Kandarin
TNPer
I was going to reply to the previous assessment of the EP's RP vs. TNP RP, but this request provides a much better opportunity.
What qualifies as a RP region depends on what your definition of RP is. Many (indeed, most active) regions refer to themselves as "RPers" on some level but I think you'll find that it means a great many different things depending on who you ask. In essence, it's a flexible word and some examination of what people mean by it is usually in order before one tries to participate in it with them.
First, there are differences in the basic definition. Many NS communities are into a narrative form which is essentially group writing of a story in a shared setting. This is one case where the accepted term can be deceiving, as this is not role-playing at all! There are no participants acting the roles of their characters, there is no alternate self-identification or acting, and unless read very, very wrong there is no possibility of duality. Then there are the groups that are role-playing, setting alternate characters for themselves and playing the role of those characters. A lot of light-hearted regional play falls under this category - indeed, many of the NS personalities we all know are simply well-played roles - but so do the more bewildering forms of duality.
Yet more groups may do online forms of pen-and-paper RPGs, or refer to forum games as 'RP', or any of a number of other interpretations. Nevertheless I believe that the two above are the most common interpretations, which is still enough to blindside the best of us. I give you the example of the Empire (a group of acting-based actual roleplayers), who took over the EP (a group of narrative-based 'roleplayers') and found that the locals didn't understand them and would only grudgingly participate in their system. Since everyone knew that the EP was a 'RP' region, they presumed that it would accept them with open arms - after all, were they not 'RPers'?
Beyond that there are distinctions within given basic definitions. Narrative groups, for one, may have vastly differing rules and mores. Some regions may use a NS-based setting where everyone writes the setting and characters of their fictional nation. Others may use entirely character-based systems with no real connection to NS. Some may have elaborate rules confining events that occur to the plausible and the technological present. Others may involve magic and spaceships alongside the mundane, and yet others make them more or less mandatory. Some may be all about war, while others may only do wars to set the plot for other events. Some may have signups for threads and plan them well in advance, while others may wing it and pull people in as they go along. Some may have high standards of writing quality, while others may be more lenient.
Such distinctions are not limited to narrative settings; 'RP' environments based on the actual playing of roles have their own distinctions as well. They may have varying levels of accepted duality and varying degrees of expected out-of-character talk. They may assume that all other NSers are equally acting, or they may not. They may hybridize with the narrative system and delve into writing stories about their played personas, or they may stick to posting as them.
To use some hypothetical examples, Region A is based on collective storytelling in a mostly-peaceful setting with almost no rules, limited writing standards, and a freewheeling creative process dependent on mutual respect and etiquette. Region B is a defender region whose participants all use elaborate, quirky and fun-loving alternate personas when posting - but who despise spies as a betrayal. Region C's members aren't quite playing alternative personas of themselves but every nation seems to be run by a thinly veiled avatar of its poster and arguments about regional politics always correspond to wars between nations. All of them can and will claim that they are 'roleplaying', or just 'RPing'. So, who's right? All of them. They're all RP regions because there is no commonly accepted definition of the word.
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I guess the Cliff's Notes version of the above is that knowing that a region calls itself an RP region teaches almost nothing about what that region actually does, nor whether you'd want to participate in their activities. Even though we all use it since we've used it for so long, the word roleplaying/RP is practically useless on its own because it has so many competing definitions.
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