I've been running a DW campaign for about eight months now at the local game store (Massachusetts) and I love the system and some of the roleplaying that's been achieved around our table, but I'm hitting a few social snags. Because I run the game officially for the store (discounts are delicious) I have to allow anyone that would like to to play, which results in a playgroup that is:

1. always changing
2. occasionally enormous
3. inexperienced with roleplaying

The first two hurdles are easy enough to deal with or ignore for me (or at any rate it feels that way because I've been doing it so much) but I'm having problems getting some people into the roleplaying spirit. Deathwatch has some great mechanics that try to overcome this, like the Demeanor system (thankyouthankyouthankyou) but some of my players would rather just spend fate points than spend ten seconds in character. Unfortunately one of the worst perpetrators of this is trying to play a classical U-marine Tac-marine that is semi-consistently squad leader. He in particular has refused to my face to role-play.

How can I get my players to stop playing a turn-based strategy game and start playing a role-playing game?

So far my ideas on the subject include:

• Squad leader term limits
• One mission where I disallow the spending of fate points, forcing demeanors to be used.
• Requiring that all fate points be roleplayed.
• Having characters speak in past tense: "I raised my chainsword and charged!"

I have had more than a few runs that simply did not involve combat, but I've found that during those my more RP-oriented players do all the talking and I worry that the rest feel bored or left out.

Advice on implementing these ideas/other solutions are greatly appreciated!

I'd really like to get my players to start triggering demeanours, we have yet to have a single instance of it… I think I just need to really push them to the edge, beat the snot out of them, exhaust their fate points and then remind them that "hey, there's always demeanours!"

Maybe award bonus XP for roleplaying? Your 'problem player' might re-think his refusal to roleplay if he is faced with the possibility of being permenantly lower level that the rest of the party…

It's going to be harder when the cast is bigger (each person has less spotlight time) and ever-changing (less chance of IC or even OOC bonding, intercharacter relationships developing, etc.).

I would say trying to create interesting, challenging noncombat scenes. That usually gives an opportunity for that sort of development, and a person is not going to be interested in roleplaying until he starts seeing his character as a simulacrum of a real person who has a personality, emotions, opinions, rather than numbers on a piece of paper.

I have a few players in my campaign with the same issue, we have all read the various sources of fluff and read the black library novels but they seem to only want to roll dice. One of the players was very meticulous with this xp and ranks, when I developed roleplaying ratios for xp, i.e. during the session I would reward roleplaying, conversations and demeanors were part of it, he jumped into his character with both feet. The other player immediately followed and soon the party was carrying on full convos over the vox and in between battles. The best part is they had no idea how much xp I was actually rewarding so I was able to keep the party level where I wanted it and still get the involvement of everyone. Hope that helps.