Yes, I can pretend to be the one-eyed dwarf who secretly likes elven cakes all by myself. But it would be nice if there were others to play along with.

Step one is find where the people are. If you can't find where the people are, drag some people to where you are.

That's always been the biggest deal with anything that involves any other people. It's one of the hardest problems to solve, and is not soluble by a system or a platform.

I have never had any luck looking for a role-playing group by telling people that I'm looking for one. I have always, without question, always had to be the one who went up to other people and said, "hey, let's go do this thing." Which is why for decades on end I was "the default GM."

In particular if you want to play a game which hinges on human decision-making as the primary means of mechanical resolution, and that's what you've been describing because that's what it takes to span all of the possibilities inherent in player action while restraining those actions to "only what's believable," somebody is going to have to be that guy that makes the decisions. In very traditional game architectures, there is one guy, and he's always stuck with it.

Which is why I have moved largely into GM-less RPG architectures. I get tired of it. Occasionally, I want to play – even if I accept that I'm the one that is responsible for pulling groups together so I get to play.

Find those people. Those people have to be found and drawn into your community, the personal circle of people that you deal with on a regular basis, if you want the chance to get to play what you want.

You also have to accept that the game you want to play may not even be possible. You want a lot of things which directly conflict with one another, the resolution of which for reasonable approximations are not within the parameters you've set.

I think they are superbly designed, but I find this aspect severely lacking in every open world sandbox style game with PvP I've played.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but "maps are hard."

Games which are first and foremost FPS or RTS have a great advantage: the ways in which players can interact with them are severely constrained. The number of verbs that someone in an FPS or RTS can use to interact with their world is few in number. Go there. Pathfind there. Jump on that. Use this skill which has a very tightly defined effect on that location.

It's when you insist on having a much broader swath of ways to interact with the world that you have the multiplicative problem. A GM is easily tasked with figuring out the result of going "I use this belt to leap out and swing around that branch, diverting my angle off to the right and landing on the bridge." Figuring out a way to even allow that intent to be conveyed to a machine? There are at least five PhD thesis papers in that problem alone.

Which means that a human needs to make that level of interpretation. But a human has a very limited set of ways to interact with the visual representation of the resulting world, and that communication takes time.

Or as I've put it before, "anybody can spell cat, but way fewer can draw one."

Ironically, when I think of "open world sandbox style game with PVP coupled with FPS/TPS," the first thing to come to mind is Watch Dogs and its sequel, both of which made fleeing from an attacker within the richly realized worlds that they portrayed both great fun and greatly challenging.

Maybe I'm just not finding the failures you are.

"Like a wargame, but where you create and play act a unique character. Like D&D, but more like a wargame in that there is player vs player conflict."

Here's your problem: other people.

People are playing these kinds of games all over the place. Including Life Is Feudal and Wurm Online. People are playing exactly what you describe, creating and playing a unique character, one who is made ever more unique the more they do whatever it is they pursue. There is overtly and aggressively player versus player conflict. That conflict is baked into the world because resources are limited in extent and the time it takes to create them.

The games you want exist already. They're out there waiting for you to play them.

They match every one of your profiles – except people who want the same exact thing is you are playing them. People who are pursuing their own interests are playing them.

Seriously, you have a choice, you can play the games that exist and match what you say you want, and if necessary go find some people who feel the same way that you do and want the same things you do to run on a private server, or a shard, or whatever the game technology of the platform is – or don't play.

The games are right there. They do what you say you want. (Though high magic mod of one of them could be quite interesting, though I have no idea if it's possible.)

Hell, it occurs to me that Minecraft actually matches what you've said you want for a game. It provides for all the things you want – except for a GM-mediated experience. With the right mods, you can even have active RTS management of attacks on other players and other players' resources, diverse factionalization, and everything else.

You just need to find some people.

That's what you need to be working on. The games exist. The games can be played. You just need to find people to play them with.

This showed up in my Facebook feed last night: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/112107051/itherverse-fantasy-turn-based-game-dandd-5e-rpg-pl

I might have to back it.

I won't even get into how bad that video is or how much media it leans on which the creators of the Kickstarter don't have license to, but the worst thing about it is that it reads like the dream checklist of someone who has never actually put together a game, much less a gaming platform.

They want to build a play by email/play by forum platform. Nothing about their presentation or plan reassures me that they will be able to. I only that, they seem to labor under the idea that "if they build it, GM's will come," and the one resource that they definitely won't have in nearly the numbers they will need are GM's.

This is a common problem.

As much as the platform isn't what I want in a game mediation system, I keep having to bring up Storium – which exists, which you can play, which people can run games in, which provides for a multitude of different play genres. Storium has the same problem is everything else, though – you need other people to play.

Find those people. That's your job. Find them, play with them. Repeat.