It's difficult for me to maintain interest in play-by-post roleplay. While I realize it's just a slower paced version of live chat style roleplay, that's the problem. The pace is sufficiently slow that I stop maintaining interest.
By all means though, if you lack my particular problem, go for it.
In-game roleplay... that's another issue entirely. Some things strike me as hard about that:
1. Text string limitations
For me, this is the main problem. It allows about one detailed sentence (and often not even that) before the string cuts out, and it frustrates me when I have to work around it in some manner.
2. The game itself
So much time have we spent treating the game as a non-roleplay environment that it's difficult to see it as a potential game. The text string limit is probably a large limiting factor in this as well, and explains why there haven't been guild wars roleplay groups popping up.
3. The environment
We tend to overlook some details about the game, that leave a number of questions. Where exactly is the guild hall located relative to everything else? In-game, this is very unclear, almost seeming like another dimension with its own set of rules and such that set it apart from other locations. Our Guild Hall is populated by about twenty henchmen and an assortment of NPC vendors who stand in one general location and beyond the gamespeak, never talk to us. Beyond that area where they stand, the hall is completely empty. This can be fixed by doing a practice Guild vs Guild match against the AI. Many of us however are disinclined to even do that.
4. Instances
While it offers privacy, it has the limitations of #1 and #2 for me. It's hard to roleplay while concentrating on skill use. On the positive side, things rarely respawn (I can think of one place where they do without some way to stop them entirely), making the idea of roleplaying easier than in neverwinter nights for that specific instance.
I don't think Guild Wars was designed with actual roleplay in the sense of speaking in-character outside of scripted dialogue. It certainly allows you to act in any manner you choose, but it honestly is pretty poor as a medium for it.
Now if Piro's player and I were to collaborate efforts into making a guild wars mod for Neverwinter Nights, we would end up with a similar, albeit less limited form of what Tashiro proposes, but not many of us have Neverwinter Nights available and the game is wildly different for interface.
