Despite what I've said initially, I think true roleplaying requires more than making things up in our mind. It needs some creative and experienced GM instead, either in person or in form of a helping hand during the design process.
Can there be such a thing as 'true' RP'ing, when it exists on such a spectrum, and there are so many subjective preferences involved? I dislike pen'n'paper or the inclusion of a GM, as for me RP'ing in a videogame is about telling an adaptive story - and an adaptive story of my choosing, at that.
All I can say with confidence is that such a person has never been invited in ED's early design stages. But to be fair I also think that Elite, no matter what version, never wanted to be a RPG in the first place. If you want to make it one you very much depend on your own imagination and maybe some friends who share a similar mindset. But we can barely blame the game for something that it never wanted to be.
That's a fair observation, hence why I call it a great-and-terrible RP'er; it has total freedom, for one, which is good. But almost zero consequences or tools to really express a defined, in-game RP. Which is obviously very bad... for a role-player.
So re something you said earlier;
...that in absent of a human one needs to be represented in form of strong rules.
Depending on what you specifically mean by strong rules (I'd describe that as defined boundaries/limitations), yes - that's Elite's problem. 'Thing in a game' constitute tools with which to construct and express an RP, and it's on that count which Elite - being such a narrowly focused game to actually play - suffers.
In-game, RP has to be expressed through; superpower loyalties, factions, role/career, ships flown, activities. With no form of 'karma' system there is no real sense of morality of any kind present in the game. A mission may require you to assassinate an innocent, or you might blow up a Beluga on a whim. At worst you get a monetary fine, which for almost all players in the game will be inconsequential. What's the consequence of the fine? Or murder in Elite? A few percent drop on a progress bar... That's not much to go on.
So it's a game that, fundamentally, doesn't contextualise anything via mechanics in a way that bolsters role-playing. Nothing matters.
And yet whilst I'd never actually design a game to be like that, if I wanted it to be an RPG, it still represents an opportunity. There was a time, several years ago, that a sweetroll in Skyrim came to have narrative value... Bethesda never intended that, and nor did I, consciously. It formed a small part of a pivot in a character's progression.
Point being; if
nothing has context, then
everything can have context - provided the player is willing to project it, and, ideally, explore it and set it in stone in some other form (a vignette/ongoing story, an RP exchange on something like Inara, etc). And this is where I feel running more than one character on an account (or multiples, if someone's inclined. microtransactions don't track across accounts, so FDev ain't getting more money from me for flippin' ship idents and nameplates... ) comes in handy; each character can be distinct in terms of looks, obviously, but also the ships they alone fly, the jobs they take, the parts of the bubble they work in, their flying style, the builds they prefer, hell, even the configurations of decals/rank badges on ship hulls, and so on.
Pick a home system with a home station, and elaborate on how the character may've lived and worked there, and suddenly those copy-paste stations and inert atmospheric worlds with their (admittedly very pretty) placeholder assets have more nuance, context, and meaning.
The characters we create would've had a lifetime's worth of familiarity with various planets, stations, factions, systems, and so on. None of that can be explored or represented in the game itself, and so an RP'er needs to create.
I understand the argument against what amounts to pure creativity and self-imposed limits, but something like Elite's total lack of context and boundaries
does at least present an opportunity - certainly for people who get a kick out of writing. Elite is conceptually a terrible role-playing game, and yet my character's endured for three whole years and the story's only getting more interesting. I've never been able to maintain other creations in 'actual' RPG's... So for me, at least, Elite's a curiously brilliant RP'er.
I do write short snippets about Viola's daily time-wasting, but the only thing it seems to bring out is how cripplingly alone she feels, even surrounded by people. / Still, I guess I'll try writing some more. I'm just not really sure what else there is to write when the entire point is to showcase how little she actually does.
Then might the character herself be a bit of an issue?
A good character is not the same as a good RP. The latter usually leads to the former, but not always the other way around, by any means. If an RP isn't fun/satisfying, and doesn't naturally lead to in-game/in-universe activities, stories, hijinks, etc, then the problem isn't with the game/universe, it's surely with our creation.
That's partly why I created two other characters, to not be limited by in-game actions, yet never break RP (the only thing I may never get around to is flying Empire ships).
