Thoughts? What do we have to do in a RPG to force the players, in the play of their PCs, to "buy victory"?
For players to be able to 'buy victory' they have to have something to pay with. In the types of games lumpley is talking about, players create characters with multiple dramatic needs and progress towards fulfilling these needs, or not, is how costs are paid and what drives the arc of the story.
Yes, you can find a Jedi master to train you, but your best friend gets frozen. Yes, your informant knows where the stash house is today but your lieutenant wants the investigation wrapped up by the end of the week. Yes, your daemon can open the safe, but you only have four humanity left and you don't want to hear what it wants you to do to your cat...
However, I think it's a mistake to think of 'forcing' the players. This is stuck in a tired, old dog-eared paradigm where roleplaying is the GMs show.
To have drama, the players have to be the dramatis personae. The players have the responsibility, before anything else, to create people with relationships, flaws, desperate needs, dangerous passions. They need characters who are part of a society, carrying the burdens that societies create - weighed down with debt, loaded with expectation, over-confident, addicted, at war with their family, haunted by ill-advised lovers.
These characters, their needs and situations, create the game. The GM doesn't create a world, doesn't build it and impose it on the players. The GMs job is to see what the players have created and breathe life into it, so the tensions and conflicts envisaged by the players begin to move and develop. The GM twists and weaves the threads, but those threads were created by, and belong to, the players.
This is a type of play where the imagining of setting, situation, conflict and opportunity comes from the players. It comes from the conceptions of the dramatis personae. If anything is decided prior to those characters being realised, the game will not feature the type of drama Vincent is discussing.