DM's who want you to Roleplay but can only say "No."

[comicshorse]

I wonder how that would've worked. Suffice to say that if you hate them, you'll probably get sick of the game long before your character's strong enough to even think about assassinating them.

You only need to be as strong as them if you're in a fair fight. Poison their drinks, hire assassins, back stab them in their sleep, etc. That said if the GM is happy with this power disparity any plan is probably going to be made to fail no matter how good it is

It's a blurry line I guess. What is 'pay respect to my high position' to one person is 'grovel like a worm' to another. There's also the thing that it's an imaginary game, not an actual society, so I set the bar for 'grovel like a worm' to be much lower than RL. Especially when dealing with PCs, who are there for the sole purpose of having fun.

That said, how does your game work to solve that problem? Mutual respect between players would be essential, but how would the system encourage such a thing?

Indeed the particular group this occured with have been playing for years and so trust each other not to abuse the position of being in power over the other players. This wasn't a single time we've had this challenge though in lots of games we've had to have a team leader : in Serenity the owner of the ship everybody worked for, in 'Warhammer' the Count that employed the P.C.s as his retinue, etc. The thing is to wield the authority while still respecting the other P.C.s and it can lead to some interesting RP'ing. Again this has to be with players you trust, I've had some storming arguments IC with other players but then still been able to laugh about it after the game is over..
In the Vampire game the system really worked against such a thing as not only are the Vampires much more powerful than the Ghouls but the Blood Bond ensures the Ghouls are emotionally manipulated to care for their master. It raised some interesting RP'ing, particularly as my Ghoul was a huge Mafia thug in a game set in the 50's in service to a bookish, female Vampire.
Fundamentally it isn't something that can be forced, the players must be willing to accept that somebody will be in a position of authority over them for the game to work. If they're not comfortable with it then its time for the GM to rethink the game