I agree that less equals more in character creation. However it is hard to impossible to educate a player in lore before they roll their toon. They can’t really make character decisions based on a few lines of text during character creation, or even a quiz. You have to see the temple of set and their acolytes before you know you want to RP them.

This extends to your idea of the game as history keeper, and player actions driving their history. The less freeform, the more your gameplay actions will drive your RPing. Problem is you will do a lot of actions not for RP reasons.

You’ll have a nice setup for communicating information and creating roleplay, but players will wind up “gimping” their characters by doing in-game actions they can’t really roleplay. Like if I am an evil elf, and at level 20 its time to get a mount. I want a white horse instead of a black, and I need to get one from a nearby neighboring town.

The town is neutral, so I grind faction some and do the quest. Instantly though that becomes IC-the game records that I did, it gets communicated, and now I have to RP as an elf with a double life of befriending humans, when I just wanted a white horse instead of black.

Freeform has a strength of letting you act OOC to get the game done, while going IC to roleplay. You can ignore doing some things like getting a bud access to an area and RP only a part of what you do. The trick will be with your system of disseminating information and a more fixed-form rp to keep that ability in games that don’t design everything around roleplay.

An MMO where the servers can parse and analyze all the text from players isn’t an unachievable world–it is something that can be done in a game now, if developers would spend the time learning the technologies. All the plot hooks and path crossing and dynamic NPC actions are technically possible. Just need someone brave enough to do this.

If I would have the time and the mood to test it, I would go to the dedicated LOTRO roleplaying server EU-Belegaer (german language) and see how much RP actually happens and how it happens.

LOTRO’s chat interface is IMO a real RP killer, people often do not hear you or are out of range.

Regarding mechanic backgrounds: Let players join Factions and ask them about their background/specialization that might also influence their initial skill/trait selection.

The Secret World might be only hype at the moment, and maybe give a damn about roleplaying and just go for a creepy atmosphere. But their initial quiz could be the first step of a mechanic to let people pick their background, which would also be very visible and accessible for other players.

P.S.: Forget about the Aion story, but my Gladiator Brunhild kicks butt with her long stick!