhaps unique, but I strongly feel like MUDs should have obvious goals characters can accomplish. Of course it's every characters job to choose their goals, and there are endless possibilities, but a MUD should encourage character advancement in all their systems and lore. (Guild ranks, skill levels, etc).

4) Growth: Constant growth, in code and theme. A world where players can make changes, affect the game, and staff aren't afraid to do so themselves.

5) Lack of OOC distractions.

[Geras]

1-5 are all "more time IRL" for me. :/ lol

[Empheba]

• A competent, available, friendly, mature and policy-consistent staff running the game. From this, all other points flow.
• Good OOC atmosphere. In a game ladden with collaborative RP and abilities for ooc communication, a mature and forgiving player base is a requirement and fundament.
• Allowing for character concepts that can persist, make a change and have fun RP also with low coded stats or no combat skills.
• An interesting world theme with enough detail and depth to inspire interesting character concepts to inhabit it.
• Emote-based communication. This is certainly subjective, but after having tasted RP with speech/language direcly incorporated into emotes, rp-muds using "say" and "pose" separately just feel primitive and behind their times.

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Empheba